Huffington Post lies about writers

When Huffington Post editor, Stephen Hull, said that HuffPo was proud not to pay its writers, freelancers everywhere exploded in anger. And rightfully so.

The direct quote is as follows:

"If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. When somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real, we know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of."

First, and most easily attacked was the underlying assumption that exposure for your craft should be the ultimate reward. To which writers aptly said, exposure doesn't pay our bills. The subset of that argument being that writing is not work, but art, and only passion, unpaid, is authentic.

The NewStatesman makes a good point here.

"When [Hull] is ill, he must have to research his symptoms online instead of visiting a [general practitioner], because their salaries mean the diagnoses they give aren't real."

When people are sick, really sick, and they can afford it, they will fly across the country to get the highest-paid doctor they can. Because the more specialized, more experienced, more practiced doctors and surgeons make more for their time. It is the same with nearly every profession, and something nearly everyone aspires to. Get more experience, get better at your job so that people will pay you more.

As journalism is a profession--it is our job to parse current events for the public, to place them into historical and cultural context, to bring up angles people may not think about without prodding, to speak to the nuance of each issue and place it in its rightful category as consumable information, and to do it all in a way that is engaging and interesting to the reader so that the publications (some of whom do not pay the writer) can continue to get paid (by whom? The very same advertisers Hull was speaking about).

We have a job. And the better we are at it, the more we should be paid.

Chuck Wendig also draws apt comparisons here, on his blog, Terrible Minds.

"Imagine walking into a building and realizing nobody paid anybody to lay the bricks that built the walls. Imagine sipping a drink and realizing that nobody got paid to build the machine that makes the can or what is inside it — nobody got paid to formulate the beverage or drive cases to stores or put the cans on shelves. Imagine that those who made the most fundamental component of the drink — the drink itself — never get paid. They were told that work was a privilege. They were told that to get paid to do those things would somehow make the process crass. It would make it impure."

But there are two things about this Hull debacle that haven't really been fleshed out, aside from writing being work for which people should be paid.

Stating that paying writers results in tainted copy 1) is hugely false. and 2) is insulting to writers.

Okay, so how is it false?

The strain of logic upon which his argument is based is flawed. He's starting upon a groundwork of false comparison. In Hull's model, if writers are being paid for their work, they will use it to advertise something, and thus shred not only their credibility, but the credibility of the publication housing their words.

"If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy."

This sentence doesn't make sense.

In fact, the very thing publications are paying for is the credibility Hull is trying to say such payment eradicates.

It is my job to interview sources on all sides of every issue when I am doing a reported piece. It is my job to spend the time on the phone, in my car, and face-to-face digging up facts and opinions from those involved. It is my job to produce for my publication bullet-proof copy that they can put their name behind, proudly. It is my job to set them apart from the rest of the pack in terms of integrity, poignancy and the emotion that can be stirred by word-smithing.

I am literally selling credibility. It is the payment that holds journalists accountable for their thoughts and words. It is the payment that entices us not to give in to easy, faulty logic or cheap shots we don't bother to investigate. This profession works the way every other profession works in the world. We want to do the best we can to get the best payment we can. Only our product isn't drinks, our service isn't health. It's credibility.

So to say payment decreases authenticity is a huge lie. Because authenticity is what you are paying for.

What else is the author selling?

"It's not been forced, or paid for."

Again, we are not Coca-Cola. We don't have any product to push, only words. Forcing someone to write something has a name. It's called public relations. And those writers do get paid. Not by publications, such as The Huffington Post, but by the corporations whose products depend on good buzz, like Coca-Cola.


The only thing HuffPo sells is words. (And it does sell them. I did a quick check. Today's Huffington Post comes to you thanks to Cox Communication.) Words it gets for free. If Coca-Cola could get engineers to formulate its next soft drink for free, I'm sure it would be over-the-moon, and ridiculously profitable. But you don't see Coke trying to tell people that paying engineers to come up with the formula results in a shittier drink. Because it doesn't. It results in a better drink. You don't see Coke trying to tell its engineers that if they were truly whole, well, good human beings, they would work on this for free so that their calculations wouldn't be tainted by the greed of the corporate world. Because that's fucking ridiculous.

