Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation

These things are true:

      1.     When I was in high school, I was voted Most Likely to Be a Game Show Hostess. I remember thinking at the time that it wouldn’t be such a bad gig.

         2.   In  college, I worked at the Career Services office and one of my duties was to administer this career aptitude test to help students having difficulty picking a major to hone their sights on careers best suited to them. I took it myself and the results that sifted to the top were: actress/performer, writer/journalist, minister/chaplain, psychologist.

      3.   I’ve recently undergone a major life switcheroo that has, in many ways, left me feeling like I’ve started over from scratch. I left Columbia at the end of September, left my children with their father to finish out the school year in Missouri, also giving us time to settle in the new town and find a house big enough for all of us; rid myself of 75% of my personal belongings, shoved the remaining 25% (constituted primarily of clothes and books and vinyl records) into a Budget rental truck, and rolled southeast to New Bern, North Carolina where I've effectively invaded and occupied my husband’s geobachelor pad.

Up until last May, my husband and I still planned on our ‘separate-but-together’ marriage. But when the my poor-old money pit started absorbing more money than I was bringing in, we knew something had to change and that change ended with me here, kids still temporarily there, and my career still somewhere in the ether, undefined and raw as molding clay.

I have, for the last two months, four days, and about 14 hours been wholly unemployed. That’s not for lack of trying. I’ve sent out 39 resumes (as of last Friday), established accounts on pretty much every conceivable job search website, hunted down employment opportunities at various levels of municipal, state, and federal government, and still I’m sitting here on my couch writing. I did a major revision on an old manuscript, wrote a considerable bit of a horror/thriller novel I’ve been toying with for about a year, and written a few drafts of an essay about contemporary feminism. I’ve been a bad blogger for the better part of this year, a disappointment to my constant readers (the whole handful of you), and I do apologize for my unpredictable and irregular posts. The forum originally was intended to be an arena for me to just bitch about things I’d make my friends listen to me bitch about, but in a slightly more articulate construct, but with no intended regularity. Now that I’m moved, settled, unpacked (sort of), I intend to remedy that. It is quite possible to remedy, because I really have nothing else to do.

Here’s another thing that’s true:

   4.     I don’t want to do anything else but write. I mean, I really do not.

For the first time since I was nineteen and started dancing in my underpants to supplement my income (read: as my primary income in many instances), I am experiencing what it truly means to be BROKE. Not, I really want to go shopping, but I shouldn’t because I’m broke or Let’s eat someplace cheap because I’m broke. Legit, way below the poverty line, broke ass, broke-ity broke broke, ninety-three cents in my checking account, broke.  My husband, God bless him, is keeping me sheltered and fed, but a Lance Corporal’s salary doesn’t allow for my preferred shopping, travelling, gift-giving, lady-of-leisure status.

Still, despite all of that, I’m so much happier spending my days writing than I would ever be sitting at a desk working for someone else, who themselves are working for someone else, who is ultimately selling or buying or processing something that I really have no passion for. I’d happily take a job offered to me at this point, just because I’m broke enough to consider crowd-sourcing my 2000 mile roundtrip way home for Christmas, but it’s not going to be what I want to do. I would resign myself to doing it. I would succumb. This is probably pretty blasphemous in some circles, but I would think about entering into a job in the corporate world as equivalent to accepting the mark of the beast. Calm down, everyone, I’m not saying that’s how it is or that I’m some biblical scholar and here’s a reasonable interpretation of the Book of Revelation, but bear with me:

Revelation 13:17

17) and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.…

          I remember as a child reading this and thinking, ‘What about parents who want to feed their kids and pay the rent?’ And I imagined after doing all the foraging and trading and underground shit a parent could do to feed and shelter their families, a moment would come where a man or a woman, head hung in defeat, would file into some queue at some local Antichrist headquarters and get branded with a 666, and then they could go to the grocery store and buy Hot Pockets or whatever.

