T1B58 and T1B59

Either my computer needs a good bash on the side of the head or I do.

I forgot to publish this yesterday, so here it is:

I forgot to post yesterday, even though I had the whole post written out in my head.

Well anyway, yesterday I was thinking about how I'm always posting about the previous day's experience, so I realized I needed to catch up one day.

The day before yesterday, I slept on the carpet in my room, but my mother told me I would freeze if I slept in clothes that I wore, so I basically lay down on the carpet and she piled mounds and mounds of clothing on me.

It worked better than tying up the sleeves of my parka.

Then, yesterday, I didn't move to a different place because I was thinking about the Weeping Angels Doctor Who episode Mr. Sale showed us on Wednesday, and after a while I just got scared and went upstairs to sleep. Today I have not slept yet, but I can PLAN how I will sleep (Ha! so I can catch up!) I will TRY to sleep in the garage, but I need to air it out today because there are exhaust fumes in it and that will clog up my throat, but undoubtedly I will get scared again or cold or something and go upstairs again.

I've actually been taking it better than usual this time, normally I would end up pulling at least a week of all-nighters because I was scared to go to sleep. Heh. Heh. I was tired these few days so it didn't work. A few of my FRIENDS, however, were tired and sore because they were scared to go to sleep and the ground was hard. Obviously, that meant I got to gloat that for once I wasn't the most scared one. I get to say, HA, IN YOUR FACE, but obviously in a nice way, although I do have enough EBA deposits (I hope) that I get to tease my friends. :)

For food, my mother didn't want to cook, and I would have cooked except my mother was scared of my food not being edible, so we ate out. But I begged my aunt for money so she paid. (last night)

Two nights ago, I still ate canned soup because I was thinking (and so were some of my friends who were spectators to the homelessness project) that a. I would not know where food banks were and b. it would not be really right to take food from people who did need them, as Mr. Olson said. I think it would take a reasonably long time for donated food to actually reach homeless people, so I once again ate canned food (cold, because homeless people generally don't have the means to cook food... I think...)

My mom won't let me sleep with the windows open, not because I'll catch a cold, but because in my room, the window is right above my head, and if its open, it means I'll have cold air blasting my head all the time, which means in the morning I'll wake up with a headache.

Which obviously is bad for academic reasons, so my mom won't let me sleep with the window open.

This is a really long blog post but I have something else to say...

I really feel sorry for the homeless people in winter. Because they have to carry all their clothes around, and wear all they have when it gets cold during winter nights, and also they don't have hot food either, unless they go to a church or a homeless shelter. Even if they get food from the food bank, they have no way of cooking it, which means they must eat it cold. Often in the winter, I find that if you are really cold, entering into a hot building, putting on an extra layer of clothes, even drinking hot water from a thermos right after coming back from the snowy outside, really warms you up. However, homeless people don't have any of that, which means it's really hard for them to warm up. Often in the winter, I used to hate sleeping, because I wanted to read, but now, as I'm getting older, sometimes I am just so exhausted the only thing I want to do is flop on to my warm cushy bed and sleep it all away. Homeless people must feel like that every day, pulled out, tired, yet they don't have a warm cushy bed to collapse into. It must feel like one long grind of sticking it out, trying to beat the cold, waiting for something better to happen and constantly telling themselves, "It'll be over soon. Just stick out this one last day. Survive through the night, the day, the night, the day, waiting for..." What? What are they waiting for? For someone to help them? For a day when they will have a warm cushy bed again? This is why we must help homeless people. For them, their home is the streets. For them, the cold is warm. For them, we must create better situations, because no one deserves to be pushed all the time, pressured all the time. Everyone deserves a break in life. It's up to us to give that to homeless people.

At the beginning of the project, I felt like, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this week? It was to tell myself that there was a reward at the end. All I had to do was stick it out until Sunday, and everything would go back to normal. But homeless people don't have that. They don't have the Sunday in their lives, the day where everything would go back to normal and they wouldn't have to be strung so tight. It's like the weekdays--when I feel overwhelmed with homework, I say, only x more days until the weekend. Keep going. But for homeless people, THERE IS NO WEEKEND. They have to keep going, day after day, suffering hardships just to STAY ALIVE. Do we want that life? What will happen if the day comes where we lose everything we have and we have to become homeless? Will we feel resentment toward those that walk by, day after day, and yet do nothing to help? Those who have thousands of dollars in income every year, and yet cringe to spare a penny on those who truly need it? Will it take that for us to realize what homeless people feel, how selfish we were when we had what the homeless need? Or can we take action now, to create a better society?