It would be like dropping your kids off at free daycares only because people who get paid can't possibly love your child. In fact, all child care should be free. Because shouldn't people just love children for the sake of it? And if someone is getting paid to watch your child, doesn't it mean their work is less-than? They're doing a worse job? No, it doesn't. Because that's fucking ridiculous.

And that's where Hull adds insult to injury. Writers, and journalists in particular, pride themselves on the bare truth of their words. Everyone is right about passion, too. We are passionate about what we do. We think it is important, and we place huge pressure on ourselves to do it right.

So to imply that needing to eat at the same time is somehow a deadly blow to all we hold dear not only hurts our workers, and hence the very profession of writing, it insults the life path we have chosen. It insults who we are. It insults our values, it insults our personalities.

This statement by Hull isn't just your regular, run-of-the-mill defense of a shady corporate system (Huffington Post) profiting on the backs of starving artists working for free. It is an active attack on all writers everywhere.

It is time for The Huffington Post to fail. They have jumped the shark.

Maria Kang Redux

Guys, I'm so sick of us. Aren't you sick of us? Here we write, day in and day out. Someone writes one thing, another person disagrees with it and writes his or her response, then another, then another ad nauseum.

And if any of us are ever good enough, sometimes we'll get recognized for our polemics, but does it ever do anything. Does it ever help anyone other than our own egos? And I am a huge offender, don't get me wrong. I will respond the shit out of each and every opinionated blog post and movement I come across. Because it's what I do. I see something, it makes me angry, and I have a platform on which I can yell about it. So I do and I will continue to do so. And I also get that awareness is important. I'm a huge proponent of using language precisely and correctly and fighting the little fights as hard as we fight the big ones, for human rights in all forms. In fact, right now, I have a list of about twenty things that happened recently that I have to write up, because God forbid the internet not have my opinion on it.

But gosh, isn't it so tiring, though?

Let's run through the process:
Write a thing.
Write lots more things.
People share some of those things.
Some of the things that were shared get picked up on aggregates.
People write responses to those things picked up.
People write responses to those responses.

Every single point of view is thoroughly explored with lots of feels and capital letters, and very little research. Journalism is dead. It's all feelingism now, and while I love that because it means I don't even have to do much work, I can just vomit emotion all over the page, I also hate it because it's boring, it brings nothing new to the table, it convinces no one, and honestly, it's not even any good.

Take Maria Kang. My favorite.

It was back in the early fall of 2013 that she went viral. And I wrote at the time a pretty popular response to her patent nonsense. There were response pictures, blogs, people defending themselves, people defending Maria, you name it. She got on the news, and on the talk shows, and kicked off facebook and the whole bit. Because even legitimate news organizations no longer understand what news is. It's all about clicks. And she gets clicks, so rock on.

Only now it's March of 2014. And being intelligent, she's done what any person would have done with the attention, and she's marketed. Well, no kidding. How is this news? If I were her, I would be doing the exact same thing. So, okay, she's pretty much a jerk who refuses to see the harmful implications of "What's your Excuse?" Do we really need to hash through all that again? We REALLY need to go over the link between psychological wellbeing and health again? We need to yell at her some more, or defend her some more?

Worst of all, we need people like this lady using the whole thing to piggyback to online mom bullying line, again?

I mean, honestly, since MK's decided to insert herself into the news, I've seen the countless new articles. I've read about her new stuff. It's not new. I'd write a response, but all I have to do is link to my old one. There is nothing new here.

And the only person who stands to make a buck or a name off Maria Kang is Maria Kang. So can everyone just stop trying? I am so bored with it.

You know what I'm not bored with? Action. We need to take all this pent-up angst we use to poop on each other with, and do something with it.

In this particular case, I've turned We Don't Need an Excuse into my thesis. I'm doing research right now to help concretely tie the psychological effects of this campaign to health negatives. Because as I've said before, it isn't about Maria. It is about the messages we send to people. And about the types of people who subscribe to those messages and what it does to them.

