Further Responsibilities

As most of you folks probably already know, I've never been one to shirk responsibilities in any form -- no, when something comes along that needs to be dealt with and/or taken care of, I do that before I do anything else, sometimes to great detriment to my sleep schedule or ability to be social. This is why, for a long time as a graduate student, I was sort of a homebody and/or hermit -- aside from the fact that I don't live in Wichita, I had many more important things to take care of that came first before socialization. I always had student work to grade or plan for, and if it wasn't work for my students, it was work of my own or studying for comps or what-have-you. There was always something else to be done.

Now that I have left that environment and routine (well, at least for the time being), my responsibilities have become much more basic in nature -- take care of the cats, clean the house, make sure the bills are paid, go grocery shopping, etc. But, obviously, the biggest responsibility I've had over the course of the past two months is to find work somewhere, and it is, of course, the responsibility that is the most difficult to take care of.

Over the course of this past week, I haven't been sleeping well. There are myriad reasons for this, some of which I'll get to in subsequent posts, but a big one is the fact that I have a looming sense of dread. I just have this overwhelming feeling that, while things may be okay right now, they're not going to be okay forever -- specifically when it comes to finances and finding work that won't make me want to kill myself every night upon returning home from said work.

I'm going to be blunt when I say that I have never felt, and probably will never feel, like I've been cut out for conventional employment. It doesn't suit me; it never has. When I say "conventional employment" I mean five days a week, 9-5, shirt-and-tie office desk job. I'm not that type of person and I never have been. I relate well to the movie Office Space because it mirrors a lot of what I feel about office environments -- boring, soul-killing, creativity-stifled work. It sounds, to me, like an incredible waste of time and human resources for the benefit of someone else, not towards the personal and intellectual growth of the individual. Even when I've worked in jobs that have involved an office of some sort, they've been unconventional jobs, positions in which the majority of my time was spent outside that setting.

As a college instructor, I taught classes and had office hours. As a newspaper reporter, I did some work on the computer every morning, but the majority of my day was spent writing stories and/or interviewing people for stories, with the occasional layout or field reporting/photography thrown in there as well. As a grocery store worker on night shifts, I generally ran the place (most nights, I was left in charge) and did everything including running register, stocking shelves, taking inventory, and sweeping/scrubbing the floors. As a laboratory technician, I did a lot of hands-on research work in addition to anything and everything else the lab required I do.

I have never worked a conventional job and, am, frankly, disheartened and saddened by the possibility that eventually, in able for me to be able to eat, I might be forced to take one. And believe me, that is the sort of job that will make me want to come home every night and put a shotgun in my mouth. No creativity. No flexibility. Dress codes, codes of conduct, and edicts on how long your hair can be or if you're allowed to have facial hair.

I don't have dress clothing. I maybe have four dress shirts, and I couldn't tell you where three of them are. If I even still own them, that is. I only own one pair of jeans, but the rest of the pants in my wardrobe are either corduroy or cargo pants. I own one pair of black, high-shine dress shoes, and I haven't worn them in five years (they're in the top of my closet, still in their box after only having worn them twice). I don't own a dress jacket or sport coat, because I can't find one that will fit me and don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on one. I own but four ties, despite the fact that no matter how I try and no matter how many times I've read and watched tutorials on how to learn, I do not know how to tie a necktie. I can never get it right. I am not kidding about this. I am thirty years old, and I am not cut out for the corporate world or private sector. I never have been, and I don't think I ever will be -- nor do I want to be, or want that kind of life. Ever.

Daisy works in an office setting, a setting in which she has a cubicle, desk, and computer in front of her, and she has to deal with all the office drama in addition to the customer support and management issues that is her job. And she hates it. She gets paid well (or, really, well enough, anyhow) but she hates it. Half of our conversations about work involve, on some level, how much she hates her job. Daisy has also encouraged me to apply there myself, in a position different than the one she works -- because it is decent money, after all -- and I told her that quite frankly I would rather shoot myself than work in an environment like that. It's really not for me, and I don't know any way to put it better than that.

