Know Tea

And no, I’m not talking about Maddie, Dave, and Miss Dipesto.

After about a year of not working job #2, I’m going back to job #2.  Not quite for as many hours as last time  (still on my day off, but only one night a week instead of two), so I hope it won’t get in the way of my primary job’s responsibilities as it did last time.  And yes, it concerns me that I’ll get into unhealthy eating habits again, grabbing bad food on the fly while I work, etc.  I guess I’m going to have to put a small cooler in the car with yogurt and bananas in it or something so I don’t get ravenous during those long shifts and try to eat the entire buffet at the end of the evening.  I will also need to redouble my efforts to exercise before and after work, because although I will be busy on this job, it will not be physically strenuous enough to count as exercise.

It’s certainly not the best way to make money, looking at it on an hour to hour basis, but unless and until composing and/or publishing ever make me one cent, and unless and until this business has a goodly handful of clients, back to job #2 I must go.  One cannot get blood out of a turnip.  We try to make the budget stretch as far as it can, but with the allergies that one of ours has, the old joke about eating nothing but Ramen for a week when the “food envelope” is empty rings pretty hollow.  And when everyone needs clothes and/or shoes, I’m not going to tell them that they are just going to have to go out in their outgrown clothes or that their feet are just going to have to hurt.  Would you say that to your children?  I didn’t think so.

It’s very hard not to feel judged sometimes–a lot of times–because of the choices we make.  And by “we” I don’t mean just my family.  I mean all of us–I think this is a universal principle.  We can stand on the sidelines and wag our fingers at other people, or mock “the poor” as so many on talk radio do (as contrasted to those on talk TV, who these days apparently prefer mocking the mentally disabled).  I’ve heard, for example, stories of people who took groceries to a needy family, only to be horrified, as they helped put the groceries away, by the sight of beer in the fridge or liquor in the cabinet.  Well, you don’t know how that got there.  Maybe someone brought the beer over.  Maybe the liquor was a Christmas present.  (I have a bottle of Crown Royal in the cabinet right now that I got for Christmas some 13 years ago.)  You don’t know.

So, if you were to see me or my wife in the store, buying organic vegetables, for example, you might be inclined to scoff that we can’t afford to do that.  But we know what you don’t.  We know what preservatives, additives, pesticides, etc., that will trigger severe reactions in our child.  And we know (because his doctor told us) that some of those ingredients have a cumulative effect in the body:  he may eat something today and be all right, but at some point the additives build up in his body, and we have a trip to the emergency room on our hands.  To our way of thinking, we prefer to spend more money on food that does not have preservatives, additives, pesticides, artificial coloring, etc., than to deal with anaphylaxis.

And before you say it, of course eating out is a definite no.  Even if we had the money to eat out, it is a definite no.  So are most “convenience foods.”  Ready-made pasta sauce in a jar or a can is a convenience food.  Right now, Goro is learning to make spaghetti sauce for himself, a useful skill to have, since now he’ll know exactly what goes into the food he’s eating.  Canned or frozen biscuits are convenience foods, as are frozen waffles, and even store-bought bread.  All of the above are routinely made from scratch around here now.

So yes, we eat really good food!  But in most of these cases, cooking from scratch actually costs more than buying the convenience foods.  The next time you make spaghetti, go get all of the ingredients for a Bolognese sauce instead of the jars of Prego or Ragú and you’ll see what I mean.

All that to say, we do the best we can with what we have to do.  Oh, and add to the list a child who needs physical and occupational therapy to the tune of about $200 a month, and our rent went up by $100 a month last January (and I wouldn’t put it past them to do the same thing this January), and of course both gas and food prices are through the roof, as well as utility rates.  But you may be dealing with the same thing.

So I start back at the restaurant tomorrow night.  Only problem is, all of my work trousers (khakis) would now be much too big for me, even if I hadn’t thrown them out.  They had gotten ruined from my first stint at job #2.  I’m going to have to beg them to be slightly out of uniform until I get my first check and can go to the local thrift store to find some that I can wear to work.

If I were doing this to get ahead, I’d feel a lot better about it.  But I’m not doing it to get ahead:  I’m doing it to try to keep from falling behind.  Getting ahead seems to be one of those things that’s never going to happen.