Sorry, lady. You’ve mistaken me as a responsible, upright citizen. Allow me to introduce myself: I am a former sofa-lounger, and now I qualify as something even lower than that.

My last full-time job ended in January 2009. Everyone at our small pharmaceutical marketing agency received an email invitation to a mandatory staff meeting. And, much like a bad reality show, it was only moments before the scheduled time that we began to realize we weren’t all invited to the same room.

Along with more than 30 colleagues, I got voted off the island.

Those lucky enough to receive invitations to the other room were told to take a long lunch while we poor saps cleared our desks.

I spent the first several weeks in a daze. There is not a lot of room for pride when you’re a single mom, so I filed for unemployment benefits. And in the height of irony, I was told I wasn’t eligible for food assistance because my income was too high.

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“You should try out for one of those singing shows,” I tell him, swaying to his melodic crooning.

Without looking up, Javier shakes his head, and snorts, “Who’d vote for an ol’ man, eh?” He yanks a hand-towel from his back pocket and coughs hard into it. His somber brown eyes meet mine for a moment.

“Fix your car, yet?” He asks brusquely, clearing his graveled throat.

“Nuh-uh,” I tell him, scraping the last shrivels of burrito cheese from the wrapper’s foil crevices. “It’s making a stinky smell, now.”

“Aye, chica, it's leaking coolant. You can’t keep driving on a blown head gasket.”

“Fix the car or pay rent,” I shrug. “I like my car, but I don’t wanna sleep in it.” I wad up the foil, and stand. “It’s almost 8. Catch ya later.”

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I walk through the pasty government-issue fluorescent light and bureaucratic cinderblock waiting room, ushered into the inner sanctum of welfare benefits review. I feel oddly privileged, striding past rows of glum, tired, bored and frustrated faces; how have I been picked out so quickly, after just 15 minutes of sitting?

Getting inside doesn't mean you'll get approved, but, like waiting in a doctor's lobby, sheer movement into a different room gives one hope.  Progress.

My benefits counselor, a tall, stocky, healthfully heavyset Indian man, speaks like a machine gun.  "Fifty-five," he says brusquely as he waves his arm at a numbered booth in a long row of numbered booths.  I'm still non-caffeinated so it takes me a moment to realize what "55" means, then I take my seat across from him.  It looks (and feels) like I'm in prison.

The caseworker, whom I'll call Chakim, is vigorous and businesslike.  "ID?  Social Security card?"

I quickly hand him everything: my driver’s license, threadbare Social Security card with my awkward childhood signature, and my passport complete with its January 2011 stamp from India (I hope he notices).

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I closed the message without replying.

"Here" was the town where I grew up. Population 9,800. The message was from a high school friend, and while I felt guilty for the radio silence, I wasn't ready to acknowledge that, yes, I was back around here.

The road back was a familiar, albeit rocky one. The nonprofit where I worked fell on hard recessionary times; those of us who had been employed as contract workers didn't have our deals renewed after our projects ended -- in my case, one that had taken me to far-flung corners of the globe. Undaunted by this, I took it as a sign that I should move to an even bigger city and try my luck there. Months passed; the dream job (or any full-time job at all) didn't materialize, and the freelance lifestyle began to feel less like an experiment in entrepreneurialism and more of an exercise in underpaid exhaustion. The final straw came when my apartment building was felled by the continent-wide bedbug epidemic. It was only after I divested myself of most of my worldly possessions and traded my mattress for the bathtub -- the tap dripped all night and my hips killed me each morning -- that I knew something had to give. When my parents suggested for the 62nd time that I consider staying with them for a while, I bought a one-way ticket and showed up on their doorstep with two suitcases to my name.

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Unfortunately, her answer changed my life.

Facing a projected $90 million shortfall, the board had chosen to eliminate hundreds of teacher positions. Not only was my Austin, Texas, magnet school among those listing teacher cuts, but also, my Latin program was one of the courses slated for elimination. There it was, buried in the spreadsheet online, like a knife in Caesar's back.

There could have been no mistake whose Latin program the school planned to slash. For 15 years I have been the sole Latin instructor. Now someone had decided that my program was not worth sustaining. Wounded and slightly panicked, I called my wife, "Have you seen this? What does this mean?"

Rhetorical questions. I knew she had no idea about this. Still, at that moment, awash in uncertainty and confusion, I needed a confederate. I needed that tacit assurance my wife has so easily offered over the years. But as we scanned the spreadsheet together, we instead found new reason for concern: Also slated for elimination was one of the three Spanish teachers at our school -- my wife's job.

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I'm visiting my former urban home (Seattle) for a brief vacation from the wilds of rural Oregon, so it seems appropriate to celebrate my wayward past and my hillbilly future with a drink that incorporates elements of both -- fine gin with a foraged garnish.

The liquor cabinet I'll be scavenging belongs to Chef Robin Leventhal, best known from her appearance on season six of "Top Chef." I know from past experience that, like the rest of her artistically cluttered house, it brims with interesting items. Today is no exception.