I had once lost all hope that I would ever make something of myself; when I originally started this blog six years ago, I had resigned myself to a fate of being a grocery store worker forever, that no matter how I tried, I would never get out of that soul-sucking, morale-crushing job. And, believe me, I tried. I tried for well over a year to find a job someplace else. I interviewed at other retail establishments -- Kmart, JCPenney, Target -- and none of them wanted me. I interviewed at banks and insurance companies, called and sent emails to the local newspapers trying to get reporter work, etc. I couldn't get anything. Nobody wanted me.

One of the insurance companies I interviewed at wanted to pay me $10k a year driving 500 miles a week in my own car (when I didn't own a car) back and forth, to and from Kansas City and several other large cities around the area -- with no benefits and no mileage reimbursement, frequently spending weekends in hotels and on the road selling insurance. For only ten thousand dollars a year.

I made $17k a year at the grocery store. And I'd applied for a secretary position at that particular insurance agency, not a traveling salesman position -- because even a secretarial position would make close to or more than $17k a year, and I wouldn't have to be doing manual labor work on nights and weekends. When I told the interviewer this on the phone, he promptly hung up on me.

This is similar to earlier this month, when my teaching credentials fit the bill and experience for a teaching position in Lincoln, and the lady called to offer me four hours a day at $8 per hour. It's insulting. There's a Writing Center position open in Omaha at the university there that pays $20 per hour, but it's also listed as "temporary" and "part time" with no benefits and no other details. I told Daisy that it was probably a waste of time to even apply for it, as "temporary" and "part time" more than likely translated to less than ten hours a week -- with the former meaning they could basically tell you to go kick rocks at any time they wanted to.

I keep telling Daisy, mostly because it's true, that I desperately want a teaching or writing position someplace, not some sort of office job like she has. This is because doing a job like she has would more than likely put me back into the rut of life, which is my greatest fear -- if I settle for something that is below me, something simply done for the sake of necessity, something that I did not go to school for and could have done without an advanced degree...I will once more give up on my life's dreams. I'll realize that I'm trapped in whatever position I have for the foreseeable future, and I will slowly resign myself to my fate as a low-wage slave more and more as what little self-esteem I have evaporates. After a while I will no longer have the drive and motivation to succeed or make anything of myself anymore -- my work will boil down to something I have to do for simple survival, and something I cannot escape because, when I try to, I am constantly smacked down and reminded that being a wage slave is all I'm good for. I know me. I know how I am. I know how my mental state operates.

The only thing that got me out of that mindset four years ago was leaving the grocery store job, uprooting myself, and moving to Kansas with my longtime ex when she got accepted into graduate school. It was the one and only good thing that came out of my move here to this hot, flat, dismal red state. It is a mental state that I refuse to fall into again. Ever. And nobody seems to "get it" when I say I don't want to be trapped in doing one thing and only one thing for the rest of my life. All of them look at me with sad eyes and say things like "do you think I wanted to work where I work for as long as I've been working there?" They say things like this because they've already resigned themselves to defeat, and did so many years ago -- now all they can look forward to is retirement or death, or both.

Careers in teaching, writing, or (really) teaching writing give me options. Options are important. This is why I've felt so fucking defeated over the past two months in being able to find nothing. Teaching, at least at the college level, is one of those few careers left in which you can work your way up through the system and actually enjoy what you do while you do so.

"I know you want a tenure-track job..." Daisy began the other night before I stopped her.

"I'm not going to find a tenure-track job," I told her point-blank. "There are way too few of them and way too many of us. Hoping for something tenure-track is basically pointless."

In teaching at the college level, if you do well enough for a long enough period of time, people tend to notice that. They tend to promote you, give you more leeway in what you do, let you fully design and mandate your own courses and their execution, and generally (over some time) tend to pay you more. You don't have to be tenure-track to get these things. Tenure basically boils down to a permanent position that is nigh-impossible to be fired from -- and only sometimes does it mean you'll get paid more than anyone else. I don't necessarily want tenure track anyway -- it means more responsibilities, and with more responsibilities comes higher, frequently difficult-to-achieve expectations. If I've learned anything in my several years of teaching, it's that you don't want more responsibilities or higher expectations -- really, you just want to be trusted enough by the administration to be left alone. As a GTA, I had that -- I helmed the Engineering English 102 sections all by my lonesome, as my own boss, for a year. I only answered to the department chair, a close friend and ally who trusted me, knew the course was "my baby" and that I'd made it my own after his wife designed the original blueprint for it, and let me go my own way. This is because I knew what I was doing, I didn't start any shit, and I truly enjoyed what I did. If anyone were to posit a complaint about me, all he would have to do would be to pull my course evaluations and look at the high-percentile marks across the board. I wore Iron Maiden, Firefly, and comic book t-shirts to class to teach in because I had that unspoken pass from the department (a department without a dress code, really) once I explained, briefly, that Engineers were classes full of nerds who could relate to someone like me better than someone who would wear a suit and tie every day.

