Lease Expiration Waits For No Man

I am not sure how I will sleep tonight, except that it may involve tossing back the precious few shots of Delsym I have and propping myself up with pillows. I'm hot, coughing constantly, and rotating frequently to combat the reservoir of mucus in my head.

I'm also moving at the end of the week.

I moved to this apartment at a time when I had an okay job, was going to school, and could afford rent increases for the foreseeable future. I figured I'd get a degree at some nebulous point in time and finally start making decent money and it wouldn't be a problem. But that didn't happen, I got sick instead and lost my job, and the rent increases became too much to deal with.

The landlord was upset when my husband told him we were moving, as if we'd betrayed him. Yet, he knew for years that I'd lost my job and was on disability, that we were on a very fixed income, and he still raised the rent. I'm not sure what he expected.

Anyway, we've found a place across town, that hopefully won't be raising the rent as frequently, and has much better amenities. The problem is just getting there.

Housing disputes and homelessness, or living on the edge of such, is a huge, huge issue. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, on one representative night in January 2014 over half a million people in the United States were homeless, meaning sleeping outside, in a shelter, or in a transitional program. Then there are the less traditional ways - couch surfing with friends and acquaintances, or doing labor for a place to sleep, or as some teenagers have to do, constantly sleeping over at various friends' houses to avoid going home. This brings me to the point that some homes are more dangerous than finding a transitional program or living on the streets temporarily. This is especially true for LGBT youth, who are often abused and neglected or subjected to dangerous programs meant to "fix" them, and which can often drive them to self-harm or suicide.

Anyway, we have no choice but to be out on Friday, which is hugely stressful already, and also we have to somehow have the place cleaned up too, and I don't know if my mom is coming up to help because there's been a death in the family, and both I'm sick and my husband is in loads of pain still, from his surgery and in his wrists.

I can't stop coughing even though my husband propped me up on pillows and gave me Dr. Cocoa. I heard a howling noise outside and I feel terrible. I wish this would just go away already.

Intake application

My name is Met. I'm a disabled woman who writes freelance, keeps up a pharmacy technician certification, is a full-time caregiver to my darling but sick husband, mommy to 4 cats and weekly volunteer at a Trap-Neuter-Return clinic for community cats throughout the city. I also voraciously study everything medical I can get my hands on, am pretty good at literature review, and enjoy helping people find low-income or specialty resources in their area for medical, mental health, and animal welfare related needs. 

My family lives technically just above the Federal Poverty Line, but we are still very poor. My husband and I are on fixed incomes, we get a pittance for food stamps, and the rest is made up by online surveys, freelance writing, occasional clinical trials, and anything else we can find. 

There is an enormous stigma against the poor, especially in the United States. We are seen as lazy parasites, leeches on society who take and take and give nothing back. Actually, I pay state gross receipts tax on everything but food, register my car, use the buses when I don't feel up to using the car (and thus pay into public transit), pay my own rent (we are not on Section 8), and still do charitable donations when I can. I'd also like to see a lot of politicians push a folding metal shopping cart loaded with sixty pounds of cat food and litter and forty pounds of groceries and medicine for a mile and a half in the heat of summer or the cold of winter, because I have done each of those things, with fibromyalgia as well.

I believe that we, the poor, deserve our dignity. We work our asses off just trying to survive. We massively outwork the rich, because the playing fields are so vastly unequal and we have to work longer hours and more jobs just to break even, whereas people with good jobs are content with 8 hours a day. I am aware that this is a generalization, and there are people with good jobs who put in huge amounts of work, such as nurses, doctors, pharmacists, soldiers, etc; these people are indispensable to human society and deserve far better treatment than they get. 

This blog is for other poor people to get tips on how to stretch their dollars, and where to find really nice things for low prices, and why it's better to save up and buy something high-quality rather than buy something cheaply made that will fall apart or fail quickly. I'll also be talking about my life and experiences here and trying to tease out lessons about what can be done better to improve situations in the future.

It's time to raise our heads, straighten our backs, and reclaim our dignity.