I’m Down (Memoir) Blog 5

Although the majority of the book is about Mishna and her unfortunate yet funny life, parts of it do deal with the fact that she’s poor. Mishna is given a scholarship to a “rich” school where all the students go away to London, Paris and Whistler during their vacations and complain how boring it is. They seem spoiled and complain about nothing (although we find out they do have problems later on) such as food. Being on a scholarship, Mishna gets a different coloured ticket at lunch which she feels badly about. She also feels pressured to conform to “rich people” ideas. These next two paragraphs are about her wanting to eat the food but also wanting to fit in.

“When it was my turn, she would file through the perfect aqua-coloured tickets until she got to my ghetto peach-coloured ticket, while I used my body to hide our transaction from the rest of the kids… My special different-coloured ticket served as a reminder that the city thought I needed some extra parenting… It was such a torn in my side that I would actually skip lunch on days I wasn’t feeling strong enough to answer the question… ‘What’s up with the pink ticket?’ Once, in frustration, I told Catrina Calder it was because I was alleric to raisins, to which she responded, ‘Bummer… raisins are good.”

“Lilth was pushing her spaghetti with meat sauce around her plate like maybe it was poison. She took a few bites of the salad, which she deemed ‘edible’ so that she wouldn’t catch too much flack from the lady that scraped the food off our trays while reminding us about the drought in Ethiopia. While Violet just looked at the spaghetti and meat sauce and let out a long low sigh, Lilith speculated, ‘It’s gotta be horse.’… My turn. ‘I think maybe it’s just really bad beef.’ ‘Beef?’ Lilith said amazed that I was defending the meat… The truth was, I love my lunch and would have eaten two lunches if I could have… Yet, sitting there with my friends, I was agonizing over the fact that I would have to throw away some food no matter how much it killed me.”