I know I’m prone to melodrama, and absolutely accept that this is one of those cases, but in order for someone to understand me, you have to understand that within the tragicomedy I’m often espousing, there’s always a foundation of truth. I see myself, shamefully and without a shred of joy, standing in line for Hot Pockets, holding back tears for another lost day in the service of a machine. 

I’m clinging to the Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation. You’ll remember, in the 1989 film Say Anything, Lloyd Dobbler (as played by John Cusack), who’ll always be a standard by which I judge romantic gestures, explains to the father of his love interest what his plans for the future entail: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything, sold, bought or processed. I don’t want to repair anything sold, bought or processed. As a career, I don’t want to do any of that.” I hear those words from Lloyd Dobbler’s lips and choirs of angels sing, and the clouds part and the sun bursts through, and George Harrison starts singing ‘Hallelujah’. 

There are exceptions to this scenario. I loved teaching because ultimately I felt like teaching students how to think and communicate did something good for the world at large. But only two of the 39 jobs I applied for are in higher education. I’m just not in a great geographical area for that kind of thing, if there is a good geographical area for that kind of thing anymore. (see previous blog Enthusiasm Don’t Pay the Bills, Son).

I remember once making a thoughtless wish and then immediately retracting it, but it went something like this: “If I were in prison, I’d write all fucking day.” Of course, this is bullshit. I absolutely, under zero circumstances, never want to go to prison. Again, though, despite its melodramatic delivery, the sentiment is still the same. To some degree, I feel like I’m in prison. I’m bound largely to my house because I don’t want to waste gas going nowhere. And even if I did go anywhere, I have no money to do anything. If I want to participate in the commercial world, I need money, and jobs are how most people get money, and I don’t want to sell anything, or buy anything, or process anything for a paycheck in exchange for 75% of my life. I don’t wanna do it. So until I have to hang my head, succumb, go get in line for my license to survive in the world we’ve constructed for ourselves, where commerce is king and the arts and philosophy and the humanities are constantly pushed to the periphery of what society deems as ‘important’, I’m gonna keep vigilantly taking advantage of my cushy prison sentence. I have food, I have a roof, I get to leave the apartment for my bike rides, I get my husband and my kitty cats and the internet and I get to talk to my family every day, and I will write until my fingers bleed, because that’s the job I really want. 

My Money Pit (or, Our House is a Very Very Very Fine House)

I moved 29 times in 27 years before I finally bought a house in 2005. Those numbers aren’t a mistake. 29 places that I suppose I had to call home before I was 3o. It wasn’t until I was in my own place, a house I bought all by myself, that I felt some sense of security. No one forced me to live there, no one could force me to leave, it was mine and brand spanking new. I was the first person to bathe in the tub, first to hang my clothes in the closet, first to sit my ass on the toilet in my own master bathroom. For the first time in my life, the American dream felt tangible. And because this house was new, I wouldn’t have to worry about the furnace busting, or termites feasting on the walls, or an ancient leaking roof. I suspected the largest of my concerns would be deciding what color to paint the walls or figuring out just where I should plant the garden.

            Here’s what no one tells you about the American dream of homeownership: it is an endeavor designed for people who know what the fuck they’re doing with any sort of tool, or those wealthy enough to hire someone with those skills. Unfortunately, I am neither of those things.

            The other point of consideration when purchasing a home is that when the need for a handyman arises, the decision often isn’t one that can be shoved to the back burner the way shopping for clothes or going on vacation can wait until times are a little more flush. No, what I've discovered is that when someone needs to come and fix a problem with your home, that problem is usually immediate. For example, say the toilets on the first floor of your home suddenly begin working in reverse, a kind of raw sewage Nile River somehow flowing from south to north, and then a good portion of the main floor of your brand spanking new house is covered with unspeakable awful. That kind of disaster results in urgent prioritizing of funds. That is, getting the running water and toilets functioning in your home is always at the top of the list. But you move on, deal with the minor damage, have 10 feet of sewer pipe in your front yard replaced, and still don’t even spend enough to make a claim on your homeowner’s insurance.

