Experience Required

While I spent a substantial amount of time vigilantly compartmentalizing various aspects of my life, at some point I said ‘fuck it’ and started allowing those different areas of being that make me who I really am to slowly and comprehensively marry themselves back together into what I've become today- a coagulation of previously divided parts puzzle-piecing into this finished product. It’s been an exuberant, liberating endeavor for my soul. It started with scrounging up the balls to write about being a stripper as an undergrad, then again as a graduate student, publishing work that ‘outed’ me to the general public, speaking to writers at a national conference about the act of writing about things of a sexual nature, speaking to feminist forums about the sex industry, doing interviews and writing for independent filmmakers to document aspects of my life I’d previously kept hidden.

What’s been great for my soul, I’m sorry to report, hasn't been all that spectacular for my employability. I've applied for 42 jobs since September when I moved to North Carolina. My résumé, as far as I can tell, meets the contemporary standards of what employers might expect, my cover letters are articulate and insightful and catered specifically to each position I apply for and to the company offering the position, and my references, in my humble opinion, are god damned impressive and include a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

I can’t help but suspect that my willingness to be honest about exactly who I am and about my life experiences has something to do with my inability to get a job. And this bums me out. I've written before about the question I’m often asked regarding whether or not I worry that being forthcoming about my experience in the Unholy Arena of the American Nudie Bar might hinder my ability to advance myself in other fields of endeavor later in life, and I maintain that it’s still more important to me to be honest about who I am and what I've seen and what I think about the whole business of being me. 
But this job search business, as soul crushing as it is, I imagine is equally tough for all of my former comrades-in-arms, my girls, my former co-strippers, who have to find jobs outside the confines of the nudie bar at some point, whether it’s because they're pregnant, or they get married, or they finally graduate from the college that their weekend-dancing was paying for. And it occurs to me that we have such a rich experience that in many ways translates to other industries, but because we have to be so secretive about our pasts as strippers, we’re left unable to document the job experience in applications and résumés.

So this is for you, gals of mine, a letter of recommendation of sorts to justify exactly what you've learned and earned in terms of experience that translates to the wider world of work in America.

Excellence in Customer Service:

We don’t get paid unless they love us. And, my darling readers, I mean that in the most precise and literal sense. Strippers, in most cases, do not get a paycheck. In fact, most strip clubs operate under a maintenance system, where a dancer pays a house fee (sometimes called ‘rent’, sometimes called ‘maintenance’) to occupy that club each night. The DJ isn’t lying when he says: “These girls work for tips and tips alone.” We rely, à la Blanche Dubois, on the kindness of strangers. That is to say, if we are not kind, kindness is not usually reciprocated (unless they’re into that sort of thing, but that’s a whole other tale). We are kind, diplomatic, congenial, friendly, outgoing. We are masters of small talk, wranglers of chit-chat, ready with smiles—at least, those of us who've managed to stick with the job. Any dancer worth her salt has no choice but to become proficient at conversation.

Likewise, we are efficient in our conversational skills. Time is money, as the old saying goes, and therefore we've learned to not be overly chatty, but rather talk until we can piece together enough context clues to discover what a patron wants. Should that man (or woman, in some cases) not be particularly interested in spending any additional time with us, or perhaps have expressed interest in another coworker, we aim to please.

Should a fella be into, say, the blonde, girl-next-door cheerleader type, I’ll be the first to say: “You know what, I have a friend you should meet, wait right here while I fetch her for you.” This serves the whole in several ways: 1. I’m freed up to move on to the next guy. 2. The gal I find as a replacement will likely remember this, and return the favor in kind when a dude is interested in a busty, brunette, pinup girl. 3. Everyone is working at an efficient pace. 4. The customer is happy. We truck in happiness. We are happiness dealers by the bushel. And that’s the point.

Business Math and Cash Handling Skills

The fifth question James Lipton always asks his guests on Inside the Actors Studio is:

“What noise or sound do you love?”

I can say that I unequivocally love the sound of 20 strippers counting their money at the end of the night. Forty hands making that ffffttt, ffffttt, fffttt, sound with thousands of dollars between them is hypnotic and enchanting and so, so fast. We can shuffle a deck of singles faster than you can say blueberry pie. In fact, I’m fairly good at guessing, down to the dollar, a stack of ones slapped into my hand, based just on the height and weight. We are money-counting mother fuckers. We deal in cash, and only cash, and we’re good at it.

