7:19am June 28, 2014

How to be a proper poor person worthy of less contempt:

lichgem:

-No phone, no internet, no TV. Go completely off the map. Your only connection to the outside world should be people you can walk or drive to. You must only read newspapers, because radios and TVs are luxury items now. If you want to hear back about a job you applied for you will just have to visit in person. Family and friends who live out of state? You’ll just have to wait until they visit to hear their voices.

-Never eat red meat. That’s for rich people only.

-Anemia, scurvy, and malnutrition are very noble.

-Never buy ice cream. Joy is for rich people. You are condemned to an existence devoid of pleasure until you die or become not-poor.

-Never have nice clothes, but also if you show up looking as poor as you are, how dare you?

-Never accept gifts in the form of nice material possessions, or this will be held as proof that you’re secretly a drug dealing crime lord faking poorness to get pity money. Therefore, ask your relatives only for cans of beans and wood for the campfire on which to cook them. (Stoves and fridges are luxuries, after all. You will be doing lots of campfire cooking and only eating nonperishable food.)

-Never talk about being poor, that is incredibly rude and people will think you’re trying to manipulate them, even if you’re speaking in a matter-of-fact way about your life to your friends and non-poor people passing through happened to overhear you. Clearly you are being poor AT them, and that’s unforgivable.

-Suffer in silence. Never cry, except but a single crystalline tear on your cheek as you die. You might have asked for help, but that is not the AMERICAN way, damn it. Better to die in a quiet, dark place with your lone tear for company, than ask for help.

-Just stop being poor. Have you thought of that?

-Never be poor to begin with, better yet. Just track down the Wishmaster and wish to have never been born.

-You’ve got all these bootstraps lying around, you can just pull yourself up by them and everything will magically be okay

- Be careful what shows in your YouTube videos. If anyone staring into the background sees anything they deem as expensive (whether it is or not, and regardless of how you got it or even whether you own it) they will accuse you of welfare fraud. (This actually happened to me. At one point I had people gleefully going through all of my videos frame by frame looking for shit like that.)

- If you were ever anything other than poor, you’re not poor now and will never be poor, no matter how poor you get.

- If you grew up anything other than poor, then surely your parents must have money now, even if they’re actually poorer than you are. If you say otherwise, you’re lying and pretending to be poor.

- You could actually afford to eat well, if you stopped paying the $20-$30 a month it takes to get Internet. Because everyone knows how much food you can get for $20-$30 a month, especially if cooking is hard or impossible. Moreover, that little tiny bit of food would be totally worth the loss of everything (including money, jobs, social life, safety) that comes with having Internet.

- Starvation doesn’t actually cause problems with cognition or physical functioning. So it’s not like it actually gets harder to procure and make and eat food (or function in any other way), the more starving you are. And it’s not like this combines with pre-existing disabilities in nasty ways to make everyday functioning damn near impossible. So quit complaining, you don't need food, or don’t need that much, anyway.

- If you’re fat, you can’t possibly be starving. Wait until you’ve dropped 70-200 pounds before you ask for help getting food. Oh wait, you could be dead by then. And oh wait, starvation makes you gain weight when you do eat because you’re holding onto calories more. Never mind facts like those. Fat people are evil. Evil I tell you. And if you are fat and say you’re starving, it’s just gluttony talking.

- Accept all help. Even if the help actually leaves you worse off than when you started. If you don’t accept every offer of help, no matter how ludicrous, degrading, or unhelpful, then you’re not trying and should be ignored as the useless ingrate you are.

- Don’t show weakness. Don’t talk about how much you cried because you haven’t eaten a square meal in a week and your refrigerator is completely bare. Nobody wants to hear that stuff, and you’re probably lying to get sympathy. Nobody who has Internet could be starving, after all.

- There’s no such thing as a disability that prevents you from eating even when there’s food close at hand. If you don’t eat when there’s food around, you must have an unconscious death wish. Or you’re wallowing in self-pity and can’t be bothered to get up and eat. It can’t possibly be, you know, autistic inertia or sensory processing problems, or avolition, or any other known symptoms of neurological conditions.

Notes: