Tag: Jobs

The DLQ adds up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Q in my DLQ acronym doesn’t stand for Quaker, though it’s not that far off, either. Instead, it’s from Dedicated Laborious Quest, a concept I constructed from Gary Snyder’s Real Work, or life mission. It usually differs from daily employment or a career. Maybe the middle term should have been “labor-intense” or “labor-filled,” we can discuss the subtleties later.

As poet Donald Hall pointed out in his memoir Life Work, our labor falls into three categories: jobs, which we do to earn money; chores, necessary tasks that pay nothing; and work, which can be energizing. In his own case, he realized that when your work coincides with a job, life’s good. For most of us, work is a money-losing activity. More of his thinking along those lines could be found in the Talking Money category at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.

In one draft of what would become my novel Nearly Canaan, DLQ was the core of Jaya or her earlier figure’s life, a blend of yoga spirituality (only at that point it was Sufi), an arts engagement, and the altruism of her career. It also came to reflect Kenzie’s journey in the hippie stories, though not so overtly.

It may even be an expression of an individual’s magnetic center in the esoteric philosophy of P.D. Ouspensky. If I interpret this correctly, you have to have something you do with a sustained passion, such as an art or a sport, something that requires daily practice and discipline. Without that foundation, you cannot advance spiritually. Checking up on that, I’m seeing a whole literature on magnetic center in mechanical physics, making me wonder if it’s applicable to Ouspensky’s metaphor, if at all.

This goal isn’t for everyone. As the Bhagavad Gita says, only one in a thousand – or maybe one in a million – pursues it, and out of that, only one in a thousand – or a million – arrives at the summit.

Whatever it is, the yogis at the ashram, Kenzie and his Buddhist buddies, and Jaya all craved it.

~*~

The practice of writing is a big part of my own DLQ, but for a long time I felt vaguely guilty about the amount of time I devoted to it, as if it was a selfish endeavor when I should have been doing something more productive or even more worthwhile. Only after the prayer workshop at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends that one summer, when I was told that writing was a spiritual gift I needed to nurture, did I feel the permission to type away as needed.

My job at the time had me on a four-day workweek, which gave me a three-day weekend after a double-shift on Saturday. Following a suggestion from the workshop, I dedicated one day a week, usually Tuesday, to my writing and revision efforts.

It didn’t seem like that much, frankly, but looking back, I now see that added up to ten weeks a year, plus another two or so of my vacations. For perspective, consider how many people manage to draft a full novel in the month of November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge.

For me, that time was allocated among fiction, poetry, and nonfiction projects – one of them resulted what became the Talking Money series at the Chicken Farmer blog after a book publisher backed away when a potential coauthor with financial counseling creds failed to mesh into the proposal. Submissions and queries also occupied some of that time.

~*~

It was also time taken away from other parts of my life: from my spouse or significant other, family, travel, hiking or camping, physical exercise, service on city council or a school board, friendships. Even reading got slighted.

From another perspective, I could have devoted it to an overtime shift every week, at time-and-a-half pay, which would have more than covered the mortgage.

~*~

What becomes apparent to me in these reflections is that the DLQ was essential for my sanity. My moves across the country and, for a while, up the management ladder, kept uprooting me, leaving much uncompleted in each place or, at a gut level, undigested. Writing was not only a means of recording highlights and depths before I lost them but also of releasing and letting go of self-imposed obligations to my past, freeing me to more openly face the present.

A quick look at labor and income changes in America

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some realities and trends I find disturbing, as gleaned from Harper’s Index over the past few years:

  1. Hypothetical median income of full-time U.S. workers [2020] if income were distributed as evenly as it was in 1975: $92,000. Actual median income of full-time U.S. workers: $50,000. (Guess which direction the differential is skewered.)
  2. Percentage of U.S. manufacturing jobs that required a bachelor’s degree in 1983: 14. That required one in 2018: 31.
  3. Percentage of Americans who believe that a four-year college degree is not worth the cost: 56. (Are employers who expect a degree holder for a low-paying job getting a free ride?)
  4. Portion of all U.S. student-loan debt that is held by women: 2/3. (Does that reflect gender pay differences in similar jobs?)
  5. Percentage of unpaid taxes that are owed by the richest one percent of Americans: 70.
  6. Average percentage of their fortunes that the twenty richest Americans gave to charity in 2018: 0.8.
  7. Factor by which the average cost of a home in the United States is higher than the average salary: 8. (And the guidelines I grew up with said don’t go over 25 percent of your income. So now it’s twice that?)
  8. Percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 who live with one or both of their parents: 52.
  9. Rank of workers 75 or older among the fastest growing demographics in the U.S. workforce: 1.
  10. Percentage increase since 2020 in the amount of work employees are doing outside of the nine-to-five workday: 28.

