Figuring out my place in things - class wise.

So, I’ve been a little confused about this class thing, I don’t think it works the same way here as it does in say America. For example, we’ve got HECS and have had free tertiary education programs, so lower class people being able to afford university isn’t so muvh an issue - but that there are other things that hold lower class people back from those areas.

In highschool there were streamlined paths of people who were gearing themselves up for tafe courses and to immediately get into the workforce, and other paths of people who were “university people” and you know, the university people tended to be the ones who spoke well and were encouraged by their families to study. I’ve known a bunch of people who were basically told “university is stupid”

The whole university things clouds things I think.

Anyway: My boyfriend and I sat down and had a talk about class and how we think it works in our country and where we think we are. I’ve said I feel uncomfotable calling myself “poor” because there are poorer then me, but I’m not middle class. When talking about it My boyfriend said “You’re lower middle class” which makes sense. My family was in about that area too.

His family were middle-middle class. And we think we live at the moment in a “lower middle class” sort of way, though because we’re in university we’ll have oppourtunities to go up, probably into middle class. He thinks that without him I would not likely push myself up too high. I don’t speak well, I’m trying to get into a male dominated field and being a woman could complicate that somewhat. I might not be able to get as high as I’d like. (I hate it, but its true.) You know. Things like that.

So. It’s interesting and good to have that sorted.

Also: I might make a future post about it. I might not: I read somewhere once that V for vendetta in comic book form was feminist, but I’ve started reading it, and it doesn’t seem to be that feminist to me. :/

A meme gathered from Richie

It’s called the privilege meme. It should go without saying, but it seems to be all class privilege.

Bold all that are true for you.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively. (Well, maybe not dress all the time when I’m doing subculture things. I don’t see joining subcultures voluntarily in the same light though, I’ve lost no privilege there.)
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

There’s this thing that has been happening lately. As I’ve mentioned before I don’t have a whole lot of money. There have been a few times where people have been assuming that I have money, when I don’t and it’s been getting annoying I guess. Here’s a sample of some conversations I’ve had recently.

*My friend and I are walking around the town, passing store windows*

Me: Oooh, that dress is lovely
Her: Well why don’t you go in and buy it?
Me: Oh. I can’t really afford to buy a dress right now.
Her: Yes you can.
Me: … No… Umm. I really can’t.

*It’s the day before new years eve. I’m walking to the store, a man selling new years eve party packages stops me on the street to try to sell me a party package*

Me: I’m sorry, they sound really nice but I can’t afford to go.
Him: What, you can’t afford $85? (Like he’s really surprised that people can’t get $85 by the next day.)
Me: No I really can’t. *With brief explanation of my financial situation*
Him: Oh I see. Have a nice night.

*Meeting some people, going to lunch.*

Her: Well I say we eat at X
Me: Oh, I really love the food there, but it’s a bit expensive.
Her: It’s not expensive.
Me: *looking down* Umm… yes it is…

(To her credit as soon as I said yes it is she acknowledged that she’s always had a lot of money to spend so it must just feel differently to her. That she acknowledged right away without my saying anything more that we have different lives which lead to our different points of view. Well. It was nice.)

I don’t know. Eck. The main thing about all these things is the bit where I say I don’t have money, or I can’t afford things, and then people immediately assume that I do have the money to spend, and I’m just being a scrooge or something.
N’I guess I am being a scrooge, but we’re at the stage where my boyfriends savings have run out, so we’re living off a combination of my student pension and my savings. I have a good amount of savings, because I’m a nark about saving - but I just don’t know how this money will ever replenish, and I hope against hope that we don’t reach the point where I run out of savngs too.
‘Cause then what will we do? Live with my boyfriends parents again? They’re lovely people but I don’t want to do that to them. Dammit.