Likewise, because we’re obligated to tip gratuity out to our DJ, our bouncers, and our bartenders at the end of the night, we've conquered figuring percentages in our head. It’s part of our job.

Diversity in the Workplace

Despite what pop culture might lead you to believe, strippers come from extraordinarily varied backgrounds. Of course, I've danced with girls who've grown up on welfare and who come from broken homes. But I've also worked with girls whose parents were doctors and account executives and whose parents have been married for 30 years. I've worked with women born and raised in small Missouri towns, and women from as far away as Canada and Australia. I've shared a stage with dancers of every conceivable race and religion and ethnicity. And when you get naked with people every night, any sense of discomfort regarding these differences evaporates. We love each other, we are truly immersed in one another’s cultural variances and accept and cherish our distinctions.

Similarly, we are exposed to every type of person imaginable. We treat everyone we encounter with the same respect and congeniality. We chance upon rich old men and poor college students, men from every country on earth, lawyers and union guys, construction workers, military service members, lobbyists and laborers, professional sports players and famous actors (I’ll never tell, so don’t ask . . . well, I will tell, but not on the internet and only if we’re friends). There is no room for prejudices in dealing with customers.

Determination and Hard Work

No matter how good you are at being a stripper, some nights just suck balls. While a dancer can count on relatively good pay in the long term, there are those nights when she might say to herself, “Fuck, I’d have made more money tonight if I worked at McDonalds.” It’s just the way it is. Because there is no paycheck, the pay varies based on customer attendance and participation, but also sometimes plain old-fashioned luck. Some nights are shit, but dancers know that the next night will be better and we show up, slate-cleaned and determined to make up for the bad nights with good ones.

And while it may look like an easy job, being a stripper is hard, just in the practical sense. We work long, and I mean long, hours. Many a night I arrived at work at 5:30 pm and watched the sun crack the sky on my commute home. And we work long hours in 7 inch platform stilettos. And we dance, dance, dance all night long. It is a physically demanding job. We bruise our knees on stages and bruise our ribs on brass poles, we twist ankles, and we climb up and down stairs, and don’t even get me started on what a decade of stripping does to your lower spine . . . a very real condition my friend, Jenni, and I have coined ‘stripper back’. Frequently, even office jobs require minor lifting . . . can you lift 20lbs? the job advertisements ask—dude, we can lift our own body weight and turn upside down on a three inch diameter brass pole.

Managerial Demands

I've been fortunate to work with some very wonderful managers in my tenure, but there have been severe exceptions to that statement. I assure you, dancers often deal with bosses who are major assholes with a capital A. If a potential boss thinks his gruff demeanor or high standards might be too stringent for a ‘delicate gal who’s only known the coddling environment of a strip club’, that dude is DEAD WRONG. I promise you, that gal has worked for a bigger dickhead than you. Take a chance, she’s got thick skin, I promise.

And I don’t suspect any former dancer will actually use this as an addendum to an application in which she’s chosen to include her experience as a stripper to translate to ‘real-world’ work, but I wish she could. I wish she could be ballsy enough to do it, but even more, I wish a person doing the hiring would be ballsy enough to accept it as true. Because it is.

I love you, my bitches, with all my strippery heart. 

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.

"Jack, You're Doing It Wrong"

One of the first ‘grown-up’ movies I attentively watched and enjoyed as a child was the John Hughes feature Mr. Mom. In the film, Jack Butler [Michael Keaton] is laid off from his job and reverses daytime roles with his wife [Teri Garr], she returning to the workforce while he assumes the responsibilities of a stay-at-home parent. The movie is filled with the situational fuckupery you might expect of a man accustomed to the daily grind of 1980’s corporate shenanigans taking on the full time parent gig—dinners are burned, diapers explode, blankies are lost. But my favorite scene occurs when Jack drops off the kids at school for the first time. As Jack tries to meander through oncoming traffic, his eldest son chides him, claims mommy doesn't go this way, says: “You’re doing it wrong.” Jack protests, claims he using the Jack Butler Method, fudges his way through car after car honking and throwing spiteful looks at him, until  another fellow mommy approaches the car, motions for him to roll down the window, and tells him, “Hi Jack. I’m Annette. You’re doing it wrong.” She goes on to explain that she tells all the new mommies to enter through the south and exit through the north, and then in reverse for pick-up.

