Diana.nu

Vlog #4! It’s about me going to Sante Fe Springs yesterday. It cost $30 and took 6 hours to get there and back, which is why I mention spending money out of nowhere. Also, it turned out to be unnecessary, but I’m not angry. I’d rather be out (and spending money) than staying home (and saving money). That’s really bad, huh?

Lately, I’ve been slowly coming to terms that I am not rich.

I’ve taken tests like the Step forward, step back game, and I’m almost always the one most disadvantaged one in the room. It’s curious, though. I always felt like the most powerful one somehow. Oh, your parents own their house and cars? Good for you. But I’ll be the one saving the world.

It’s been a weird week. I haven’t been feeling so powerful. I realized that, holy shit, no one in my family has ever been happy or financially well-off. Things that are normal in my family, like not having enough to go grocery shopping some weeks, taking 7 years to pay off a car, being cold most of the time because of no central heating—these things aren’t everyday things for other people.

When kids would complain that their parents weren’t giving them enough allowance to go out with friends every weekend, I laughed it off. I didn’t know what to think when they were telling me that. It was a strange thing to hear about. It felt unreal. I wished I could complain about something like that. But it could never happen for me. So, I didn’t worry about it.

I had some extra money from little web design and development jobs for a while after that. It was surreal. I could walk into a bookstore and walk out with a book. All the nice things in this house are mine, incidentally. I learned something from that period.

Sometimes I hear people glorifying the broke. They say things like, “The poor sure do have the fighting spirit,” “The poor are always thankful for what they have,” and “The poor rarely whine.”

My family does have a fighting spirit, we are thankful for what we have, and we do rarely whine. That’s the problem.

Yes, we’ll fight for the absolute necessities. The bank recently screwed my mother over, and she’s fighting her ass off trying to get what little money she had back into her account. But I doubt she’ll ever fight for extra money. What kind of nonsense is that? (I don’t even understand the concept of extra money. How can you buy everything you need and still have money?)

Yes, we’re thankful for the crap food and furniture we have. Which is why we’ll probably never have good food or furniture.

Yes, we rarely whine. We do complain. We’ll complain when we have nothing to eat or when the rent goes up. But we’re not going to whine about something silly like having to cut the cable to pay for the electricity.

It’s nothing to be glorified. Everything you have, no—everything everyone has—they didn’t do anything more to earn it than I could have. I would say they didn’t do anything more to earn it than I did, period. The only thing they had that I didn’t was the chance to pay for it.

People down here are conditioned to hold in negativity. No, it sucks down here. We need to learn to get what we need and then some. Not just enough to survive. Enough to be comfortable. And I’m sure more people would be rightfully negative if their lives weren’t already wrongfully negative. I am going to try to make it so this “adding negativity to negativity” thing doesn’t end in misery for me.

My birthday is in 20 minutes! (On the 22nd) I’ll be 19!

Other news: Pell grant. I’m getting $1500 for school-related things, which is going straight towards a MacBook Pro.

School starts on Monday, and I cannot wait to be able to get on a good schedule and have an excuse to leave the house! I have World History first. The book, $130, I found on eBay for $25. I am obviously buying it late in the game, but I think I’ll survive. I hope.

Then I have a class that revolves around publishing a literary magazine. Which means print and web design!

Good year, good year.