They came to me in the middle of the night. They were young and beautiful and dressed up like they were about to go out. I had about an hour’s warning, and their knock on the door was light so as to wake no one who wasn’t already up. When they got to my doorstep, I was ready. I knew it would be hasty and impromptu, but there’s no reason even a simple wedding can’t be beautiful.

We shared grapes and wine, and I told them that what begins as new and perfect fruit can end up a rich, fermented, much-changed substance that the vine might not recognize. They tasted both and said their vows, and we signed the paperwork. With a little help from their friends, they were married.

In the state of California, any recognized member of the church clergy can marry individuals to one another if the couple has a license. Over the years, I’ve married a handful of couples in the woods and in my living room. I’ve seen the state and the nation struggle over the definition of marriage, and I’ve seen it take many forms. I’ve heard the academic and feminist arguments that marriage was, for many centuries, a primarily economic arrangement to secure the merging and inheritance of property. Much about marriage has changed, but for the very rich and the very poor, the economic part remains the same.

The rich have assets to protect. They draw up contracts and agreements to ensure no one is seduced into a holy and blissful union by a heartless and calculating gold digger.

The poor have other arrangements to make. We are more likely to cohabitate to save money, whether it is appropriate for the relationship or not. In my life, I have known men and women who choose to stay with partners who are abusive or merely unsuited because breaking up means giving up a place to call home.

My friends who were married that night in my living room loved one another and probably would have chosen to marry at some point. The reason they came to me with so little notice, however, was not a pregnancy or a shotgun or even a romantic whim. It was the deadline for FAFSA submissions for the following academic year. Too young to be considered independent from their parents, they were desperate for enough financial aid to transfer to a four-year university. They were the children of vanishing middle class. On paper, their folks could afford to contribute to their tuition, but real life is complicated with gambling addictions and jobs that don’t offer health care.

It wasn’t young love. It wasn’t an impetuous gesture or an adherence to belief. It was a financial decision. Like many decisions forced upon us by poverty, it was a decision that puts the future in jeopardy — no money down, crippling credit terms down the road. The FAFSA considers married students independent and places a student in a wholly separate category for aid. Choosing to marry now to qualify for aid may result in a possibly messy and potentially expensive divorce later, but in the moment, we do what we must. In the meantime, we give one another the gift of an education otherwise out of reach.

Tuition has outpaced the cost of living, outpaced inflation and shows no sign of slowing. People all over are taking drastic measures to afford school, and at the University of California, we are no different. A recent discussion on the cost of housing led some of my classmates to speculate on the appearance of quad dorms with four bunks to a room and the feasibility of (not kidding) camping on the Glade and writing a blog called The Great Outdorms. The idea of getting married for mercenary causes may rankle the romantic soul, but in the scheme of desperation, it seems almost a tame solution.

In my tradition, couples being wed grasp hands and are gently tied together to symbolize their bond. When this couple was tied, I told them to remember that it’s only one hand they’ve given and that the other remains free. True of their marriage, this also became a symbol of their shared commitment to helping one another get through school, support one another’s dreams and be good partners; they were not entirely bound, but they were also not entirely free.

Marriage was never pure. It is sometimes undertaken in the spirit of perfect altruism and true love, but my friends’ practical decision was perfectly in line with the long and fraught history of this evolving institution. They might have given up, waited a few years or taken on crushing loans to move forward with their education. A license to marry costs $97 and takes effect the moment both people say “I do.” They’re responsible to one another and for one another, and they take that seriously. This year, they’ll both graduate from a UC school with their respective bachelor’s degrees.

I now pronounce you educated to the minimum degree necessary to get a decent job.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post For richer or for poorer appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Corn tortillas were being warmed over an open gas burner, perfuming the kitchen with that taco night scent. A simmering pan bubbled and spat, and I spotted a mounded bowl of shredded jack cheese. Tomatoes, lettuce and onions were arranged like birthday balloons in bright colors, and bottle of crema with a Spanish label lorded over it all, the white-robed lord of the condiments.

