"I feel like I'm on welfare."

This is not the sort of thing you should say to your mother when she offers you $4,000. Especially when there's barely enough money in your checking account to buy a week's groceries and vodka.

But I said it anyway, not because I'm ungrateful for her handout, but because it brought to mind the sorts of complications that those less fortunate than I must deal with, paycheck after paltry paycheck. You know, complications like rent and credit card bills — neither of which I can feasibly pay until I start my new job at the end of June.

Now, I spend carefully, so I've managed to graduate from college without debt, be it credit cards, student loans or otherwise. What's less impressive, however, is the fact that moving into a new apartment has left me practically broke. How is it that I've worked my ass off all semester, interning at a public relations firm, and yet I've nothing to show for it? This is the constant plight of our nation's working poor, except replace "all semester" with "at Wal-Mart" and "interning at a public relations firm" with "folding acrylic blouses in ladies' apparel."

You see, I've just finished reading David K. Shipler's "The Working Poor: Invisible in America" and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America." Read these books. If you think you are not well off — even with your debt, your crappy apartment, your seventeen illegitimate children — then think again! Poor people are not the hilarious scapegoats that we (read: I) previously made them out to be. They are people, too, and chances are that they work as hard as — if not harder than — you.

Okay, time for bed. My parents definitely won't miss the rum I've pilfered from their liquor cabinet.