I'm not saying we all need to be out on the ground doing volunteer work or whatever. Blogging is great, it's fine, it's good. Let's go at it. You all know I do. I'm just saying, can we get some new material, though? We already had this fight, and I haven't heard one new thing about it. Let's figure out where we go from here, not stomp all over where we've already been.







 

Five Unbearable Internet Facts That Will Make You Headdesk for the Rest of your Life

Guys, what are we doing? What is it in our nature that compels us to click on stupid headlines? We already know that whatever that content is, it's not "earth-shattering", it won't "blow our minds" and it probably won't even "melt our hearts". It's very unlikely anything we can read from these aggregates will make us hate humanity, we probably will actually be able to believe it, and you know, the danger probably isn't really in our own home. So, why do we click? Why are we allowing click bait to be a thing? For this, I have no answer. Onto the headlines:

10: "This Weirdly Realistic Human Typeface Will Leave You Traumatized" (source: Huffington Post)

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that for the majority of people, no typeface will leave them traumatized. Why is an adverb thrown in there, seemingly arbitrarily? (My guess is the headline flows better. Plus, now we know it's not only traumatizing, it's also weird). What even is a human typeface? That's a legitimate question, but does it combat the fact that you couldn't care less about a typeface that you'll never see, never use, and is no technically better than a bit of high-tech clip-art? It doesn't. But in case it does, better click. (Spoiler: It's typeface colored like white human skin with eyeballs on it. Looks a bit like muppets. Not traumatizing.)

9: "Another Monster Mother, But, Hey, She Means Well" (source: NPR)

This is actually an interesting review on a movie, and I'm glad I read it. But I only clicked on it because I'm looking for stupid headlines, and seeing one from NPR surprised me. From this hed, we can't see that it's a review, that it's for a movie, or basically anything about this story. What constitutes a "monster mother?" What constitutes a mother "meaning well?" Have any children been harmed? Is this real life? (That's actually not a question because the reader assumes the headline references something (though what, exactly, we don't know) that happened in real life.

8: "Graduation Surprise Video Saves Biggest News for Last" (source: Huffington Post)

Guys, you guys. This couple graduated college and are also expecting. And they made a corny video about it. No one else has ever done this. Ever.

7: "WestJet Christmas Surprise Will Make You Believe in Santa" (source: Mashable)

This is a great example because the story went wide, with many, many informative headlines like "Airline Asks Passengers What They Want for Christmas, Delivers Gifts at Baggage Claim", "WestJet Finds Out What Passengers Want For Christmas, Leaves Presents At Baggage Claim (VIDEO)". The difference? The first headline got 1.59 million shares on Facebook. The other two got 10,000 and 95,000 respectively. (While I'm just a blogger and can't really control for popularity of website, I tried to choose stories that ran on the same day, by publications with roughly the same number of subscribers).

And even I find the first headline the most compelling. I'm not saying we shouldn't (well, sometimes, but not in this case), but I am wondering why a headline that is basically a teaser (again, in this case, unlike the typeface one, a good teaser), that tells us virtually nothing about the story, and makes assumptions about us as readers do so well. We spend so much of our internet breath telling marketers and other people that they don't even know our lives and shouldn't try to tell us about ourselves, and yet, when a headline does it, we're like, HUH?! SOMETHING COULD MAKE ME BELIEVE IN SANTA? (And we know it can't). WHAT COULD BE THAT COMPELLING TO ME? THANK YOU FOR TELLING ME WHAT I AM COMPELLED BY.

I'm just saying, I don't get it, is all.

6: Blah blah blah Blow Your Mind (source: Everywhere.)


- 65 Amazing Facts That Will Blow your Mind (source: MentalFloss). Not only will they blow your mind, they're also amazing. And they're facts! About what? Are they related? We don't know. Better click.

- 10 Optical Illusions That Will Blow Your Mind (source: Huffington Post). Spoiler: They don't.

- Facts about Walmart to Blow Your Mind (source: Business Insider). This seems fairly legit, to be honest. I bet they could have headlined this with intelligence and people still would have clicked.

