Archives for July 2017

Fine, Call Me Snowflake, But…

July 31, 2017 by Andrea Thompson 19 Comments

Image by Johnny Silvercloud (License CC BY-SA 2.0)

Snowflakes. That’s what they call us now. In any given day, with just a quick browse through social media, someone has been referred to as a snowflake at least a dozen times. And that’s just at a glance. So, what is a snowflake exactly?

According to the dictionary, it’s a “flake of snow, especially a feathery ice crystal, displaying six fold symmetry.” As an insult it is supposed to “encompass not just the young but liberals of all ages; it became the epithet of choice for right-wingers to fling at anyone who could be accused of being too easily offended, too in need of “safe spaces,” too fragile.” In their opinion, we’re weak, whiny, and useless. But to someone like me, being a snowflake means so much more.

Being a snowflake means that you’re standing up against the utter uproar of a shit storm that is our country and our politics these days. Being a snowflake means you want nothing more than to see EVERY human being in this country and on this earth have the same basic human rights as everyone else. It means you’re getting really fucking tired of watching the news, only to see people shot and killed for the color of their skin.

“Now, insults are going to happen. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been called a “libtard” or a “lazy millennial.” I’ve been called a redneck and a hick. I’ve been called worse than that more than once. I don’t take it to heart anymore.”

You’re beyond over watching your friends fight tooth and nail, just to marry the person they love, and then someone arbitrarily telling them that their love is not the same or as valuable as the rest of ours just because they happen to have been born with the same genitalia. You’re sick of having to fight for rights to your own body simply because you’re a woman.

Your opinions don’t matter, your body doesn’t matter, and you’re not even worthy of an equal wage. You’re tired of walking down the street at dark, terrified, because someone thinks they’re more entitled to your body, your very skin, than you are.

As a snowflake your heart aches for the thousands that are facing losing their healthcare with nothing to replace it. Your stomach is sick at the thought of all the refugees with nowhere to go, their children confused and scared, fleeing a country that we’re shooting missiles at. And you’re damn right we’re fucking fed up with drowning in student debt, only to work unpaid internships and laughable minimum wage jobs; trying to keep our heads above water in this economy that the “not-millennials” so kindly threw down the fucking toilet for us.

We’re the ones participating in women’s marches across the country. We’re the ones celebrating pride month with parades, and wearing out that Facebook pride reaction for as long as we can. We’re the ones building and shaping our children to love and respect human beings— ALL human beings. We’re raising our children to be warriors for those who need a voice. We’re fund-raising for Planned Parenthood and protesting the bullshit at every given opportunity. We’re raising our voices when we see our “president” committing treason in broad daylight, only to have it brushed under the rug and defended with some sort of ridiculous excuse.

We’re throwing a fit when we see that his inept, unqualified daughter is sitting in for him at the G20 summit meeting; something that the Republicans would have crucified Obama for if he had done it. We’re tired of watching our “president” play golf. We’re gathering at airports, and clinics and government buildings, and in the damn streets if we have to, because we’re pissed. We’re tired, we’re fed up, and we’re fucking angry.

Now, insults are going to happen. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been called a “libtard” or a “lazy millennial.” I’ve been called a redneck and a hick. I’ve been called worse than that more than once. I don’t take it to heart anymore. And while snowflake never really offended me on a personal level any more so than all the others did, I have to say it did stump me a bit. I had to wonder— have these people ever spent much time around snow before? Because I have.

Kentucky is a strange state when it comes to our weather. We like to say that we get the best of both worlds. We’re far enough south that our summers are sweltering at times, but our winters can be mean with snow and ice for months. Snow and ice that knocks out power and shuts down all the major roadways. Snow that has people running to the store in a panic to buy milk, bread, and eggs. Snow that shuts down schools and businesses for days or even weeks at a time. Snow that has you hiding in your house, afraid or even unable to go out, hoping that it ends soon, because you’re running out of food and heat. Snow that all started with a few snowflakes falling from the sky.

So, if snowflake is the new insult these days, I’ll take that. I’ll be a snowflake, and I’ll be a proud one. Because one snowflake, all on its own, is fairly powerless. It can give its best shot, but once it hits the warm pavement all alone, it’s doomed to melt. But have you ever seen what hundreds of thousands of snowflakes can do together? You get a fucking snowstorm.

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Andrea is a freelance writer based out of Kentucky. She is the mother to a 3 year old little girl and step-mother to a 6 year old boy. She’s been married to her husband and best friend for 5 years. She enjoys fishing, camping, hiking and the occasional glass of wine by a bonfire.

Our Review Of The Month: The Nano Towel

July 28, 2017 by J. Parks Leave a Comment

Our Review Of The Month: The Nano Towel

Here at The Underemployed Life’s Home Office we use a lot of paper towels. We probably go through four or more rolls a week. We use paper towels after we wash our hands at the kitchen sink. To wipe up the kitchen counter. We use them to wipe down appliances, the bathroom mirror, and on spills. Most homes go through at least four rolls of paper towels a week. If you have kids, you definitely go through more.

We kind of hate buying paper towels. For a lot of reasons. You can’t fit them in your grocery bag, they take up a lot of kitchen space, and they’re not cheap. Even if you get the cheap ones, you end up needing so many rolls of them it’s like buying the expensive ones. Besides costing a lot of money, they’re also terrible for the environment. That, we didn’t know. We found out when we went looking for decent alternatives.

The U.S uses more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year. Producing that much consumes lots of resources, including 110 million trees per year, and 130 billion gallons of water. It also causes carbon dioxide to be let loose into the atmosphere. After a single use, most of it ends up in landfills, and decomposes, which produces and releases methane gas, a large contributor to global warming.

So we went looking for something better, cheaper, and not an environmental hazard. After about a month of trial and error we found something we liked, called the Nano Towel. We want to make it clear that we are not paid by Water Liberty, the company who makes the Nano Towel, to promote, endorse, or say positive things abut their product. We do however, get a small commission if you buy the NanoTowel through any links we provide.

