First World Problems: Why trying to be Middle-Class in America is Depressing

It's been a long time since I've dirtied my fingertips with a blog post. I had been planning for my next post to be an uplifting piece about the flood my wife and I experienced, the triviality of material goods, and how perspective and a positive attitude can help overcome the direst of circumstances. I should've known I'd never get around to that one. (I will, I promise). Instead, brace yourselves for a stark, honest look at what it's like to live in America. Or go to Buzzfeed and click on something much more entertaining and visually stimulating.  Cuz this is probably going to be depressing.

Let's start with a little bit of context. I'm not poor. Simply by virtue of being American, I'm placed in, like, the 20^th percentile of richest people on the planet (I'm too lazy to Google; that's probably close enough). Even among Americans I'm not one of the poorest.  I'm probably not even in the bottom 25%.  And so for the past few years, I've been traipsing around, all lackadaisical like, feeling economically infallible.  I’ve drunk jarras of cerveza in flamenco caves in Andalucia, swum with stingless jellyfish in Palau, sampled loads of street food in Thailand, and surfed in Peru.  All because it was relatively cheap to do so.  (It still is.)

In my extended state of kidulthood, the dollars I made went a long way.  I didn’t pay rent.  I didn’t have bills.  I could just work at Burger King for a few months making minimum wage (which is several times higher than the average Bangladeshi makes), and then go travel the world for a few months.  It certainly seemed to me a more responsible alternative than what I saw many of my peers doing: working shitty retail jobs, buying new cars and other luxury items—trading the majority of their waking hours for material goods.


To the average American in today's workaday (read: wage enslaved) world, that last statement must seem like heresy, since work and the things it allows you to buy are pretty much the meaning of life.  But lest I be dismissed as some utopian trustafarian who enjoys life at the expense of those who work hard, let me just clarify that despite enjoying my life, I was also doing what conventional wisdom suggested I do in order to become a productive member of society.  I got a college degree.  And I didn't just drink my way through college and have a degree handed to me.  I worked my ass off, double majored, became fluent in a second language, and graduated with honors.  Because, I believed, if you've got a college degree, you can get a good job.  That was what I was told, from the time I was in elementary school, when they were already trying to decide what I should do with my life.  Get a college degree, you'll get a good job.

I did get a good job.  In fact, I got several.  After college, I joined the Peace Corps for some valuable experience in my chosen field: Teaching English Abroad.  After Peace Corps, I married my wife in Costa Rica, and we decided to keep the party going.  We lived and taught English in Ecuador, then South Korea, and then informally in the Philippines.  And we loved every minute of it.  Well, most minutes.  But the key thing is that it wasn't that difficult to survive.

That's me loving every minute of the Philippines.

In our several years of living abroad, we were pretty much breaking even.  In South Korea, we were banking a ton of money.  Our rent was covered by our employer, meaning almost every penny of our very generous salaries stayed in our pocket.  But even in Ecuador, where each of us worked around 20 hours a week making $4US an hour, we were making rent and were able to eat incredibly well on the cheap local produce (we also got free health care, imagine that).  And if we spent more than we made, it was because we wanted to do touristy shit while we were abroad (like eat out a lot).  And, because we had a few grand in the bank of combined savings when we left the states, losing a bit of money here and there wasn’t a big deal.

After months of doing pretty much nothing, vacationing in the Philippines, we decided to come back to the states.  We briefly entertained the idea of me going to grad school, but ultimately decided on coming to Nashville so that I could pursue music, because if you don’t buy a ticket, you don’t win the lottery.  (I don’t play the lottery.  Just FYI).  Nashville is an awesome town, and we love living here.  There’s a wealth of diversity, culture, art, music, and progressive ideas that make it a great place to live.  And, one of the main reasons we moved here is that the cost of living is so much cheaper than other places in the U.S.  So keep that in mind when I bring math into the picture.

Nashville's pretty cool.