6b: blah blah blah mindblowing blah (source: Everywhere)

- 11 Mindblowing Facts That Will Completely Change Your Perspective on the World (source: Huffington Post). OMG, STOP.

- 29 Mind-blowing Coincidences You Won't Believe Happened (source: Cracked). Well, that's repetitive, isn't it? And chances are your mind will not be blown and you actually will believe these things happened, since someone is going to tell you they did, then back that shit up with citation.

- 9 Out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong about This Mind-blowing Fact (source: Upworthy). You know, I didn't know there were degrees of wrong, really. But okay, completely wrong. And not only will the fact blow your mind (whatever genre of "fact" it is), but also, EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG ABOUT IT. Click quick! Then you can be smarter than 9 out of 10 people.



You know, I was going to do ten of these, but my eyes are already crossed. I'll do the next five in a follow-up post. Good day to you, internet clickers. I said GOOD DAY.



 

What It Truly Means to Be Poor, and How We Get There - Guest Post

I've been following the stories of the woman who wrote a Huffington Post comment about what it means to be poor from afar. I first read an expose of her, and shared it, not having done much research. The expose has holes, and lots of problems of its own, including harsh judgments that are not necessarily truth, but conjecture. The woman's own story touched many hearts, won many dollars, and in turn, when the possibility of it being fake came out, turned many people off in anger. A close friend of mine has written a response to this back-and-forth. At first it looks like a derailment of the original woman, but it is not. Poor is poor (or so they tell me. The closest I got to it was 2008 when I had to go on Medicaid and WIC to feed and get medical care for my infants who were born prematurely right as the economy crashed, we were unable to pay for our now-underwater house, and my husband lost his job. Fewer than two years later, we were back on our feet, thank God, and these days, I do shit like make cookies to Christmas carols. This is not my story, but it is a story of many.)


 ...

You’ve read it by now. Everyone has, I think. It’s received national and even international coverage. A woman, who may or may not have struggled monetarily in life at one point, fabricated a heart-wrenching scene of what it’s like to live at and below the poverty level, down to rationalizing how it affected her decisions to eat, sleep, smoke, raise her children, and steer her life. It was poignant and well written, and it touched on a number of good points.

See, there were giveaways in that little essay that niggled at me, though. Things that niggled at a lot of other people, too. The connotation that poverty is always dirty, framed in a way that is recycled from the mouths of those who have really never been inside it, right down to the same language. Then there was the colorful diatribe about the roaches, and their little toothpick stakes, where she impaled them (by hand,) like victims of Vlad the Impaler. I live in the South, folks. If you’ve never been, we have a special brand of demon roach commonly called the Palmetto Bug. They’re big, they fly, and they’re fucking terrifying. More so than anything, they are in ALL HOUSES IN ALL THE PLACES, and they’re FAST. No chance in hell you’re going to sit on your floor with some toothpicks and impale those bitches. They will dart or fly across the room before you have a chance to ready your spear, and then they will laugh at you.

I was hurt when her hoax was brought to light. I was outraged. I felt for her; she was “one of us.” She was trudging through the shit like the rest of us, she was part of this brotherhood of hard knocks and occasional hopelessness. Or at least, she led us believe she was. But instead, she was privileged more than most, with a wealthy family, a boarding school early education, and a career in politics that started at a young age. She defended herself by saying that her essay was misunderstood, that those reading it saw what they wanted or needed to see, that they were obtuse. And she defended the outpouring of support that she soaked up, both monetary and emotionally, by iterating once more that people chose to act based on how they interpreted it. It was no fault of her own, but she was certainly not going to turn down any “help” anyone wanted to offer.

Well, folks, I want to do you a favor. I want to paint you a real picture of working poverty. I want to show you what poor decisions get made every day and why, and I want you to understand that this time, it’s real. Because I’m NOT doing this for pity, support, or donations, this will remain completely anonymous. The writer is a known blogger and guest blogger, but I choose to keep my identity well hidden, because more than anything, I want to show you what it’s like to live a day in the life. Shit like names and ages and a gender here or there have been altered. Really, I don’t want you to know who I am.