            My latest woe, the rain coming from the second floor hot water heater to the first floor powder room, has pushed me to reconsider the value of the security in owning a home. Let me repeat the most important part of that last sentence: it’s raining in my god damned bathroom. The hot water heater apparently is improperly placed and, unbeknownst to me, has been leaking for some time.

            I discovered this after I decided that filing an insurance claim was likely the best option for me given the scale of repairs that are needed. So I made the call, the insurance people came, and gave me an estimate for repairs that my policy will cover. And while my policy will happily replace the now rusting vents and graciously slap a new coat of paint on the affected areas, the source of the disaster (namely hot water heater and resulting rotten floor beneath it) is NOT covered.

            When I realized this, I couldn’t help but think of the Tom Hanks film The Money Pit. In a particularly pivotal scene of the 1986 comedy, Tom Hanks attempts to fill the bathtub on the second floor of his home with water he’s boiled on the stove. His wife, played by Shelley Long, stands by, exhausted and dejected from the series of disasters that have befallen them since purchasing the too-good-to-be-true residence. As the couple tip the  galvanized steel buckets of warm water into the tub, the floor beneath gives way, and the whole shebang goes crashing through into a porcelain and water explosion on the first floor. They stand silent peering through the gaping hole down to the disaster below and Hanks laughs. And then he laughs harder, and harder until his mouth falls open and guffaws trumpet from him, laughter being the final result of the hysteria whipped up inside a human being after such a series of cataclysms. Because what can you do? And that’s where I am. I can only laugh.

            And I keep laughing. Because though it occasionally rains in my bathroom, I don’t have raw sewage creeping from the toilets. And I’ll probably laugh should the rotten floor just give way and allow a birth canal for the heater to crash through to the powder room, given no one is popping a squat down there at the time. Because what else I’m supposed to do? I can’t cry. I can’t complain, because I still have this house and I’ve busted my ass (pretty literally) to keep it.

            My only other option is to begin an internet campaign to become the most undeserving person in the history of Ty Pennington to get an Extreme Home Makeover. And while my husband is an active duty Marine on unaccompanied tour and I suppose I’m generally well liked among the ne’er-do-wells I call my friends, I haven’t done any sort of impressive thing for my community or adopted 10 foster kids (though I do have an unusual number of cats that no one else wants). I don’t want to leave this place. It’s a poorly and inexpensively constructed pre-fabricated piece of shit but it is MY PIECE OF SHIT, and I like our neighborhood and the schools, and after those 29 moves that were almost exclusively out of my control, I want to stay in the only home that has ever felt like a home to me. And so until I figure out how exactly we’re going to turn the 5 x 5 foot rainforest back into the cute art-gallery bathroom it used to be, I’m going to laugh. And try to find The Money Pit on Netflix.

If you lived under a rock during the 1980's, here's that Tom Hanks bit I was yammering about.

To Tell the Truth

I was recently asked if I worry that the things that I write and send out into the world might adversely affect my future. I suppose namely that question was aimed at what some might call the confessional nature of my writing. I've spent a number of hours in the last few weeks thinking about this and I've decided that I would be remiss to not respond in writing to a question about writing itself. The answer to this is brief. No, I absolutely do not worry about the content of my writing railroading my future endeavors. My position on this matter is quite the opposite.

Here’s the thing- I am addicted to the truth. Particularly over the last few years, I've learned that the most important aspect of anything that is pure and of value is that it not be hidden, nor censored, nor manipulated to avoid any waves that it might cause when presented to the world. I've come to a place in my life in which I can NOT avoid being open and honest about my experience in the world, whether or not that honesty makes people uncomfortable. It isn't my aim to cause discomfort. I don’t write about my life or my perspective on events that affect my life in order to shock, or shame, or embarrass anyone. I just have to tell the truth. And it’s usually the times when I’m most hesitant or afraid to be honest that my inevitable honesty is the most cherished. I was terrified years ago to write about dancing naked because I knew the general perception of exotic dancers, and how that might be applied to me as a human being. But when I embraced that no one else could tell this story, my own particular brand of truth, I was in turn embraced by a loving [if somewhat limited] audience.

