i think a lot of ppl assume food pantries are for if you’re completely destitute and have no food in your house at all.
just so you know if you forego certain foods because you can’t afford them or you can’t “justify” spending the money, you might be able to get that food at a pantry.
i was living in a super wealthy area once where the only grocery store within a 40 minute drive was all fancy upcharged local organic and i literally pretty much stopped eating fresh produce because i couldn’t afford it. i went months without eating a carrot or greens or anything that didn’t come from a can. sometimes i got frozen veggies.
so sure, i was eating. i wasn’t starving. i was getting nutrition. but it was nuts that as an animal on earth where plants grow in abundance, i didn’t get to eat any of them fresh. people deserve fresh produce!
one day i was lamenting it and my friend was like, “oh yeah i get all of my produce every week at the food pantry.”
i was surprised bc she made the same paycheck as me and i wouldn’t have thought of either of us as someone who ‘qualified’ for food assistance. i went to the food pantry and found out because the median income in our town was so high, i did qualify. more than that, they asked for no proof of income, it was more of a 'if you think you need help, we don’t make you prove it,’ situation.
for like 8 months i got all of my produce (and eggs!) there every week. and yes if i had made sacrifices elsewhere in my life i probably could have afforded some produce at the local grocery store. i could have, i don’t know, skipped seeing the one movie i saw at a move theater once every couple of months and spent the $8 on spinach one time instead of the ticket and had spinach once every couple of months.
but the point is the food pantry had more than enough to go around. if i hadn’t taken some of their produce, it would have gone bad. the resource was available to me, and there was no reason for me to crawl on my hands and knees to qualify for it.
resources like food assistance are not available everywhere and they can be very limited and hard to come by. they won’t be given out just for fun to anyone. if you ask for assistance and are offered assistance in reply, you need to believe that the assistance is available for you.
if a food assistance program doesn’t have resources to help you, it’ll say so. there is no harm in asking! you will be told 'yes’ or 'no.’ but you won’t know until you ask.
stop convincing yourself that you don’t deserve assistance, that everyone else needs it more than you, that you’re taking it from someone else, that you should have nothing at all in order to deserve anything.
you deserve to not only eat but to eat well. if there’s assistance for you to access better foods than what you have, understand how fortunate you are, and stop denying yourself that resource!
accessing food assistance at pantries is also a great way to help yr community, because you can spread the word and help normalize receiving food assistance in yr community. you can even become a volunteer and be part of the team providing to you and others (i did that and it rocked)!
my point is, yes, there is always someone who needs something 'more’ than others. i have been completely destitute and it sucks. but when i went to the food pantry never once did i think, 'nobody better be here if they have more than me.’ i was grateful that we all had support.
the mutual aid food share I volunteer at asks your situation so they can do statistics (we help x many seniors, x many kids, x many ppl who can’t afford food) but they don’t ask for ANY documentation and they don’t turn anyone away even if they answer they’re totally food secure. They ask for a $15 donation for a two-week food box but also it’s optional, and the sign up says clearly if you can’t afford it, don’t pay anything.
and like. Honestly policing who’s “allowed” to be there would cost more money than it’s worth in any sense. So it’s very likely your local nonprofit food pantry doesn’t police either.
A high quality “expensive” pair of shoes is one of the thriftiest ways to spend over $100 because if you have good shoes it reduces stress on literally every joint in your body. Please do not ever thrift-OCD yourself into wearing bad shoes
I have to give the hardest possible plug for Orthofeet here. My fiancée introduced me to this company when I was lamenting the fact that it feels difficult to find orthopedic shoes that aren’t kinda fugly and unfashionable. These are some of the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn and for both pairs I own there was very minimal breaking-in needed, they were just comfortable right out of the box. I walked around a ren faire with hills and uneven terrain for several hours in these ankle boots and I felt about the same level of tired I’ve felt after walking around in sneakers all day.
They’re not cheap shoes, but almost all of them are under $150 and it’s 100% a worthwhile investment. They have a pretty generous wear testing policy—you can wear them up to 60 days and still get a full refund if you don’t like them. There’s also lots of different styles so there’s kinda something for everyone.
Amongst the flowers I am alone with my pot of wine drinking by myself; then lifting my cup I asked the moon to drink with me, its reflection and mine in the wine cup, just the three of us; then I sigh for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along with me never saying a word; with no other friends here, I can but use these two for company; in the time of happiness, I too must be happy with all around me; I sit and sing and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I dance, it is my shadow that dances along with me; while still not drunk, I am glad to make the moon and my shadow into friends, but then when I have drunk too much, we all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on these who have no emotion whatsoever; I hope that one day we three will meet again, deep in the Milky Way.
last year i played around with different zine formats/ways to get creative with page layout. this design resulted in two distinct halves around a center spine, so i thought it’d be fun to add in a 90º rotation as well.
the one time i had an online support job i was actually backend tech support who rarely spoke to customers (yes i did a strange and brief sidequest in a coding job do not ask me how it happened) and we had none of the like training the customer support team did on how to speak to customers or any of the responses we should use. so one day a customer sent me an email trying to cover up his absolutely immense fuck up that was definitely going to get him sued and he tried to make it look like it was my fault and he ended the email like, ‘i’ll see you in court.’ but i was the very bottom of a multi-billion dollar tech corporation like. i was the true sub-basement rat of the entire tower so i emailed back, “you’ll see someone, but they don’t pay me me enough to make in-person appearances. i’ll escalate your concern to whoever will see you in court.” and the customer emailed me back 12 seconds later like “EXCUSE ME?????”
management reviewed the interaction and was like, “well the information you provided was accurate and you did escalate it through the appropriate channels……”
i know this isn’t the reguar theme of this blog but i need to share it somewhere because today someone called my local fire department because they found
a horse
and not only was it a not-dead horse, they dug it up and it was