So, how does one end up poor? Or working poor, in my case? Well, I’ll tell you. It started young. I had young parents that struggled to make a life for their kids. For a long time, we bounced from shit hole to shit hole, always just evading eviction, while I pretended to not notice that there were days when dinner was spaghetti with canned sauce for days in a row, pretending not to see the terror and the sadness in our parents’ eyes when they laughed off our requests for trips to theme parks or for ponies or new bikes with the excuses of “That’s an awfully big request, let’s save it for an awfully big occasion.” (I was the oldest by seven and nine years, respectively.) I knew they wanted nothing more to do those things for us. I knew they simply couldn’t. I knew that they didn’t want to work from dawn to dark to try and make ends meet, I knew they’d rather be home with us, but I also knew that as much as they supported us, it was crucial that I support them, too. So I smiled back, and made light of the worries that trickled down my way. They tried desperately to shield me from it, but I was precocious and observant. If nothing else, it helped shield the littles; I could reinforce the ruse so that they, at least, didn’t have to have any inkling of how bad things really were.

At one point, finally, they made it out of the rut. They bought a nice house, upgraded to cars that worked. Took jobs that didn’t have them working themselves to the bone, where they could spend evenings making dinner and doing yard work, going to our extra-curricular activities that they could finally afford. I knew poverty at a young age and for many years, but we had moved beyond that.

So how, then, do you go from being an average, now-upper-middle class family, to a single mother living in that very same house, where you’ve all become working poor in spite of multiple incomes and at least two people with promising, bordering on prestigious careers?

Well, I’ll tell you how. It’s a secret now, so don’t go blasting it around everywhere. Are you ready? Here it is: Shit. Fucking. Happens.

I made it through high school, and due to a self-destructive and rebellious streak, I decided fuck college. I was going to do as many drugs and fuck as many people as I could. I blew through job opportunity after job opportunity, some of which would see me today working in very, very cushy research positions with my education paid for, because I got bored easily and was really convinced I was bullet proof.

I found that even though I bounced back and forth between being on my own and my parents support, I could do okay for myself.

Then came baby.

Alright, alright…that happens. I had unending support from my family, and at that point, we were still doing okay. They hadn’t made it to the jobs they have today, and my mother was furthering more her own education. Things were tight; my siblings were in high school at that point, and while we had to budget, we made ends meet. I took odd jobs here and there, and for the most part, got to stay home to raise my baby.

Still not poor. Still not experiencing poverty.

Then shit happened again. That education my mother was furthering? Her degree left her floundering in a temporarily saturated market, when the economy was falling in a tailspin down the toilet. My father, with his cushy job with tenure? Yeah, that whole market and economy thing struck his sector pretty hard, too.

At about this point, my teenage sibling, during a very exciting senior year, made me an aunt.

So picture this. A husband and wife. Three children, one of whom is an adult, the other two are teens. A two year old grandbaby, and another grandbaby on the way. Oh, and now joining our cozy abode is the other newest addition to the family, the daughter in law.

That’s when things became reminiscent of my childhood.

Enter me becoming very, very ill. I could not work. I could not pay my portion of anything. I was in and out of the hospital. I had tried to go back to school, and that effort was decimated. It’s hard to go to class when you’re possibly dying here and there.

Enter another couple of years of fluctuation. Second child and second grandbaby and daughter in law move out, enjoying their “wedded bliss” and their go at being self-sustaining adults.

At this point, in spite of having a roof over my head, I was personally at the poverty level. My own bills were going unpaid, some of them with dollar figures in the hundred thousands because I spent many of those hospitalizations uninsured. My ability to provide for my child was severely limited. My parents helped, of course, but there’s only so much money to go around. Jobs were hard to come by for anyone anywhere, and no matter what, being an adult means that even if people think you have a free ride, there’s no fucking free ride.

Well, back to the family dynamic. Darling sibling goes through a messy divorce. Back home again, where BAM. My nephew, who had always been special needs health wise, has his health spiral out of control. My child’s special needs rear their ugly heads. Suddenly, an entire family who was holding their own, albeit with a very tight budget, suddenly meets the poverty level once more. My sibling could not work, as he was caring for his gravely ill child. I could not work, as I was caring for a gravely ill me, and my child who was suddenly higher maintenance. My youngest sibling was struggling to make sure that her future remained bright.

