First off, a few quotes from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Regarding the “hotel” where he briefly had a room in the bowels of Paris:

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

He doesn’t shy away from a thorough discussion of the bugs, the boredom, the hunger, and the abject discomfort of poverty. Still:

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. . . . And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.

Have you ever noticed that when you were actually, as Trent Reznor would say, “down in it,” things weren’t as petrifying as they were when you were considering the worst from a relatively comfortable height? Have you ever experienced something you never thought you could cope with, and found that you managed to carry on in spite of it all? Maybe this is because, frankly, you were too busy getting by to worry about other people’s opinions, or certain conventions, or the kind of existential angst you’re normally prone to wallowing in. Choices are taken away from you in such instances, and the world suddenly zooms in on just a few small concerns, whether they are finding a place to stay, digging for change so you can buy some Ramen, or touching base with the friends who can keep you sane.

When I think of the incidents in my own life I’ve gotten through, I should draw from them as a well of deep, abiding strength instead of viewing them as failures or black spots on my life’s report card. Because you know what? I got through it all. And so have you. In a way I feel sorry for people who haven’t been down in it. I wonder if they’re more frightened than I am of the abyss, having never known it well.

All that cheerful nonsense being said, here’s a Pulp video. Because, let’s face it, in the end I’m pretty sure I have a lot more in common with the insufferable (and naive?) girl from Saint Martin’s College than I do with the narrator of “Common People,” so I should probably just shut my trap. It’s very important to be able to make fun of yourself, comrades!