I was spending the night at a friend’s, and I was very excited. We had played for hours, and when her mom finally called us in for dinner, we were starving. There was an assembly line, and we could make our own meals. I got to the pan full of shredded beef and looked at it for a minute before getting nudged to get a move on. I was polite and didn’t say anything, but I was very confused.

When I got home, I asked my mom about it.

“So I spent the night over at Yesenia’s.”

“Yeah, I know you did. I met her mom.”

“Her mom made tacos, but she didn’t put any potatoes in the meat.”

“No kidding.”

“It’s like they weren’t even real tacos.”

She laughed a little and sat me down for one of the first adult conversations of my life.

My mom raised four kids on her own. She worked retail jobs and drove broken-down cars, but we never went hungry. She just got creative. Whenever she made beef, she explained to me that she could extend it with potatoes. They were filling, they’d soak up the flavor of the meat and they cost pennies to keep in the pantry. The more recipes she mentioned, the more I realized that she loaded all of my favorite dinners with the cheapest grains and produce she could find to make more out of less. Cabbage rolls with rice and carrots. Meatloaf that was more than half tomatoes and bread crumbs. Dark meat chicken and the heels of rye bread.

Up until I was 12 years old, I thought fettuccine Alfredo was just buttered noodles with pepper. My mom joked that she never cooked more than a pound of ground beef, even when the table was set for eight.

Poor doesn’t always mean going hungry. There is legitimate hunger in this country, but most of America’s poor suffer from a lack of options. People who grew up like me, on rice and bread and potatoes and convenience food, weren’t starving — we were slowly developing diabetes and gout. Our eating habits were formed early, and I still note the price of ramen noodles, holding steady at four for a dollar in my neighborhood store. However, I am trying to learn from the examples set for me by both Lil Wayne and Junot Diaz. I am trying to retain the parts of my identity that were forged by being poor while shedding the bad habits of poverty. My stories come with me, but the ramen and the purple drank have to be left behind.

The national debate about childhood obesity and the eating habits of the very poor isn’t just political. It’s deeply personal. I remember my friends in grade school who ate uncooked ramen sprinkled with the super-salty flavor packet for lunch every day. Not some days, not bad days, but every day. I remember living in a food desert and choosing between dinner at 7-Eleven or Pizza Hut about five nights a week. My mom made the best choices that she could, but there’s no denying that there is a great deal of privilege that can be read in our diets.

Living in the Bay Area, we have access to a great deal of local and imported produce. We can buy organic every day if we choose — and if we can afford it. Restaurants in this area are prepared to answer questions about the origin of ingredients, methods of preparation and even the moral philosophies of how and why they cook what they cook. Our options are numerous; our standards are high. This is the privilege of people who aren’t too hungry to worry about it.

When I visited home this summer, I could see I wasn’t the only one moving on. Like many women who had children when they were very young, my mom is still growing up and still finding herself. I opened the freezer, expecting the 19-cent burritos I grew up on, but I found it full of frozen quartered squash, my mom’s homemade chicken stock for soup and a couple of whole free-range chickens. She’s stopped using anything processed or artificial in her cooking, and she’s not scrambling to feed a bunch of kids anymore. We’ve both changed our circumstances enough that our choices are dictated by what we like rather than what’s cheapest.

We went out to dinner together and talked about what’s changed, and I think she said it best.

“When you kids were growing up, if we went out, I could only look at the right side of the menu, where the prices were printed. Now I only look left.”

We think back, we look left, we look forward. We keep the good and leave the ramen on the shelf.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post Top ramen wishes and taco night dreams appeared first on The Daily Californian.

“We’re going to go on an adventure.”

My mom had woken me up sometime after midnight to tell me this news. I blinked in the low light, trying to wake up fully.

“What?”