I don’t know why I felt such a kinship to this moment in the life of the fictional Jack Butler, even as a child. There was very little about my six-year-old self that would have connected in the logical sense with a mid-thirties stay-at-home dad. But the sentiment, even at such a young age, resonated with me. I was often ‘doing it wrong’.

That phrase still reverberates. I’m a parent and a homeowner. I have a master’s degree and a minivan. I’m a Marine Corps wife, for god’s sake. Why is it that I can’t get my shit together and quit working at the nudie bar and grow the fuck up and start doing it right?

Why is it the things that make me say aloud, “Oh my God, I love my life” also frequently accompany the thought “What am I doing with my life?”. I love my life because, despite all the shit I complain about, I’m a really happy person. And I am surrounded by people who make me laugh, and that’s currency in my house.

Someone asked me recently what I would do if I didn't have writing and teaching and dancing in my underwear taking up all my work hours. More specifically, the question was: “What would be your dream job?” And I’ve thought about that a bunch. The answer to this is very simple. My dreams rarely, if ever, involve jobs. I know myself well enough that if I were to overhaul my life and start working an eight-to-five in an office with cubicles and break rooms and industrial lighting, my soul would die. That sounds like melodrama, but I’m not kidding you. I’d give myself six months until I was deeply medically depressed and crying uncontrollably on a daily basis. I’m just not made for that kind of thing. And though it enters my mind occasionally that I might be doing it wrong, that this seemingly bizarre life I've created is steeped in madness, I’m also reminded that I’m so much happier than most of the people I know who are doing it right.

And maybe that’s why I developed that childhood crush on Jack Butler, and why I could find humor in his consistent doing it wrong. Because maybe I knew even as a child that I would hear that over and over again and that I should just start laughing at it early. I've done it all wrong, and backwards, and out of order, and the refrain has sometimes been Jack, you’re doing it wrong, but I’m learning as I get older that the people singing that chorus are people I don’t really like much anyway. And they’re unhappy people, and often unhappy because they've made life choices based on what everyone told them was doing it right.

It’s too late for me to derail from my crazy train now. I’ve gotten a taste of what it means to find the beauty in humanity and not succumb to the bullshit we’ve made up along way. I’m relishing in doing it wrong.

To fully appreciate the Jack Butler Method-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKkZhubwt04

Enthusiasm don't pay the bills, son!

On occasion, I’m asked to talk to certain organizations or groups of students or writers about my life. More specifically, I’m asked to talk about the content of my writing, primarily the seeming dichotomy of being who I am. And usually there’s a Q & A afterward, a set aside amount of time that generally is characterized by questions about the stripper job.

“Do you find yourself growing irritated at men because of the job?”

“How did you start doing it?”

“Who in your life knows about the job, and from whom do you keep it secret?”

There are elements of my life that I’m so accustomed to, I forget that people might find it interesting or unusual.  I've been doing a curious amount of interviews lately as a result of some of the talks I've given. And I’m noticing that the question I’m least often asked, or least often asked to elaborate on is this: “If you’re a professor, why are you also a dancer?” That whole element of my life is sort of overlooked for the juicier, and admittedly probably more intriguing, details of the stripper job. What bothers me is that the conversation I feel like we should be having, if there needs to be a conversation about me in the first place, is why DO I have to have both jobs?

I almost never reveal my daytime identity at the nighttime job. Largely it’s because I feel entitled to some semblance of privacy. But also, if the idea of privacy weren't in the foreground, I know that the truth about my academic life in the context of the strip club is almost unbelievable. I could make up the most asinine bullshit—I was born into a family of Irish travelers and I grew up in an RV, I’m a folk artist who makes lawn furniture out of discarded silverware, blah blah blah—and people buy it by the cartload. But the truth is far less believable, and so even if I felt compelled to tell it, no one would believe me anyway. The Cassandra Complex.

Here is the answer to the question I want to be asked: In name, yes, I am a professor of African-American Literature and English Composition. That sounds impressive, perhaps, inspiring thoughts of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, and days spent in grand lecture halls, or quietly book-buried in an office behind a stout oak desk. But that’s not true for 76% of college professors. Yes, 76%, over three-quarters of American college/university faculty are adjuncts. Sometimes institutions dress the names up: part-time, continuing part-time, voting adjunct, etc. but ultimately the names define the same occupational status: higher education untouchable.