So too could be said about my openness about the way in which I was quietly excused from my teaching job. Perhaps if I just kept quiet, pretended I was granted a surprise, unpaid sabbatical, then I might have a wider range of teaching prospects in the future. But the blog I wrote about that experience got more hits in 72 hours than all of my previous blog entries combined. Silence may have saved me a spot to teach at the same institution next semester, but how can my constant quest for truth through the written word be honored in my staying silent? Is it better to take my licks and keep quiet about it, or should I use experience to shed light on something in the world that I think is extraordinarily fucked up? I’m willing to sacrifice poverty wages for a moment of telling a truth that might resonate with people. And I guess that’s what makes me a writer.

 There’s an Arab proverb that goes something like this: When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet. I've been thinking about this as it applies to me, to all of us. Let the king be anyone, any institution, any powerful aspect that sets itself in opposition to the people. I’d rather be a broke poet in the trenches than a writer who never tells the truth because I’m afraid. Writers, artists of any kind, have to tell the truth. It is not my job to give the world, be that my limited audience or a king, what it wants. I will tell you the truth I need to tell you, always, because you need it.

And I think in a broader sense, this may be what is wrong with us. And by us, I mean all of us individual humans walking the planet. I think somewhere along the line we've become afraid of the truth, both telling it and receiving it. And it’s what keeps us separated from each other, and separated from positions of power, and in constant opposition.

This might be wisdom: It is important to be open to knowledge. In order to know, it is important for someone to be willing to tell the truth. And in order to tell the truth, it is important to live a life unafraid of what discomfort the truth might inspire. Ultimately, my truth-telling has created much more harmony in the world than the collected concealment and certain downright lies I've told over a lifetime.

It is much easier to connect to people when you’re honest with them, and honest with yourself. Since my addiction to truth took vigorous hold of my life, the writing that has come out of that period has reverberated much broader and farther than when I was afraid to tell the truth, to places and people I never may have reached otherwise. But I think this is applicable to everyone, not just writers. I dare you to refuse to be afraid of the truth, because I've learned that as soon as you stop being afraid of the truth, you stop being afraid of everything, and then you are liberated.

Bullets from the Trenches (Jacks Gets Fired)

One could argue, if one were interested in such a semantic argument, that a Facebook post I wrote was misleading. Though it seemed to ignite a little firestorm in my infinitesimal corner of the interwebs, garnering something like a comment a minute for several hours, there’s a decent chance that the world at large missed the news. So if you missed the status, here it is:

“So that’s what it feels like to be unceremoniously fired after 7 years on the job. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”

The word that everyone latched onto was the word fired. I don’t mean to suggest that I was hauled into an office somewhere, read a list of grievances about my performance, and then Donald Trump-style sent packing. That didn't happen.

It has to be said that my teaching job is always, was always, contingent on a variety of factors, primarily upon institutional need. I was, as I have mentioned before, an adjunct professor. This means I am not a full-time employee, but a revolving contract employee. When an institution has severe dips in enrollment, my presence at that institution as an educator is no longer necessarily required. This has always been a possibility and is a stark reality for many of my friends and colleagues in academia. I suppose I could have been clearer about the firing had I written, students won’t be available to show up to my classes, so I shouldn't either. This happens all the time.

But I had hoped it wouldn't happen to me, hope being a large staple of the adjunct diet. I've been teaching at Stephens since January of 2007, and through all of the structural changes and shifts in leadership and highs and lows of enrollment, I've managed to avoid losing all of my classes in one semester. In fact, as of early December, when I was still grading finals and wrapping up the fall of 2013, I was also prepping articles and assignments for the spring. Texts for the class were chosen, syllabi were undergoing a good tinkering.

