Day 159 — Situation
Fri, Sep 4, 2009
ANN’S NOTE: Catch a gander of the real Ann today on FOX Business Happy Hour, between 5:20 and 5:30 PM EST.
I’ve got a situation.
Girl On the Brink racing on bicycle toward a blind man poking his long white cane from side to side on a narrow sidewalk.
Think fast. What to do?
Holy shit. Get the hell out of the way.
Escaping physical danger is much easier to sight than something that’s unforeseen. When the chosen few discovered that toxic mortgages were about to pollute the nation’s economy, the average person had no idea that their lives would do a 180. I surely didn’t.
Since I was laid-off last November, I’ve learned to live with less because I have to. Nonetheless, I grip the vision that my life will return to when I could afford to line the entranceway to my house with clay pots brimming with flowers and buy my 10- and 12-year-old sons Billabong clothes.
As I leave my house this morning to walk my older son to school, we’ll pass pots of scraggly Nasturtiums I had planted from seed in the spring, and he’ll remark that his $3 T-shirt his aunt bought him was a real find.
We hardly say anything anymore about the humongous hole in the kitchen ceiling, which fell in after a leaky toilet from the floor above saturated the dry wall. After more than a year, the wooden beams and plumbing pipes are still exposed. I treat my few pieces of good furniture like jewelry: I won’t let them go.
Instead of jetting off to Atlantis in the Bahamas this Labor Day weekend, I’ll be shopping at Target for a $12 sleeping bag so I can go camping Sunday with my sons, and, yes, my ex, whom I still live with because he lost his job three weeks before mine, and we both couldn’t afford our own digs. [I'll preview my visions of that adventure tomorrow.]
Sometimes, I hope to have amnesia about this time in my life. I also hope to find a confident man who will see the strength behind my financial fragility and love me as much as I hope to re-love this nation as the best place in the world to live.
Tags: frugalness, money woes, survival
Dear Ann,
I am from Singapore.
You write and pen your thoughts well.
It will be just a matter of time that you will do well in life again.
Best wishes and regards
Benson
I watched your interview on FOX Happy Hour today. Finally someone (you) that feels the same as I do. During my professional career I had suffered health issues that put me in a situation where I too needed financial assistances from our government and discovered that the assistances was not there for me at my level, even though I’d paid into the system for years. I found that if I had accepted government help it would have forced me to sell (or eventually loose) everything that I had worked for. All I needed was help for a few months and then I would have been able to go back to work and carry on with my life. I was lucky that I had family at the time to step in to help (not having to go to the government). As you mentioned on the show — our government is not set up to help the middle class in their time of need. If one has the misfortune of falling into the system… it is designed to make you poor and keep you there.
Just wanted to say that I was laid off this past June and I can totally sympathize with your struggles. Last summer we had an upstairs bathroom leak through our kitchen ceiling and, even when I had a job, we lived with a hole in our kitchen ceiling for close to 6 months as we tried everything to fully correct the problem. A massive renovation just wasn’t in the budget (although it wound up being inevitable).
Anyhow, I have been blogging about my unemployed life as well, it seems that the only therapy for me has been to seek some comedy in my every day challenges! Feel free to check it out.
http://activeleisure.wordpress.com
Best of luck to you!!