"Smell this," Robin commands, handing me an attractive bottle of Ebb and Flow gin. Ebb and Flow is from a new Ballard distillery, Sound Spirits. Thanks to a recent change in Washington's liquor laws, Sound Spirits is the first distillery to open in Seattle since prohibition, and it smells like they might be on to something. The gin's aroma has a tinge of coriander and an echo of absinthe. Robin thinks it'll be the perfect complement to her latest prize -- pickled ramps and wild fiddleheads from nearby Enumclaw.

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"Uh, huh," I said, distracted. I'd been crouching in front of our woodstove for 45 minutes trying to coax the smoldering pile of kindling to flames. The wood was wet and unseasoned, and the mausoleum damp of our house wasn't helping. I could hear water plinking through the tin roof into the bucket behind the stove, where the worst of the leaks fall. When Rich's statement sank in, I was amused at the perfect anachronism: my mustachioed husband in a flannel shirt complaining about sourdough starter. But then I realized I fit the picture, too. I wore rubber ankle boots, a skirt, a long canvas jacket smeared with mud, a wool hat and an apron. My plans for later that day: gather dandelion greens for dinner, heat water for my bath, scrub the wooden floor with a vinegar solution, and sweep out the outhouse. Yes, outhouse.

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My grandmother lived in a trailer, which she never properly cleaned. It smelled horribly of cat pee and moldering potatoes and Comet-choked drains. My dad would wait until Maki was distracted and he'd sneak in and attempt to clear out the clutter -- removing garbage bags full of water-stained biographies and mouse-chewed finery. Maki behaved as though every book, item of clothing, or bit of trash had a personality, but her deepest allegiance was to plants -- from the ratty African violet that lived on her windowsill to the majestic Douglas fir in the yard. She read a little bit of "Walden" every day for the same reasons that the truly devout read the Bible.

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Nettles lose their sting when exposed to concentrated heat, and they are edible and extremely nutritious, being rich in vitamins A and C, as well as potassium, iron, magnesium and calcium. Supposedly you can use the plants to treat a huge variety of ailments including hay fever and arthritis. My friend Kamari tries to convince me that nettles are God's gift to hippies, but I've always been dubious about cooking them, for obvious reasons. However, our return to Deadwood has been marked by hard times, and scrounging is the name of the game. I started foraging for wild mushrooms, but as our resources dwindle, I'm getting more creative. Stinging nettles it is.

My plan for dinner tonight is spaghetti with beef meatballs. Our neighbors very kindly gave us six or seven packages of ground beef when they slaughtered their bull, and the meat is delicious -- flavorful and tender. For our vegetable course we will have the dubious stinging nettles, sautéed in white wine. In the interest of making this sound less obnoxiously twee, I should mention that I found the meatball recipe in "Playboy." Go figure.

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"What?" I holler.

The bellow again. I detect words, but distance and thick underbrush are the enemies of meaning.

"He must have found some more up there," I say to Kamari, who is crawling on the ground 10 feet away, happily plucking hedgehog mushrooms from the blanket of dead leaves.

Although we've seen some variety of colors and sizes, most of the mushrooms we've picked are tiny, waxy white and easily identified by the undersides of their caps, which are furry with bristles.

Last time we went mushroom hunting, we looked for chanterelles up among the big trees, but this time we're in a much scrubbier forest: the leafless alders allow for patches of bright sunlight. Eventually we deplete our area and bushwhack back up to the gravel road. Kamari cocks her head, listening. A bearlike rustling and grunting indicates the presence of her boyfriend, GH.

"You finding anything up there?" she calls.

"Yup."

We scramble up the dirt cliff and I plunge into a thicket of huckleberry. GH is lying on his stomach. The intensity of his foraging, combined with his dark curly hair, makes me think of some skinny sub-species of bear.

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At the time, I was visiting Las Vegas with my brother, and had looked up an old friend I knew who lived in town. I met him that night at a bar near his office, and he was joined by some of his staff and fellow loan officers. They were driving nice cars, Hummers, Mercedes. I quizzed my friend on his success, and he told me all I needed to do was be willing to learn, work hard, and develop relationships. He explained that commission sales gives people without a college degree an opportunity to make much more money, through plain hard work, than a regular hourly wage would. Intrigued and in a dead end job back home, I took my friend's offer, and arrived in Las Vegas to start my career as a loan officer.

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At the time, my girlfriend's best friend was dating a guy who worked in mortgages. He drove a BMW, had nice clothes and carried himself well. Over drinks one night, I kept quizzing him on his success, and he told me all I needed to do was read a book or two and have some sort of people skills and I could be making six figures. Hearing those words was like a dog whistle to a middle-class immigrant who had only worked restaurant and construction jobs until that point. As it turned out, the bar for entry into the mortgage world was even lower than reading a book or two.

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Conventional wisdom has held for decades that veterinary medicine is a "recession-proof career." I think, on a profession-wide scale, this may be true, but not with large animal vets. In hard times, people may continue to seek the same level of care they always have for a dog or cat whose upkeep may total $40/month. But when the animal in question is a horse, boarded for hundreds of dollars a month and whose value has plummeted, or a cow, when feed costs are sky-high, reality dictates cutbacks -- yes, even to veterinary care.

