No Recognition

I am feeling especially aware of my material poverty this month.  I am on the very edge of gong into the pit of debt, and if I fall in, I can't imagine how I will climb out.  Meanwhile, I need look for a new apartment, and I so desperately want to better my living space - cramming into two teeny-tiny rooms over the last year was really tough, and I certainly did NOT imagine it being an indefinite situation.  I have to send the kids to camp so I can go to work, but I'm going to be spending my entire salary on camp tuition. Meanwhile, I keep sending checks to the lawyer......enough, I'm not going to catalog all my expenses.  The point is: I'm poor, I'm getting poorer, I don't see this turning around any time soon.  I want a break from "Sweet Pro's" world, but there isn't really any acceptable escape.

I recently bought a bunch of comic collections at the library book sale, including some of the later "For Better Or For Worse."  Not my favorite, too full of herself, but I will read almost any comics, and the kids like them.  So I see that a minor character was added as a school-friend of the youngest daughter.  The new character is a special needs student with trouble speaking.  Perhaps the idea from this character came from  a real person in the life of the cartoonist, but I thought about the attempts to extend the "diversity" in the strip. What popped into my "pity me" head was, "There are no poor characters in the strip."  Okay, that is not completely true - very young adults are shown having a hard time with finances, but this is clearly just a stage, a rite of passage. One of the son's friends lives over a garage from the time he graduates high school through his first couple years of marriage.  But soon enough he becomes one of the most successful business men in town.  And even his alcoholic parents seem to have had a nice house in which he grew up.  Okay, okay, she is documenting the world she knows, but it still gets me down.  Everything I grew up with on TV, in books, in comics, etc shows American life as rich by default (I know, Johnston is Canadian, but you get the point). It's not so much that I dislike my circumstances as much as having my kids (and myself) wondering why we can't just be like everyone else.  Isn't there already enough "less then average" about us?

While trying to think of a title for this piece, I considered "No handicapped Plates", as in no special accommodations for the working poor, the fat, the skinny, the bald, the ugly, the dysfunctional family member, the insecure, etc; basically the emotionally crippled.  A scene from Seinfeld jumped into my thoughts, where George has the same analysis: the world owes him for all his hardship.  I can't even figure out exactly which episode, I think it is in "The Butter Shave", when he gets the job with Play Now, they think he is unable to walk, and give him all the "perks" of being "handicapped".  George tells Jerry that he intends to take full advantage of the situation, since he has just as many problems as anyone with a physical impediment.

So I'm even more pathetic now: I'm kinda' siding with George.