income

A National Emergency

/ lovizmytrio / 1 Comment

A national emergency is a series of hurricanes on one coast and as many fires on the other coast, the direct results of climate change that our country chooses to ignore. A national emergency is the healthcare crisis, where we can’t get prosthetics if we’re missing a limb or pay for cancer treatment even if we’re dying. A national emergency is CEO pay which has multiplied exponentially for five decades and left the common worker with a salary too low to buy a house, buy eggs, or pay rent.

There is no national emergency at our border. There are millions of people, despite all of our national emergencies, who have faced far worse: farms that can no longer grow coffee due to climate change, dictatorships that have taken away all rights, medical care that includes fewer options for cerebral palsy or cancer than we have here.

Their emergencies trail behind them, left in their home countries weeks, months, or years ago, and like that train that they cling to carrying them across Mexico, they hope never to see again.

They are here now, families in tow, babies in tow, ready to work, ready to enroll their children in school and provide jobs for teachers like me, ready to take into their hands the American Dream that you have declared doesn’t exist for them.

They are not criminals.

They are not illegal.

They are not a national emergency, an executive order you’ve used to circumvent Congress on your first day in office.

They pick your food and clear your sidewalks after snow and build your roofs and work in your restaurants and run your factories and teach your children and make you rich. They are professors and lawyers and engineers and mechanics and everything in between.

They are human.

And after more than four hundred years of forced colonization and enslaved labor indoctrinated in our blood by imperialists like you, the only national emergency is how far back we’ve moved the dial of progress, and for how long we will make Suffering the motto of YOUR AMERICA.

Work

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment 
i'm back at work today
after a solid two weeks
of rest and relaxation

in which i found this schedule
from my first job
age seventeen
(started there at sixteen)

where i'm scheduled for all but four days
of July of '95
and i've never stopped since.
really stopped.

even when i was
home with the babies
i watched other people's babies

and the two weeks
thirty years past due
just seems 
so
short

$1000

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

What can I buy with $1000?

A color printer for my classroom so I can make posters pop for my Newcomer students. Eighteen credits at ISU so I can try to earn a livable wage with a salary lane change. A week in a hotel for one of my students and his family who were out on the streets.

What can you buy with $1000?

The last shred of dignity that DPS promised on our September paychecks. You said you kept your promise with extra pay for hard-to-serve positions and bonuses, a 2.06% raise, and $1000.

But guess what? We didn’t receive the $1000 that you are holding because our union wants arbitration against your broken promise. We only got the watered-down raise.

Where is it? Where is the 5.2% COLA raise that you agreed to?

When my student’s family was living in a tent, I asked my English colleagues at South for as much money as they could spare. Within a day, I had collected more than $1000 to keep this family off the street for a week. Why did I ask when we’re all strapped for cash, when gas and food prices and mortgage interest rates keep so many of us from paying our bills?

Because that is what I do. I teach Newcomers who came here for a better life. I work with generous colleagues who would reach into their nearly-empty pockets to come up with $1000 because it matters to a student. A family. A life.

How else can I earn $1000, or a real raise? From my second job as an adjunct professor, where, if the classes don’t get canceled before they begin, I might earn $1000 extra a month to make up for the gaps in my DPS paycheck? From teaching summer school, doing ISA paperwork, coaching, directing, or after-school supervision?

Why isn’t what I do in a day, in a school year, enough to earn $1000 of your respect? To earn 5.2% of your respect?

I plan lessons and grade papers for four preps. I have a classroom of students who just arrived from all over the world and speak seven different languages. I engage them in English, help them cope with trauma, show them where our food bank is, take them on excursions across the city, teach them about cultural norms, and communicate with their families about their never-ending physical and emotional needs. I have kids who have never held a pencil and don’t know their letters in their home language and kids who could write a novel in Spanish, and I work my ass off to meet all of their needs, even if it means giving them $1000.

What I don’t have is a salary proving that DPS believes that what I do is respectable and professional. What I don’t have is my promised COLA.

DPS, you agreed to support your teachers with a real raise, and you couldn’t even give us $1000. If a picture is worth 1000 words, I hope my words are worth at least $1000.