Now, we’ve never done a video product test before. You can check our site for that fact. We ran it through some rigorous tests to really test if it was good as their website said it was. We truly didn’t know what to expect. Below are the results.

So here are the things we like about it.

PROS

- Great absorbency- you see this on the video.
- Cleans virtually anything with just water.
- Environmentally friendly. No Toxins
- Doesn’t take up all the storage space of paper towels.
- It can replace most of your paper towel use. It will save you money as a result. A lot.
- Has a 30-Day 100% Risk Free Trial Offer
- You can use them for dusting, washing counter-tops, floors, bathrooms, glass, stainless steel, spills. Our video showed us using the Nano towel successfully for these uses.
- Each towel can last 2-3 years, or 300-400 washes.

You can get it here!

Here are the things we didn’t like so much.

CONS

- Not ideal for using for using to clean your fingers after a barbecue meal
- Not ideal for using to clean mechanical gunk that may get on you if you’re doing auto repairs or any mechanized repairs.
- Does not Sanitize
- It’s not colorfast

OUR TWO CENTS

We like them, and we use them now. It’s as simple that. There is still a use for paper towels though. To soak grease from food, and to use if for messy foods among them. (Anything with barbecue sauce for sure.) Paper towels are great if you run out of coffee filters- (Yes, we’ve done it before)

However, if you’re tired of spending money every week on paper towels, this is a much better option. First, it’s truly better than paper towels at doing what paper towels are suppose to do. Second, depending on how much you spend each week on paper towels, you’ll save a lot of money and cabinet space. We didn’t know how much space our paper towels were taking up until we got rid of most of them. Also, it’s better for the environment. Lastly, if it doesn’t meet your standards, you can send it back, and get a full refund.

WHERE YOU CAN GET IT

The product is cheapest at their home website. Yes, even cheaper than Amazon. About 20% cheaper. You can see for yourselves. Their website currently has limited time specials on three different packages for purchase. Their Four Pack is only $19.95, while two Four Packs is priced at $34.95, and three Four Packs is priced at $44.95.

This is good since the website offers a free money back trial for anyone dissatisfied with their purchase. They also offer a one year warranty.

You can get it here!

Is Melbourne Really The World’s Most Liveable City?

July 26, 2017 by Harrison Stamoudis Leave a Comment

Image by JlascarJorge Lascar (License CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I flick on the tv, which admittedly is not often at all, I always hear the news reporter announce the weather forecast or other such trivial local news by referring to Melbourne as “The world’s most liveable city”.

“The weather forecast this week in the world’s most liveable city”

Being originally from Sydney myself, I chuckle every time I see Melbournians (their word, not mine) trying to be the best and out stage the great city of Sydney. Yeah sure, you might have some trams and a generally clean city, but WE have the bridge, the opera house, and our new year’s fireworks show is much better than yours. So eat it, Melbourne! You will never be like us!

But seriously though. Melbourne has been ranked the world’s most liveable city for the last 7 years in a row; which is a remarkable achievement. The metric by which the liveability of a city is determined is by examining a city’s political/economic stability, access to health care, access to education, infrastructure, culture and environment. But… no mention of access to employment opportunities?

“Do the rough sleepers have nobody but themselves to blame for their life on the streets? Some of them, yes it is their own fault. Did drugs, or do drugs play a part in them being on the streets? For a number of them, yes this is also true. Do they deserve to be on the streets? In one word: No”

You know, I’m old enough to remember when people held cardboard signs on the streets of Melbourne, begging for work. When the city of Melbourne was littered with shanty-towns, particularly around Flinders St Station and under the Queens St Bridge. I also remember long, long ago when the poor and destitute queued outside of St Paul’s Cathedral, eagerly awaiting a free meal. All of this happened… well… just 2 weeks ago when I took the photo below. Being such a liveable city is probably why so many homeless and unemployed people choose to live on the streets of Melbourne… right?

“I feel sorry for those suckers living in Sydney”

All jokes aside, by international standards, Australia’s unemployment rate is pretty good: sitting at a 51 month low of 5.5%. But whilst on the surface our unemployment rate looks relatively healthy, it is very misleading. Unemployment may be down, but underemployment has now climbed up to 8.7% . These statistics are even more horrifying when you look at Melbourne’s individual suburbs. In 2015, the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster had an unemployment rate of 10.4%, Dandenong had an unemployment rate of 21.5%, and poor Broadmeadows lead our state with an unemployment rate of 26.7%. That’s right, in 2015, more than 1 in 4 adults from Broadmeadows were unemployed.

You might be inclined to think “but Harry, surely the 26.7% includes students, retirees, stay at home mums, and other people who are technically unemployed?”, but no, it does not. The international definition for unemployed persons, as set out by the International Labour Organisation, (ILO) is someone who is both able and willing to work, and who is actively, or has actively tried to find employment sometime in the last 4 weeks. If you don’t look for work, whatever the reason may be (studying, kids etc.) you are not counted in the statistics.

Let that sink in for a moment. Some parts of Melbourne had a situation where 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people were out of work, and trying to find employment.

Did someone say “world’s most liveable city”?

So how about all those people who have no job and no hope? Who are unemployed and have given up or simply are unable to look for work due to circumstances like, I don’t know… sleeping underneath a bridge? 2016 saw 247 “rough sleepers” on the shivering streets of Melbourne, a 74% increase in 2 years.

“And then it’s the hidden part of the iceberg that really scares me.” Says Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Rob Doyle,

“Behind those 247 rough sleepers are tens of thousands of people in housing distress.”

Tens of thousands… no job, no home, no hope in hell.

Where did we all go so wrong?