I had some warning, just after finals, when I received word that enrollment was down and that some departmental classes were going to be cut and consolidated. But I didn't need this warning to know how easily expendable my job was; that was a basic fact underscoring the role of the lowly adjunct.

After finals, I followed up with the powers that be about the status of my courses, but had yet to hear anything, so I unhinged my tethers to classwork for a few weeks to focus on the holidays with my family. My husband came home on leave, Christmas happened, we celebrated New Year’s Eve.

Forget the image of the board room firing, and imagine instead my sipping coffee in bed, checking headlines on my phone, relishing the last few days I had with the husband before the USMC swiped him back to Pensacola, when I loaded the Stephens page onto my phone to check which classrooms I’d been assigned this semester. Again, I’d heard nothing from my boss regarding the fiscal decisions the college had made, so I assumed I should go ahead as originally planned and prep for a new semester. But my classes no longer appeared on the course schedule. I whipped open my laptop and logged onto my email, where I found the information I was looking for.

See the important word in that Facebook status I made wasn't fired. My job ceasing to exist wasn't that big of a shocker for me. The important word in that sentence is unceremonious.

Resting there in my inbox was a two-sentence email which read:

“Jackie- (misspelled, no less)

            Sorry we had to cancel your classes. We’ll be in touch to retrieve your keys.”

And that, my friends, is fucking unceremonious. After 7 years, hundreds of students, countless papers graded, sleepless nights organizing lecture material, letters of recommendation written, advice given, poems and stories edited, committee meetings, and stellar, I mean STELLAR, reviews by students who've taken my classes, it all ended in a two sentence email. It was like that scene from Sex in the City when Carrie gets dumped via post-it note.

This is reality for 75% of people working in American academia right now. No thanks for the hard work, no sorry you won’t be teaching this year, no see ya around—just ‘classes cancelled, give us our keys back’. There is no recourse, no unemployment benefits, no judicial proceedings. Done. And while some might not call this being fired in the traditional sense, it still feels like fired. You still feel useless, you still feel utterly disposable, and you still lose the money you've been counting on.

But here’s what makes me happy—

First, for three days after I made this little Facebook status, I was flooded with email messages and comments from former students expressing so much gratitude for having been in my classes. Students I had my first semester teaching sent me notes of outrage at the institutional decision to sack me, students reflected on assignments they remembered writing for my class, voiced appreciation for the opportunity to have met me and for the things they learned from me.

And second, as my Composition students can attest, I embrace language as a magical art. Magic beyond the notions of muse and inspiration, but I mean magic in the Bardic tradition. As my magical guru, Alan Moore, would tell it “Art is magic, and magic is art. The word for the grimoire, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying ‘grammar’ and to cast a spell is to quite literally spell.” It is interesting and sometimes strangely informative to explore the evolutionary meaning of words as an almost divinatory practice. This is something I told students when I made them write a definition paper, and showed them how to use etymology to gain a greater sense of why certain words are used the way they’re used, and how they came to mean what they mean.

So I looked up the word fired in the etymology dictionary and here’s what I learned:

In the sense of "sack, dismiss", fired is first recorded 1885 in American English (earlier "throw (someone) out" of some place, 1871), probably from a play on the two meanings of discharge: "to dismiss from a position," and "to fire a gun," fire in the second sense being from "set fire to gunpowder," attested from 1520s. Of bricks, pottery, etc., from 1660s. Related: Fired; firing. Fired up "angry" is from 1824. Firing squad is attested from 1904.

And maybe I’m crazy (a distinct possibility always rolling around in my brain somewhere) but the language of being fired having come from these origins seems beautifully metaphoric for me. Imagining myself closed up in a chamber, and without warning, the firing pin strikes me in the ass, the pressure hurling me forward. And while what is left behind is a now useless tool in the hands of the shooter, I’m zooming away toward something else, soaring through the sky, faster than a speeding bullet.