My thoughts on being poor and riding the bus [View All]

[Lyric]

God, I just need to vent for a few minutes. Sometimes I hate life.

Last Fall our '99 Dodge Stratus had a grievous transmission malfunction that would have literally cost thousands to fix. We couldn't afford it, period--so the car got sadly towed away to the junkyard, and we've been taking the bus ever since.

Now the bus service where we live isn't all that great. A bus runs to the front of the mobile home park where we live roughly every two hours, from 6:30 am until 5:30 pm. We live way out past the edge of the city limits in a rural area with lots of insanely steep hills and narrow roads, so walking is just not a possibility. Our first classes of the day start at 11:30 am, which means we have to take the 10:05 am bus in order to get to class on time. We get to campus at around 11:05 most days, attend classes from 11:30 am until 2:30 pm, and then ride the 3:05 bus home, which gets us home at around 4:00--just in time to meet our 7-year-old as he gets off of *his* bus. Sounds pretty ideal, other than the few hours wasted in transit, right? Well it *would* be...except that we have to make *money* somehow, too. Our daytime hours are completely eaten up by getting the kidlet ready for school, getting him on the bus, getting *ourselves* ready for school, our classes, and the annoyingly long-ass waits during bus transit.

The hours we have available for work (and only one of us can work, as the other has to be at home with the kidlet--no family in town to babysit, unfortunately) are from 4:00 pm until midnight or so. But the last bus (Monday through Friday) that runs out here drops off and picks up at 5:30 pm. It's worse on weekends--the bus only runs *half* of the usual M-F times, and on Sundays it doesn't run at *all*. Getting to the grocery store is an utter nightmare--we have to go on Saturdays (because all weekdays are eaten up by school and the bus) which means leaving the house at 10:05 am and getting home sometime around 4 or 5, all for the sake of getting only the small amount of groceries that we can carry by hand. Taking advantage of sales, buying in bulk, buying frozen goods--all practically impossible. We eat a lot of beans and rice lately. They don't spoil or melt during the 3-hour wait for the bus.

Doing laundry is also hell. We have a washer, but there's something wrong with our dryer, so we have to load up big duffle bags (the kind that were originally used to store hockey equipment) with a hundred pounds of wet clothes and hike a half-mile up a steep hill to get to the nearest laundromat, where we stand a chance of getting bitched at by the management because "You're not supposed to use the dryers unless you also used the washers"--which we simply cannot afford to do. Argh.

ThinkBlue1966 just lost yet another freaking job because her employer insisted that she start working Sundays--which simply is not possible, as this place is easily 5-6 miles away from our house. ThinkBlue1966 has bad knees, and I have a herniated disc in my lower back--walking or bike riding (even if we could *afford* to buy a secondhand bicycle) is just not possible, and not safe either--there are no sidewalks, and our rural road is narrow, steep, and full of people driving SUVs *waaay* too fast.

So now I'm looking around at my life, wondering why it has to be so damned hard to get by in a supposedly wealthy nation. I'm praying that we can somehow get by until the semester ends (May 8th) and our daytime hours are freed up again for work. When we got our student aid this past spring, we were smart and paid our rent and utilities ahead--we're covered rent-wise until June 1st, and the utilities are only now starting to come due, which means we should be safe from losing our power or gas service for at least another month--but the job market here is shrinking at an alarming rate, and the competition is fierce. I'm talking menial jobs here--fast food, grocery stores, video stores, Wal-Mart--that kind of job. Those places don't want to hire you unless you swear that you're available for *any* hours they might decide to assign you. Telling those places that you're only available from 7:00 am until 5:00 pm (and not available on Sundays) is practically a death sentence for your application. There are twenty other people who want that job and are willing and able to work whatever weird-ass hours they arbitrarily assign. *sigh*

I just read "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich, and she really nails some of the issues that people like my family face. The middle-class is getting squeezed, but down here at the bottom, we're getting smothered to death. It's downright freaking scary right now.