Ok even sven, I have held my tongue too long. I didn’t say anything until I saw that you felt free to go after a throwaway statement by another doper. Rather than hijack your (lame) thread, you get one of your own.
Please drop the poverty schtick it is embarassing, overdone and pathetic. Let me tell you about a few things that poor people don’t do. Poor people do not:
Choose to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country
Poor people take the opportunity to go to college as a gift, they get a degree in a field that is in demand and they move, fight and scratch to get the career they want. You apparently spent some time in school, most likely studying philosophy, and feel that the job fairy has failed to make a house call. All this would not be worth a pitting if you didn’t whine about it constantly. I can link to literally a hundred posts, and if I had Ilsa Lund’s talent for coding I would, of you lamenting your fate. Two recent posts will have to suffice:
As a guy who has been poor, and worked damn hard to remedy the situation, I think you forfeited your schtick when you traipsed across India for three months. I would dearly love to do that, but I have never been financially secure enough to even consider it.
Notice there is no profanity, I don’t think you are a lousy person. You just need to realize how silly this all sounds. You need to realize how this is percieved by other people here with more life experience. You are poor in some ways, but most of it is engineered by you. If you don’t have the job you want, you would be better served by spending the thousands of dollars it costs to go to India, and establishing yourself somewhere where jobs are plentiful. Please, even for the next 100 posts, give it a rest.
I do recall her explaining that she actually saved money when she went to India (the cost of living there was so low that it off-balanced the plane ticket). As for the rest of it, I haven’t been following her rants too closely, so I can’t comment too much.
However, I question your comments about her degree (I believe it was in film). I don’t think there’s necessarily anything so terrible about studying a subject that you have a passion about and have some talent for. (Pardon the awkward grammar there.) I assume that she felt that way about filmmaking, and if she did, I can’t begrudge her getting an education in that area.
I certainly would have done better for myself financially if I had taken after many people I know and stuffed my passion for art away somewhere and had studied, I don’t know, business, or something. But I cannot, for a second, regret the art classes, the teachers, the wonderful things I learned—the things that fed my soul—and if I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way. If I had forsaken my art education, I’m sure I’d be either very bitter or very sad (or a combination of the two) and that would not do at all.
So, no, I can’t begrudge sven studying film—if she feels the same way about film that I do about art.
Yosemite, I actually agree with you. I studied something I loved. I accepted that as part of that price was temporary poverty and difficulty finding a job. As a live and let live type of guy, I am pitting the whining more than the decisions.
Well, you know, India has a thriving film industry. Perhaps she should look at moving long-term to India and getting a job helping to make films in Bollywood. As she has stated, the cost of living is much lower in India, a whole bunch of people over there speak English, and I’m sure it’s much easier to get a job in the film industry in Bombay than it is in Hollywood.
Her degree is in film. But don’t knock the liberal arts. Being a philosophy major is fine is you channel the skills one has learned, like writing and research, into better-paying lines of employment. College isn’t vo-tech–one doesn’t go to learn a trade, but to learn how to learn.
Even Sven been given oodles of advice on finding more rewarding work, but she ignores every bit of help she’s been offered. Heck, I even researched temp agencies in Santa Cruz for her to no avail. Working at a Motel 6 might not be very remunerative, but perhaps the soul-crushing pressure of trying to live on the minimum wage will ignite a fire in her heart to better her circumstances.
I’ve done the desk clerk/ waiting tables thing, but I did it in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Death Valley, and Grand Canyon national parks during college and for a couple of years after to finance my hiking and rock climbing jones. I’ve also been to India, as well as to a slew of other countries, but I did it by taking vacations between English teaching gigs in Asia.
She doesn’t have to live a life of grinding poverty, but until she learns that she has to take control of her destiny and go out and actively grab the opportunities she wants, she’s going to continue to be a victim.
If she wants to work in film, she ought to go to LA. She can get a day job while she networks with working professionals to get the contacts she needs to find film work. Even it’s just being the craft services girl, any job in the industry can be a step up.
I don’t begrudge people who pursue their passion; but it can be a real drag to listen to someone complain about it all the time. My brother is a starving musician. The rare times we hear from him, all he talks about is him, him, him. How he nearly died of poverty, how he can barely make ends meet. It’s not like he couldn’t do something more economically beneficial, but he loves the art. Okay!Then quit the whining already! Or move to where people listen to jazz.
As for the major, I can understand choosing love over money, because I did the same thing. What ever decision you make, you must accept the consequences. I’m sure even sven knew (or should have known) that she probably wouldn’t make loads of money with her degree.
Nonsense, one can complain here about anything. The catch is that if you’re complaining about a problem of your own making, then you can’t expect a pity party without the question of personal responsibility being raised.
I saw her original post to that effect and bit my tongue. But I have to point out the twisted logic… She saved money relative to NOT WORKING in the US. It’s also possible to live much more cheaply in the US or even in CA for that matter if you don’t choose to live in such an expensive area as Santa Cruz. I just don’t buy the “I saved money by spending 3 months in Inida” line, and I think it’s indicative of a way of thinking in which working at a job is considered an inconvenience.
Beyond that, I’m almost sure I’m missing a pitting almost identical to this one and several threads about how to eat on an extreme budget, which even sven is apparently an expert at, being often close to starving.
Which is all to say that this has a background. I don’t think this is generic “blaming the victim”, I think this issue specifically has been brewing for a while.