Take a walk

[Bunny]

It's pretty late here right now and I starting thinking about all these things. I don't really know what it is but I needed to write it down and let someone see it and maybe talk about it. Kinda came out as a short essay.


Suburban Wasteland

This week I had a thought-provokingly tragic conversation with a certain manager of mine. (For your information, I have five. Eat that Office Space.) After a couple of months of hour-cutting misery, I finally made the decision to challenge the most accessible of all my superiors to supply me with any logical reason that I should ever have under twenty-five hours a week. See, my constant frustration is that I have the second-highest sales percentage in the store and the most amiable personality of any employee yet somehow the people with lower sales and generally disgruntled attitudes are the ones who get all the hours every week. The explanation I got for this phenomenon started me on a train of thought no force on earth has been able to stop.
“Well, the management seems to have come to a common consensus that you don’t want more hours. To be honest, we all thought that you were some kind of balla’-like you’re always bringing these extravagant meals in here. We thought you had money.”
You know what assuming does?
The thought that got under my skin most was that not a single one of my five managers had the decency or the thoughtfulness to ask me about my situation before my hours were cut. Nevermind that every employee there knows that I’m a college student about to move to a new city, a new university, and into a new apartment straight out of my home, what overruled all of that in their minds was obviously the food that I brought in.
To clear things up, I cook. I cook often. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s good practice for when I’m actually on my own. The “extravagant meals” everyone sees me bring in - all the beef kabobs, the beef stew, the lemon-lime chicken- are 100% homemade. Other than that, my meals consist of bits and pieces of whatever fast food I have a taste for at the time and no one ever sees me eat that because I’m sure to eat it in my car on the way back to work.
So in reality, what keeps me from getting money at my workplace is my culinary skills.
This isn’t the end of what bothers me.
What bothers me is that I have to beg for financial aid because I’m stuck in this middle-way social class appropriately named the middle class. Anyone who shares this caste probably shares my dread everytime they fill out a FAFSA. You already know that having a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on a half acre lot just outside of city limits is going to mean having to take out a student loan because your awarded funds won’t even cover tuition and it only gets worse because each year tuition goes up and each year more loans are available. Soon you’re facing a minimum of $20,000 of debt accumulating interest and coming after you in your dreams like those ghosts in pacman.
It’s funny how people determine need.
A lot of people would consider me privileged but the reality of my situation is far from picturesque. To be completely transparent, I have a mom who works two jobs, a dad who retired from the military and had to move two states away for a job with a salary big enough to put me through school, a brother who makes good money as a welder in Colorado but still needs financial help a little too often (if you ask me), and a grandma who should have retired three years ago but has to work full-time to help us out. As for me, I do my part. I’m a full-time student so I can only pull-off a part-time job, which is just enough to cover my gas, my clothes, and whatever food I may need.
It’s a prevalent way of thinking that residents of suburbia are far removed from the problems everyone has fallen under in recent times but I look around and I see suffering even behind our white picket fences. I don’t even mean the Desperate Housewives kind, either. I’m talking about my neighbor who resorted to selling drugs out of his home and went to jail for a year. Now he’s under house arrest and his wife works to pay all the bills. They have three daughters and a lawnmower that doesn’t always work and anytime one of the younger girls cries too loud or the grass gets a little long, my snarky neighbor is the first to call the sheriff. I knew their girls years ago. They were happy then but now they’re only happy when they’re with the neighbor’s children and they get to spend time away from the house.
There’s this guy that lives one street over from me. I’ve never said more than maybe ten words to him but everyone knows his story. He started out just smoking weed but then soon he was dealing and he’s never been caught and most think he’s quit but everytime I see him, he looks at me like he’s waiting for me to say something. I don’t even know what he would want from me but I know it’s not just me. He looks at everyone this way and it makes me wish I was magical and just knew what he needed from me. I wonder if anyone’s ever really been his friend.
Yeah, there’s still a lot of people who are more comfortable than all this and they’re everywhere around me but I look around and take pity most on the truly privileged because they’re going to keep calling the cops and looking down on teenagers who just lost their way and never realize that it’s all their fault.
I start thinking about these things and I can’t stop myself because I want to get out of my bed in the middle of the night and walk across the street to tell that ruined family that I’m going to be there for them. I want to walk to that guy’s house and spend some time just getting to know him.
But I know I won’t. Just like I know I won’t get more hours at work. Just like I know financial aid is never going to be enough.
We’re all contributing to the wasteland- from the projects to the city to suburbia. It’s all our fault and the first step is re-defining need. The first step is opening your eyes and the next is taking a walk.

[Esoteric]

Just a couple questions before I know how best to respond:

A: Is this autobiographical or fictitious?

b: What were your plans for it when you were writing it? What I mean is, did you actually intend it to be an essay, ...or something different, like a journal entry?

[Bunny]

A. This is autobiographical

B. I had no idea what I wanted from this but all my journal entries tend to be essay-like anyways. It was just really late and this was all really stream of consciousness. Honestly, when I woke up I didn't even remember I wrote this then I checked this forum and I was like..."what is that?" I'm actually kinda embarrassed I put this out there without even thinking about it or editing it. It's completely what I felt at the time but still a little raw. I usually refine things again and again before anyone sees it.

Looking at it now, I think I might incorporate it into a novel I've just recently started.

[Esoteric]

Ah. Yes, at the present it's sort of halfway in between sounding like an 'essay account' and something more introspective. I think you could work the elements into a novel or other form of story quite well with a little embellishment.