But the Shade Tree

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment 
with one vacant lot
the clear divide of wealth
(urban devilry)

Pandemic Pandemonium

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

My mayor stepped onto a plane headed for Mississippi to visit his family for Thanksgiving in the midst of a level-red, please-don’t-travel-Denver pandemic. My mayor graduated from the same high school as me. My mayor worked to shut down the high school he graduated from. My mayor told me I was racist for walking along a picket line after fighting for fifteen years for a decent wage. My mayor thinks education reform means shutting down the only good thing that most students have: a public, comprehensive school that accepts all students regardless of ability, ethnicity, or work ethic.

Is this why my Sleep Number tells me each morning that I have a shitty sleep score, that I have been restless most of the night?

Or is it because I brought an immigrant boy into my home, a boy who had never laid eyes on a computer, who, two months later, was forced to do online schooling for the duration of his time here because people like my mayor keep getting on planes?

Is it because I have four teenagers in my house, all at one level of depression or anxiety after nine months of pandemia, and I worry that if I don’t let them see their friends I am going to wake to their wrists slit, them hanging in a garage, a bullet to their head? That I spend my early morning hours walking my dog and playing, replaying every fucking scenario. If we get tested today and are negative and promise not to go anywhere or see anyone for two weeks, can they see their friends? But wait… won’t their friends and their friends’ families have to do the same? But wait… my husband has to go to work every day, so… But wait… I have to buy food for these endlessly hungry mouths, so… But wait…

I’m sure my mayor was thinking along the same lines when he threw our elected school board and our teachers under the bus for our superintendent’s sudden resignation.

During the strike, I was in charge of Valentines on day three. We were writing love notes to Susana Cordova. My job was to censor, to ensure no cuss words were present.

“But wait,” a teacher held up her, I’m-gathering-the-class’s attention-now finger, “What if I want to say, ‘Susana, I fucking love you'”?

And how could I say no? How could I explain to my mayor that Manual High School changed my life and opened my eyes to what the world could really look like, and why did he think he needed to shut it down?

How could I explain to my mayor that I, too, am a DPS graduate, and DID YOU EVEN HEAR WHAT WE WERE STRIKING ABOUT?

How could I explain to my mayor that I fell for his Democrat-reformer propositions, that I sent two of my girls to his beloved charter schools, that they were put in lines and held silent in the hallway and had to write essays in their hour-long detentions for forgetting a fucking eraser on a pencil???

That if you weren’t academically the best, you were just forgotten?

Maybe he wasn’t there with me last night, tossing and turning. Maybe he didn’t follow my girls to the public high school where the teachers take the time to get to know their students rather than teaching them a rote routine of conformity. Maybe he doesn’t understand that test scores–how he measures success–are meaningless to a teacher of immigrants whose students carry two languages, two cultures, two views of the world, two experiences in America, two lives insides their souls.

Maybe he’s never been outside of the bubble of Denver, the whitewashed, integrated Manual, the real world for our kids.

Maybe he hasn’t seen a sixth-grader have a panic attack because she forgot to put a proper MLA heading on a piece of notebook paper.

Maybe he haunts me in the night, two days before Thanksgiving. Maybe he has another agenda in his third, lame-duck term.

Maybe I should have Thanksgiving with my parents who live fifteen minutes away.

Or maybe I should just sit down. Breathe. And be grateful that I will always apologize when I have made a stupid choice, as a parent or a teacher, and not try to blame my mayor for taking away a wink of my sleep.

Coronatine, Day Sixty-seven (Social Distancing Applied to Poverty)

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So we don’t have a beach in Colorado, not a real one anyway. We do have immigrants from a hundred countries and out-of-state transplants from all fifty states who have come to live here for one main reason: to be outside.

It’s true. Colorado has one of the highest rates in the country for outdoor recreation, and in general, physical activity.

So, after more than two months of being trapped indoors, of ski areas being shut down too soon, of gyms being closed, of mandates that tell us we shouldn’t drive more than ten miles to enjoy the outdoors, this happened: a crowd of just-out-of-school teenagers, more than two hundred of them, ignored all social distancing mandates and managed to get all of the state’s beaches closed indefinitely.