Let me be very frank here, because I know that we are all thinking the same thing right now: Do the rough sleepers have nobody but themselves to blame for their life on the streets? Some of them, yes it is their own fault. Did drugs, or do drugs play a part in them being on the streets? For a number of them, yes this is also true. Do they deserve to be on the streets? In one word: No. Homelessness is not a glamorous life, and it is not a suitable “punishment”. Who wants to live on the freezing streets of Melbourne, especially as winter is now upon us? Is homelessness justified for someone who ruined their own life? Is it a reasonable punishment? I think not.

And not all rough sleepers share needles or are addicted to ice. Some are just ordinary people who haven’t been as fortunate as the rest of us have been in our lives. Whether it be mental illness, escaping domestic abuse, or disability, the rough sleepers all have their own unique stories to tell.

There’s help available… IF you know where to find it

There are many organisations running programs to help those on the streets: The Red Cross, St Vincent De Paul Society, Mission Australia, Wesley Mission, The Salvation Army and Father Chris Riley’s “Youth Off The Streets” are just a few of the many organisations that offer crisis and support services, as well as employment skills and training in their efforts to end poverty and homelessness. But in my experience in social work and welfare, one of the greatest barriers to accessing these services is that those in need are simply not aware of the services being offered or how to access them.

Rough sleepers do communicate with each other and they do help each other out. When you’re on the streets, you must help each other if you want to survive. If someone starts giving out free food on a street corner every Sunday, then word spreads very quickly, and before long, large groups are turning up looking for a feed. Communication is very good amongst the rough sleepers, so now we just need to give them the right message to pass around… “Help is available”

I hope I never get the opportunity to take a photo like that again…

Support Harrison’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!

Harrison Stamoudis is a freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia. After a lifetime of being praised for his intellect and being told “you can do anything you want”, he was doomed to grow up without guidance and direction (it’s difficult to pick a door when they are all open for you). Aimlessly wandered from one job to the next, he struggled to pick a path and stick to it. Harrison often had to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and the work history list on his resume is a little longer than he cares to mention. Harrison is currently in the process of completing higher education (for a third time) so that he may make his next major career change, this time civil engineering.

Three Day Only, Incredible Electronics Deals

July 25, 2017 by J. Parks Leave a Comment

The Underemployed Life has a partnership with a few companies where we get exclusive discounts not available to the general public. Today, we have a discount good for all of World Famous, Banggood’s electronics. If you buy any electronics today from Banggood you will get an additional 10% off any items (except for on 3D printers). You even get this discount off of electronics products that already have an advertised discount.

The discount is only not applicable to specific Banggood promotions which are clearly identified. We’re not paid in any way by Banggood by the way, to promote their company. We do however get a small commission if you buy anything using any links we provide. This allows us to continue to run our website so we truly appreciate it.

We’re pulling our ad in three days, so if you were ever looking to get any new electronics, now is the time. They have almost everything you want too. The code for your discount is: Elec. We also have another limited time discount code if you find something you like from a different department. That is a 7% OFF for ALL categories (normal price only). That code is: bgaff7. Now what are you waiting for? Go get the stuff you know you want and need, and without hurting your budget.

Click on this link to take you straight to Banggood’s Electronics Section.

These are a few of our favorite products.

KOTION EACH G2200 USB 7.1 Surround Sound Vibration Gaming Headphone Headset with Mic LED Light

WEISRE PGX58 Omni-directional Wireless Microphone System Dual Mic for Karaoke Party KTV

LP/Vinyl Tape To PC Record Music USB Cassette To MP3 Converter Capture

A Tale of Two Americas: Is there a Different Kind Of Civil War Coming?

July 24, 2017 by Isadora Teich 4 Comments

Image by ItzaFineDay (License CC BY-SA 2.0)

I have been conned. And so have you. As Americans, we’ve all been conned. It’s like an Oprah episode, only instead of getting a copy of a book you’re never going to read or a car or some shit, you just get ripped off forever.

What am I talking about? If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know where this is going. A lot of the problems of our country, many which seem totally unrelated, all boil down to the fact that capitalism implies winners and losers, and the winners have Jedi mind tricked y’all into thinking you can catch up with their centuries of money if you deserve it and/or work hard enough.

You probably can’t, and that’s not just my opinion as a slutty black magic practicing communist and enemy of the moral order or whatever.

You almost definitely can’t.

“Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane.”

Let me run a scenario by you.

Two babies are born. Both white. Both male. Both have little tufts of tawny hair and big blue eyes. They are plump, healthy, and fairly chill babies. They have those cute little baby toes. You know the ones I’m talking about. That’s the good shit.

One is born in an affluent suburb near New York City to some old money motherfuckers. One is born to a poor family in rural Pennsylvania that burns their own trash, because no municipal trash services are available. The only WalMart is two towns over. There is no grocery store.

Old Money Baby’s dad is an alcoholic and a fuck up by all accounts, but he’s also an heir, so it doesn’t matter that he is unable to provide for his family or himself, or do any of the things that anyone of a lower class would hate themselves for being unable to do. Despite earning nothing for himself, he has several houses, a number of cars, and dresses impeccably.

Because he’s drinking scotch and IPAs instead of PBR, it’s classy. Because he’s rich, his cruel neglect of his son in favor of being constantly fucked up is fine. He’s just distant and showing him tough love. He’s not mentally ill. He’s not an addict. He doesn’t have to address anything. He doesn’t have anger problems. He’s fine.

Old Money Baby goes to a good school, but grows up traumatized and deeply angry because his father is an emotionally distant drunk that spent half of his childhood shooting lions in Africa and the other half screaming at him. His mother has been at brunch with some other housewives for ten years straight.

He gets into drugs in high school, and gets caught, but it doesn’t matter because his dad is friends with the judge. He goes to Columbia for no real reason, other than that he can and most of his family has, and spends most of his time there drunk, and despite never really putting effort into his education, he’s been passed through so many high quality educational institutions that some of it sticks.

