Click images for desktop size: "Airbound Spore" by 0 Went grocery shopping yesterday.
Went to four stores in a mad attempt to save money. I used to do similar by myself but I did it on foot. This time we had a car. Made it only slightly easier.
My first cynical calculations had the savings at $30 or so. Since it took four hours I still felt that was pretty good.
The brainwork of trying to remember the prices here and there was wearisome. When your looking at saving 10 cents here or 20 cents there its fatiguing.
There needs to be a stronger word than chagrin for some of this. There was one thing, rice cakes, that we stocked up on for 1.49, this was a savings of 10 cents an item. When we got to the third store found out that they had an unadvertised special where the rice cakes were 99 cents . . .
Little things mean a lot.
At one time I would have trudged back to the first store and asked to return the, now, expensive rice cakes. As it was we re-stocked up on them. I guess this was easier and a lot less embarrassing.
Doing the final calculations figured we saved $130 bucks. That figures out to 16 bucks an hour each, even allowing for gasoline spent.
That means we can buy more dog treats.
You can't glamorize it. It sucks being poor.
Especially when your whims are fairly minor. That means they're always just within reach.
Fifty's movies called it the "rat race". I never understood that. Its a not so pretty image for a not so pretty thing but I don't get the simile at all.
Rats and the working poor?
I don't get down though. I remember once in LA going to the LAVA, an art walk visiting all the studios that had erupted in downtown LA. As usual I strayed from the designated path and came across a park on 6th Street. It was the first time I'd ever seen a cardboard city.
It was peculiar and frightening. There were all the giant boxes, some of them painted in what were supposed to be cheery and uplifting colors. A number of them were decorated with children's finger paintings. The effect roiled from sad, pathetic, to horrifying. Especially under the bright LA sun with the 20 foot palm trees bowing weakly in the crystal blue sky.
It was a homogenous group.
Click images for desktop size: "World Map" Wino's who'd given up and mainly people who tied to look, "human" (or society's concept of respectable). Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and Asians. They all worked and played together, trying to keep this a home while it teetered on the brink of a new hell.
It almost conjured up images of Vidor's "Our Daily Bread" except that was a fiction and this was in the middle of my home town, one of the richest cities in the world, certainly one of the most expensive.
For me that made it more grotesque and terrifying than the tin shacks of Sao Paolo or the tenements of Hong Kong. The children running around and stirring up the dust bothered me the most. Children smiling and having fun, all looking malnourished and hungry, but all smiling. Even a couple scrawny yellow dogs were cavorting with them, yapping and dancing with the excitement of joy.
I talked to a few people. They were open. I ignored the ones who bummed spare change. Of course walking into this hell made my companions edgy but I've always had a thing about not wanting to imagine what things are but knowing what they are, even from my own personal and limited perspective and my incredibly minor abilities to comprehend and translate, I need to know.
I'm still an idiot that way.
I reduced the 5 or 6 valid stories I'd heard into one. The only way I could cope and rationalize my understanding.
They came to LA because of the hope. Hope for work, hope for a life, hope for their families, hope for sun.
My family came here for the same reason.
I found that in the families both parents were working, usually for minimum wage or close to it. The kids went to school. They were saving to bet an apartment. A 1 bedroom apartment, with utilities turned on would run you about 3-4 grand in LA. There's only a 3% vacancy which qualifies as severe housing shortage.
On their days off they would go to social services and get housing vouchers so they could shower instead of taking sponge baths in the restrooms of the gas station or restaurants that would let them in.
When they had time left on the room they'd sell the room to someone so they could buy clothes for the kids, so the kids wouldn't be so tortured when they went to school.
And they bragged about how close they were to having the money to get their own apartments soon, any day soon.
The lucky ones worked at McDonalds where they could bring home food for the kids. McDonalds food is so expensive that when an error is made in preparation they throw it away instead of trying some salvation. For the people in cardboard city this was better than working in a restaurant.
Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown In a restaurant only the worker would get free food, at McDonalds you could legally pilfer the garbage and feed your family.
Legally was not a word they used lightly. They wanted their kids to survive, to thrive, and this live in cardboard was better than the life they'd left behind. Or they got here and couldn't get back, or had nothing to go back to.
They kept an impromptu police force because LAPD wouldn't come near the place. (If you know LAPD there's not much shock there. LAPD are notorious as bullies, racist, lazy bums. Most want to live the fantasy life of movie cops and be left alone. Not all of them but its hard to remember the good ones. Some of my kids are LAPD so I know there are some good ones out there.)
With everything going around them, all the squalor they fought against they still kept hope, not for themselves so much but for their families. They did everything for their kids.
I find that not so much nobel as I do full of common sense.
We were already deeply involved in the home for battered woman so didn't have much time to figure what to do for homeless families. Was more annoyed to discover that my Hollywood Council person just kind of blew it off. The only thing we were able to accomplish, with a lot of help, was to get the schools to not reject kids only because they had no address.
It was what LA School District did as they attempted to survive. No address meant you probably weren't in that school district. So, move along please.
Now kids can at least go to a school that's convenient instead of one that would close an eye and let them in.
But, yeah, that's why spending four hours at four stores grocery shopping wears me down but doesn't discourage me much, at all.