What it Costs to Live in the United States

Let's get right to it. Combined, my wife and I owe about $40,000 in student loans, which, for a couple, has got to be below average.  Unfortunately, we’re both English majors, which means that, in terms of earnings potential, both of our degrees are essentially useless. Did anyone tell us this when we were choosing majors as college freshmen?  No.  Do I regret the choice?  Kind of.  Although it has led to many of the awesome experiences I’ve had abroad.  But if you had said to me in 2004 (when I chose my major), “you’re going to live in the U.S.  Do you want to be an English major?”  I would’ve said, ‘fuck no.’  And now I work at the Home Depot.

Don’t get me wrong.  The Home Depot is awesome, and I'm thankful that after searching for months and applying to dozens of jobs, I was finally able to get a job with them.  As far as huge corporations go, they’re great.  They treat their employees well, offer benefits, all kinds of stuff.  And employees at Home Depot get paid significantly better than the minimum wage.  But at the end of the day, when you’re in America, $10 an hour only goes so far.  That’s what we’re figuring out now.

Here’s the math:

Leia works at a day care (somewhat related to her chosen career path) making around $11 an hour.  She works full time (40 hours/week).  I’m making around $10 an hour, working part time (around 25 hours/week) to allow me time to do music stuff.  A quick tally shows that, before taxes, we earn about $690/week.  That’s about $2,760 a month. $33,120 a year.  Thirty three thousand dollars. That’s a lot of f***ing money.  A lot.  Or at least, it sounds like a lot.

That's probably less than $33k.

This is Leia in a few years.  After we become butterflies.

But let’s look at what we have to spend.  And just so you know, I’m really looking at what we have to spend.  In our house, I walk around behind people turning out lights.  We unplug everything when we leave the house or go to sleep.  When we shower, the tap goes on for a few seconds to get us wet, then off while we lather, and on for a few more seconds to rinse off.  We sew patches in our holey jeans rather than buying new ones.  We wash ziploc bags and reuse them. By American standards, we consume way less than the bare minimum.

So here’s the breakdown.  (Items with a ** are non-necessities, but we allow ourselves a few indulgences to make the sedentary life more palatable):

Rent: about $600/month

Electricity: about $80/month

Groceries: about $300/month

**Internet: about $50/month

Gasoline: about $200/month

Car Insurance: about $80/month

**Cell phones: about $60/month

Student Loan Payments: about $300/month

**Eating out budget: about $100/month

Health insurance (including dental & vision): about $100/month

Credit card payment: about $500/month

Total Monthly Expenses: about $2,370

Now, a few of these expenses, you might say, aren't universal.  The most glaring, of course, would be the high credit card payment, since most people with incomes as low as ours don't have good enough credit to owe that much.  Luckily, we do, and it's enabled us to remain afloat after the flood.  The expenses from that (including repairs to our one vehicle, motel stays, replacing lost furniture, etc.) totaled around $6k in credit card debt (on our one cc, btw), and we're hoping to pay it off in a year. 

So you might just say, 'well a huge portion of your expense is the result of a natural disaster, and while that sucks, it's not representative of the American condition.'  That's very true.  But what does it cost to buy a used car?  To give birth?  If a family member has a medical emergency?  (Despite paying the premiums, insurance doesn't cover a thing until you meet the $1600 deductible, not to mention co-pays, co-insurance, etc.) And what if we had a kid?  What if we didn't live in low income housing?  How much would our rent be then?  What if one of us couldn't work because we had to take care of a child, or children? There are a whole host of circumstances that could supplant our own, and this budget would still be realistic, if not optimistic.

So let's zoom out a bit more and look at the bigger picture.  We make $2,760 a month and we spend $2,370/month on basic necessities, which means that even after taxes, we should be able to save about $300 a month.  And save that we will.  Of course, that’s assuming we don’t go a penny over budget.  No alcohol.  No extra nights eating out.  No iPads, new phones, clothes, shoes, etc.  But we can do it.  We’ve done it before.  And of course, I’m considering these figures in our own context, which is a relatively cheap place to live.  Imagine making ends meet in L.A. or New York.