And, of course, I was right. I was trusted. Nobody was going to give me any shit about anything when they saw the results of my teaching abilities, and nobody did. Ever. I got along with the program directors who nobody else liked and who nobody else got along with. I had hour-long conversations with them on a semi-frequent basis, because I was trusted and respected. Again, as you know, I took my job seriously. It was the highest of responsibilities for me, and that served me well.

So teaching, you see, is an animal all its own. It's sort of like being in the mafia. You gain trust, you gain respect, and you work your way up the ladder. It's also a position which has just the right amount of job security, and with every class you teach you add more experience and another notch to your proverbial belt on your CV. It's not a conventional, sit-in-an-office-and-work-9-to-5 job. It's a 24/7 job. But it's a job that also gives you a lot more flexibility and leeway than many other jobs do, and when you have downtime you actually get to savor and enjoy it, instead of getting off work and wanting to drink a fifth of gin to make the pain go away.

Teaching is also flexible in the sense that if you don't like what you're teaching, where you're teaching or when you're doing it, you generally only have to deal with that for a semester at a time, and the more respected and trusted you are amongst the administration and your peers, the more you get to have a say in what you do and when/where/how you're doing it. Again, look at my example above -- even as a GTA, I was trusted enough to basically run an entire program by myself. I could've done anything I wanted in that class -- I could've gone in there every day wearing my leather jacket and a speedo, bullshitted with my students about the science of Star Trek, and as long as I performed admirably and still fulfilled the requirements of the department, it didn't matter. Having autonomy, having interaction with one's students, having a classroom full of subjects under your orders and command -- so many of these things are taken for granted. And none of these things are present in most other fields I could be working in. It's a totally unique experience.

The other plus about teaching is that I have never, not once felt hopeless, trapped, or resigned to my fate. My fate was education. My fate was bettering the world as I bettered myself as well. I was never smacked down or chastised for wanting to be the best person I could be -- teaching encouraged and bolstered that in me. I made a difference. I was doing work that meant something to not only me, but everyone I worked with.

The thought that I may have to eventually take an office job that will make me feel the exact opposite of that feeling not only terrifies me, but very deeply depresses me.

Writing, on the other hand, offers supreme flexibility at the expense of any and all job security. I've written before about how I've basically lost faith in the publishing industry; very little of what I see published these days is at all good or interesting, and most of it is just flat-out boring or bad. I became bitter and jaded about literary journals long ago, especially when my own submissions (or the brilliant submissions of my friends and colleagues) were rejected in favor of some of the worst, most trite poetry or short fiction I've ever read. It's almost impossible to get published anymore or to find a literary agent who will actually do anything for you -- it's very similar to the music industry. If you have something good, you might as well put the work into it and release it yourself independently, because then at least you'll be likely to get something out of it. The only way one can make any money writing these days is, sadly, through journalism -- and that's tenuous money at best. I write for the newspaper because I can do it, it's relatively fun and easy, and it's something I enjoy that gets my work read by the public while I actually get a paycheck for it. I took on two stories for the paper yesterday morning, and my deadline for at least one, if not both of them, is Tuesday morning. It won't pay the bills, but it's something.

Still I am filled with dread and uncertainty about my future, and it's a feeling I can't shake. In less than two weeks, I will find out whether I will be adjuncting this fall or will have any sort of employment with the university at all. If I'm not, I have to either dive into as many stories as I can get the newspaper to give me at once, essentially making my freelancing a full-time job, or I have to dive into the soul-sucking, life-draining job market everywhere I can in order to be able to find something that will allow me to pay my bills. Or both. None of it's going to be pleasant.