Old Money Baby graduates college too fucked up and miserable and drunk to hold down any job, but it doesn’t really matter. His family money carries him through. At the age of 40 he hasn’t held a job down for more than a few months ever, but lives comfortably. It’s fine. He’s not mentally ill either. He’s also not an alcoholic. The cycle is not continuing. It’s all fine.

Ok, so let’s talk about what happens to Baby Pennsyltucky, after growing up with a deadbeat alcoholic father, and a mother who doesn’t have time for him.

Baby Pennsyltucky goes to an unfunded rural school where there isn’t a textbook that isn’t from before 1975. He lives in a crumbling house with parents who work three jobs between them, but can afford nothing. There is no computer in his house. There’s only electricity about half the time.

His parents can’t afford a lot of the most basic shit, like even laundry detergent. Many poor families have only two kinds of soap in their house; bar soap for washing your ass, and the cheapest industrial tub of dish soap, which is used for literally everything else. Baby Pennsyltucky’s clothing is washed with dish soap. His parents can’t afford to buy him deodorant. He smells like shit all throughout school, and because of that the other kids fucking torture him.

He’s tortured by other kids at school, and at home by his family members, because it turns out no one really reacts well to the constant pressure of existing on the edge of complete desolation.

His dad is either at work or home drunk and unconscious. He sees his mother every few days, and it’s clear that she regrets having him, because how could she not? None of them really know each other.

It’s no fucking secret that there is an opioid crisis in this country, and whether you believe it’s a terrible accident or yet another attempt by the lizard people to cull the herd, we all know it’s happening. There’s whole streets you walk down in my city and can find needles sprinkled everywhere, like the world’s most fucked up confetti. It’s so fucked up that librarians are learning how to handle overdoses.

Baby Pennsyltucky learns no skills and absorbs nothing from his underfunded school where he is isolated and tortured, because the school isn’t really there to teach anyone anything; just to tick off some boxes so the powers that be can pretend they tried.

Baby Pennsyltucky ends up overdosing on heroin at age 16. He almost dies. There’s no money and no safety net. There’s no one to smooth things over. His parents kick him out and he hops between friends couches for awhile until their generosity dries up. Somewhere in there he drops out of high school, but it doesn’t really matter to him. When he gets mixed up in drugs there’s no one to back him up,and there’s no one to bail him out; there’s no nothing. He goes to jail, where he is further traumatized, but this is never addressed.

No one cares. He’s another degenerate, alcoholic, addict, scumbag that just can’t do anything right and doesn’t deserve anything, right?

Like many prisoners, he goes in and out of jail for years. He’s more or less homeless in between, because employers won’t hire ex-convicts to do upstanding over the table work in many cases, regardless of what their charges actually are. And when he does get hired he’s too deeply scarred and angry and mentally unstable to hold a job for long. But because there’s no old money backing up Baby Pennsyltucky, that makes him an irredeemable piece of shit in the eyes of our society. He’s someone who doesn’t deserve the very basics of a minimally non-miserable existence.

Baby Pennsyltucky and Old Money Baby are both white male American citizens born in the same country. They actually don’t even live far from each other. Let’s say that Baby Pennsyltucky lives in the Shippensburg, Pennsylvania area, which has a median income of about $31K, and Old Money Baby lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which has a median income of over $150K.

Both of these assholes only live about 200 miles from each other. According to Google Maps, you could drive from one of their hometowns to the other in about 3.5 hours. This is less time than it takes somebody to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

In the time it takes you to watch Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn go from a dirt and sweat caked sex god who looks like he would somehow smell worse before fucking you raw than after (!!!!!!!!), to some old guy in a dumb crown who probably bathes and would fuck you ok (…..), you could experience the vast chasm that exists between rich and poor America. In an afternoon basically.

Of course, there are vast intersections which influence just how far you can get in America, but right now I’m hitting it straight from the economic angle. While occasionally somebody Mad Max Fury Roads the shit out of a barrier, that does not negate an entire network of oppressive systems torturing millions of people.

When we have such vast disparities on multiple levels, including this one, why are we all pretending that everyone has the same opportunities for success? For most Americans, you only matter and deserve anything if you can prove it by having a lot of money. We believe this deeply about ourselves and others. So deeply that we are probably about to kill millions of our own citizens and not bat an eye.

It is for this reason that the Republicans might just manage to jack health care from over 20 million people. As Americans, a cornerstone of our culture is that you are only worth as much as you have. Your humanity is tied entirely into how much you are worth to your boss and how much you earn. Money lends you grace and buys your humanity, even if you didn’t do fuckshit to earn it. We don’t believe that life is innately important, even though we want to think we do. This disregard underpins what it means to be an American. To insinuate that people might need one another and have moments of “weakness” is offensive.

Do not buy into the fallacy that you are self made if you have anything, even if it’s not a lot. Don’t let them play you. Rich people who have done nothing to inherit their money, or maybe even did rad and respectable shit, but want to pretend they didn’t have a lot of help, have invented this self made bullshit. People who come from money will do wild leaps in logic to pretend they are self made. This can be seen everywhere from Ivanka Trump’s latest book to that song by Drake.

Almost nobody who got anywhere really started at the bottom.

Drake comes from a family of successful musicians and grew up rich in Toronto, eh.

We are all products of our environments; both good and bad. We are our parents, we are our class, we are our race, our sex, our gender, our connections, our family. A lot of this has nothing to do with us. While we all have agency, it’s a lot easier to exercise that agency when you aren’t a starving child, and the President your parents voted for out of blind desperation and anger wants to take the one guaranteed meal you get a day from you.

We need to take the value off work and off money in this terrible system and put it back on people. Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane. Having two towns a few hours apart in the same country, be oceans apart economically, is crazy, and also probably a big part of the reason Trump won and the final season of America is so wild.

In Detroit, where capitalism has already notoriously failed, citizens are devising their own kind of economy, which responds to the needs of the people rather than prioritizing numbers and idolizing the fiction of hard work in exchange for things.

Why the fuck do our lives revolve around money and jobs, instead of ourselves?