And after 12 months of this, what will be our reward?  Well, our credit card will be very close to being paid off.  Unfortunately we will still owe around $35,000 in student loans.  Our rent will most likely go up, since our two incomes will put us over the threshold for low-income housing (I didn't have a job when we moved in).  But we should, if all goes well, have a few thousand in the bank by then.  And with a few thousand you can do what, exactly?

Can Someone call a Wahmbulance?

This depresses me, because my wife and I both hold university degrees, and yet we know that this is the fate that awaits us, should we choose to live in the U.S.  It’s a life of working way too hard at a job you don’t like for less pay than you think you deserve.  You can say that I made the wrong career or academic choices, and that things would have been better had I done this or that.  But how many people in this country are worse off than I am?  How many people have no degree and very few marketable skills in the first place?  How are those people expected to raise a family and put food on the table?  I can’t imagine how much more difficult our situation would be if we had a child right now.  Or several.It used to be that any reasonably intelligent person with a strong work ethic could go out and get a job, work hard, save up money, buy a house, and raise a family on one income.  For those of my generation, most of our parents got jobs straight out of high school (or didn't even finish), and within a few years they owned their own homes and had a bunch of kids running around, who they could afford to feed.

It's not that it's impossible to get ahead in this country (many immigrants do it by sharing a house with 20 people and spending frugally for a decade or so).  It's just that for those of us who grew up amid seemingly ubiquitous prosperity, the American dream doesn't look anything like the one we were taught to believe in.

The American dream is dead, and college for the sake of college is some of the most useless advice you could give someone.  I know I won't be pushing my son or daughter to go, unless they're dead set on a particular career field that requires a college degree, and even then, only if they've already worked in that field to be sure they like it.  Instead, I'll tell them, get a job, any job, as soon as you graduate high school.  Live frugally and save everything, and after 10 years or so, you may have enough saved up to start your own life and live comfortably.  Or, just take off and go vagabonding around the world like I did, but skip college and the massive debt burden it brings, and even if you come back penniless, you'll be ahead of the game.

At the end of the day, our problems are first world problems, for sure.  Ultimately, I'm complaining that we can only keep a roof over our head and put food on the table, and that's a pretty thin complaint.  We're not poor by global standards.  We're not even poor by American standards.  At this rate, we'll make around $33,000 in 12 months.  In the U.S., the poverty threshold for childless adults with no kids is less than half that: $14,600.  And at least 15% of Americans are impoverished by those standards. That's about 1 in 8.  So even though I consider us incredibly lucky to be doing as well as we are, it's a tough pill to swallow, because the more you learn about economics, history, and politics, the more it seems that it really doesn't have to be this way.

I have my own, relatively well-informed opinions about how we got to this point, but I'm not interested in detailing them here.  What I really want to convey is what I've learned since returning to the US: that $10, 11, 12 an hour, really isn’t as much money as I thought it was.  You might be able to survive on that, but that’s all you’re doing.  Surviving.  I'm so tired of the media vilifying the poor. And not only the media, but middle class people who are only slightly less poor themselves.  Are there freeloaders in this world?  Yes.  Are there people who game the system in order to live it up at the expense of others.  Indeed, there are. Many of them work on Wall Street. But the myth that people are only poor because they are too lazy, or aren't talented enough, is bullshit.  My story isn't unique.  So many people of my generation were middle-class when they were kids, and they aren't anymore.  I'm confident that my wife and I are smart enough, resilient enough, and hard-working enough to eventually claw our way back up to lower-middle-class, but it sure is hard to make a living in the good old U.S. of A.

The Hungry Backpacker: Episodes 1-3

Me and me lady like to eat.  We like to eat and we like to travel.  We like to eat, travel, and sometimes document the delicious things we eat, so we've made a few food videos for the internets.  One of these videos has over 20,000 views.  It must be really good, or really bad.  Or somewhere in between.  I guess it could be just an average video.  Anyway, here are the first 3 episodes of The Hungry Backpacker.  Hopefully we'll be making more in the near future.

