I think the system is broken

So, as you may have gathered, I'm poor. And while it is a hard notion for me to comprehend, having come from the middle class and wanting to stay firmly there thankyouverymuch, it was actually my parents who brought up the options I was ignoring. Welfare.

Even now, I feel slightly embarrassed just admitting to it. How absurd is that?! It is easier for me to admit that I provide sexual satisfaction to creepy old men for money than to admit that I applied for government assistance. This might be the first problem. Why is welfare such a dirty word? Is it merely a product of my upbringing? Is it the burden of the middle class that if you slip from that class level sex work is a better option than letting your taxes pay for assistance? What weird sort of mental blockage is that? And yet, there it is. I have told more people about the fetish club than my application for food stamps. That should not be the case.

But anyway, I did it. I applied for foodstamps. You can do it all online (at least in my state - did you know food stamps are state based? I was mistakenly under the impression that it was a federal program, but no. It is a state run system and, I assume, qualifications differ from state to state) so I did, over the course of about 90 minutes one evening.

I received a letter in the mail shortly after. It was one page long.

the letter I received from my friendly government assistance office

So go ahead and read that over. I especially enjoy the bold line at the top. "I know you're hungry right now, but you're not a migrant worker and you have more than $100 to your name, so sorry, we have to wait till we get around and review your application." Meanwhile, I went to the gym today and stepped on the scale. It had been broken the past 2 weeks, so I wasn't sure how much weight I'd lost, if any. I knew people were commenting, but who knows how that translates? I started at the scale in disbelief. A women behind me said that she wasn't sure it was working right, since it had been broken so long. I found another scale. Same number.

I've lost almost 10 pounds in 4 weeks. Any other time I would be THRILLED (oh hell, I'll admit it here, I'm still a little thrilled) but it's cheap excitement. I didn't EARN that weightloss. It isn't even that I have the willpower of an anorexic. It's just that I'm not a seasonal farm worker who doesn't qualify for food assistance. Never mind that I'm hungry.

Yes, I understand that the system can't be too easy because then it would be abused to hell. But you know something? I see a LOT of people shopping at the local Whole Foods using their foodstamp cards. I'll even go out on a limb and assume that all of those people are qualified. What I can't understand is how the hell they figured it out. I mean, I have two degrees. And I can't make heads or tails of all the documentation they are requiring from me. I don't know.

You know what else sucks? The dispute option. Even though I wouldn't have disputed (obviously, I don't fit any of those categories) the time frame given to me was over by the time I received the letter in the mail. That's pretty shitty.

I'm going to pursue this route. As my parents pointed out: "You're going to be paying for it the entire time you work, so you might as well use it when you need to."



You know, if they let me.