Why aren’t we taking care of each other?

What are we doing?

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

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TFW(That Feeling When) We Share Ourselves On Social Media: Can We Be Authentic?

July 19, 2017 by Natalie Houchins Leave a Comment

TFW We Share Ourselves On Social Media: Can We Be Authentic?

Image by Maëlick (License CC BY-SA 2.0)

Last Monday, I was so depressed I didn’t leave my bed until noon. After eating breakfast and spending an hour staring into space, I pulled it together enough to go to the gym. I walked in, took in the smell of the lobby, and then immediately turned around to go back to my car. I listened to NPR drone on until the tsunami of feeling subsided and I felt like I could drive.

When I’m depressed, everything feels impossible. My skin prickles with sensitivity. My mind snakes through the mountain path of fatalism and gender pain like a steam train. I buy a ticket, and I can’t get off until I reach the end of the line, whenever and whatever that is.

After I got home from my gym experience, take-out in hand, I sat on my couch and looked out my window. Watching myself have this experience, seeing my neural pathway train go round and round, I had the impulse to share something about it. I wanted to Snapchat a picture of myself with a caption that somehow described my experience while giving it levity. Something along the lines of: “tfw your depression hits, but then you get tacos and maybe it’ll be ok.”

Yes, I know I’m not very funny. I’ve never really “gotten” how to Internet. I LITERALLY (and I mean that literally) did not know what a meme was until a year ago. I’m almost 25, so I know I’m probably slightly over the hill in terms of Internet speak, etc, and I’m sure my impulse to write an article about this is evidence that I clearly do not “understand,” but the fact that I was having a pretty bad depressive episode (in my book) and wanted to share it with the world, gives me pause.

“We want to share our vulnerability, but the act of sharing it, whether it’s something positive, horrible, or somewhere in between, is the opposite of vulnerability. When you control the narrative (however much we think we control the narrative on the Internet), you’re not being truly vulnerable.”

I didn’t pick up the phone and call my parents, friends, or partner. I didn’t text my therapist. I didn’t write in my journal or attempt to make art of any kind. What I wanted in that moment was for the 30 or so people who follow my Snap Stories to pay attention to me for three seconds. I wanted to hurl my experience into the ether and receive…validation? Understanding? Someone to relate? Someone to see me; truly see me?

In my purview at least, we are talking about ourselves more honestly on social media these days. For a while, I felt like the goal was to make your life look as awesome as possible. That’s still there of course, but now there’s something else. There is a desire for not just performance, but connection via sharing the more vulnerable parts of ourselves (maybe the performance of connection?), whether we are sharing something positive or on the darker side.

I see that Kermit meme. I see “existential” memes. I see little videos of kids or animals looking pissed/sassy/doing something clumsy or stupid, with an accompanying caption acknowledging that the person who posted it has done or felt something similar. There’s “relatability.” Instead of, “Look at how awesome my day was! My boyfriend bought me flowers and I feel really loved and wonderful and I wanted to share to make you jealous but also because I am consuming myself and am intoxicated by my own aesthetic,” we say, “tfw bae buys you flowers (heart eyes emoji).” That feeling when. You’ve had that feeling when. Everyone can relate to a feeling when. Look, I can share this braggy thing because y’all are with me, right? RIGHT?

And on the flipside, when we’re having a horrible day, we don’t share a picture/caption with what’s really going on. We mitigate it with some kind of humor or irony qualifier. Or maybe there’s no humor qualifier, but there’s something to signify that this was a CHOICE. Look at me, I’m being vulnerable. It’s cool. I did this on purpose. Or, when we’re hungover or feeling “vulnerable” (socially sanctioned vulnerability like sickness or sharing in a collective emotional experience a la an awards show or basketball game), we caption it with, “I literally want to die,” or, “my life is a dumpster fire.” Nevermind that you may have literally felt like dying at some point in your life, or that people have lives that are actually out of their control—lives one might consider a “dumpster fire.”

We want to share our vulnerability, but the act of sharing it, whether it’s something positive, horrible, or somewhere in between, is the opposite of vulnerability. When you control the narrative (however much we think we control the narrative on the Internet), you’re not being truly vulnerable. You’re sharing a curated portion of your vulnerability, just as I did in the first paragraph of this article. I tried to be as honest as possible about what happened that day. My nitty gritty physical sensations, and my thought process—but the sentence, “My mind snakes through the mountain path of fatalism and gender pain like a steam train,” is a pretty way of saying something that isn’t pretty or even romantic.

I’m being forthcoming about my experience, and I suppose I’m opening myself up to attacks from strangers on the Internet who no doubt have things to say about mental health, etc, but I’m still the one who decided to proclaim my reality. Even if I don’t get any likes or shares, or any response, I’m still the one who made the choice. I’m still billing myself as relatable. Not abject. Not outside the “norm,” though the norm has now been greatly expanded.

There is nothing wrong with sharing our stories. I know I have been positively affected by reading and seeing what other people have to say about their pain or success. I think that the move toward more honesty, even if it’s couched in irony, humor, and hyperbole is a positive one. It creates space for real life conversations that may not have happened before. It gives us a collective vocabulary, however rudimentary, for talking about hard things like post partum depression, body image, oppression, chronic illness, disability, economic struggle, etc.

What worries me though is that we are all relating to each other in a way that is masquerading as authenticity, but, we must realize, is not. No matter how honest social media gets, the choice to put yourself there gives you agency that is always, ultimately, false.

All the Instagram photos in the world of your post-baby body or the way your face looks when you give yourself a double chin or a flower with a caption about your recent loss will not change the fact that your decision to share your experience, while valid and meaningful as hell, is not authenticity. Authenticity and earnestness will never be cool, because not being in control will never be cool.

Keep sharing your memes and struggles however you need to package them, but don’t forget that being vulnerable is when you allow people to see you when you haven’t made any choices. It’s hard fucking work, and it should be. The pay off is too valuable for it to be easy.

