Man, I’ve been so excited for today.

Yes, its my sisters birthday, but she keeps having those, so that sucks some of the fun out of it.  No, today’s going to be awesome for a whole nother reason, people.

Monday, November 7th, the US census bureau is going to unveil a whole new way of determing poverty, and lemme tell you, it’s gonna be off the chain.

The new process that will be used by the CB (which doesn’t have a name yet so I’m going to call “Operation Curtis Blow”) will update the old school LBJ method, which, I understand, is based on the cost of a loaf of bread divided by the number of children you have, and represented by this equation:

$latex m=\frac{B^3}{\sqrt{7-e}}(\phi\kappa\kappa-\frac{\pi}{-A})&s=3$*

*Where B is a loaf or bread, Phi Kappa Kappa is the sorority you should have gone to at the college you didn’t go to because it was like 1960something and, hell, you’re poor, A is the approval rating for Johnson at the time (Great Society, hell), and E is the number of children you have.  And all the numbers and lines indicate that AT doesn’t know shit about math.

So why the change? Well, apparently the numbers don’t factor in things like location (cost of rent in New York vs Oak Ridge); how much gubment assistance you might already be receiving, and giving the Census Bureau something to do.

The big question is, come Monday, will all these people raking in 70 grand a year but still struggling to pay bills be considered “in poverty”?

The Heritage foundation took a peek at the numbers in the 2010 Census Bureau and threw a big hissy fit over the fact that folks defined currently as ‘in poverty’ have things like air conditioning and microwaves, because evidently that doesn’t fit the image of poverty that they’re interested in promoting, which is a sad state of affairs.

I’m not sure what to expect out of this, and frankly, I’m not sure about a lot in 2011.  My political barometer is broken after the last few years.

This is a year when the 9 year old Pigpen tells me one the way home from school that he learned more one out of 10 people don’t have a job, but it’s also a year that Bell tells me frequently about the people going into her store to apply for a minimum wage job that they won’t take, because they just have to keep proving that they’re applying for jobs so that their unemployment benefits won’t go away.  Folks aren’t going for the minimum wage jobs, but they’re still griping about not having jobs.

People are camping out right now in a movement that 10 years ago, I would have been unabashedly joining, a movement intending (I think) to shout out about the screwed up situation where a standard 40 hour a week job won’t pay for groceries, rent, the car, and weekly trips to the dinner and movie you deserve to see for putting up with all of the BS that comes with a 40 hour workweek.  Today, I have a hard time not seeing the entire Occupy ____ thing as empty, hollow anger, like a child with a toy out of reach.  No solutions to the problems, no intentions of going through the motions of fixing them, just shouting at the moon.

There isn’t a political side that appeals to me, or my interests, anymore.  There isn’t even a valid ideology that turns my head, at this point.

I wonder if that’s not the point of the anger, if maybe everybody feels that way, and perhaps sitting in a park in a capitol is the only way left in 2011′s America to express this.  Maybe the point isn’t to change anything, the point’s just to try to get somebody to notice that you’ve caught on and you’re crying foul.

Whats the point, AT?

No clue.  Maybe I’ll feel differently if they label me as “in poverty”.

But I’m keeping the A/C…