I don't really tell Daisy about a lot of the thoughts going through my head or the stress I'm under right now, because I am mentally able to keep it pretty balanced and I don't want her to worry about me. My financial situation right now is just fine, but it's not exactly sustainable for more than a few more months, despite my few monetary needs. Internally, I am always in a low-level panic, always feeling that there's something more I should be doing, but I don't know what else could be done. I know if I were to apply for, and get hired into some low-level sales job somewhere, while it would bring in some money, it more than likely wouldn't be enough for me to live on, and I know I would fall back into that pit of despair, that pit of "I'll never succeed doing what I was meant to do with my life, or anything I went to school for" and I will lose all motivation to even try anymore because it will be too goddamned depressing. You may think that knowledge of this situation alone would prevent it from happening, but it doesn't. I know how I am, I know how I think. I can't change who I am at my core, not even the traits and pitfalls that I do not like about myself. It is so easy, whether you think it would be or not, to fall back into that pit of despair and self-loathing. So, so easy. And I don't want to end up looking back on my life in a year or two and hating everything it's become, especially not when I'll just be starting a life as a husband (and probably a father) as well.

In the meantime, there are few opportunities that will offer me any sort of stability at all beyond, say, a semester or so's worth of work. Daisy has applied for academic advisor positions at a community college, and has encouraged me to do the same (as the starting pay is $38k a year or so), and I will do so, but even that feels basically fruitless. While it is still in the education field, yes, I can also see that playing out as one of those positions I'd apply for and would then never, ever hear back from because it is posted as a formality -- something else Daisy's father reminded me of when I was visiting last week.

"So many of these job postings aren't really job postings," he told me. "They're put up because they have to put them up as placeholders when, in reality, they already have someone lined up for the position from within their ranks, and have no intention of hiring any outside applicants."

This is something I knew before of course, and something I've known for years, but had conveniently forgotten in favor of actually being able to hold out some sort of hope that maybe, eventually, someone might actually want to hire someone with my skills, experience, and qualifications.

I put up a treatise this morning on Facebook about why I believe the national minimum wage should be federally mandated to be $20 per hour, for everyone (including servers/waiters/etc) and how employers should basically not be allowed to have "part-time only" jobs anymore. I come from a state where Walmart is the largest private employer because nobody can get any work anywhere else, and Walmart is legendarily known to pay their employees as little as possible and to work them like dogs -- it's the American version of sweatshop slave labor. Yet, companies like Walmart rake in millions, if not billions, in pure profits every year. Companies like McDonald's, who do the same thing and expect their employees to be able to live on their poor salaries, have basically admitted that to break even, an average employee's wage should be at least $15 per hour.

I got a lot of shit over this, by friends of mine saying things like "$20 per hour is $40k a year!" Yes, yes it is. I don't see the problem here. Especially not when many companies like Walmart and McDonald's are making such massive profits on the backs of their employees who essentially run the company for them, employees who are worked to the bone at the lowest possible wage they are federally allowed to pay them.

"Okay," I said, "So don't make it all companies and businesses then, only the ones who make a pure profit of $5M, $10M, $20M a year or more."

Putting in a stipulation like that would allow small businesses to survive, and would force the megacorporations raping the workforce to actually better our economy by, y'know, allowing their workers to be actually able to afford life.

One of my friends replied that "Basic, menial jobs exist to give people a place to start. The opportunity, as it is, is to build skills and a job history in order to advance to the next step. Okay, so minimum wage can't get someone by, fine: work two jobs."

Yeah, that's part of the problem. The solution shouldn't be "work two jobs," ever. If you want to work two jobs? Go for it. I have no problem with that. For a time, after I graduated from WVU, I worked three jobs all at once -- freelance reporter for the Morgantown newspaper, grocery store checker/stocker, and laboratory technician/assistant. In addition, I ran my own web business. I barely slept, and with the money I made from all of those ventures combined, I wouldn't have even been able to pay car insurance, let alone move out of my parents' house and fend for myself. Combined, with all of those, I worked anywhere between 60-70 hours per week -- I usually had about 38 or 39 at the grocery store (so that they couldn't classify me as "full time," which meant they would have to pay me benefits) and around 20 in the lab, not to mention the hours I put into writing stories for the paper. And even in that, if I weren't living with my parents at the time, I would not have been able to survive. This was almost ten years ago now.

