Normal

The movie Take the Lead is inspired by real world events. It's the story of a dance instructor who goes into a school in a bad neighborhood to teach ballroom dancing.

A high school kid named Rock works while going to school to put food in the kitchen only to find it's all gone, his parents ate it and left none for him. He's getting ready for a school dance and his alcoholic father vomits on his ticket, ruining it. Because the ticket is ruined, he's denied entrance to the dance.

Rock has a dead brother who had been in a gang. His dead brother killed the brother of a character named LaRhette whose mother works as a prostitute to support the family and one day one of her mother's johns tries to rape LaRhette. She ends up leaving and going to the school where she runs into Rock who is now homeless, having lost his job and been thrown out by his drunkard father.

Rock is trying to do all the right things to make a better life for himself and it's never enough. No amount of hard work and trying to do right is adequate to get his life to work.

I really enjoyed this article called Life in a Studio Apartment with my Wife and Two Sons and I hope to use pieces of it to say nicer things somewhere at some point, but ever since reading it over a decade ago, I've wanted to pull out one piece and say "That's a big fat NO from me."

Lesson 8) When living on tight margins, the highs are the same, but the lows are much lower

Whether rich or poor, a normal day is a normal day. When you’re wealthy and your car breaks down, you can get a rental. But when you’re poor, paid hourly and your transportation fails – that sort of thing can just compound into a really bad situation. 

If you are poor like the high school kids depicted in Take the Lead, there are no normal days where you just get up and go to school or go to work eat a cheap and boring diet to keep things on budget and shower and go to bed like middle class people or rich people.

If you are a homeless American -- and there are millions of them -- odds are long against you having any "normal days" that aren't some variation on Rock's life in Take the Lead. And I say that as someone who has spent years homeless and I am fairly talented at trying to stay adequately fed no matter my circumstances and things like that.

I say that as someone who is something of a trend setter, even while homeless and often much to my annoyance, as described elsewhere. So while homeless in Fresno, California, I and my sons began using the outdoor space at the library to have lunch and then everyone began using the outdoor space, much to my annoyance. Before that, staff frequently forgot to unlock the back door because no one used that space.

While homeless in La Jolla, University students would go "Oh, that looks good! Where did you get it?" They thought we were students and it was a giveaway at a campus event when it was clearance rack baked goods from a nearby grocery store. We would tell them where we got it and they were crestfallen and lost all interest.

This was a campus full of kids who flew home to Asia for Christmas and stuff like that and couldn't feed themselves. And my older sister had similar stories from attending university on scholarship and being in the dorms for a year and being asked how to boil an egg by one of the other residents.  

This resident was from a very upper class family. My sister was there on scholarship.

No matter how talented you are at feeding yourself better quality food on a budget while homeless than upper class people around you are eating while they stare enviously at what you've got and wonder where to get it, homelessness is still a constant source of stress and there are no "normal days" where you just do your routine and feel okay about life, even though you aren't excited by your boring, budget-friendly lifestyle.

I wish poor people the world over had lives where most days are normal days and they get up, go to work or school or whatever, eat decently and don't feel too stressed out about anything. But many people are living like Rock in Take the Lead while the upper classes tell themselves it's not that bad.

There's a scene in some movie I saw a zillion years ago where an upper class White South African girl realizes the Black people queuing up in the street in a Black neighborhood are in a long line waiting to use a porta potty. She says something like "I thought they lived like me, but with smaller houses."

I wish they lived like you but with smaller houses. We mostly don't have small residences in the US anymore, which is a direct cause of rising homelessness.