Ficstructor
48. Spaghetti Without Tasty Meat Sauce I am inspired to be political today. I just watched a ton of Occupy Wall Street videos and then saw a photo series about the 99%, who write sob stories about their economic situation. Most of them are legit: no job, no house, a mess of kids, foreclosures, bankruptcy, cancer, single parenthood, crippling debt. Some are not, like this one person without kids who earns over 50k a year and somehow can’t make it work. She’s got a spreadsheet of how the numbers don’t add up, but some of that has more to do with living beyond one’s means than an economy or government that isn’t working. I’m a dude who’s hardly employed despite having a ridiculous amount of education … yet an education I in no way try to pass off as real employable skills. I went to school for too long and didn’t learn as much as I should have and read books about dragons and stuff and none of these things bear any resemblance to real skills, like fitting a pipe or building a house or counting numbers or staring at a spreadsheet or whatever the hell people do at jobs. I’m a part-timer with full bennies. Sometimes I have to freelance to get enough money to be able to buy the top of the line cupcakes for my wife and I, but since we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that we can’t afford kids, a house, or cars … or whatever the hell it was that made our parents and grandparents happy … things have been looking up. Basically, we know how to make some really great Mac ‘N Cheese. Ramen is a treat as well. Tonight we ate spaghetti, no meat sauce. Marvelous. That’s OK, though, because from the outside we’re often mistaken for ultra-liberal, young hippies (which we’re also OK with), but most of that stereotype is fulfilled unintentionally. Like, we save money by not showering or getting haircuts or buying clothes or buying meat. So, you know, Eff you, “The Man,” it’s not a goddamned choice. 159 161