I love this piece very much. It is full of excellent advice for everyone, whether or not you have a bed to call your own.
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The life of a gutter punk couch surfer is a bit more harrowing, but I ended up with a lot of stories. Couch surfing isn’t that difficult until you run out of couches.
My SO lives a transient lifestyle, as a combination of choice and circumstance and a lot of the stuff in the article has rung familiar in regards to things he has told me about transient (or hobo) lifestyle. Like pheeno, he’s also amassed a LOT of stories.
I think I may be married to some old drunk biker. He growled when he spoke, so no one ever had any clue WTF he was saying. Somehow during a party I got left alone with him and he was in a talkative mood (if you could call it talking) so I spent the better part of 2 hours simply smiling and nodding. Anytime I saw him after that he would growl with delight and bear hug me, then gesture at me to his buddies and growl more, which earned me approving biker nods. My popularity was cemented when someone handed me a plastic jug of whiskey and I took a shot, making the sides touch as I did. Came in handy one night at a dive bar when some cracked out weirdo leaped out from behind a pool table at me, grabbed me and screamed DO YOU LIKE THE MACARENA?? I CAN DO THE MACARENA!! They converged on him and tossed him out.
My advice wouldn’t be dating advice, but more along the lines of ” How To Use a Lit Cigarette To Move Through Unruly Spontaneous Mosh Pits”.
Riiiiiight. Because there’s nothing fucked up about using the word “hobo” AT ALL. Yes, even for oneself, yes, even if one has no home; it’s still widely used to romanticize, exoticize, and trivialize the plight of homeless people, specifically those living on the street. She’s not reclaiming a word with pride, she’s using it like a hipster asshole. It’s not a word that’s actually applied to her, so it’s not hers to reclaim anyway.
C’mon, Jill, admit it, you’ve gone full fucking Jezebel and are just going for the controversy now.
No. I actually do really like this piece. And yes I understand that terms like “hobo” are often problematic, but I take less offense at using it to describe oneself when oneself actually does not have a home. Is there a wink of irony in the usage, and a little bit of humor? Sure. But I’m not of the viewpoint that people must always be humorless about their situations just because their situations are kinda shitty.
And perhaps the issue is a hyper-sensitive commentariat who aren’t actually reading for discussion or engagement, but are reading to try to find something PROBLEMATIC!!!111!. See, e.g., the post very near this one where several commenters say that I am “shaming” people for saying that numerous studies point to the fact that a sitting-all-day lifestyle isn’t great for you, and therefore I am looking into getting a standing desk. SHAMING! PROBLEMATIC! Because some scientists looked at the evidence and were like, “Yep, sitting all day isn’t great.” Now PROBLEMATIC! because a young woman who is broke and can’t afford to have a home of her own calls herself a “hobo” in an offhand way. Come on.
It’s a common term among street kids, but how nice of you to dictate how they refer to themselves. That happens so rarely.
Not trying to snark.. but not understanding how it doesn’t apply to someone who is, from the sound of it, for all intents and purposes, homeless and transient?
Proper homeless people don’t try to lighten their situations at all ever. Their outlook must be BLEAK at all times. They are not allowed to simply walk down the street, they must trudge. Depressingly. Otherwise how will we know to pity them? People who are not homeless can’t use terms like hobo or gutter punk, so homeless people aren’t allowed to say it either. God knows they’re romanticizing and trivializing their own lives when they do and we can’t have that.
After all, we know better than they do.
Ahh okay. I get it now. Thanks ;-)
As someone who was *actually homeless* (and by “homeless” I mean “sleeping outside”) last year, I don’t have a problem with someone who’s “not a proper hobo” referring to herself as a hobo.
Just because other people have it worse, that doesn’t mean her situation doesn’t suck, too.
Also, I liked her piece. It was interesting.
@MadGastronomer
Why can people not resist the urge to be rude or mean on the internet? Does it give you joy just to make other people’s day worse?
A LOT of people experience homelessness to one degree or another. It can happen to someone who gets “ironic” essay writing gigs too, you know. And even if you can write about something “ironically,” that doesn’t mean that it’s an awesome experience you’re merely appropriating. If the global economic crisis deepens, we’ll be reading more and more of these stories.