Brainy Badger #2
Natch.
"I think it's time that you got a job and started paying off your bills," my mother had said. By "bills", she meant the tattered green accounting book she had maintained since I was 6 years old, detailing each and every broken lamp and disciplinary fine that had accumulated in a rather modest childhood. The total was around $70 dollars, a veritable fortune to a 14-year-old living in an economically depressed agriculatural area.
So off I went, on my hand-me-down bike (a girl's bike -- natch again), through the mosquito-infested Iowa summer seeking employment bailing hay or de-tassling corn. Hay paid better, but I secretly hoped for a de-tassling job simply because it was easier. In the days before genetic manipulation magically eliminated the problem, rural teenages were paid a penny apiece to cut the pollen-producing tassels from the top of young corn stalks to prevent pollenation and the rise of disruptive "volunteer" corn plants in farmers' fields the next year. A day wandering through a field with scissors just sounded better than trying to throw hay bales that weighed half as much as I did.
Trouble is, the long-standing depression in the farm economy and the growing presence of large agro-corp factory farms really cut into my job prospects. Most doors that I knocked on never even opened and the one's that did usually revealed only a poor retired farmers' wife who had long since sold or rented the land to a larger farming operation.
Ultimately, I wound up seven miles away in town, playing video games surreptitiously and hoping that no one who knew my parents would see me. It wasn't so much that I feared trouble for playing video games -- though that would definitely ensue -- but rather that if my mother found out I had money, it would be quickly confiscated to pay the Debt Book.
I almost never had any money. Lawnmowing at summer cabins for rich people down by the lake eventually replaced the failed agricultural job hunt as a source of income but, like an early introduction to confiscatory taxation, the Big Government of the Debt Book always gobbled it up right away. And as my rate of income increased, so also did the rate of disciplinary fines levied against me in the Book.
Natch.
"I think it's time that you got a job and started paying off your bills," my mother had said. By "bills", she meant the tattered green accounting book she had maintained since I was 6 years old, detailing each and every broken lamp and disciplinary fine that had accumulated in a rather modest childhood. The total was around $70 dollars, a veritable fortune to a 14-year-old living in an economically depressed agriculatural area.
So off I went, on my hand-me-down bike (a girl's bike -- natch again), through the mosquito-infested Iowa summer seeking employment bailing hay or de-tassling corn. Hay paid better, but I secretly hoped for a de-tassling job simply because it was easier. In the days before genetic manipulation magically eliminated the problem, rural teenages were paid a penny apiece to cut the pollen-producing tassels from the top of young corn stalks to prevent pollenation and the rise of disruptive "volunteer" corn plants in farmers' fields the next year. A day wandering through a field with scissors just sounded better than trying to throw hay bales that weighed half as much as I did.
Trouble is, the long-standing depression in the farm economy and the growing presence of large agro-corp factory farms really cut into my job prospects. Most doors that I knocked on never even opened and the one's that did usually revealed only a poor retired farmers' wife who had long since sold or rented the land to a larger farming operation.
Ultimately, I wound up seven miles away in town, playing video games surreptitiously and hoping that no one who knew my parents would see me. It wasn't so much that I feared trouble for playing video games -- though that would definitely ensue -- but rather that if my mother found out I had money, it would be quickly confiscated to pay the Debt Book.
I almost never had any money. Lawnmowing at summer cabins for rich people down by the lake eventually replaced the failed agricultural job hunt as a source of income but, like an early introduction to confiscatory taxation, the Big Government of the Debt Book always gobbled it up right away. And as my rate of income increased, so also did the rate of disciplinary fines levied against me in the Book.
Natch.
posted by Anonymous at 7:58 AM
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