I had to bite the bullet. Welfare. I had been on WIC, that kind of went without saying. But now the monsters of food assistance and Medicaid had to be confronted for everyone’s wellbeing.

And that worked for a while. It was the band-aid we needed to get through it. Well, it was truly just a band-aid.

I soon found the love of a man who turned out to be a literally homicidal psychopath, and like in every love story, I got pregnant. BAM. Shit has happened again. Back with the ‘rents. Now the body count is: Two parents, two adult children with two-almost-three grandchildren, and one almost-adult child who is still determined to beat the odds and make something out of her life.

Ohai, welfare. Nice to see you again.

Do you see where this is going? Can you see the pattern? Nobody fucking wants this. Nobody wants this to be their lives. It can happen to anybody. It can happen to those who plan best, it can happen to those who are stupidly convinced they’re bullet proof.

And the poor choices? Well, yeah. We do fucking make those. Because when it comes down to it and you are working any job you can get at any shift, just to make sure that the lights don’t get shut off, or there’s gas in the car to get the kids to school, and doctor appointments, and keep diapers on their asses and clothes on their backs and shoes on everyones’ feet, you say fuck it and you do what you have to do to keep living. You DO smoke those cigarettes to give you just a couple hours more energy. You DO indulge in those bottles of Three Buck Chuck wine, just to find some escape. Your foods are processed because they’re cheap, and if you’re smart, you manage to supplement with the freshest you can afford, but damned if that’s possible all the time. And you sure as hell aren’t buying organic. Trader Joe’s? HAHAHAHAHA. More like Save-A-Lot and the farmer’s market.

My second child was born very, very, very sick. I kept that baby alive through sheer willpower, or so the specialists all tell me. There will be lasting effects from it, and she has a neurological disorder that brings its own can of worms. This is something that, if I had a good job, or a husband who had a job, or even had a family that was slightly less strapped, wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

This is a child who cannot go to day care. This is a child whose dietary needs for the first two years were the cost equivalent of feeding the entire family beforehand. That, combined with her brother’s progressing special needs (and also special diet, and medication needs,) means that we had finally come full circle and hit Rock. Fucking. Bottom.

Veering away from the entirety of my family for a moment, let me show you what this means for me. Just me. This means that my days are spent shuttling back and forth between specialist appointments for both children, and multi-hour, multi-day therapy sessions for one child. Trying desperately to potty train, trying desperately to communicate. Learning sign language and turning around and teaching it. Never leaving her with a stranger, because there’s no way for her to tell me “Mommy, someone is hurting me.” Monitoring another child for behavior changes and seizures. Finally finding a job where I can pick my own hours, move my schedule as needed within limitations, and get paid a wage that even if it were me alone I wouldn’t be able to live off of. It means special diets that are expensive, it means medications that cannot be missed, no matter whether or not I have the money to buy them. It means begging friends for help, praying that nothing goes wrong with food stamp and Medicaid re-certifications, and always, always, always wondering where the next dollar is going to come from.  It means spending a few precious hours with both kids in the afternoons before I go to work, where I get off at midnight, come home and take care of as many things as possible, crash for a few hours of restless sleep, and begin it all over again.

Once upon a time, I dreamt of being a perpetual student. All I wanted to do was study and learn. Sometimes I decided I wanted to do veterinary research. Once, I dreamed of pioneering studies on HIV/AIDS.

I have not even finished a full semester of community college. All thoughts of getting a “real” job are pipe dreams, because when you have a child who does not speak, you cannot simply put them in day care, no matter how free it is, because like I said a moment ago, there is no way for them to tell you “Mommy, someone is hurting me.”

This. Is. Poverty. This is not being a welfare queen. This is not being lazy. This is desperately wanting something more, and never being able to get a step ahead to achieve it.

So where does this leave my entire family at this point? Well, my nephew is doing much better. My sibling got a very promising job with a company that paid well and offered benefits. He found a woman he loves, and they were set to move out and begin anew. Until that company folded. And another baby is on the way.

