Hi. I'm poor. By any standard you wish to measure I am among the ducat-deprived. I'm also white, though, and was born and raised in the US, so mine is a qualified poverty, one that includes electricity and running water (at least most of the time; ten-day outages were common in my rural childhood), and access to lots of financial patch-kits. These days I even have a savings account. My clothes are second-hand and fit…

Heather Seggel's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Some people may be born to misandry, but I've always been happiest when I have some male energy in my life, my only rule being pants of all parties remaining on at all times. Guys are cat-like in their independence and long silences and more likely than the women I know (as opposed to Women in General) to obsessively quote

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It was roughly ten years ago that the editor of a small literary journal called me with an invitation to contribute. He'd seen my letter to another publication and noticed that, at least by rural standards, we lived fairly close to one another. I liked his paper, especially the book reviews, but it didn't feel like a venue where my ideas would be welcome. A nice place to visit as a reader, sure, but without…

Heather Seggel's past writing for The Toast can be found here, and it's all really good. On December 31, 1991, I was standing in the middle of the Castro district in San Francisco. Flanked by a group of friends, we had come to ring in the new and absorb a little pride by osmosis. At least that was part of my purpose. Most of my friends went to UC Santa Cruz; I attended the…

(A version of this essay appeared in the anthology Punk Rock Saved My Ass, edited by Terena Scott and Jane Mackay and published by Medusa's Muse.) My first taste of punk culture was seeing live footage of bands on TV upside down from the floor, where my mother was trying to cut my unruly toenails against my will. This predated MTV and my parents weren't into punk at all, so I can only assume…

Heather Seggel's most recent contribution to The Toast was Class Navigation: On Being Poor. In December 2011 I hung lights inside and outside my trailer. They were asymmetrical and droopy, but it didn't really matter because I never plugged them in. I felt the need to decorate. My dad had died in July and this was the first holiday I'd spent completely alone so it seemed important to cast my lot with the living,…

I was working in a bookstore when The Secret came out. It wasn't an event on par with the seventh coming of Harry Potter, but any time a book gets Oprah Winfrey's thumbs-up a decent clerk must, at a minimum, know where it is on the shelf and roughly what it's about. I didn't even need to meet that low standard—one of my coworkers bought the book and the DVD and raved about both…