Real Jobs

One of my current students found my myspace page last weekend, and friended me. Most of my students on myspace eventually do find me, so it wasn't unusual. However, after class today he asked, "so, your real job is as a writer?" I told him it was, and he didn't respond with the disbelief or obvious discomfort that other people sometimes have. This little exchange stands out because he concluded that my real job is as a writer, where as teaching is something I do "on the side." That isn't quite true, but it's the exact opposite of the conclusion that people usually come to, so I thought it was interesting.

List of my current jobs:

• Teaching English as a foreign language
• Teaching developmental English
• Tutoring people about writing
• Designing t-shirts
• Doing research for a marketing company
• Creating marketing materials & public relations materials for a local yoga studio
• Managing the web site of that same studio

List of my current writing, art, and editorial projects

• Diligently shopping my first book manuscript around to all the places people said I should, even though I'm pretty sure I already know how it will eventually be published.
• Editing my second manuscript. Getting ready to, yes, diligently send it around.
• Kind of putting together a third. I don't think the third is really a manuscript--the pieces are too disparate to make a coherent book.
• Writing my fourth manuscript.
• Still working on "Memory Lessons," a series of visual pieces.
• Thinking already about my contribution to the 2008 Dusie project, now that the 2007 one is complete and live.
• Little bits of an essay thinking about the concept of "The Gurlesque." I need to plan ahead so that I have something to say by the time the anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg comes out from Saturnalia in 2009. I've been a slllooowwww critical writer recently.
• Little bits of a review on Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, even though it's been reviewed. Maybe the review and the essay will be the same thing. Maybe I'll send them/it to Absent.
  

List of current yoga projects:

• Dropping back into urdhvadhanuasana from standing. Standing up from urdhvadhanuasana.
• Jumping up into handstand from two feet but with straight legs.
• More flexible hips, hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps. So, that means a lot of hanumanasana and krounchasana.
• Learning and memorizing all the asanas named after birds. Krounchasana is the "heron pose--a very appropriate homage and counter balance to my bike rides around the lagoons.
  
  

I want a writing MFA I don't want one

Having an MFA would do almost nothing for my publication possibilities, but it would help me get adjunct work. Wow, that's motivating!

I'm feeling arrogant and impatient: I'm a really good writer. I'm a really good teacher, I can help you learn grammar and writing and theory, I'm extremely intelligent and totally cute--and my social skills are top notch. Plus, I can do a really solid handstand. I am sure I will have a book out in the next year or so. Most writers I respect, even ones with MFAs, say MFAs aren't necessary (or they say that everyone needs a PhD now). Necessary for what? Apparently, an MFA is necessary for adjunct work. Blech.

I am considering, again, doing an MFA in art. Not writing. I don't want to be anyones academic superstar, I want to be able to make a living and not go crazy. I am feeling impatient about my writing and professional careers because, I suppose, they are actually going quite well. So I want them to be even better. Now.

The new year has begun for real! The holidays are over! All worries that I have not worried for weeks are beginning to return!

I'm making beef stew.

My students went to a country club in Temecula last night. Where? I said. Temecula, they said. Oh, I said. Tem-e-cu-la. I've driven through there. Then I laughed in a way that made them look at me strangely.

They wanted to know if I know how to "country dance." I kind of do. I can sort of square dance, but I'm better at contra-dancing, which I did in Maine fairly frequently in high school, while wearing 80s-style hippie floral dresses, even though it was the 90s. I will not go to bars and go surfing with them, and I will not teach them to square dance. I'm certainly not driving out to Temecula with them. But I want them to tell me their stories.

Today we researched film noir. My Vietnamese student gave a pretty awesome presentation on German Expressionist influences on film noir, and he hadn't even seen any film noirs. I miss my DC students, but my students here have their moments.

I sent a manuscript to Futurepoem today, but not Fence.

Bought tickets, courtesy of my father, to Dallas. I'll be there from Christmas Eve until January 3rd. Quite a while. But it's my last chance to see everyone before they head off to Adelaide. Of course I want Mark and I to visit them in Australia, but I can't count on it. I've been researching places to get fried chicken and BBQ and chili con carne. I'd like to make gingerbread houses with my sisters, but since I don't arrive until the afternoon on Christmas Eve, I'm not really sure that will work.

It rained today. A lot. It was a San Diego storm. It rained from 4 am until now, although it's only drizzling now. The roads here weren't built to drain. In the mountains I'm sure there will be floods and landslides, especially in the places that were burned.

I like some Stevie Nicks songs from the 80s, but I'm not into the 80s hippie look--hers or anyones--since I was a victim of it myself. Oh, those velvet bourrets!

Grading is my life, apparantly

And it hurts. It hurts.