Now, I am a high school teacher, AND I have four teenagers in my house. Are they crazy? Yes. Are they self-absorbed? Yes. Are they reckless? Absolutely.

But must we all, all of us outdoor fanatics, suffer a summer without our “beach” because of a crowd of adolescents?

Because let me tell you who is affected by this new mandate. All the poor people everywhere who crowd into Cherry Creek State Park, conveniently located in the center of the city, on any given weekend because you can fill a car full of people to enjoy the water and sun for a measly $11. You can pack a picnic or a barbecue, relax under a cottonwood, dip your toes in the water, and pretend that the world outside of this sanctuary doesn’t exist. For a few hours, a day, you can have a sense of peace.

I have lived within fifteen minutes of this park for most of my life. On summer weekend days, you have to stake out a spot by 10am if you want the perfect combination of shade and sun. And you will see people from all walks of life enjoying its proximity to the city. Every language you can think of, every tone of skin, every belief system, all enjoying the splashes and sun.

And now we’re in a pandemic. And now we’re supposed to stay home. And now we’re social distancing.

Most of us are.

But guess who still gets to enjoy the water at the fourteen parks with closed swim beaches?

People with boats.

Guess who gets to enjoy the lakes and campgrounds owned by counties in northern Colorado? Lakes like Horsetooth Reservoir with its crystalline turquoise water, surrounded by mountains?

People with hard-sided campers that contain their own private bathrooms.

And guess who those people are?

People with money.

So, in the midst of a pandemic, when the privileged are allowed to storm the streets brandishing military-grade weapons because they want everything open, those same things ARE open. To them.

And to those who can just gather up the $11 entrance fee? They can social distance from home. They don’t need to play golf or take out their speedboat or enjoy a luxurious camper that costs more than they’ll ever make in a year. They can go back to their cramped apartments with no yard space while the rich can back their boats into their third garage and pay their gardeners to perfectly maintain the 10,000-square-foot lot that they COULD be enjoying instead.

And no matter what, don’t you ever forget it, this is the Land of the Free.

Free for everyone with a million bucks, and ever-so-costly for those who can just afford $11.

(I will miss those cottonwoods).

 

Coronatine, Day Sixty-one

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I went to the grocery store today, and I don’t want to write about the nightmare I had last night where no one was wearing a mask.

Could you imagine, three months ago, having a nightmare about people not wearing masks in Target?

Actually, King Soopers was well-stocked today. Everyone I saw had a mask on. People at 8:30am obeyed the one-way aisle rules, and best of all? I stayed within my budget.

I made a budget for my post-work husband, starting at the beginning of May. $200 a week. It may sound extraordinarily excessive, but we’ve got six mouths to feed, and these are American prices, after all.

But I bought extras today. This bugleweed. A roll of packaging tape. And sushi because fuck Wednesday cooking.

And, my nightmares should end soon.

Because my post-work husband got a job, a non-union, non-seniority-screws-you job, doing exactly what he’s great at and wants to do forever, in the midst of a pandemic.

And.

And you can call it what you want. White privilege. True. Luck. Absolutely. Divine intervention. Maybe.

Or just… fate. The fate that led him through the Air Force to me, that led the boy to our doorstep, that led three beautiful daughters into our home, that led his previous experience to him becoming the best candidate out of all the others being laid off.

Coronatine, day sixty-one. It’s a beautiful image filled with pets, hope, and love.

And I want to hold on to this non-nightmare feeling for as long as I can.

And.

This cat was born to be a model. Good night.

Coronatine, Day Fifty-five

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

and from this soil

from blustery spring breezes

good news can blossom

Coronatine, Day Forty-seven (Land of the Free)

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

Should I continue to measure quarantine in days, or should this new life be measured in weeks now? Weeks since we’ve been to work. To school. Weeks since I went to the grocery store without spending $300-$500 trying to stock up for when we’re really going to need it.

Weeks since I made it through one day without crying.

