- Show:
- Comments
- Liked Comments
On Wealth of 100 Richest Could End Poverty of WORLD
@Sandy505 Well yes that is what words mean.
0
On On Leaving Too Much
@down the rabbit hole YES THIS. I assume that I get more out of tipping 25% than my waiter does. Self-satisfaction is a wonderful, and relatively inexpensive, indulgence.
1
On On Leaving Too Much
@Choire Sicha@facebook Never mind the time that she spent WRITING THIS ENORMOUS THING FOR FREE FOR THE BILLFOLD.
1
On Getting An Actual Date and Time Down is Crucial
Agree with Mike's advice. It is hard for young people to understand just how much old people like me LOVE to talk about ourselves and bask in the admiration of young whippersnappers. He's probably hoping you'll ask again, but figures you were just being polite and is too embarrassed to bring it up himself.
0
On Wedding Costs from the Dude's Perspective
So about $75K all-in. That's (1) about what I expect to spend next year, (2) something like 18 months' income for an average American, and (3) depressing for both of those reasons. (And echo @TheclaAndTheSeals - I would've appreciated seeing honest numbers like this before I started planning my own wedding.)
0
On Is Poverty a Choice? Or Is It More a Sixth Finger, Or a Tail
@MuffyStJohn This is fair! I don't want to be the guy who says "stop complaining, poors!" It is altogether fitting and proper that people get really mad about our society's fetishization of money and treatment of those who don't have lots of it. I just think that slumming NYU dramatic writing grads aren't always the best standard-bearers for that anger (though that's touchy!), that upper-middle-class eighteen-year-old liberal arts students aren't the best target of it, and that dehumanizing people by calling them the product of "generations’ worth of cautious and highly selective breeding” isn't the best way to express it. (And that "Is Poverty A Choice?" is a tone-deaf title for an essay written by someone for whom it manifestly is. Usually it isn't!) But you're not wrong. This sort of post brings out a lot of indignant comments that you don't see in the comments to posts of the I've-made-great-life-choices-look-at-me-go variety, and I feel conflicted about contributing to that.
2
On Is Poverty a Choice? Or Is It More a Sixth Finger, Or a Tail
I hate, I just hate, I really really hate, the dehumanizing disdain for people who have made different choices and more money than you. Phrases like “incredibly rabid disaffection toward the rich,” “a veritable ant farm of yuppie proclivity,” “I have no respect for stories like that, that play out so predictably,” and “generations’ worth of cautious and highly selective breeding” are easy to throw around if you don’t think about them, but have no place in a supposedly thoughtful essay. You’re an NYU grad and Bed-Stuy gentrifier for Chrissakes; *this* is how you write about your local college? *This* is how you write about people who love their families enough to go work with them in a small business? You write eloquently about the shame of having less money than other people (though your claims of “poverty” seem specious – an NYU grad publisher is not my mental image of the late-capitalist proletariat), and about your wish that others would treat you as a human and an individual. But just imagine someone saying something as cruel and essentializing about you as the things you say about others. Describing the poor as the result of “generations’ worth of reckless breeding” would get you instantly and rightly bounced from any self-respecting publication. But you have no problem tossing aside a lot of no doubt well-intentioned, hard-working, family-loving teenagers – many of whom will major in dramatic writing and grow up to be small-press journalists and lazy Marxists! – without a thought just because their parents have more money than you currently have. Sorry, I get that you feel sorry for yourself, and that you want to express it; I even get that you are grasping in your own way for self-knowledge and reflection. “I would classify my disdain as unhealthy” suggests to me that you’re trying to become a thoughtful person, not just a mass of ill-expressed resentments. Try harder.
7
On On Doing What You Love
"When I got off the phone, I was reasonably upset." This is a very Mike Dang sentence.
0
On I Didn't Think Art Could Make Me Rich, But I Thought It Might Pay Some Very Cheap Rent (Nope)
I'd be curious to hear how much the author, and other poets in the comments, *spend* on the work (books, chapbooks, readings, etc.) of other living poets.