“You’re going to pack up your backpack for a trip. Bring clothes and the stuff that’s most important to you. Whatever doesn’t fit in your bag, we have to leave here.”

“When are we coming back?”

“We’re not. Hurry up.”

I was 7 years old. This was the first time we had to leave in the middle of the night.

We stole quietly out of the apartment. The notice on the door read “EVICTION.” I knew that word. My little brother lay curled up on the floor of the car, under the glass dome of the hatchback. He was asleep with his favorite stuffed animal under his arm. I hoped my mom had packed for him, but I didn’t ask. I had done a terrible job of packing for myself, choosing books and forgetting my hairbrush. The next time it happened, I was better at it.

In my life, I’ve moved more times than I can count. I’ve lived in more states than most people have driven through and more countries than most have seen on vacation. As an adult, I moved for jobs, for school, for love and for fun. As a kid, I moved because we were with the army. After my parents divorced, we moved because we were dirt-poor and could never seem to stay anywhere. Like most kids, I hated it. I could never stay in one school for very long or make friends I could keep. More often than not, we left in the middle of the night, abandoning our belongings, never to return. For a long time, I hated the word “adventure.”

This week, I moved again. But this time, I chose to move. I have lived in Fremont for a whole year, from CalSO to finals, and I never had to worry about packing to leave in the middle of the night. This time, I chose the time and the place, the neighborhood and the size of my new home. I chose the length of my commute and the distance I would have to travel to a grocery store, a library and a freeway.

These changes brought on by my choices got me thinking about moving and privilege. Privilege can be largely represented in choices. These simple choices about how and where to live were choices we didn’t have when I was growing up, because we were poor. We couldn’t choose to stay or go. We couldn’t choose not to live in the ghetto or in a rent-by-week motel — because privileges like that have to be bought. The old saying goes that beggars can’t be choosers, and that is more evident in how and where one lives than in anything else. It is inescapable.

My escape in growing up brought me choices. I get to choose who I live with, where we will live, where we will go.
Living in the South Bay was a hard choice. As I’ve written previously, my choice was between a commute lasting between an hour and a half to three hours, and at a distance from campus that made a social life or club involvement really difficult. Circumstances have changed enough this year that we were able to make the move to the East Bay to a home in West Oakland. The maximum length of my new commute, even if I take the slowest no-cost option, is 40 minutes. It is a new world.

My friends are almost as excited as I am. Everyone is very supportive of this change, and strangers touched by my story tell me they have been rooting for me all along. Our new place is bigger, better located, and packed with better features than anything we’ve had before. There are more good things about this move than I can list, but it feels incredibly fragile to me. To have so much freedom and so much choice is hard to accept after a lifelong habit of being the beggar who could not choose. It all seems too good to be true. I am hanging up pictures, making my bed and making it real. Our choices become our lives, they make up who we are.

I caught the bus in downtown Oakland for the first time a few days ago. The ride was over so quickly that I barely had time to distract myself with emails and texts. The bus pulled up to Bancroft Way, and I was momentarily overwhelmed by the small changes in fortune that led me here. I had my packed my bag for a day, not forever. I have the keys to my new place, and I know it will be there when I get back. The long car ride of eviction and the long bus ride of the beggar have ended.

I am no longer afraid of adventure.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post Moving on up appeared first on The Daily Californian.

If you attended high school in the United States, you probably read a story called “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant. It’s a story about a poor woman who borrows a necklace from a friend and loses it. She then panics because she believed the necklace was worth a great deal of money. She decides to replace it and never comes clean about the mistake. I remember when I read it — I was a freshman in high school living in a bloodthirsty little town before the anti-bullying crusade began. I knew from experience through elementary and middle school that there were many things I could hide, but being poor was not one of them. Poverty was in my lunchbox, on my clothes, on my no-name brand shoes.