Ten recent tools that greatly changed carpentry jobs

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Remember, not everyone who carries a hammer is a carpenter.

Apart from the Amish, who often are master carpenters, today’s tradesmen are indebted to these advances:

  1. Rechargeable batteries for all those power tools.
  2. The Sawzall. Top of the list. Any project working on an older house requires getting through earlier construction. This chews right through the mess.
  3. Oscillating multitask tool. The Sawzall’s little sister. Chews through the finer details. It’s like the equivalent of laparoscopic surgery that doesn’t leave huge scars.
  4. Carbide blades. They go right through nails and screws and greatly outlive their earlier incarnations. Think time of constantly replacing the blades as well as the time and cost.
  5. Laser-light “stick.” (And before that, the retractable metal measuring tape.) Look, our contractor’s working with 1/16-inch tolerances. Accuracy counts, especially when dealing with hand-hewn beams and posts from nearly two centuries earlier. He’s trying to get a plumbline precision to preserve the earlier let’s-hope-it-works construction.
  6. Laser level indicator. This one really blows me away. Place the small device where you want and it shows an appropriate line all around. I have no idea how you’d accomplish the measurements otherwise, but they can be crucial. Especially when we’re dealing with everything that’s overhead.
  7. Structural fasteners. They’re engineered to be superior to earlier long screws or bolts. I guess it’s kind of like those zip-ties I’ve come to rely on in gardening, but I’m told this is huge.
  8. Cell phone, including Internet access. You know, YouTube advice, as well as ordering online or by phone, calling consultants, even checking on the status of other participants in the project. Not all of those calls are personal, not that I’d begrudge a hard-worker there.
  9. Clear plastic sheets and zipper strips. A lot of dust and whatever goes flying around, after all. Keeping it rounded up is definitely appreciated, especially as we’re trying to live in the same house. Add to that the power vac. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but these are amazing. Even with water.
  10. Dumpster. I’m starting to see having one outside our house as a kind of status symbol.

Status symbols? We could do a whole other Tendril about those pickup trucks and trailers or the guys’ preferred brands.

Source: Mostly Adam Bradbury.

Everybody should get a sabbatical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Shortly before finding myself officially unemployed, I engaged a typist to prepare a clean draft of Subway Hitchhikers for submission to literary agents or book editors. At least that would be moving forward.

And then, when the ax fell, I was surprised to find that after arriving in Baltimore, in debt from divorce and selling a house at a loss in a recession, I had saved up a bundle in just two years. Having a company car and an expense account covering my meals during the week added up. Rather than return immediately to the workforce, I decided to give myself some time off, a sabbatical, as it were, to concentrate on the writing I had always wanted to do. The kind that would put my name on the cover and the spine. Something more lasting than a byline on a daily paper or even, more prestigiously, a magazine.

Watching a colleague who was waiting till retirement before he could tackle the children’s book he always wanted to write nagged at me. I had heard a few similar dreams – wait for retirement. Except that a heart attack felled Russ shortly after he got that farewell cake.

In my job-free spree, I hunkered down to hard writing, up to 12 hours a day. By this point, I was pretty proficient with my personal computer and its dot-matrix printer. And so, while she was typing up Hitchhikers, I turned to keyboarding other material.

What I see as I look back on my sabbatical was that I entered the year more prepared than I’ve assumed. It wasn’t like I was sitting down and staring at a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, I had journal notes, correspondence, even maps and photos to draw on.

Every writer works differently, as interviews in the Paris Review demonstrated. The one with Jack Kerouac had inspired to use the end rolls of teletype paper for drafting, freeing me from having to keep inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Using a PC was like that, only instead of having to replace paper I had a 5¼-inch flopping disk that filled up. If only I had an editor waiting, like he had.

As I awaited word on my query letters to agents and publishers, I began examining my life from college to the present through the eyes of fiction. Keyboarding large sections from my journals gave me a foundation for following my moves from the East Coast back to Ohio, on to Indiana, again, and finally the Pacific Northwest, events that included my first marriage. Making it work as fiction, though, was the challenge.

My primitive PC was still a huge advance over typewriters, in my case, an Olivetti Editor 2. And here I had been seeing the ubiquitous IBM Selectric as an enviable sign of a successful writer? The thought is rather amusing today. Gee, and there was no Internet yet, hard as that is to believe now.

In my sabbatical I concentrated on a single manuscript and then put it aside as I awaited feedback from potential agents or publishers or maybe just for a space to season until I could come back to it afresh. That opened a window to start drafting another. I was a fiend, having waited years for this opportunity.