"I find it most amusing," said one of my other friends, "that most of the people telling fast food workers to get better jobs that pay more than minimum wage are the same people complaining about welfare, food stamps, low income housing etc. Stuff that a lot of people wouldn't need if they could actually survive on one 40 hour a week job."

My thoughts exactly. It's not about getting comfortable in some fast food job so that one never leaves it -- it's about being able to survive working that job for the time being when one needs it, or, conversely, in the case that the person working it is unable to ever leave it. I know people who have worked in grocery stores or in fast food for over twenty years -- why? Because they can't get out of it, or because they don't have the education or ability to do anything else and are forced to rely on that job to survive. And it kills them mentally and socially, as well as physically. If you think everyone in this country has the same opportunity to get an education and to move up in the world, you are wrong. If you think everyone has the ability -- mental or physical or both -- to continue bettering themselves and rise up, you are also wrong. Most of my own family members worked in the coal mines of West Virginia and Pennsylvania for the better part of their lives not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't afford to go to college, and working in the mines was the only job available that they could actually live on. Even today, in West Virginia you either work for the mines (or mining companies), work for the university in some capacity, or end up working at Walmart or a grocery store. Those are about the only three real options unless you want to sacrifice your life to the military, since poor states like West Virginia have the highest recruitment rates -- people would rather take the chance of getting shot at on a regular basis just to be able to make enough money to survive.

I find all of this incredibly sad and depressing, of course.

This is what I have to deal with; this is all of the stuff I think about on a regular basis. It's not much better here in Kansas than it is in West Virginia. It wasn't any better in Missouri when I lived there, either, and it's not much better (if at all) in Omaha. Could I get a minimum wage job right now if I wanted to or had to? Yes, of course I could -- at almost any retail or foodservice establishment here in Newton, for fuck's sake. And yes, it would help pay the bills. Yes, it would keep food in the fridge and gas in the car, and would do so for a while. But would it be enough for me to live on indefinitely? Hell no. It would be just like adjuncting -- it would supplement what I already have, but it would not fully stop the hemorrhaging of money, nor would it really allow me to save anything. It would just slow the bleeding to a trickle for a short time.

I'm not alone in this situation, of course; I'm not crying the "poor me" routine. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of recent graduates exactly where I am right now, looking down the barrel of unemployment and financial ruin with hope for the future in my chosen career field slowly dwindling more and more by the day. And what can be done about this? Not a lot. I'm sick of assholes calling people like me -- recent graduates -- "lazy" or "entitled" or what-have-you. We're not -- or at least not all of us are. I didn't get two degrees to expect a job to fall into my lap. I'm not that immature. I got two degrees with the simple expectation that doing so would better my chances of actually being able to do what I want to do with my life, only to find that thousands upon thousands of others did the same thing and are also in the same situation I am. All of us are working hard to find some sort of employment we can live on, and yes, I am fully aware that I am the product of my choices and life decisions (by the way, don't Google the statistics on how many MFA graduates commit suicide, because it's fucking scary). Still, to a certain extent I don't care what other people think -- my life choices, my experience and credentials, should mean something. It's not about self-importance, it's about self-reliance.

My mother asked me this morning if I had any updates for her on the job hunt, and it took all of my self-control to not begin laughing. Instead, I had to explain to her that over the past two weeks or so, while there were plenty of jobs in education-related fields still out there (most of which require degrees more advanced than mine and/or experience I do not have), most teaching positions have been disappearing, dropping like dominoes as the timeframe for being able to interview and hire applicants has now passed -- including many of the positions I myself have applied for. I also had to explain to her that even if I got a call today and was offered even an interview, let alone a position someplace, it's far, far too late for me to be able to uproot myself to move halfway across the country again to be able to start teaching on a set date. That's the difference between teaching positions and other positions -- set dates. You can be the best candidate possible with every degree and credential any given institution would want, but if you can't interview, pack up and move, secure a new living situation and be ready to teach on the first day of classes....sorry, we'll pick someone else. That's part of what's so frustrating about looking for work in education -- very strict, metered-out timeframes. At least for most other realms of employment, if hired I can give them a start date on my own terms. If you're a professor, you can't -- they dictate those times and you have to abide by them.

I found this on Twitter this evening: "Life doesn't give you what you want. Life gives you the materials necessary to create you into the person you're supposed to be."

I've already crafted myself into the person I'm supposed to be.

What now?