I read “The Necklace” knowing that I’d never make the mistake of borrowing a diamond necklace from a friend — but also that I could just as easily end up a slave to a simple mistake and to my pride. The woman in the story could have just told her friend what happened. I could just tell my friends that my mom had lost her job and that we had to move in with friends of hers. Instead, the woman in the story works 10 years in menial labor to save her pride, and I came up with implausible lies about not wearing my nice clothes to school or doing a science experiment on how fast sneakers fall apart. Pride is the great barrier.

There are many instances in which pride is the correct response. When you’ve accomplished something, when you have learned who you are or when you have overcome an obstacle, you should be proud. When your pride keeps you from texting your exes when you’re lonely or from selling out a friend when you might have profited in doing so, pride is a companion to integrity and self-respect. When pride is a companion to poverty, however, the two can get you into trouble. I can’t count the number of times I’ve laid down my debit card at a restaurant or a bar and said “I’ve got it” when I didn’t have it. Or the times I’ve agreed to go out in the first place when I knew that going out was not in the budget — and that once I was out, I would have to spend money to save face. I’ve had to learn to get over my pride as I’ve gotten older and tell my friends to come hang out at my place, pick somewhere cheaper or go on without me. My pride has often been too large to swallow, but I’m learning.

Part of the trouble is that here in America, we assign no nobility to the poor. We often treat it like a choice that people make not to be ambitious or industrious, forgetting that most people who were born poor will stay poor, because we never catch up. We forget that there are times in life when almost everyone is broke — like in college — and that it’s a temporary state we get through that is not something to be ashamed of. We forget that our friends will understand that we aren’t made of money.

When I finally get up the courage to tell a friend that I can’t afford to go, I’ve always been met with understanding — and sometimes relief. Honesty engenders honesty, and if you fess up to being broke, you might be surprised at who says, “Me, too.” Americans are trained to consume from birth, so saying no and admitting you don’t have the money isn’t easy, but it gets easier as you go. Once I got over the initial peak of my pride and admitted to a friend that I couldn’t always buy concert tickets or sushi, it all seemed to get better from there. I was not rejected because I wasn’t rich.

Economic cycles can sometimes help us out. In times of booming markets, it may be harder to tell people you’re not in a position to spend money for fun — because it’s what everybody does. However, the recent cycle of recession changed what people expected from adulthood almost completely. Most of us no longer expect to be married by 25 and own a house filled with kids by 30. College graduates move back home at an incredible rate these days, and scaled-back entertainments like game night, TV-watching parties and dining in have become trendy and even expected. It’s almost like being broke is cool.

“The Necklace” ends with a tearful confession, and the owner of the lost jewelry tells her friend it was a fake; the necklace was not worth much after all. What has been lost is 10 years during which the main character’s pride deprived her of time, freedom and friendship. Her pride kept her from admitting her poverty, and she suffered in ways that her poverty alone never would have caused. Being broke in Berkeley can be tough, and admitting it can be embarrassing. But refusing to admit it can be much more costly.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post The pride issue appeared first on The Daily Californian.

lochnessjess via flickr/File

It is one of the first things that makes students uncomfortable when moving to Berkeley — the widespread poverty. Encountering this social welfare problem tends to be strange because for the majority of students, this level of poverty is only seen on occasion and probably not seen in our hometowns. Yet this feeling of uneasiness doesn’t last long.

At times, I’m conflicted as to how to respond when someone asks me for money. Should I give them money? If I decide to, should I pull out my wallet or put change in my pockets ahead of time for easy access? If I decide not to, how do I say no? In my personal experience, these encounters are typically guilt-inducing as well, because while I have access to a variety of food options with a swipe of my Cal 1 Card at Crossroads, people asking for money along Telegraph Avenue and other Berkeley streets may be hungry or lacking a place to sleep at night. As I became acquainted with Berkeley, I was informed about details concerning the issue of poverty in this city and cameto realize that it was more complicated than I had made it out to be. In turn, I justified my growing passiveness toward the homeless until I became comfortable with it.