There are nine of us in this house right now. There will be ten in a few short weeks. Some of us are healthy, some of us are not. Some of us are special needs, some of us are trying our damndest to make it out and succeed. Two full-time careers, one part time job with not even a half-living wage, and one quarter-time job in retail in a college town. There is Medicaid all around, and foodstamps to supplement.  $340 to try and feed a household of ten. It is not uncommon for us to go a few days without phone service, or a night without electricity, because medication needs to be bought, or the price of the supplements for one kiddo or the other has gone up due to high demand and low production. It’s not uncommon for vehicles to go unrepaired because fixing them would be the difference between having a car to drive and eating for two weeks.

This is poverty, people.

We’re not dirty. We don’t impale roaches and lament over crooked teeth that cause us to be passed over for clerical positions or spots in restaurants as wait staff. We paste smiles on our faces and we make ends meet. We swallow our pride and ask friends for money to buy milk and bread when pay day is three days ahead of us and we’ve fallen just that short, and we pray that this friend won’t do what the last did and look you in the eye and tell you no, that they think that you’re just using them when you could surely be doing more to help yourself, or you should surely have someone else to turn to, even if you’ve made sure every time you’ve had to ask that you’ve been vigilant about paying them back with speed and some other small token of gratitude.

 We hide the fact that the power is out from our neighbors, and we hide the fact that this is the third night of spaghetti. We make sure our young children, the second generation, goes through life never ever coming close to comprehending that we had to exchange doing some bookkeeping so that they could go on that field trip, or in my case, in my very lowest moment, pity-fucking so that there were dry diapers for the baby who, because she was so sick, needed to be changed every five minutes or else the diarrhea would eat at her flesh and leave her burned and bleeding.

They will never know that there was a blow job traded for that trip to the pharmacy to pick up their medications.

The rest of the family will never know about that time that there was a motel room with ropes and a gag, and a crowd of cameras, and the blood and the bruises for weeks, just so I could make sure that there was food to go around for everybody, not just the kids, and gas money for us to wake up and start it all over, again and again.

Poverty is not waxing poetic about burning the candle at both ends and lamenting that you don’t cook because you’re afraid that it will make things that are already dirty even more so. Poverty is dealing with it silently, never letting them see you cry, scrubbing the counters until they gleam. Why? Because when nothing else in your life shines, at least that fucking vinegar and baking soda will get the coffee stain out of the grout and remind you that something, somewhere, somehow, can be under your control, and you can make that one part of your life where everything else seems tainted and dirty, covered with despair and worry, finally come clean.

When you’re poor, it’s not your house or your clothes that are dirty. You don’t have poor hygiene. It’s your soul that becomes covered in filth, because that despair and that terror of never knowing what’s coming next, that desperation to climb out of the pit and never finding a foot hold…it all leaves a layer of grime that just builds up. No amount of showering in scalding hot water seems to ever make it go away.

If you’ve read this far, I congratulate you. It can’t have been an easy read. It sure as shit wasn’t an easy write. Please, if you take nothing else away from this, just…be thankful, and think twice about someone you might otherwise write off as “obviously not having it that bad.” Sometimes we become true masters of disguise.

 

Why I'm Going to Continue to Tell my Girls that They are Beautiful

Quite a while ago now, Lisa Bloom, blogger for the Huffington Post, wrote a piece outlining why we need to stop focusing on appearance in little girls. She made a lot of good points, and it gave me a lot to think about.

"ABC News reported that nearly half of all three- to six-year-old girls worry about being fat.

"15 to 18 percent of girls under 12 now wear mascara, eyeliner and lipstick regularly; eating disorders are up and self-esteem is down; and 25 percent of young American women would rather win America's Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize."

I thought about these statistics, and I decided that I am not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

Bloom then stretches those statistics and comes up with this: "Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23."

