Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.
Being poor is living next to the freeway.
Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.
Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.
Being poor is off-brand toys.
Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.
Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.
Being poor is Goodwill underwear.
Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.
Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.
Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.
Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.
Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.
Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.
Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.
Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.
Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.
Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.
Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.
Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.
Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.
Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.
Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.
Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.
Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.
Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.
Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.
Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.
Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.
Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.
Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.
Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.
Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.
Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.
Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.
Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.
Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.
Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.
Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.
Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.
Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.
Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.
Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
Being poor is seeing how few options you have.
Being poor is running in place.
Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.
— John Scalzi
(Source: debatenerd)
After six months of meticulous, detailed selection and exposure to all kinds of different shit in the last six months, I have my annual summer mix.
There’s all kinds of stuff in here, and it’s broken up into two parts, roughly amounting to one pop mix and one alternative mix. Download both if you choose, I’ll try to keep tabs on the download links this time around. Download, listen, enjoy and reblog!
Part One:
- LEN, “Steal My Sunshine”
- Daft Punk + Pharrell Williams + Nile Rogers, “Get Lucky”
- Kanye West + Chris Martin, “Homecoming”
- Outkast, “Prototype”
- Vampire Weekend, “Worship You”
- Bruno Mars, “Locked Out of Heaven”
- Kate Nash, “Do-Wah-Doo”
- The Flaming Lips, “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”
- Doves, “Black and White Town”
- Modest Mouse, “Ocean Breathes Salty”
- Angela Perley + the Howlin’ Moons, “18 Feet Under”
- Blondie, “Die Young, Stay Pretty”
- The Very Best + M.I.A., “Rain Dance”
- Divine Fits, “Flaggin’ A Ride”
- Django Django, “Firewater”
- Holy Fuck, “Lovely Allen”
Part Two:
- Wild Nothing, “Only Heather”
- Kings of Leon, “Knocked Up”
- Spoon, “Back to the Life”
- Father John Misty, “I’m Writing A Novel”
- Bright Eyes, “Another Travelin’ Song”
- The Shins, “We Will Become Silhouettes”
- Titus Andronicus, “…And Ever” (Abridged Edit)
- The Beta Band, “Dry the Rain”
- The Subways, “She Sun”
- Rilo Kiley, “Hail To Whatever You Found In the Sunlight That Surrounds You”
- Pixies, “Nimrod’s Son”
- Dirty Projectors, “Swing Lo Magellan”
- Blind Pilot, “We Are The Tide”
- XTC, “Love on a Farmboy’s Wages”
- The Kingston Trio, “Sloop John B”
- Beirut, “Port of Call”
- Elton John, “Tiny Dancer”
Links!
33 tracks, a little over two hours, and it is ALL OVER THE PLACE.
I’ll most likely upload it this afternoon, and re-post sparingly over the next few days.
Ukiyo-E Heroes (Illustrations by Jed Henry)
Digging in the vast deep internet, I have recently found the artwork of this illustrator: Jed Henry, who teamed up with “Woodblock Printmaker” David Bull for the making of these parody illustrations of videogames called: “Ukiyo-E Heroes”.The classical game characters including: Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Street Fighter, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, etc. Has been taken to the past with a medieval outfit, making a reference to the japanese culture in the past.
This is very awesome!
Love this.
When a restaurant is dead, you start scouring for the stuff that’s not going to be used today.
Today, this happened.
i’m so sick of the government reading but never liking my statuses
For those of you who haven’t heard me babble on about it, I’m a huge fan of Paul Simon, be it his work with Art Garfunkel or his solo work (for the record, I tend to prefer the latter, but the entire body of work is astonishingly great). And having delved into the lesser-known, less-respected work he’s done ( see Heart and Bones, which is in places either truly uninspiring or truly breathtaking), I sometimes glance over his most prominent work, like his mid-70s output. I’ve never been able to really appreciate that most sustained period of success - it seems a little bland, too Adult Contemporary for me.
Then there’s Graceland.
It’s one of those albums that constantly makes Best-of lists, part of the stable of 80s albums that get spit out in shuffling order every month or so by some magazine or blog. It is hardly an album of its time, musically. But it became a Big Deal kind of record, which was sort of expected considering what Simon undertook in order to even produce it. At a time when Apartheid was tearing apart South Africa and causing to isolate the nation from the western world, Simon took a huge risk to come in and defy de facto sanctions just to make a record.
But in doing so, he managed to pull off a few nifty magic tricks. He produced a true world album, something that’s become something of a mocking trope of musicians in their later careers. After being inspired by Sotho music, he didn’t just track down a few session guys, buy some new toys and pump out some Afro-pop album (Los Lobos, put your hands down, that’s a story for another time). He synthesized it with his style and previous influences, particularly the 50s music he’d already be pulling from for Hearts and Bones, and created something unique and compelling. At the same time, he managed to avoid anything resembling a statement politically, outside of the fact he worked almost entirely with native musicians - whether this was beneficial or not is debatable, but beyond Wednesday Morning 3AM, he’d never been overtly political, so why start again?
The fact that it came out and became so universally acclaimed can get cause it to be almost oversold. Sometime I get caught up in trying to tell people that his work that, you know, isn’t Graceland is really good, too. (On that note, do yourself a favor and listen to his second album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and not just “Kodachrome”; it’s his second-best album top to bottom, with virtually no weak spots). But then, I happen to listen to “Boy in the Bubble” or “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” and the hair on my arm stands up again and I remember, “Oh, so this is why this album is such a big deal.
tl;dr - This is a great fucking album and if you don’t think so, you have an actually wrong opinion.
It’s never too soon to decide how to mark National Bourbon Day. Celebrated on June 14 (that’s Friday), this I’m-not-quite-sure-it’s-official holiday commemorates the day in 1789 that the Rev. Elijah Craig is said to have first distilled whiskey in Kentucky.
Now, if…
Calendar: marked