Obsessive bureaucratic specificity

is not useful to students. I would rather give students feedback about two or three issues at most, and leave the rest for later. I hate rubrics--they make it seem like a writing can be measured like a math problem can be evaluated.

This is just not useful.

It is late August

Some of you are going back to your jobs after spending the summer working on your own work. And some of us are just experiencing the end of summer.

The water temperature here is 75. I am going to go to the beach well into September. Last year I didn't because I was too out of it and didn't understand the beach.

This is a good time of year to enjoy the beauty of the fleeting nature of existence. "Time passes, listen, time passes." Etc.

Had dinner at the Rothenberg's. Yum. Always fun.

Dear Future Non Employers

Asking for salary histories is a waste of time--my time and your time. You already have a budget for the advertised position. Why waste time not posting a salary range, receiving and going through resumes, then interviews, then asking for salary ranges which are usually way out of your budget? Why?

Answers:

1. Because you have a lot of money and don't care if you waste even your own time or if your business / magazine makes any money.
2. I know you don't care if you waste my time.
3. Because you want to pay someone 20k for a job that in DC would be at least 40k even though the cost of living here is actually the same.
4. Because you don't really think it's worth it to hire someone who might do a good job and stay longer than a year.
5. You don't want to pay for my health insurance. Frankly, you are disturbed that I'm not married. You were hoping that I was a marginal stay at home mom forced to work 20-30 hours a week to make ends meet.

I don't want another job, I just want more money.

The classifieds depress me (here & everywhere). Job-hunting is time-consuming and depressing, even when I'm successful. Who would be employed in the "having your services engaged for a job that pays wages or a salary" sense if there was an alternative. I'm all for work. Work is great. But most jobs just suck. I have many jobs, and my job situation is quite good (no office, I like teaching, etc etc), but I must constantly be applying for work to make sure that it stays that way. The vast number of crappy jobs amazes me.

It's slim slim pickings around here. The keywords "writer" and "editor" turn up, in a good week, about two jobs. One job will be part-time and pay $11/hour, and the other job will be full-time and very corporate and want someone with an MA, but pay $28,000 a year. Marketing/PR and design jobs are more of the same. Other than that, there are a lot of opportunities to be a "Temporary Accounting Clerk."

3 out of 4 organizations I've worked for in the past 12 months cannot manage to pay me on time,

or every pay period. There's always some "mistake."

OK, sometimes employment is useful

I like most of my students. Most of my students like me. Teaching is at least social, and I get to talk about grammar. I get to ride my bike everyday. I get more paychecks, and more sun. I teach about 10 minutes inland, which is just enough to make it sunnier there more often in June.

Thanks to a combination of gift certificates and birthday finds, I have binoculars and a binocular harness arriving in the mail, as well as Sibley's guide to birds of the western US.

They are killing me

The community college applications are overwhelming and exhausting. The forms are long, excessive, and repetitive. I used another set of similar but different forms that I filled out for another community college job to fill out the forms for this job. I noticed two typos and also that my jobs were not listed in exact chronological order.

Both sets of forms want me to list every single relevant job since college. In my case, this means 17 jobs, and that doesn't include the jobs that aren't relevant to the position or temporary work or the jobs I did in between the relevant jobs. So, I have had 17 jobs relevant to this position since I graduated from GW in May 2000. That is a lot of jobs. I am so employable! So versatile! So adaptable! And yet they only give me 4 spaces, so I had to recreate their forms to accommodate my job history. This leads me to worry that perhaps I am not the kind of person they want to hire, even though of course I am a fabulous teacher and like community college students because they are diverse and interesting and have had experience in the world. And I am also office worthy. I can file! I can write grant proposals. I can bear staff meetings (sort of).

I have had many jobs. Do I really want any job this much? Answer: no. However, I will fill out the forms anyway, because I must be employed. And even though I am already employed, the only reason I am employed is because I am constantly seeking employment and applying for jobs.

If there were some other better option I wished to entertain, I would be entertaining it. I like my job life now, but it is important to remember that most job life sucks, even when you like it. I don't believe in running away, and anyway, anyone who's ever run away knows that running away is impossible. Most problems resurface eventually, despite geography.

Systems bore me. I sometimes need them. Not everything I need bores me, fortunately.

Nearly done with my cover letter for the community college jobs. After I finish writing a cover letter, I feel disembodied. Cover letters are uncomfortable points of contact with discourses from which I feel various degrees of alienation. Of course, my alienation isn't limited to the professional world.

I am not alienated by Lester. We communicate exceptionally well with each other, and we're not even close to being the same species.

I feel this way (alienated--who wrote this?) even after this particular cover letter, where I get to talk about things I care about and even find interesting: teaching. how I do it. literacy. why working at a community college isn't at all a kind of second choice wish.