Let’s try a countdown of weeks. Weeks until his job ends: three. Weeks until I have to spend 24% of my take-home pay on health insurance: four. Weeks until we run out of money based on this: twenty. Weeks until I will feel safe about seeing and kissing my husband, as he will no longer be an essential worker and risking his life every day: five.

Weeks until I make it one day without crying: zero.

But I thought I was done crying! I was writing gratitude posts, 10×10, one hundred goddamn things to be grateful for! On the final day, I spent hours reviewing our budget, stupidly thinking we could manage for up to a year on our savings, our tenant money, and my salary.

Because I saw this and did the math:

And what is $260×2, the bottom left plan, the only one we could afford? It’s $520. And add in dental and vision, it was going to be $650 a month, and we could just. Barely. Manage.

But it was a lie, a lie to myself, a bait-and-switch chart from the school district, a slap in the face at 5:00am this morning when I decided to open enroll. No, not $260 per paycheck. Here is the real price:

For the cheapest plan for my family. The plan with a $7000 deductible. So… other than a singular wellness-check visit to the doctor (should I be grateful this is included?), we will pay $12,000 a year in monthly premiums and then another $7000 if anything happens, and then 30% of the rest until we reach the out-of-pocket max of $12,700. Ummmm… shouldn’t the out-of-pocket max INCLUDE the $12,000 a year already spent on monthly premiums?  (Asking for a friend).

What could I do? What could I possibly do? I looked on the Colorado Marketplace website. On the initial page, I experienced another bait-and-switch: Let me tell you, we’re between tiers 2 and 3, and we have a family of five, not 3-4 like in the picture. Yay! It was looking good! We could get a premium tax credit!

So I started to fill out the application. And guess what?

Do I need to tell you? Or have you lived in the Land of the Free for all of your life and already know what a FUCKING LIE THAT IS?

Here’s the summary:

And here is what it costs without the premium tax benefit for the cheapest plan:

$1409 per month with an $8200 deductible. I couldn’t even make up these prices if I tried!

Dear Colorado and Billionaire Health Insurance CEOs: Would I be ON THIS FUCKING PAGE if I were shopping for health insurance for MYSELF ONLY? Because of COURSE it’s affordable for myself only! And of course, for myself only, according to my beautiful school district blue and green chart, I would be MAKING $11 a month, so yeah, it meets your goddamn threshold of “9.78%.” (But don’t you love how, even on their website, they put the word “Affordable” in quotes because they know it’s a fucking joke?)

Let’s return to the beautiful school district chart that shows “DPS Contributions” and I STUPIDLY thought that meant that DPS was footing part of the bill, but what they REALLY mean is the $422/month on my paycheck labeled “Cash for Benefits” which is unofficially part of my take-home salary. So their contribution is really MY contribution, or, in laymen’s terms, MY FUCKING MONEY.

And if we don’t pay? If we don’t give in to this bullshit in the midst of a pandemic?

You guessed it. We’d lose everything. Because we all know that in the Land of the Free, all it takes is one emergency room visit, one contraction of a deadly virus, one broken bone, to lead the uninsured straight to bankruptcy.

So, after seventeen years of teaching, two degrees, one advanced certification, and having seriously ONE form of debt (a mortgage, not a single student loan, not even a car payment), after working my way and paying my way through those degrees, after keeping my children out of daycare and living on a way-less teacher’s salary for eight years, after EVERYTHING…

We still can’t live on my salary.

How many weeks has it been that we’ve been trapped at home? That my husband has been going to work, entering businesses and homes and fucking medical clinics without a mask (because his company doesn’t provide masks) or any form of PPE, risking his and all of our lives before being laid off?

How many more fucking weeks will it be before he can find a job in this market?

Coronatine, Day Forty-seven. Week 7, almost 8.

Why does it feel like day one thousand, week ninety?

Because we live in the Land of the Free, where every life costs a fortune.

Coronatine, Day Thirty-eight

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

these organized shelves

ready to be fully stocked

with his last paychecks:

they represent us,

our Coronatine journal,

worry turned to work

work we’re still doing

with tiny pics on small screens

working for our kids

our creative kids

with a cat-house-building night

paw prints, love, and all

“new normal” softens

as we make the best of fate

on day thirty-eight