David Brooks' previous sestina about the road to character can be found here. I think we will all agree that bad relationships cause poverty. Also, not acting like someone in the Jane Jacobs book, and not having a “code.” It is certainly not caused by rich people owning almost every single thing including money that others might potentially need.
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
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…