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Natalie Houchins is a graduate of Northwestern University, with
degrees in Theatre and Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is a writer and
actress based out of LA, who is perennially homesick for Austin, TX.
She currently spends her free time hiking, watching Battlestar
Galactica and resisting the Trump administration. For more information, visit her website: www.nataliehouchins.com.

Even for Trump This Terrible Pick Stands Out

July 17, 2017 by Andrea Thompson 1 Comment

Image by Gage Skidmore (License CC BY-SA 2.0)

If you’re anything like me and most of the rest of the world, you keep up with the news on a regular basis. If you have a phone, are on social media, or own a TV, it’s hard to miss. So you may have seen a few headlines in regards to Trump’s new pick for healthcare advisor, Katy Talento.

At first glance, Katy Talento seems promising. She holds a Master’s in Science from Harvard University, and has spent a lot of time in the field in the US and Africa working on disease control programs. She volunteers at the Leadership Institute as a faculty member and previously worked as senate staff for Senator Thom Tillis and the Health, Education, Labors and Pensions Committee. She sounds like a ray of hope in the dreary days of Trump, right? Someone that may have a bit of common sense. Wrong.

However hopeful we may have been, this woman is just as nutty as the rest of them. Talento fought to have HIV/AIDS funding cut by millions because she is under the belief that the funds are being used to profit Russian prostitution rings. As far back as 2003, during her time on the Senate health committee, she was part of a group pushing to defund and blacklist more than 150 HIV/AIDS research grants; grants that were set to be used for anything ranging from educational programs to transmission rate studies among sex workers and IV drug users.

“As if women as a whole aren’t already facing serious disturbances in their access to affordable and effective birth control, we now have to deal with a pro-life, right-winged health advisor that swears up and down that birth control kills babies.”

If passed, this would have shut off over $100 million in grant funds. This group claimed that the funds were being used to promote legalized prostitution and to print materials that would be distributed to schools, orphanages, and institutes to encourage young girls to pursue prostitution as a viable career choice.

This uproar forced Russian officials to spend months researching grants and funding, and produce tons of paperwork to disprove the bogus claim. The truth was that the grants were being used exactly the way they were supposed to be; funding educational programs, studying infection and transmission rates, and developing curriculum used to teach young people ways to avoid contracting the diseases.

The bill was blocked, but not without a serious shaking to the science community. They were left feeling as though their research, hard work, and dedication would be overshadowed by senseless investigations to push them into a right-winged agenda.

The scientific community are not the only toes that Talento has stepped on. She’s also ruffled the feathers of women’s healthcare groups by stating, on more than one occasion, that oral contraceptives cause abortions—even though this has been thoroughly research and has been found to be completely untrue. As if women as a whole aren’t already facing serious disturbances in their access to affordable and effective birth control, we now have to deal with a pro-life, right-winged health advisor that swears up and down that birth control kills babies. Not that they care at all what happens to that baby after you give birth to it. Don’t ask for healthcare, food, or assistance for that kid, because it’s not their problem. But you damn well better give birth to it anyway. But that’s another story for another day.

The fact of the matter is, the women’s healthcare community is up against enough as it is. We’re looking at losing basic rights to our own bodies and losing access to affordable basic care. The last thing we need is a woman pushing a right-wing agenda down our throats, because she doesn’t understand how science works.

If all of the above isn’t enough to make you shiver yet, this is the same woman who has pushed less than effective recommendations for avoiding the Zika virus. Zika is a mosquito borne virus that is transmitted through a mosquito bite or sexual contact with an infected individual. For a generally healthy adult it will cause flu-like symptoms, such as fever, headache, and joint pain, but is mostly harmless. However, if contracted by a pregnant woman, it poses a serious risk for birth defects in the unborn child, including microcephaly, severe brain defects, and an increased risk of Guillain-Barr Syndrome.

This past January, Talento published a list of recommendations to help avoid contracting the growing disease. A lot of her tips are standard, such as avoiding travel to high risk areas and using bug repellents. But she also suggested that women sleep with their husbands, with the woman snug tight under the blankets and the husband sleeping on top of the covers so that the infected mosquitos will hopefully go for the “easier target.”

Basically, you’re supposed to cocoon yourself under tons of blankets while your husband lies uncovered and offers himself up as some kind of human mosquito sacrifice. There’s no mention of what you’re supposed to do with your vulnerable, uncovered face (because you HAVE to breathe), what to do if you don’t have a husband to offer as a sacrifice, or the fact that Zika is sexually transmitted. She also doesn’t say what you’re supposed to do to avoid transmission once your husband has succumbed to the Zika mosquito gods.

Healthcare is in the middle of facing a serious shit-storm. Millions of people are facing the loss of their healthcare and access to life-saving treatments. A slew of ridiculous crap is about to be considered “pre-existing” conditions, and funding cuts are being proposed left and right. To say the least, a lot of people are already on edge. The very last thing we need is a healthcare advisor spouting inaccurate bullshit at every corner. Unfortunately, education doesn’t always fix stupid.

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Our Annual Best Outdoor Products For Australian Living, 2017

July 13, 2017 by April Leave a Comment

Whether you have a spacious outdoor living space or a tiny balcony in the city, there are simple ways to make your outdoor space more functional, relaxing, and overall aesthetically appealing. You may want to create an outdoor oasis or simply a cozy space for kicking back after work. Or maybe you enjoy hosting events in your backyard and just want some ideas for making an unforgettable impression on your guests. The following products can complement any type of outdoor space and are my personal favourites.

Best Outdoor Products For Australian Living, 2017

Trellis Rose Arch with Planters

A trellis is a must-have in any Australian garden space. This beautiful, weather-resistant trellis is made of solid wood and features two planters on each side for flowers, vegetable plants, herbs, or anything you wish. The arched top adds a classic touch, making this nearly six-foot-tall trellis the perfect addition to any outdoor pathway or entryway. Beautiful beautiful beautiful is what this is!