I don't agree with this. I don't think that complimenting a little girl on her looks chips away at her self-esteem. I cannot see how simply telling a girl she's pretty somehow translates into telling her she's not pretty enough. The problem, as I see it, isn't that parents or family or even strangers are remarking on physical attributes positively. The problem is beyond that. It's entrenched in a society that shows women with botox and boob jobs as prettier than the average girl. It's in the magazine spreads and celebrated celebrity lifestyles. It's in the television, as reality stars spend hours in the bathroom to get themselves ready for the next random hookup. It's not us. If anything, I think, our daughters need us to tell them they are pretty more now than ever.

When I say tell them they're pretty, I mean just that. If they look nice that day, if you like the way their hair is done, if they're your daughters and you just want to squish them up into you because they are the most beautiful creations inside and out to bless your world, you tell them that.

I don't mean saying things like, "You'd be prettier if...", or "Let's try to do your hair this way to make you pretty." I also don't mean dwelling on it. Once is enough, per surge of emotion. No need to repeat it a thousand times. That makes the words lose their meaning. They lose their context. If you are a broken record, your compliments cease to be compliments and they tread on the territory Bloom is talking about. Your compliments lose their object, the girl herself, and she begins to only hear, "pretty, pretty, pretty." This is what Bloom is scared of.

But there is another side of the coin that cannot be ignored. Our society, as it stands right now, is not blind to physical looks. To turn away from this does nothing to solve the problem. It will not help your little girl's self-esteem as she grows older. Yes, it's important to focus on her inner beauty and her skills, but there's no reason to pointedly ignore the physical. Because if you do ignore it, you'll be the only one. And you'll be leaving a gap where your daughter needs you most as she grows.

Because people are going to call her ugly. I don't care if she is the most beautiful, well-coiffed, poised young woman in the world, some jerk is going to come along and try to make her feel bad about herself. And while the thought that "looks aren't important, it's the beauty on the inside that counts" is true and important for her to know at every age, that's only going to help her when she's already a fully grown adult, when she's already determined who she is and what her personality is like, when she's already stable in her place in the world.

Looks aren't important, it's the beauty inside that counts. That's not going to help her when she's 9 or 12 or 15. At those ages, how the outside world perceives you is important, and a parent ignoring looks will become just another example of how "mom doesn't understand me," or "mom doesn't want me to be happy."

These are treacherous years. During them, your daughter is going to need to know in her subconscious that she is beautiful, inside and out. The way to give her that nugget of truth is to tell her when she is young. So that when that ahole comes along spouting filth about your daughter's looks, she doesn't have to rely on a philosophy too complex for her years to get her through. No, she'll be able to draw strength from a subconscious well of knowledge that she is, indeed, pretty. You told her so. Your friends told her so. Everyone she met from age 2 to now who is not this person (or these people, as the case may be) told her she was pretty. Her own self-esteem isn't developed enough to get her through the attacks unscathed, but with help from you in her growing years, she may find strength -- the source of which will not be clear in her mind.

Bloom is right. Little girls, teenaged girls and women in general should not have to worry about their looks, especially not obsessively like we've begun to do. But that doesn't change the way of the world, and your daughter needs your support in the world in which she lives, not in the ideal world in which you wish she lived.

So, yes, I will continue to tell my daughters they are beautiful. I will tell them every day. Because I feel it every day. And there will come a day when they no longer believe me. But my words to them now will be lodged in their subconscious minds. My words to them now, I hope, will form a base of knowledge from which they won't have to waver. I can only hope that they'll understand that looks are not everything, but that even so, they look beautiful. Always.

You know how my mother did that for me? She said "Looks are not everything, honey, and I think you might spend a little too much time caring about what other people think. You don't need to. You're beautiful on the outside. And more importantly, you're beautiful on the inside."

So, why not be honest with our daughters? Instead of ignoring an ugly side of society that we don't like, hiding in the sand, why don't we face it head on, acknowledge it, and give it its proper place in our daughters' perspectives as they grow? Because without our guidance here, without our acknowledgement and understanding of this part of life, our daughters will be forced to figure it out all on their own. And the only people they'll have for help are those magazine spreads filled with botoxed beauties. The only people they'll have for help are those kids at the bus stop calling them names.

We need to be a positive force in our daughters' lives as they live, not as we wish they could live.

 Link to original piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html?ref=fb&src=sp

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