Episode 1: Cuenca, Ecuador.  Highlights include roast guinea pig and a burger the size of my face.

Episode 2: South Korea.  Highlights include squirming, recently alive octopus tentacles and mouth watering KBBQ.

Episode 3: Legazpi, Philippines.  Highlights include fertilized duck egg (balut) and fried chicken intenstines.

We've got a short trip to Kuala Lumpur coming up in April.  If we're not too lazy, we might throw together a video then.  After that we might try to do a video of our favorite spots back home in Oxnard, CA, USA.

Brand new album available to download FREE at my new music site.  Go to mestizomagic.wordpress.com to download.

I'm a singer, songwriter, and producer based in Southern California.  Check out my site for hip hop instrumentals and songs from various genres.

Tropical Permaculture in the Philippines: Update 3

 

It's now been about a month and a half since we began our garden project in my dad's back yard here in Borongan, Eastern Samar. So far, there have been a number of set backs and frustrations, but quite a few things are going according to plan.

One of the most frustrating things for me is a problem that's really only specific to my particular plot of land here: trash. Every time I want to start a new bed, I start digging, only to find that for every cubic foot of soil, there's another cubic foot of trash that I've got to dispose of first. I've filled up about 4 of those huge rice sacks full of trash in a single week. It's like they've been using the lot as a landfill for several years now. I'm not here to judge. If you send your trash to a landfill, you're just throwing it in someone else's back yard anyway. And in fact, from all the trash that does decompose, the soil does become a lot richer. It's just a pain in the ass to have to sift through every spadefull of dirt and separate the trash.

Creeper Xmas tree, featuring sitao, ampalaya, and sigadellas

Another set back has been the climate, which brings us to this week's first lesson (one I had known before getting started): stick with native crops and your life will be much easier. Here in Eastern Samar, the weather seems to vacillate between two extremes. It's either blazing hot under the harsh equatorial sun, or it's a torrential downpour. There's not a lot of in between. Most European crops don't like either of those extremes, so growing them is possible, but it's a lot more difficult. Unfortunately, I started with a bunch of packs of seed that I got at hardware stores, and most of those are non-native varieties. So that's what's up.

Most of the crops you'd think would fail miserably in the tropics have done just that—cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, onions. I got them to sprout, but they didn't last more than a week or two, even protected from the sun and rain in the nursery. Others seem to have mixed results. I've got sweet peas that are doing ok, climbing up bamboo and more than a foot high, but I've lost about half of them to the heavy rains before they got to the climbing stage. My zucchini seemed to be doing great—it gets broad leaves and a thick stem really quickly—but after transplanting, they only lasted a week or two before being devoured by these orange beetle looking things, and maybe picking up a bacterial wilt. The onions I've tried to plant from the seed packs are very difficult to keep alive, but I've planted quite a few of the little mini onions available at the market here, and they seem to be doing great.  

Sweet peas

Meanwhile, the crops well-suited to the tropics are unsurpsingly doing well. My star performer is a sitao plant that's climbed higher than me already, and it's already starting to produce some beans. If you haven't seen it, sitao is like green beans, except each bean is like 2 or 3 feet long. The ampalaya (bitter melon) is doing similarly well. I've got sweet corn and white corn, and both are doing great with thick stalks and broad leaves. My eggplant and chilis seem to be doing fine. I only planted a few kangkong plants, but it hasn't been troubled a bit by the typhoon rains. And the cucumber plants seem to be doing great too. They've got big broad leaves and they're producing flowers already (I'm not sure if that detracts from their fruiting. . .).

The worm bin is doing fine. I think there are more worms now, because they go through waste a lot faster. There are also some maggots in there now, but the bin is outside so they're not really hurting anything, and I figure it just processes the waste quicker. I'm starting to think I've been overthinking the compost thing, though. The compost heap is also doing well. It's almost fully decomposed only about five weeks later, I haven't really maintained it much. The thing is, everything decomposes so fast here in the tropics, I think it's a little unnecessary. I can just walk around the yard and pick up the dead leaves, throw them into the beds, and within a week or two they've decomposed and been absorbed into the soil.