I figured that there were organizations in Berkeley aiding the cause, providing places where those in need could receive shelter and food. I convinced myself that other people have made this issue their focus — that I didn’t need to worry myself about it. I even told myself that some of the homeless chose this life for themselves. I just walk past them quickly and go about my day, because even if I responded to every request for money when asked, my dollar wouldn’t make a difference, I told myself.

As the months passed, I simply became comfortable with the fact that homeless people are part of Berkeley’s community. And, as I became more comfortable with it, I cared less and less.

Recently, I have realized that getting too comfortable is dangerous.

Once we grow comfortable and settle with the state of our community, it will be difficult to recognize the existing need when we have been living around it for so long. As a community, we become numb to problems because they have been normalized. This results in a lack of concern, slowing down advancements toward change. It is difficult to make progress toward serving and minimizing the homeless community, dealing with the crime rate, addressing the faults existing in primary and secondary education system in Berkeley or even mentioning the uncleanliness of city streets when we have grown used to all these issues.

It is my hope that I’m never too comfortable and that I realize that although I don’t necessarily have to advocate for every cause, there is always something little that I can do. When faced with huge social issues, Berkeley has been known throughout history to stand up, have a voice and act. However, it is in how we address the “little” problems that will confirm our strength as acommunity for our greater community.

Monica Mikhail contemplates the truth of the matter in her Thursday blog. Contact Monica Mikhail at mmikhail@dailycal.org.

The post The danger in being too comfortable appeared first on The Daily Californian.

He was pretty well organized, and with a slot set up for his laptop, he obviously had a system going. What attracted my gaze was not his square old HP, however. Inside his well-worn backpack was a white plastic trash bag set up like a liner around his books and folders and his computer. When he had everything stowed, he pulled the red tabs of the bag together and folded it over on top of itself before zipping up his bag.

When he finished, he looked up and caught me staring.

“You have a trash bag in your backpack.”

He was immediately overcome with embarrassment. He ducked a little and looked away from me.

“Oh. Yeah.”

I didn’t let up. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, but it was suddenly vital to me to make this connection.

“It keeps your stuff dry. It’s because your bag isn’t waterproof. Right?”

Finally, he looked back at me. “Yeah. I’ve been doing it since high school.”

I smiled at him. “I used to do that, too.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. We knew without saying it that we were children of the same house. We looked nothing alike, but he was my brother just the same. I knew that he had a long walk or bike ride ahead of him somewhere on his way home, and that experience had taught him that the rain curled the corners of his textbooks, made the ink smear and run. I knew he had done it since high school because he had always faced these same circumstances and had developed strategies to cope.

I knew he was poor, and I knew he had grown up poor, like me. We understood each other.

After he got up to leave, I put my laptop into my backpack. My trash bag is black, and I ripped the red pull tabs out of it a long time ago. It’s less noticeable that way.

Since that day, I’ve gotten to thinking about the skills and habits of poverty. On a global scale, most of us who grew up in the United States experienced a very privileged form of poverty. I haven’t suffered like the starving children in Darfur or displaced refugees anywhere in the world. The American experience of poverty is not comparable to that; it’s a completely different world. But I did grow up itinerant, often homeless — the very definition of poor in America. I grew up learning and developing the skills to cope with poverty, just like that guy with the trash bag did.

That tiny life hack of a plastic liner in a backpack represents a specific set of skills. I bet that guy also learned to sew when he was very young to repair what could not be replaced. I bet he’s owned more than one pair of sneakers held together with duct tape and shame. I bet we both studied more than a few times by candlelight when the power went out and stayed out for days.

He and I are in the same boat now, although the waters are calmer. For me, coming to UC Berkeley meant access to financial aid, work-study or other jobs and the support of a good school. Although we’re poor college students, some of us feel comparatively rich these days.