Buy it here

2. Wood Plastic Composite Flooring with Solar Light Outdoor Garden Balcony Interlocking Decking Tile

I absolutely love these outdoor tiles for many reasons. This eco-friendly outdoor flooring automatically absorbs sunlight during the daytime and then lights up at night. These durable tiles complement balconies, decks, garden pathways, porches, gazebos, and virtually any even outdoor space. They’re also easy to install and come in several different colours. Your family will love this. It’s stunning!

Buy it here

Save an additional 15% off your order when you use special code: BGhouse
*Limited time offer*

3. Garden Bridge

A garden bridge adds a romantic touch to any outdoor space – no water required. This solid-wood bridge is weather-resistant and durable enough to use year-around. It’s 4’ 7” long and can be placed over a small creek or flower bed. The double handrails adds even more charm to this already beautiful garden bridge. Remarkably inexpensive.

Buy it here

4. Solar Power Hanging Glass Jar Lamp 8 LED Beads Garden Courtyard Landscape Decor Light

Experience a calming, almost magical light show at night with these solar powered hanging glass jar lamps. They are perfect for hanging onto tree limbs or fences, adding playful ambiance to any outdoor decor. These eco-friendly jar lamps absorb sunlight during the day and automatically light up at night, requiring no wiring or electricity. Choose from a variety of neon hues or classic white. You and your family will be dazzled by these lamps!

Buy it here

Save an additional 15% off your order when you use special code: BGhouse
*Limited time offer*

5. Outdoor Hanging Swing Chair with Roof Black Rattan

Every outdoor space needs a comfortable swing for relaxing after a long day. This durable and weather-resistant outdoor swing includes two removable pillows and features a roof for shade under the hot Aussie sun. A swing is the perfect addition to backyards, decks, porches, balconies, and virtually any outdoor space. We think you’ll agree, it’s the perfect summer addition!

Buy it here

6. Garden Patio Hanging Thicken Hammock Chair Indoor Outdoor Cotton Swing Cushion Seat

This hammock cozy, comfortable, and colourful. Simply lay back and enjoy the breeze from underneath a shade tree. For adult use only, this striped hammock can be used in your yard, porch, or away from home on camping trips, at the park, or while hiking. This hanging chair is also very stable thanks to the rope and rod. Can you see yourself enjoying a nice glass of wine, reading a great book, and relaxing away? We can, and we think you’ll be thanking us for recommending it!

Buy it here

Save an additional 15% off your order when you use special code: BGhouse
*Limited time offer*

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April gradually escaped the world of employment by writing for a variety of online publications. She’s worked many jobs worth forgetting, mainly in the retail and food industry. All of which were boring and uninspiring to her creative side. Now she works as a freelance virtual assistant and enjoys taking online courses on various subjects.

Avocado Toast Is The New American Dream

July 10, 2017 by Isadora Teich 1 Comment

Image by Michael Miller (License CC BY-SA 2.0)

Maybe I’m kinda late on this and no one cares anymore, but honestly, I can’t let it go.

It haunts me.

Every generation has its symbols and stereotypes and generalized flaws and accomplishments, but the idea of a fruit on a piece of bread being symbolic of the apparent wastefulness and lascivious overindulgence of my generation— is insane to me.

Remember when representations of affluence were like, having a car? Or wearing fucking gold?

Oldheads are mad we don’t buy cars. They’re mad we don’t buy houses. They’re mad we don’t buy diamonds, and they are mad many of us have realized we have been priced out of having families of our own, and so are not doing it.

We can’t. Even if we desperately wanted to.

And instead of listening to us when we say it is impossible to meet your standards of success on the wages you pay, hot and fresh out the debt mill you created, some motherfucker wants to make it very clear that it’s not a chaotically systematic clusterfuck designed to bleed dry anyone that’s not on Trump’s constant golf holiday.

It’s our love of avocado toast, according to Australian property mogul and millionaire Tim Gurner.

Well, I’m here to make it very clear that given the choice, I would choose a single fucking slice of avocado toast over owning an entire house. I’m not interested in meeting a single standard set up by a generation of sociopaths, who have destroyed the world around them without compunction.

Whether we are talking some fancy shit with fennel, radish, and lemon or just some avocado mashed onto a piece of toast with a fork with salt and pepper, I think that avocado toast is great, and owning a house is dumb, based on what they do for you.

“We are doing our best to care for ourselves and each other in big and small ways as older people hold the world hostage out of spite, seemingly unaware that they actually exist on the same shitty planet they are plunging head long into oblivion to spite us”

So, what exactly does avocado toast do for you that a house does not?

On a basic level, avocados are actually incredible for you. They offer over a dozen vitamins and minerals, which are good for everything from your eyes, to your blood pressure, to your skin, to cell repair. How well we live and how fast we die is tied to how well our cells repair themselves. Basically what I’m saying is that if you eat enough avocados you will live forever.

Yeah, science!

On a more bullshitty “I have a liberal arts degree level,” avocado toast is really being used in this context to generalize a fascinating shift in what counts as indulgence and valued action in our culture, how it functions, and what it means. Tim Gurner is picking up on the fact that we don’t give a shit about what he values and what he is.

So, what the fuck am I talking about?

As I said before, indulgence and success and taking care of yourself used to mean very different things. In the old days you got a house, you got kids, you married ASAP, you ate steak every night, you hired poor people to do your exercise for you, and you worked a pointless job to acquire objects that would mostly just rot in your basement.

You would be expected to do things like put time, energy, and money into maintaining a lawn, which is functionally useless, while driving your gas guzzler to the supermarket to pick up overpriced borderline nutritionless produce picked by terribly paid immigrants.

All of these things are performative. We know now that eating steak every night will kill you, and staying with someone you hate forever, sucks (and now that we are no longer held economic prisoners to one another, we don’t have to!). Also, never moving will kill you, and relationships and meaningful work and human connection will do more for you than having 15 cars and a breakfront full of fine china no one is allowed to ever use will.