I teach two courses nearly every semester [sometimes it’s three, occasionally it is shaved down to one]and I am paid per course. I receive no benefits, no sick leave, no retirement or pension, no funding for professional development, no sabbatical, no real voice in administrative decisions regarding curriculum or course scheduling. There are semesters when my courses get cut, and therefore, my pay is suddenly halved without warning. I pay for my own parking. My gross income from teaching topped out last year at around $16,000. And honestly, that’s pretty spectacular adjunct pay. I have friends at other institutions who’ve worked the same hours for far less. All that said, I think a more colorful illustration to describe my work in academia is this: it costs more to board and ride a horse at Stephens than it does to pay my salary. That’s not an exaggeration. I just added up the fees. And don’t even get me started on what my students pay in tuition, room & board, technology fees. That number would likely pay my salary four-fold.

Since the economic crash of 2008 [coincidentally, the year I entered graduate school, partially at the behest of the former VP of Academic Affairs at my institution] 40% of full-time jobs in academia have been permanently eliminated. Simply put, there are no new jobs for MFA’s or Ph.D.’s available. When they do become available, the influx of applicants for a single position is gargantuan. If I were to quit, seek a non-academic job, I sever ties to my institution, limiting my likelihood of ever teaching again. And honestly, aside from the embarrassingly low pay, I really love teaching. I blush with joy when I get to share information with students. My enthusiasm is palpable in my literature classes. I don’t want to give up teaching; I would just like to think that it holds some value in the broader sense. Joy and enthusiasm don’t pay the bills, son.

Moreover, when I watch the money generated by academic institutions via tuition, sporting events, alumni donation get funneled into bigger buildings, posh furnishings, more bricks, more mortar instead of toward the development and maintenance of faculty, I wonder what the hell college is even for anymore. When the highest paid employee in the state of Missouri is the Mizzou football coach [or maybe it’s the basketball coach . . . either way, they both make more than our governor] meanwhile, I’m wondering how I’ll make it if one of my courses doesn’t fill and has to be cut, thereby cutting my already paltry salary in half. And don’t give me that old shenanigans about how sports generate money for the institution, so it’s crucial to hire the best, yada yada – shut up! I get it. I understand the commercial and economic factors behind this decision making. But ultimately, or at least historically, don’t people go to college to learn? Doesn’t anyone want to know stuff anymore? And why are faculty and faculty positions the first on the chopping block when it’s time to trim the fat? Something is wrong when 76% of faculty is paid as poorly as I am, while the football coach is a millionaire.

[Likewise, something is wrong when my husband, an active-duty member of the USMC is paid a dismal fraction of the annual salary of an average NFL player, but that’s a rant for another time.]

This is why I’m still a stripper on the weekends, folks. Because I make in a weekend what Stephens pays me in a month. That’s not braggartism, but a testament to exactly how poverty-level consistent my academic pay is. And this isn’t a condemnation of Stephens, but an observation of the larger institutional shift from focus on education to focus on commercial/financial gain. Colleges became businesses instead of idea spaces long before I entered the academic world, but the disparity between the learning part and the business part stretches, an ever-growing chasm, far from the original intent.

The weekend job isn't an exploratory gig for me, not an endeavor in immersion journalism, not an outlet for exhibitionism nor a therapeutic space for me to investigate sexuality. It’s a god damned job, like schlepping drinks, like busing tables, like cleaning office buildings, like retail . . . all of those jobs that supplement the lowly adjunct’s pay. I’m just getting by, just like everyone else.

These are the things I see, friends, from my figurative periscope, deep in the hot trenches. Lately in some ways, my written observations are taking on a life of their own, shaping the path ahead of me, which is terrifying and thrilling at the same time, but I can’t stop telling the truth about my experience. It’s probably because I’m getting older, and don’t give a shit what people think anymore. If people are going to hold court on my being a stripper, but not issue judgment on why anyone has to work as much or as hard as I do just to make ends meet, then they’re assholes I wouldn't associate with anyway. Also, I’m learning people seem to feel good about reading what I write, and the feedback has been overwhelming and inspiring. On days when both jobs make me feel like a slave to my own reality, the writing gig, this thing we writers do, fulfills me in ways no occupation can and I’m grateful for all of the amazing people who've written to me upon reading a post that has resonated with them in some way. So thanks for reading, guys. And thanks for being human beings, which I’m discovering is the most challenging job of them all.