My hunkered down life? I got the deepest tan of my life by taking a midday break at the pool, at least through the summer. And did get out for hikes, especially in nearby pine barrens that had lead mine remains and a waterfall. Spiritually, I was connecting with Plain Quakers, liberal Mennonites, former Amish, and a small circle from the Church of the Brethren – all in the pacifist tradition. There was even a writers’ group that Tom Clancy addressed just as he was on the cusp of celebrity.

What I see now when I look at my earlier writing is that I could never have created those pages later in my life. Too many details would have vanished, along with the urgency and originality and even the voice.

The sabbatical was also a period of heavy reading for me, including the brat pack being edited by Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

As my savings ran out, I still hadn’t found an agent or publisher. Realizing I’d need at least another year clear to achieve that, I reluctantly headed back to my career in newspaper journalism, this time in New Hampshire. There was a crucial shift, though. The archconservative Union Leader had a unionized newsroom where I could go back into the ranks as an editor and still earn more than most small paper managing editors across the country. I even had job security and a 35-hour workweek that allowed me time for a real life.

I packed up with the first rambling draft of what would become Promise, released via Smashwords in 2013, and two related novels, plus Hometown News and all of the outtakes from the subway project. I could continue to revise those drafts in my free time, but the book publishing world was changing in ways that baffled even the most celebrated literary agents.

Looking back, I must admit how much risk I took in my year off. I had no health insurance, for one thing, and no guarantee I could return to the shrinking ranks of journalism. I was also perceiving the pace I was working at could not be sustained.

I had been appalled in reading interviews with famed authors who boasted that they worked four hours a day – what slackers, I thought. Now I see that as a rather lavish amount of time, considering the additional hours of research, related correspondence, submissions, reading, and basic home-business demands (yes, writing is a business). Gee, how did I overlook all those hours of lunch conferences or cocktail hours in the lives of the literati, which were essentially business? Or even their hours in psychotherapy?

Two years on the road came as a welcome respite

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ‘80s hit me with a couple of hard setbacks. First, Mount St. Helens blew up, as did my job in what I had seen as my Promised Land. I went bouncing back east, first to a stint along the upper Mississippi in Iowa and then three years in the Rust Belt of Ohio, where my shirt-sleeve management position ate up 60 hours or more of my life every week. Shortly after my first marriage fell apart there, my job was eliminated. At least I had a hot love going, with an engagement to be announced once I could relocate to Baltimore, where she had moved for her studies.

Somehow, I landed a field representative job with the Chicago Tribune’s newspaper features syndication service, one that allowed me to move anywhere I wanted within the 14 northeastern states I would be covering. Baltimore was perfect.

Except, once I ensconced in the top floor of an 1840s rowhouse in a gentile in-town neighborhood, my beloved wasn’t. If only I could get a straight answer from her.

Complicating matters was that I was out on the road three weeks out of four, home only to unpack and repack on the weekends. The job introduced me to a world many American men know: frequent flyer lounges, taxis and limos, hotels and motels, expense and mileage reports, quarterly sales meetings, three-piece suits custom made at Joseph Banks, a company car, bonuses. Newspaper management, especially on the smaller papers that I had known, were nothing like that. You might get a nice note from your boss or someone up the ladder thanking you for a particular job well done.

Getting from one sales call to the next gave me a lot of time for thinking as I drove or even reading, if I was flying. The time allowed me to decompress from a decade that had included 11 addresses in seven states. I could journey at ease or read or revise earlier manuscripts at night in my room, whatever its number.

My personal life included some of the loneliest nights ever but also led to my best friendship ever, a Plain Quaker who worked as a supermarket meatcutter when he wasn’t working as a nurse. I also had a circle of Mennonites who introduced me to four-part a cappella part-singing, a step that would lead me to the excellent choirs I would join in Boston and Eastport. I also visited among Friends, aka Quakers, and sometimes managed a few hours for genealogical libraries and archives or walking through cemeteries where my ancestors are buried. I even revisited the ashram and my old stomping grounds in upstate New York.

None of this apart from the newspaper world has entered my fiction directly. I thought she would be a fine character to build on, except in retrospect it turned out all too banal. What these experiences did feed was my poetry later.

Thanks to my best friend from my junior high and high school years, who was now living an hour south – unlike the previous decade, where we kept landing on opposite ends of the country – I obtained my first PC, something some of his buddies were building. It had 5¼-inch floppy disks, which would be ancient history to so many tech-savvy youths today.

