Is Hungry a country or a state of mind?

To answer that question I would say that for me Hungry is a state of misery that I find my myself meandering through almost every day. I am now in my second year living below the poverty level and I think it is starting to mess with me. Or at least it is starting to mess with my stomach.

While in France I was forced to survive off of not much money at all. When you consider that Paris is one of the most expensive cities in the world, I was most certainly on the poverty line. I once saw one of those exclusive "le Dateline" shows in France that did an expose on people who were poor in Paris. I kept thinking, how do these people live like this? How can they survive? I then soon found out that most of the "victims" made almost twice as much money as I did. Now that seems odd.

There are many ways to dealing with one's poverty and almost all of them rely on you feeling bad in some way. You may feel unhealthy, you may feel guilty, or you may feel rotten for all sorts of reasons.

Food is something we all need. If you try to say otherwise you are a complete idiot because like water and air, it is just something you gotta get once and while. When you are trying to salvage your money it seems like anything but your food should be what you skip out on. Every day I find myself between the option of the shit behind an alley food or some legitimate good stuff. I always go with the first option because it always seems like a good idea at the time to save a little green. So I have found myself day after day eating this retched food that really does make me feel sick at times. I find that if I keep it cheap maybe I will be able to use that leftover money for something else that I need. I have really gone with this philosophy for around a year now.

The option that I don't recommend is simply to stop eating all together. The nice part about this is that if you just don't eat, you don't have to pay for food at all. At first I wanted to try my own version of "fasting" simply because I new that others had done it and survived and had actually felt changed in some way from it. I can honestly say that giving up food for so long a time did make me appreciate my meal once it was finally steaming in front of me. The smells were more potent and I could feel the tasty morsels filling the empty voids in my body. It was really rejuvenating.

But I mean that was a long time ago when I would waltz through the lively streets of Paris wondering how much longer I could go denying myself the carnal pleasures of food. (In the end I almost always chose doner kebab too, so it really wasn't that much of a step up.) Those days were good because as I stumbled from cafe to cafe I could imagine myself as one of the hunger crazed artists who's barren stomach released sparks into his brain which thus aided his creative genius. But that was how I felt. I acutally looked like some stinky bum wondering around aimlessly with nothing else to do. I guess I sort of was that description.

The difference is that now I am here in Taiwan and I am much much poorer. I had come to this wonderful island believing that I would make my big payday and I would be able to begin my ascent/descent into real life adulthood. What has actually happened is that my whiskers grow quicker, my clothing has become less diverse, and my hunger more profound. The other day I set a new record; a 30 hour hunger strike. It is miserable but I have begun to acquire quite the endurance for hunger because I hardly eat. I don't know why I choose to save money on something I love so much and need so badly but every time it happens the same way.

I said that when you give food a break it seems all the more delicious later, but here it isn't always true. You can either eat some really great food and some food that makes you want to throw up just writing about it. Of course I wouldn't be able to throw much up because I haven't eaten in about 18 hours.

I try to keep myself on a regular cycle of eating and I take advantage of free food whenever it comes by but that just simply doesn't do in this hunger lifestyle I have begun to acclimate to. I will often hope that I get to my school early enough to steal some of the cafeteria food and I almost always miss the deadline. This means that for the rest of school I have to maintain a positive and patient attitude while my stomach begins to absorb my muscles because the fat is already gone. That is the edible fat. My boss has on several occasions informed me that I need to do some work on my "tummy." The Asians here are such a kind and honest people.

There are two types of hungry people in the world. There are those types of people who do not have food and they do not know when their next meal may arrive. They go about their day to day activities just the same as anyone else but they do it without any food based energy inside them. The same people who would give a bit a food to someone else before consuming it themselves. These are the people that you and I should admire because while they have no choice in what they eat, they still survive.

There are also people like me. Now I will tell you, I really am poor and even when I do start to make any real money that money will have to go back to other people who have had to hear me say over and over "just help me a little bit and I will get it back to you." I have to borrow money in order to still look poor which gives no satisfaction to those who loan the money. People like me are hungry because they don't know what the hell they are doing and they make impulsive decisions that put them in the position of having to deny themselves sustenance in the first place. These are the people that you probably won't be sympathetic to but you can at least laugh at their slightly less miserable predicament.

So is Hungry a country or a state of mind? Well I travelled to hungry by myself and I was so poor then that I had to sleep in a bus station with a bunch of hobos who smelled like rotten pumpkins and I can tell you for sure that I had some hungry times then as well.