I’ve been invited out to a few events. A birthday, and two different ‘dress up and go to the movies’ things. Oh man I want to go. I wish I didn’t have to worry about the cost of the damn train, and how I’m going to eat. I went to an event today, and I spent more money then we normally spend on food for a week. </3
I can’t keep doing this. I wish all my friends events didn’t revolve around spending money. I want to see them and not fret about costs.
I feel like I must be annoying them so much when they suggest events and my standard reply is “I can’t afford that” but dammit. I can’t afford half of them. I wish we had more going to other peoples houses and hanging out events. Or going to the beach events. Or something with no money spending.

I guess now I’m just whining, but I can’t say it doesn’t feel bad.

The annoying thing: I love spending money on myself and I know that even if both of us get a job I still won’t be able to. There are priorities for when we get a stable income that go beyond buying lovely dresses, like buying vegetables… and shampoo… (at the moment I’m using out house mates. He must have bought it for us anyway since he’s bald. The way we go about things in this house can be so.. british… at times.) when more money comes in I still won’t be able to spoil myself, because we have to get in a situation where we have all the actually important things.
Whine, whine, whine.

It is 1:00am December 25th. So, merry christmas, happy holidays, seasons greetings and all that good stuff. I hope that no matter what you’re doing and how you celebrate whatever you celebrate - or how you sit on the couch if celebrating isn’t for you - that you have a good time.
(That isn’t good English is it?)

The Hogfather has been on the last two nights. It’s been good. I enjoy Terry Pratchett, and I enjoyed that movie. Oh, I can’t remember the name of the book but one of them - the one about the girl who dressed up as a boy and went to war - it touched on feminist points and it got me. It was great.
Reading ‘The science of discworld II’ he said things about feminism too. He was talking about how people have always used stories to shape people in different cultures. About how you could dehumanize someone because they don’t know your rituals and your stories. He called these stories the “make a person kit” and said something along the lines that the make a person kit doesn’t work the same way for girls as it does for boys because girls havn’t been people*
he said that even with feminists working there really isn’t a model of story telling for women and girls yet that matches the developed ‘make a person’ kit of stories for men.

Really I’m just going on a tangeant there by talking about how Terry Pratchett seems to know somethings of feminism. What I wanted to talk about was the tiniest little thing I saw in The Hogfather.

Alright. So, The Hogfather is a lot like Santa. He’s discwords Santa. They celebrate Hogswash, which is discwords Christmas. This is one of those ’someone kidnaps/kills santa/the hogfather and someone needs to save christmas/hogswash/the world’ stories and one of those people is the personification of death, who takes on the role of the hogfather, getting all his powers and stuff. In the book he SPEAKS LIKE THIS and I don’t think they quite captured capital letters in sound, but look here I’ve gone on another tangeant.

Death likes, but doesn’t always entirely understand humans. He sees bad things about Christmas/hogswash and he tries to make them better with his hogfatherly powers. Like, he goes to a store and magically whips up presents to give to kids, which makes the owner of the store very distressed because now no-one is buying things, and that’s what christmas/hogswash is about to Mr. Mall. Owner.

He sees that a poor child asks for expensive things. His helper says something like “Well that’s all very nice, but he’s getting a ball and an apple” and Death doesn’t understand. He should get what he wanted. It’s not fair that rich kids get rich things that they want and poor kids get a ball and an apple.
“You have to take into account their socio-economic status”
“That’s unfair”
“That’s the world”
But Death likes humans and thinks this is unfair so he uses his santa/hogsfather powers to give the poor kid what he wanted.

At this point it should be noted that in discword stories are real. The world is run on the power of narritive, and narritives are real in the story. So, at one point we see the real life version of the little match stick girl. Cold and dead. (That story is always so sad! It always got me.)
The guy helping Death understand about christmas/hogswash says that the little matchstick girl is part of the hogswash spirit, because people can look at her and think “Well, it doesn’t matter how poor I am, and how terrible things are for me because the little matchstick girl has things worse”
Death thought this was similarly unfair, brought the matchstick girl back to life and dropped her off with the city watch.

and THAT’s where I wanted to go with this.

I was reading miss crop chicks blog, and then some blogs off the side bar, and some blog off of there. So when I saw that thing, where he brought her back to life I just started thinking about diability. All that “I thank you lord for I am not crippled” sort of stuff.

