C.B. Potts's Blog, page 30

Talking 'bout A Revolution

Food is not the only thing we buy. This bit I'm not particularly articulate about yet, but bear with me. I think somewhere along the way, the definition of 'an acceptable standard of living' got inflated. Way inflated. Everybody lives like they're really rich - especially in my experience the people who have nothing. People who actually do have tons of money tend not to have tons of stuff - they have what they want, and that suffices. But poor people - my god, we're drowning in stuff.

And we'...

Talking 'bout A Revolution

More about becoming a better shopper. Something really fundamental shifts inside you, I think, at the moment you learn why quality really matters. Experiencing better - no matter what form better arrives in - transforms one entirely. For a long time, I'd personally equated better with more expensive and therefore unobtainable. But that's wrong on a whole bunch of levels. You can pay good money for garbage; it turns out that paying a high price for something doesn't necessarily mean quality, a...

Talking 'bout A Revolution

One thing I think it is important to talk about is that we are not born skilled shoppers. Shopping is a skill that is learned, but not taught - I mean, yes, people are told to look for the lowest price but that is the smallest part of shopping.

This is something that it took me a really long time to learn. For a long time, my provisioning decisions were based very, very strictly on what can we afford and getting maximum quantity out of every dollar. There is a world of difference between know...

Talking 'bout A Revolution

Do you know what poor people do? Poor people create rich people. It's mainly all they do, and they do it all the time. It's exhausting how much time and effort goes into creating rich people. But I guess that's how it must be: there are ever so many people and they all want to be rich.

Poor people give rich people their money, in dribs and drabs and everything they have all at once. McDonalds millionaires got that way one burger at a time. Poor people give rich people their time. Scrubbing fl...

Friday Morning Thinky Thoughts

Our local newspaper ran an infographic breaking down, county by county, the percentage of children living in poverty. For Clinton County, the county we live in, the percentage was 20%. That's one out of every five children. It's a number that seems somehow both astronomical and not out of keeping with my experience. I was curious, and found out that the national average was just under 22% of all children live in poverty.

Last year, the poverty line for a family of four was $ 23,050. I look at...

This Post Is For People Like Me

You need to be emotionally engaged with your environment. We are physical creatures. We live in physical space. After you clean a room, go in there and take 5 minutes - a full 5 minutes, time it! - and enjoy it. Look at how the space appears now. IT IS YOUR WORK THAT DID THAT. Enjoy the change you created. See it. Smell it. Experience it. This is your home. You should be getting enjoyment from it.

If no one is helping with this, that's your de facto carte blanche to arrange things exactly how...

This Post Is For People Like Me

Look at the stuff you're keeping. It's amazing how often something (all things considered) you don't give a rat's ass about winds up ruining something you do care about. This doesn't just happen. It's not a spontaneous phenomenon. It's a direct result of the choices you've made to keep this stuff. You can make different choices.

If it's garbage, throw it out, right away. If you're struck by the "Hey, this could be a useful thing that I could make using my mad upcycling skills" either make it...

This Post Is For People Like Me

The experience of poverty impacts many things, including how you keep house. When you hold onto that last little bit of toothpaste in the tube or the 'maybe there's a wash left here' bottle of shampoo AFTER you already have a one-deep backup of these items, what you are really telling yourself is "I don't have the confidence in myself to provide these things again if we run out. I don't believe my future is sustainable at the level I've achieved right now" and you're leaving your living space...

To Be Calm

Remember that everything has its own time. You can't melt the snow by wishing. The sun might seem cold round now, but it's working all invisible like. So slow you can not see it. Turn around and all at once the fields will be standing water, liquid mirror for the sky; even clouds will, if given the opportunity, preen and delight in their own countenance. What marvels we are made. Work like that takes a while. Might as well breathe.

Something I Want To Remember

Quite different from yesterday, or perhaps not that different after all:

It’s amazing how little attention the payroll-tax increase got at the time—maybe because so few of the players and observers involved could imagine how much difference fifteen dollars out of the weekly paycheck of someone earning forty thousand dollars a year could make.

It made enough difference to send Walmart’s earnings into a temporary free fall.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/apple-wal...