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Now I lie awake at 3 a.m., terrified that as a result I am permanently financially screwed.

As of my divorce last year, I'm the single mother of two almost-men whose taste for playgrounds has been replaced by one for high-end consumer products and who will be, in a few more nanoseconds, ready for college. My income -- freelance writing, child support, a couple of menial part-time jobs -- doesn't cover my current expenses, let alone my retirement or the kids' tuition. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of two teenagers must be in want of a steady paycheck and employer-sponsored health insurance.

My attempt to find work could hardly be more ill-timed, with unemployment near 10 percent, with the newspaper industry that once employed me seemingly going the way of blacksmithing. And though I have tried to scrub age-revealing details from my résumé, let's just say my work history is long enough to be a liability, making me simultaneously overqualified and underqualified.

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It's gone now, all of it. Two years of food, rent, lights, phone, food, rent, lights phone -- and before you know it, you're taking a can of coins to the supermarket and dumping them into Coinstar, that green, sticky refrigerator-sized machine that spits out a receipt you take to the checkout counter and pay for groceries with. You can get cash, too.

I had, naturally, cut back on all nonessential spending since the layoff. Like a lot of people in the country, I watched in disbelief as the economy fell off a cliff, banged into the side of the mountain, rolled a few times, then burst into flames at the bottom. The earth split open and what was left continued falling to hell, where, as far as I know, it's still smoldering. When I was laid off, Bernie Madoff was a respected investor living on the Upper East Side. That's how long ago it was. Nobody knew the storm that was coming.

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Ok, here's a smile: update on our doc on recession/poverty. I love America

http://bit.ly/btt50h

Here's the text you get when you "share" the video report Curry's tweeting about:

Overwhelming response to Dateline's poverty report

A development to the story we brought you about struggling families in Ohio who have been pushed over the edge by this recession. ††There's been a response from people wanting to help.

http://bit.ly/btt50h

So it's that old TV thing. NBC does a story on "Dateline" about families struggling through the recession in rural Ohio, and letters and donations and job offers come pouring in from all over the country.

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"Paul" leads his roommate "David" (not their real names) into their apartment's spare third bedroom. They are soon joined by their friend "Adam," who has come to help with the evening's task. A floor-to-ceiling curtain of thick white plastic partitions off a corner of the room. Paul pulls back a part in the drape. Bright light and warm, herb-smelling air pour through the opening. Inside the enclosure, 18 mature members of California's largest cash crop crowd each other. The plants, hybrids of the so-called Casey Jones and Hindu Skunk strains, started off weeks earlier as tiny potted cuttings. Now they are as tall as their growers and bristling with dozens of sticky, hairy, cone-shaped buds.

The guys chat and sip beers as they snip branches from the plants and carefully trim away excess leaves and stems. Later, Paul will hang the pruned buds up to dry in a nearby closet. The work is slow and tedious. Pretty soon, the small talk subsides. It's going to be a long night. It's barely nine o'clock in the evening, and no one expects to finish until well into the wee morning hours. Then comes the hard part. They have to figure out how to sell the stuff.

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"Can I have a military discount?" one asked.

"Do you give student discounts?" asked another.

No and no, I thought, hitting Delete on those e-mails. In the business of doing other people's homework, there are no discounts of any kind. (Who needs my services besides students, anyway?) All sales are final, and all payment is upfront. No one gets free credit — well, they get credit from their instructors, plus high grades and lots of compliments.

I entered this business purely by accident. A victim of the craptastic economy, I've done all sorts of things for money. I've cleaned maggots out of other people's kitchens. I've scraped cat poop off carpets. I've watched small screaming children for hours at a time. But doing college homework for cash? That one took me by surprise. It began innocently. Having tutored writing at a small private school, I decided to offer my services to the larger market via Craigslist. Soon, a prospect contacted me.

"Can you just write the paper for me? I'd pay $100," my new client wrote. She wanted a compare/contrast essay about Charles Dickens and had little interest in reading "Oliver Twist" or "Great Expectations." She moaned about her great-grandma's hunting accident/funeral and her busy weekend party schedule. I couldn't have cared less about her motivations. She had me at $100.

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The doors weren't red when the crystal was freed from its bubble wrap and set, with all its symbolic promise, on the Mission-style cabinet with the fingerprint-free glass doors more than a decade ago. Back then, the house's vibrant Craftsman beauty was still shrouded in dowdy cracked beige. My husband, Mike, and I spent the first year with hammer and sander carving out our home from this blank and bland canvas. We liberated hardwood floors with inlaid borders from the bondage of dusty brown wall-to-wall carpet. In retrospect, we should have left the hallway carpet alone, but who knew that there would be only subfloor beneath? Who takes the flooring out of a hallway?

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Then, in the drop of a Dow Jones average, frugality suddenly became fashionable, and all those still-unpaid-for off-road vehicles and granite countertops became symbols of foolishness and excess, rather than success. Lifestyle sections brimmed with redemptive stories of former mortgage brokers/derivatives traders/entertainment publicists who had suddenly discovered the humble joys of family game night and three-bean soup. The general conclusion: We had all overextended ourselves, and now we all must learn a new way.

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