The good news is that it’s cool to be poor in college. Most people have to budget when they can go out and when they have to stay in. For those of us with the skills and experiences of poverty, this kind of coping is familiar — even comfortable. We know how to live broke, and this is our time. This column will explore these strategies and skills of poverty.

So what’s it like to be Broke in Berkeley? It’s knowing where all the best deals are and how to get there for free by using your Cal 1 Card every day. It’s sacrificing time and convenience to save money. It’s fixing or repurposing broken furniture and worn-out clothes; it’s bringing dead electronics back to life rather than just throwing these items away. It’s not being ashamed of these habits. It’s finding a way around the cost of textbooks, having well-chosen and supportive roommates and keeping your eyes on the prize.

If you’re Broke in Berkeley, you probably don’t plan to stay that way. We all want our degrees to launch us into a different life — hopefully one where our skills of poverty won’t be needed and our bags will come already waterproofed and we won’t spend much time in the rain. Until then, we have to stay sharp. After all, the skills and secrets of being Broke in Berkeley mean the difference between a dry laptop and a broken one.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial ssues affecting UC Berkeley students. Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

The post Broke like me appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Veteran Kelly Johnson speaks about homelessness and his past.Surrounded by a pile of tattered backpacks, Kelly Johnson squints against the sun’s glare as he recollects the years he spent searching for a home. Johnson, 51, is one of the hundreds of homeless veterans that the Obama administration seeks to house by 2015. Not one to be left behind, Alameda County is participating in the administration’s ambitious goals to end veteran and chronic homelessness by 2015 and all homelessness by 2020. Read more here.

The post Veteran in People’s Park speaks about homelessness appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Ashley Chen/Staff

The city of Berkeley has made significant strides in combating poverty in recent years, despite a high concentration of people living below the poverty line in Downtown Berkeley, according to a recently published report.

The report, released by the Brookings Institution Thursday, shows that Downtown Berkeley is a neighborhood of extreme poverty — with more than 40 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. However, the report does not take into account how many students, who may not necessarily have a source of income, live in the area.

Data from the 2000 Census indicate that over 60 percent of Downtown Berkeley residents are enrolled in some sort of higher education.

Despite the report’s findings, both poverty and homelessness levels in the city of Berkeley as a whole have decreased over the past decade as a result of programs implemented by the city in conjunction with EveryOne Home, a countywide effort to end homelessness.

While a 2004 count of homelessness showed that 41 percent of Alameda County’s chronically homeless population resided in Berkeley — which composes 9 percent of the county’s total population — by 2009 the city constituted only about 15 percent of the county’s homeless population, according to the city’s 2010 annual action plan. Additionally, since 2003, the city has seen a nearly 50 percent decrease in the number of chronically homeless, according to the city’s 2011 plan.

The only areas with concentrated levels of poverty are those directly surrounding campus, according to the Brookings Institution.

However, according to Amy Davidson, a senior management analyst for the city’s housing and community services department, that should not be a cause for concern.

“The thinking is that it’s a lot of the student population because students might not have very much income while they’re in school,” Davidson said.

Still, the city has yet to resolve the continued homelessness of 680 Berkeley residents as of 2009. Additionally, the scope of the city’s anti-poverty measures has been limited by recent fiscal cuts coming from the federal government.

A key factor in decreasing poverty levels has been the city’s effort to maintain supportive housing, according to the city’s action plan.  But, according to the action plan, “current funding, particularly for housing operations, is not sufficient to meet the existing need.”

This year, Community Development Block Grants — federal grants used to fund shelters and safety nets for the city’s homeless — were cut by 17 percent, according to Davidson.

Although the city managed to minimize the impact of the cuts by spreading the costs across community agencies, programs across the board sustained about a 3 percent reduction, Davidson said. She added that the city expects similar cuts in coming years.

Adding to the financial burden, the city expects to lose access to Community Services Block Grants, which have funded $140,000 for the Multi-Service Agency that provided medical and mental health services to Berkeley’s homeless.

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