Peanuts going gangbusters.  Tomato and cantelope on either side.

Those orange beetle things I mentioned are a real pain. Researching on the internet, I haven't found what they are exactly, but they seem similar to cucumber beetles in the plants they like to eat and because some of the plants seem to develop a bacterial wilt after being terrorized by them. They've destroyed my zucchinis, nearly destroyed my watermelons, and they're big fans of the canteloupe and pumpkin too. I've tried companion planting with onion and garlic—seems to make no difference whatsoever. I've been handpicking and squishing them, as it seems that might be the most effective solution. We've got a few chickens running around here, but I think they do more harm than good. I might look at setting up a pond in the future to encourage frogs, but it would also encourage mosquitos, and I've got plenty of them already.

Watermelon and some orange beetle terrorists

I've finished another bed with bamboo stakes, and we threw down some gravel paths so it's not such a mud bath when it rains. I'm keeping a constant flow of new plants going in the nursery, so I'll continue to have new stuff to transplant, and hopefully start harvesting some stuff in a month or two. And Leia's adopted two gnarly, scroungy jungle puppies that sleep outside our back door now. That's it for now.

Eggplant

Ladybugs humping on a chili plant.

Peanuts up close.

This tomato and a few friends survived my neglect during the typhoons.

Kamote

Okra

Cucumber

Garlic

Something's been snacking on this pumpkin. . .

Tropical Permaculture in the Philippines: Update 2

It's been a while since my last update, but there hasn't been much to report. Partly, that's because things move a lot slower here—there's a lot of wait-and-see, and he'll ask someone who'll ask someone else, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also because the wifey and I took a week long break to meet up with some friends in Boracay (which, by the way, was amazing). But we're back now, and I'm back on the grind. Things are on track and a general plan is starting to formulate.

Of the seeds that I planted in pots, all of them sprouted and most of them seem to be doing well, with the exception of the green onion. I'm not sure what it's problem is. The sitao (green bean), ampalaya, corn, and cucumber did so well that we were able to transplant them to various spots in the garden, and they seem to be going strong, though the sitao has a bug problem already. I also picked up some more seeds in Iloilo, on our way back from Boracay, so we'll be planting those soon too, hopefully. (There's watermelon, cantelope, mustard, white radish, tomatoes, bell peppers, pumpkin, cabbage, carrots, sweet peas, and a few more I can't remember). We've also got some peanuts from the market, so I'm looking forward to using them as living fertilizer.

The worm bin is doing well. I just put a little spot of organic waste in there, and about a week later, the worms have left me a nice, brown, slightly slimy pile of worm shit, perfect for fertilizing soil. I've only made a small amount of fertilizer so far, since I started with very few worms. But I've added more daily (we've been moving a lot of dirt in the garden and I've found a bunch), so I should be able to process more waste now.

The compost bin is also doing well, though I think I need some more green stuff. I tried to cut the materials down to little bits using garden shears, but that gets a bit tedious, and most of the input was 4-foot-long dried carabao grass, so a lot of it is in about 6-inch strips. Plus I added a little bit of soil (it's mostly clay here), and I found a sack of sawdust in a pile of garbage, so I threw some of that in too. And of course, I'm adding all the kitchen waste that doesn't get fed to the worms. It's doing well. It's hot to the touch on the inside, and at the bottom there's already a nice layer of fertile soil. I'm turning it once a week. I've got lots of room to add more stuff, but I'm also kind of lazy, so we'll see what happens.

We've cleared a good spot of land, but after doing so, it became clear that in the big open plot there's a big problem—the sun. See, the Philippine sun don't f*** around. In just a few hours in can lay waste to the hardiest carbon-based life forms, be they animal or vegetable. Thus, only a few of the plants we've got will actually thrive in those conditions. The rest will wither. So I've got a few solutions lined up. Long term solution: plant more trees. We've already got some coconut and banana saplings around the lot that could be moved, plus I plan to buy some other saplings as soon as this mysterious tree truck everyone tells me about makes an appearance. Medium term solution: plant a ton of corn, which will provide shade to nearby plants as it gets bigger. Immediate solution: choose better areas to plant. Which leads me to my next point.

