Fishing

There's a saying out there "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime". Did you ever wonder why the originator of the saying chose fishing? I think it's because even the best fishermen have days where they don't catch anything. Like on that show on Discovery Channel where they show the Alaskan King Crab fishing season. Some times you win, sometimes not.
I'm a pretty good fisherman I think. I gots skills, man, mad skills. I also have two infants sleeping behind me. You go back 1,000 years and if I didn't have the resources to feed/cloth/house my children, they would simply die. You go back 100 years ago and you had a slim chance at some "charity" but not at getting any kind of real job to take care of yourself and your kids. Fifty years ago and you might be that woman on the block who is a single working mom busting her butt to take care of her latch key kids trusting them to stay out of trouble. Twenty years ago and you might be that person sitting on their ass on welfare. Today, Fucked. Or at least that's how it feels. I go through all the red tape at various government agencies, wait in the various waiting rooms with my two crying babies with about 25 to 50 other people in the same situation desparately trying like hell not to judge them just so I can find out that there is yet another form, another appointment and another office I have to go to in order to get the "help" that I desparately don't want to need. Apparently some mandate was sent down from heaven forbidding the government to offer a simple form to find out what you qualify for and what you don't or even what is availible to apply for in the first place. Nobody will tell me anything except stuff like "you might want to call the Health Department to see if you qualify for anything". You call the Health Department and ask and they want to know what it is you want to qualify for, then they give you a form and an appointment. Only to find out they don't have that program anymore. All because people used to sit on their butt collecting a check instead of learning how to fish. I want to be gainfully employed. I want to have money to pay for the big ticket items like gas, water, electricity, rent, food, insurance... omg, insurance.... don't get me started there. Crap. Anyway, where was I... oh ya... but what do I do with my kids while I go off and work at a job that only pays enough to barely cover the day care I don't want to drop them off at in the first place? Right now, I'm trying to get my AA and I'm trying to find some sort of job I can do at home until the kids are old enough to go to school. Talk about fishing. I feel like a salmon headed up the river of a thousand fisherman (that sounds like an acient chineses proverb). There are literally hundreds of thousands of web sites all asking for $39.99 for you to find out how to work at home using your computer. So far, most of them seem to be more or less a piramid scheme. You pay the $39.99 to find out how to get others to pay the $39.99 so that you can get a percentage of that $39.99 they paid. How is this not illeagle? How is a child seeing a naked person on the internet more damaging than a desparate person getting robed of their last $39.99 instead of paying their water bill or car insurance or health insurance or food or whatever... how the heck is that worse? I guess it's the same level of "worse" that the MPAA movie rating people use to say that sex of any kind is always worse than violence of any kind. Makes you wonder if they took all the bad words out of "Reservoir Dogs" would it be a PG movie? Some of those scenes still give me nighmares. This takes me to another, slightly related topic, what we get paid.

The average employer salery equation is something like, they will pay you 1/3 of what they can make from your work efforts. When I was a security guard, I regularly got paid $7 to $10 dollars per hour but the company I worked for got paid $20-$65 per hour by the people who wanted me to secure their property. I guess that is why movie stars and athletes get paid Millions of dollars and teachers and firefighters get paid squat. Since when was it the governments job to make money anyway? People get all worked up about where our tax dollars are spent but none of them ever read the country's budget... hell, I wonder if anyone reads the country's budget. BILLIONS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. It makes Bill Gates look middle class. Why do we run at a budget defecit and still need help figuring out how to pay teachers, fire fighters, mental and physical health cost, etc? I think because NOBODY READS THE COUNTRY'S BUDGET!! The government makes availble grants for the public every year so that people like me can pay for stuff in the short term without having to pay it back. Why then, please tell me, do I have to pay $100 or even $39.99 to find out what grants are available to me and how to apply for said grants? Because Wal*Mart and Bill Gates and those types don't think twice about throwing down a dime to get free money but people like us have to decide whether or not to eat or try for "free money". Even if I could afford the fee, it doesn't mean I'll qualify for the grant.
I just want what every body wants I guess. To live happily in my mediocraty. To do the best I can at raising my kids. And not live on the streets or sit around begging.