August 12, 2012
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What I have learned so far at Daycamp…
My relatives were strangely well-behaved yesterday. I had maybe one aunt get really antagonistic, but no one else was wishing for a fight. At least there’s still lots of watermelon in the fridge.
I realized something about economics yesterday, while watching Antiques Roadshow with my dad. He kept complaining about how some of the coins in his old coin collection could only be sold for their metal, and not for their collector value. I said something about how this is a buyer’s market, and nothing like it would have been ten years ago. People are too worried about selling, and know that it’s to the point of just pawning things to pay the bills. So, it’s the buyer that sets the price, and then worries about if they can sell what they just bought. Everything is going up in price, but losing value. It’s the strangest phenomenon.
I’ve also realized, that though my past job was pretty shitty, and one of those “minimum wage-slave” kinds of gigs that I hope never to have to do again, it’s kind of made me a crusader for the lower class. People keep talking about political things, and economic things, and I keep spouting out almost anarchistic dogmas, without really meaning to. I mean, it’s like I was doing field research and one day I figured out what makes and keeps poor people poor and now I’m putting words to their/our circumstances, and it’s all coming out angry and subversive. I’ve never really felt “poor”, even though by poverty line standards I have been, but then again, I’ve never felt the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” that most people seem to be afflicted with, where I empathize with rich people, and hope that some of that trickles down to me. Despite my fancy college education and all my strange eccentric sophistication, (that once actually had a cop fooled that I was much more wealthy than I was and had him almost chasing down my stolen wares until I told him that it was just a fifteen dollar backpack and a book of poetry), I’ve come out with some pretty hard life lessons, that maybe hopefully made me a better person. Or maybe I’m just romanticizing this shit too much.
Also: there’s a huge, viscous dog that got loose outside, and I’ve been instructed to poke it with a stick if it comes at me while I’m outside while my parents are at church. I keep hearing a small dog yelp in the next yard over, and it makes my heart sad.