In my travels, I saw much industrial wasteland. Not just Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania or Sparrows Point outside Baltimore, but also around Philadelphia, across upstate New York, in Worcester and Buzzards Bay and the Merrimac/Merrimack River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The newspaper industry was also taking hard hits. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so did readership for afternoon papers, which were read by people taking the bus home or waiting for dinner. That greatly reduced the opportunity to place new features in their pages. As I was told, only a few years earlier, I would have had no difficulty selling to editors. Now, the challenge was keeping them happy with what they were already buying. I also saw great turnover at the helm of papers. I would curry an editor and have promises for a sale once the new annual budget was approved, only to find that he was no longer there in a year. The position I had aspired to and been groomed for was now revealed to be something less than desirable.

What became clear to the five of us out on the road was that the business was in trouble. One or more of us would be cut. I was the one. Besides, I really never was much of a salesman.

My observations of visiting other papers did augment my actual newsroom experiences that would emerge as the novel Hometown News.

Back to the precarious nature of scalloping

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The crews are out in our deep cold and often nasty winter weather, not just fishing but also shucking before landing their haul. Most of them head out before sunrise, as I hear from my home.

Are they crazy, as some of them contend, or just dumb, as others jest? Even both? It’s more than honest work, no question.

In our zone, boats are limited to a crew of three and a maximum harvest of two buckets of shucked scallops a day. That’s ten gallons, or nine to ten pounds total. Doesn’t look like much for a day’s haul, especially when you factor in paying for their labor, the boat, gear, fuel, insurance, and the fact it’s seasonal and very cold work, even before the regulations that hold draggers to three days a week. Try making a living on a three-day, limited season, income. Good luck!

Officially, ours is a 50-day run spread over four months, but in reality, an earlier cutoff kicks in on short notice to preserve the stock from depletion. In effect, “It’s over, guys,” arrives in the captain’s email, post haste. Last year, that eliminated 17 fishing days, a third of the season. More than an entire month, actually. By dumb luck, my daughter and I were at the docks just in time to stock up a gallon in our freezers.

At least we’re not managing a restaurant.

As this season? We’re holding our proverbial breath. My, those morsels do taste unbelievable.

(Divers have a different schedule, even more limited.)

Think of that when you wonder about the seemingly high price of heavenly shellfish.

Does every act of creation begin with demolition?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or at least making a mess?

The observation here originates with an artist’s amazement at the mess at the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Bible. As panelist on the Bill Moyers’ PBS series, he picked up on the matter of chaos at the outset. Not the blank canvas but rather all the surrounding disarray, probably including thinking.

More recently, I’ve been seeing that in our own home renovation project. For a while, there was a lot less of our house than when we began. How quickly the Dumpster got filled and another delivered!

Living on $10,000 a day. Or even an hour.

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

The thought crept upon me the other morning as I was pondering simplicity and frugality.

Yeah, look at the flip side.

I remembered reading a recent New York Times piece on a Long Island boutique that catered to billionaires and noted the owner’s insight that they spent differently. I shrugged it off then but come back to it now.

Suppose your after-tax income came to $3½ million a year? That would be nearly $10,000 a day. (I did miscalculate and put that at $100k a day, a more interesting figure. Still!)

For perspective, the median pay for S&P 500 chiefs was $14.5 million last year, in contrast to an average $56,000 earnings for American workers.

The No. 10 guy on the list, Tim Cook at Apple, came in at $99 million in salary, benefits, and bonuses. More than $240,000 a day. That is, $10,000 an hour.

Ahead of him were the CEOs of companies like Alphabet, Peloton, Live Nation, Sarepta Therapeutics, and CS Disco, plus four I recognized. Please, can somebody tell me what the head of Pinterest is doing to make him pocket $123 million for the year? A tad under $337,000 a day?

As one scion of affluence told me a half century ago, there isn’t much real difference between a $20,000 car (today’s prices) and a $200,000 vehicle, as far as everyday performance goes. Let me add, today’s median family car is far superior to the luxury vehicles back then. Air conditioning? Seat warmers? Cruise control?

As I played with the $100,000-a-day figure, nearly twice the yearly earnings of real workers, I realized how little of that was needed for everyday expenses, even at inflated expectations – how many houses does one need, anyway, or how many hotel suites while traveling? What came into focus was the vanity opportunities: collections of antique cars, paintings, sexual playthings, political hobnobbing. Just name it and claim it.

And that’s where it gets scary, even when you scale back to $10,000 a day.

Conservatives like to quote Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” while they pursue the maximization of their personal wealth, which intensifies their power and, thus, corruptedness. Per the logic.

Renting a luxury yacht – $100,000 a week plus expenses, last time I looked – is peanuts in comparison. As is a private jet. They might even be business expenses, paid by the company.

Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald did quip, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

But I am wondering what he’d make of today’s mutations.

What would you do, given that much at hand?