(this is a cross-post from The Secret Chicken)
I hate wasting things. Unfortunately, it means that sometimes, but trying not to waste, I end up wasting even more. Don’t throw that away, it might be useful someday! And of course it never is, and what is more wasteful than having a possibly useful item sitting in a box in the garage? Yeah.

We all have neat things, things we see value in, but which have no real value in our lives. And we ask ourselves, “Why am I keeping this? It’s useless to me! But it’s so neat, and it still has uses…”, so we keep it. In a closet, in a box in the garage, hell, in extreme cases we keep them in storage units because it’s just too hard to get rid of it.

This is where donating comes in. It’s a way of letting these ever-so-useful items become useful again – to someone else.

A lot of us shop at thrift stores, but we don’t consider that we could donate just as easily. We see things that we need, things we didn’t know we needed until we saw them…so why can’t we do that for someone else? Give them a chance to see our neat things, and let them see how much they need neat things.

Last week, I had a few things I wanted to donate. Not much, but a few things. Some clothes my daughter let me pry from her hands, mostly. I put them in a box in the living room, and told my roommate it was there, if he wanted to add to it. And miracle of miracles, he did! He added a jacket he’d had since the 80’s. Some shirts he’d had almost as long, things he’s had in his closet because they were too nice to throw away, but didn’t fit him anymore. They did have some sentimental value, they were from peak of his youth and all that. It was hard. But knowing that someone else can use them, that made it possible. It made it a good thing, not an angst-driven purging.

And what that means, is that somewhere out there…there is a person who will find that jacket. That jacket that looks like it was made from the upholstery of my grandmother’s couch…and think it’s neat.

And that is why we donate.

Years ago, like more than 10 years ago, a guy I worked with made me a mix tape (remember those?). It had a bunch of stuff on it, nothing I’d ever heard before in my small-town-to-married-to-mother-to-single-working-mother lifetime. One of those things was Marilyn Manson, and we all know how that turned out…

But another band on there, I went years with having a song or two of theirs stuck in my head but I was never able to figure out who they were (once the cover from that tape was lost, so was the band info). With the advent of the innernets in my life, I finally figured it out.

And I’m kind of feeling like a dork, because the name of the band is kind of dorky, and some of their music is a little dorky – and I wont even get into their costumery. But then again, there are a bunch of songs that are really damn good. Example:

Ocean of Hunger (no real video, sorry)
or
Ice Planet Hell (no real video, but star wars!)
or

(again, no real video, but images of the band)

Anyway. I’ve had Ocean of Hunger stuck in my head for the last two weeks, finally looked up the lyrics and it turns out that even the line that was stuck in my head was totally wrong. But that’s ok. Now I know, maybe I can purge it from my mind for a while?

Or not.

Remember when you were a kid, and your mom worked two jobs and was a drunk besides, so sometimes you were stuck at home with your older sister and younger brother eating #10 cans of beans and weenies for days on end, because there wasn’t anything else in the house to eat? Having cheap boxed mac&cheese made with water because you were out of butter and milk? Having a life sturgeon in the bathtub because they have to keep it alive until just before they fillet it (or whatever you call it when the fish weights as much as a small horse)?

Remember that? No? Yes?

Well, I just had it reminded to me, when I realized that I’ve spent more of my tax return stuffing the cupboards/freezer to the gills. As [god] as my witness, I will never go hungry again. And neither will anyone else in my house. I got 2 spare 50lb bags of chicken food, 2 spare 20lb bags of cat food. Enough school snacks to make sure my kid never has to skip a meal because she’s staying late for a play. Probably enough for the rest of the school year, in fact. Frozen veggies (those new steam-in-the-bag ones are really good, actually), divied up family sized packages of chicken, pork and beef. Ice cream, frozen lasagna, bread, cheese, crackers, cookies, bisquick, cereal, canned tomatoes and beans, canned and add-water soup bowls. Fish sticks, tater sticks, fig bars, Japanese rice crackers. Sushi rice, glutenous rice, brown jasmine rice, white rice. Yukon potatoes, red potatoes, russets. 8 bottles of that V8 juice that says it’s got 2 servings of fruits/veggies in them. Spare coffee, creamer, sugar. Even got sweetened condensed milk to go with the Trung Nguyen. Udon noodles, rice noodles, elbow noodles, egg noodles, penne and farfalle.

I bought a pantry cupboard thing, it’s 80″ x 36″ x 22″. It’s full. So is the upright freezer in the garage. And the fridge, and the kitchen cupboards.

We got home today with the latest haul and just stood staring, blank-eyed, trying to figure out where to put it.

But dammit, we will NOT go hungry, or live on #10 cans of anything. As [god] as my witness

My mom says, she’d rather avoid death, so she chooses taxes. I am not sure it works that way, but in any case, when you’re dirtpoor whitetrash, you get money back so doing taxes is like filling out a form for free cash. So yeah, my taxes are done and filed. Just waiting for them to hit the bank.

I have a three-stage list.
1. Have-to’s – Bills, Bras, Britches. Getting Spike fixed.
2. Needs – some storage units, backup food (people, cat and chicken), Kumoricon tickets, hosting fees.
3. Kinda needs, mostly wants – laptop, camera, Kumo lodging.

I’m pretty sure it will all work out – if the DOE doesn’t take the whole damned thing for my outstanding student loan, like they did last year.

One thing that came up in January that caused some friction was a special vote thing. A couple of measures were proposed that would do a number of things, including raising taxes for people making a shitload of money, and reduces income tax on unemployment payments.

There was a lot more to it, and most of the “no” people had good points…but the thing that made me a “yes” was that it puts money back into schools. See, I have a theory. Fewer school days = stupider kids = less qualified workers = crappier, continually declining economy.

Contrariwise, More school days = smarter = qualified = improving economy. In the short term, it might well suck. People talk of job loss and loss of our kicker check, but what the hell do I care? The kicker is based on what you pay into it, which I don’t make enough to pay much into. And I already don’t have a job, what are you going to do, make me more unemployed?

I know – it’s sort of a selfish way to think, but is there a problem with wanting the future to be better, rather than bouncing from crisis to crisis? I’m not saying this will fix it, but at least it’s something.

Anyway. Here’s a picture of a cute kitten to make everything better. Hopefully, in a week or so, I’ll be able to take pictures of her (and the rest of them) on a real camera, but for now, fuzzy cellphone camera will have to do.