I f***ing love bananas. I'm bananas. For bananas. And not just because they're delicious. Banana trees are godsends for tropical organic farmers. They grow in clusters, since new banana trees are formed from the 4 little shoots that pop out the bottom of mature trees. They've got huge leaves, and even on healthy trees, half of the leaves are usually dead and wilted. They fall off and decay, and the trees feed on that added nitrogen in the soil. Banana trees are mostly water, so when they die, the trunks decay super fast, too. What that means is this: if you've got a little circle of banana trees, you plant some raised beds around its base. The banana leaves provide dappled shade, protecting vulnerable young plants from the harsh sun. As the leaves fall off, or after you harvest bananas and chop down the trees, you can throw all of the organic waste in the center of the cluster, where it will decay. When it rains, you've got a natural fertilizer dispenser, adding nitrogen to your beds. At least, that's the theory I'm going with. We'll see how it works out.

We're using bamboo stakes to make the raised beds. Bamboo is cheap and plentiful, and works great to form pretty curves. Also, I use these big elephant ear leaves for spot mulching around young plants. It helps keep moisture in the soil and also discourages weeds from getting too close.


That's about it for now. There's a lot more work to do and a lot more things to plant, but I have direction now, and I'm excited about how everything is going to turn out.

Tropical Permaculture in the Philippines: Update 1

My wife and I are currently in Borongan, Eastern Samar, Philippines.  We're staying in my dad's house, which was otherwise being unused.  We'll be here for the foreseeable future, and my primary goal during our stay is to turn the unused lot behind the house into a small organic farm/large organic garden.  I'm going to be posting updates on here to track my own progress and also to contribute to the vast online permaculture community.

I should note that I have no idea what I'm doing.  Aside from being forced to slave away in my mother's vegetable garden as a child, I have no experience growing anything, so organic tropical permaculture is new to me.  But I'm a firm believer that you can become an expert on anything with the help of the internet.  Plus, I have tons of local knowledge to help me out (though it might take a bit to get the permaculture idea across here, since the typical practice is slash-and-burn, plow up large plots, and plant monoculture crops).  I expect a lot of trial and error.  A lot of error.  But I'm going to learn a ton in the process, and hopefully end up with some yummy fruit and veg for my kitchen table.

Here are some 'before' pictures:

 There are already some banana tree clusters, a few coconut trees, and some other fruit trees spread randomly across the lot.

 

The first step is to cut the 4-foot tall Jurassic Park grass.  A machete is way more labor intensive, but less hassle, since the weed eater constantly bogs down in the heavy, damp grass.  I'm sure plenty of permaculturists will cry foul at the burning, but in my defense, they started burning before I got there.  From things I've read, it seems that the primary problem with burning is the loss of all that organic matter which could return nutrients to the soil.  But tropical weeds don't f*** around, and they gots to go.  Plus, I've still got tons of Jurassic Park grass on the lot, and I'm going to turn it into compost. 

 

Planted some test run seeds in pots a few days ago.  Most of them have sprouted and broke surface already.  Not all of them can be transplanted, but I was bored and wanted to start somewhere, so I planted them.  I've got ampalaya, sweet corn, cucumber, chili pepper, pechay (like bok choi), kangkong, sitao (green beans), and green onion.

 

Leia is stoked that the house has an oven, and she's getting a puppy too.

 

I made a worm bin, so I can feed them our fruit and veg scraps and they can give me worm poop to use as fertilizer.  Just started it yesterday, but the worms seem lively and happy, so I'll start adding food in about a week.

That's the first update.  Next up in the project is finish cutting the grass, till the soil as necessary, start a mandala garden with raised beds, build a compost bin and start composting, and go from there.

Ingapirca, Ecuador