It’s unfair to make people into symbols of being “worse than.” ‘I’m gateful I’m not like that person’ when that person is still a person.

Uhhh.

That is all.

1:00am rambles.

*I don’t think he literally said girls have not been seen as people. I’m putting my own words here because I don’t remember his.

I’m thinking about money, and class and cooking. Mostly because I just bought dinnerfoods.

Neither my boyfriend or I have a job at the moment. We were both working at Pizza Hut. I got in a fight with the owner and left, and my boyfriend wasn’t making enough money to pay the rent so he left. He gets paid in deliveries. $6 per delivery. The store was very quiet and he was only getting one or two deliveries an hour, and on top of it he had to pay petrol.
We used to be doing better at a different store, but it closed down and we got transferred to this one. The other store was much busier, which meant my boyfriend made more money. Also, on quiet nights he could move to busier stores to help out. Unfortunately the building the Pizza Hut we were in is getting demolished so a giant residential building can be built.

So we got transferred to a franchise. Apparently there’s a rule saying that if you work at a franchise you’re not allowed to work at a non franchised Pizza Hut for a period of a year.
So this meant my boyfriend couldn’t just transfer and work at busier stores on quiet nights.
They do it because when someone buys a franchise they’re also buying the workers to staff it. Basically. It’s a way of making sure the workers don’t leave.
It made me upset because I’m a human being, and I felt like I’d been sold. I mean, not literally. But that was the effect. That’s what they were sort of aiming for.
The worst part: No-one told us about this rule. If we had been told that getting transferred to a franchise store meant never being able to work at any other store for a year, we might have applied to transfer somewhere else. But they didn’t tell us. I felt trapped, which might be why I got so easily hostile.
In the end what it comes down to is neither of us have jobs.

I have a student pension. It’s good. We’ve been in a situation like this before only then we were living in a house with nine people and splitting the rent nine ways. It was much cheaper then. Back then it was hard, but the two of us were able to survive on my student pension. We both have savings at the moment, so we’re able to pay his share of the rent with them, at least for a few more weeks. But if one of us doesn’t get a job soon things aren’t going to be so well. If I pay his rent we’ll have about $35 a week left over to buy food and petrol for the two of us. That’s not bloody much, and there’s no saving for things like electricity and phone bills in that.

I always feels so strange when I try to place myself on the class scale of things. I do so much better then some people, but I’m also below the poverty line. It feels like cheating to call myself poor when I can afford an internet connection. The situation we’ll be in if one of us doesn’t get a job soon is the worst we’ll have ever been in. I think it’d be fair to call ourselves poor at that point. We’re still living reasonably well though.

So what about cooking: We’re still in “able to go out sometimes and eat decent food” mode. Tonight I bought for dinner:

$2 worth of snowpeas. (A luxury. We normally do not buy vegetables because we cannot aford them.)
The cheapest meat in the store. Chicken Drumsticks.
Homebrand lemon.
Homeband pasta.
A marinade sauce that I would consider a luxury.

It came to about $12 all up, food for the both of us. The pasta, and the sauces should also last for awhile.

When we’re doing really well, or celebrating we buy tacos, mince, lettuce and cheese. It’s always awesome. The tacos come with delicious taco sauce stuff.

Last time we were both living off my student pension we bought some kind of pasta, or potatoes and the cheapest meat the had in the store. Usually we’d go late and get whatever was marked down.
If it happens this time, we probably won’t be able to afford the meat. It’ll likely be lots of pasta, and homebrand sauces to make the pasta tastier.

I’m not a very good cook. I’d like to be a decent cook. M boyfriends mother gave me a list of easy recipes the other day and I looked at it, and read some of them and said that it was lovely of her, but we can’t afford things like dessicated coconut and other ingredients needed for a lot of the meals. Creams, eggs often meats. We just can’t afford ingredients.
There are lots of factors that make me a not very good cook. A primary one would be my general inattentiveness. But…. I can’t help myself from thinking:

Class has a function in good cooking too…..