We indulge in experience, each other, and ourselves, often through eating healthier, physical activity, and doing things to benefit our communities. We often make shit money working terrible hours for nonprofits because helping others is worthwhile to us. We are doing our best to care for ourselves and each other in big and small ways as older people hold the world hostage out of spite, seemingly unaware that they actually exist on the same shitty planet they are plunging headlong into oblivion to spite us.

So to summarize, avocados: the complete key to immortality. We like ‘em ok. We are living in the age of avocado culture. It’s like the age of aquarius but it doesn’t have that song at the end of “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”

So, what does a house do for you then?

Home ownership is one of the main parts of the American dream, which is pretty much dead, and may not have ever been a thing in the first place. I, personally, cannot afford one, and am not sure if I ever will be able to. Even if I magically won the lottery tomorrow, I’m not entirely sure I would immediately sink that money into a home for a few reasons.

For one thing, spending money to not only buy, but constantly maintain a structure against entropy and termites seems like an uphill battle that is ultimately pointless. When I die, will it matter that I renovated my kitchen every 7 years? Will living in a room painted blue rather than one painted red dramatically improve my life? Will putting all of that focus into maintaining an external and ultimately slowly degrading structure rather than myself and the people around me yield all that I hope it will?

I’ve seen people desperately pour money they didn’t have into their nice homes while their elementary school aged children sat on the floors of their big individual bedrooms slicing themselves hip to ankle; death their first real flirtation.

BUT HEY, THE NEW FOUNTAIN OUT FRONT WILL MAKE THE NEIGHBORS JEALOUS.

People pour countless thousands into their homes. The decks, the paint jobs, the driveways, the useless lawns, the cleaning – all of it. Something breaks every 14 seconds and it’s on the owner to pay for its replacement. That’s on top of your mortgage, insurance, and property taxes. Even in 30 years, after you pay the damn thing off, your stuck with property taxes forever whether you like it or not.

Homeownership keeps you stuck, preoccupied, and constantly in debt. People are who are in debt are less likely to fight back. What are you unaware of if you spend all your time fucking weeding and working overtime to just take up space somewhere?

Unless you are a young person with an endless supply of money at your disposal (let’s be real, all those people are too busy taking Molly in Ibiza in their indie brand swimsuits to read this), owning a home is probably not only out of your reach, but maybe not the best call even if you can swing it. Homes can limit your opportunities. Get offered a great job somewhere across the country? Fall in love with someone who lives far away? Good luck selling your house in this market, buddy. If you don’t like where you rent for any reason, you can leave at any time.

I want flexibility and I want freedom. I want limitless opportunities for self-cultivation. I want to take care of myself and those around me. I come first. A house does not.

While conservatives have kinda ruined “Fight Club” for me by constantly misquoting Tyler Durden— calling us all a bunch of snowflakes for wanting to have the same standards of living the rest of the first world has, they really wouldn’t like almost anything else the character had to say; like that whole thing about how “The things you own end up owning you.”

So, to summarize:

Avocado toast: Tasty

Homeownership: Sold to you as tasty, but actually eats you.

Bye.

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Our Review Of The Month: The Nano Towel

July 8, 2017 by J. Parks Leave a Comment

Our Review Of The Month: The Nano Towel

Here at The Underemployed Life’s home office we use a lot of paper towels. We probably go through four or more rolls a week. We use paper towels after we wash our hands at the kitchen sink. To wipe up the kitchen counter. We use them to wipe down appliances, the bathroom mirror, and on all kinds of spills. Most homes go through at least four rolls of paper towels a week. If you have kids, you definitely go through more.

FACTS

So we went looking for something better, cheaper, and not an environmental hazard. After about a month of trial and error we found something we liked called the Nano Towel. The Nano Towel is a nontoxic replacement for paper towels. It is made of Nanolon Fiber, a fabric technology that is hundreds of times finer than one human hair.

Now, we’ve never done a product test before. You can check our site for that fact. We wanted to see if it was as good as the company said it was. We truly didn’t know what to expect. We also want to make it clear that we are not paid by Water Liberty, the company who makes the Nano Towel, to promote, endorse, or say positive things abut their product. We do however get a small commission if you buy the Nano Towel through any links we provide.

Below are the results and a few photos from our field test.

So here are the things we like about it.

PROS

- Great absorbency. Probably the biggest takeaway for us was how absorbent it was.
- Cleans about everything we threw at it using only water.
- Environmentally friendly. No Toxins
- Doesn’t take up all the storage space of paper towels.
- If you have a Swiffer you can use them on it instead of buying replacement pads. We tried it and it worked great.
- It can replace most, but not all of your paper towel use. You’ll definitely save money
- They have a 30-Day 100% Risk Free Trial Offer
- You can use them for dusting, washing counter-tops, floors, bathrooms, glass, stainless steel, spills. We used it successfully for everything on that list.
- Each towel can last 2-3 years, or 300-400 washes.

You can get it here!

Here are the things we didn’t like so much.

CONS

- Not ideal for using for using to clean your fingers after a barbecue meal
- Not ideal for using to clean mechanical gunk that may get on you if you’re doing auto repairs or any mechanized repairs.
- Does not Sanitize
- It’s not colorfast

OUR TWO CENTS

However, if you’re tired of spending money every week on paper towels, this is a much better option. First, it’s truly better than paper towels at doing what paper towels are suppose to do. You’ll probably be as surprised as us at its absorbency. Second, depending on how much you spend each week on paper towels, you’ll save a lot of money and cabinet space. We didn’t know how much space our paper towels were taking up until we got rid of most of them. Also, it’s better for the environment. Lastly, if it doesn’t meet your standards, you can send it back, and get a full refund. We give it a full recommendation.

WHERE YOU CAN GET IT

You can get it here!