Blog Addiction, help!!!

I also could have titled this, the PNN addiction or “The blog that ate Manhattan, and me.”

I fear I’m in a B movie from the 1950s (and I was not even born then). You know, the one with the monster blob that eats people? Swap the b for a g and you have blog. Yes, ladies and grrrls, that’s my fear, the blog will swallow me whole.

See, I started this, as many did, after surfing craigslist for a litany of things (including an ice cream maker, bread maker and waffle maker) and this little suggestion that one could make money blogging popped up. Honestly, I had no intention of the money, but I had heard that knowing how to blog can help in landing a job. So, I gave it a try. Around the same time, my lil’ sis signed me up on Facebook. On Facebook I have my sister and former students to tutor me through and, as I keep the page closed to any outside my circle of friends, I find it needs little maintenance.

PNN is another matter. I would surf a bit and find out, wow, look at that great writing. I mean there is veganchic and she has so much to say and I so agree with her vibe, so I subscribe. Then, there is goinggreen and she has great advice and her page is so professional, you can tell she does this for a living and several of her posts have found a life elsewhere and I also agree, subscribe.

I also found others with strong opinions on a lot of stuff that matters to me: Rosemary Peavler, mn.risley, epeterson13 and Chelsea g summers, so, of course, I subscribe, I mean, finding someone who speaks to a part of you is rare, so honor it, right?

And then there are the writers who awe: Writergrrrl, SallyG, and Annie and I just had to add them. I write mostly fiction and am pretty concerned about it’s readability (though I like my topics and have one short story of which I’m proud) but these women WRITE, like, wow.

There are the women who manage to write and mother and give the rest of us advice about it. These women are amazing and have helped me to managed a quasi-adoptive state I have of a friend’s two daughters. So, of course I subscribe to Mamabear, Crayonmarks, wearmanyhats, and Suzannehailey.

There are the women who speak to my soul, and for that I am grateful and joyous and yes, I subscribe. Thank you Procomicdiva, Conchita, and Ladyvi.

There are those powerful women living in other places that allow me to itch my travel lust, if even just a bit, so, how could I not subscribe to Embassy Wife, Fotoh, and emilyro. There are the, make me laugh out loud and spit the tea from my nose funny posts from B the Gossipgirl, mssantos, and chitowngirl—I mean, how’s a woman to turn that down, click, I’ll follow.

When I started on PNN, I would jump from home to a great post and then hit next blog to see what I might find in a Russian roulette meets wheel of fortune fun game, in search of provocative, thoughtful writing. I found just that, from shear luck or good clicking, and through a love of their pages/posts, I subscribed to Witte, Louise Larsen, youlki22, rosalea, Allison, and pleatsatsea.

So you see, I now have kind of a problem. See, I used to job search and do my consulting gig and play with my friend’s daughters and play with my purring monsters and post things here and now and then make it to the gym or try to sleep or read a novel. However, now I read and read and read on pnn, ignoring other emails and my cats (a feat in itself!) and the novels calling my name (like Wally Lamb’s great new The Hour I First Believed or Toni Morrison’s new Mercy or The House at Sugar Beach—great books all!). I am not replying to the job emails (and I know I’m lucky to get them and I will get to them, eventually) or completing the consulting (ditto) or hitting the gym (though I did deep six my shoulder a week ago. . .)

They say you know it’s an addiction when it affects your everyday life. I love PNN. To quote another here, I do, I really do. It’s just, well I’m averaging 50 editor@pnn.com messages and even my boy is starting to notice (and I usually have to knock him over the head to get him to notice, though he will notice immediately the gash on my thumb I might try to hide).

So ladies (and appealing to just women here), do I need an intervention?

Falling in love with life out of the rat race

I have found myself amongst the ‘underemployed,’ as one good friend euphemistically calls us. Having worked full time since I was twelve, I started this terrified—mailing resumes and searching for jobs with abandon. However, now that I’ve had a chance to step back and ponder, I’m finding the time to ponder oddly liberating. My worry—how will my new, peaceful, tranquil happy self measure up to the 5 AM alarm clock and sixteen hours days of my old, workaholic self? What are the lessons of this time that I might take into my new position (when I find it!)?

My concern is, obviously, a personal one, but it’s also a concern about the many in my shoes across the nation. The US is a nation of hard workers. As much as many would like to convince the wealthy that the under and middle classes are filled with lazy nine-to-fivers eager to extend a lunch break and slip out early, the reality is quite different. Those in unions are there to protect themselves from the greedy CEOs eager to pay themselves more than a thousand times what the lowest paid in their company earns.

I know that I started work as a twenty hour a week babysitter for four children on my block when I was eleven years old. I quickly graduated to working for several families every day after school, evenings and every weekend. My first job paid fifty cents an hour but I was soon making seventy-five cents and when it bumped to a dollar an hour I thought I was rich. I could buy a pair of designer jeans! I could also quickly figure out that buying designer jeans was a poor use of hard-earned money.

In high school, I graduated to the highly paid ranks of the fast food industry, earning a grand total of $3.50 an hour. I discovered that, as with babysitting, showing up on time and being consistent were things a boss appreciates. Unlike babysitting, my smile and Southern politeness worked in my favor. (The Southern politeness did not arise from actual life in the South. Instead, it’s a result of my father’s influence—there was a time I would say ma'am to three year olds. As a good friend pointed out the one time I did live in the South, that politeness is a pretty foil for the actual sting—you can say the most awful thing about anyone, as long as you follow up with ‘bless her heart.’)

In college I worked three part-time jobs to meet expenses my parents could never have met and that my financial aid package did not come close to covering—things like books, food, the phone bill, laundry quarters, you know, the non-essential essentials. I waited tables, sold ads in the newspaper, worked as a legal secretary, worked as a bookkeeper, in catering, in a wide plethora of jobs that all earned me a broad swath of experience that actually served me quite well.

My first ‘job,’ as in pay the rent and live on my own job, as in not a college part-timer or summer full-timer job, was also my first union job. I was a teacher. Guess what, teachers work pretty darned hard for their money. Guess what else, their salaries—though better now than when I started—are lower than they appear when you factor in the cost of pencils, paper, books, markers, chalk and other sundries that teachers, especially new teachers, tend to spend, you know, the non-essential essentials. Just because I was in a union did not mean I did not work hard. I found I loved teaching, especially in the situations most people fear. I loved the challenges and joys of working with urban youth. At the end of the day, I greatly admired the children I taught for the simple resilience they demonstrated in making it to school each day.

I’ve had a huge collection of jobs since then, each steadily paying more than the last. Each job required successively more hours and energy to complete and provided less satisfaction, beyond the paycheck. Though I stayed in education, I found myself further and further from children and the issues more centered on how to keep adults happy than on how to keep the kids learning. It was frustrating. Now that I have had the chance to step back, I do know I never want to go back to what I was doing. I either want to return to a job closer to children (which, paradoxically, means a LOT less money) or to a job outside the mainstream providing alternative opportunities for children, or something outside education all together. Why not take this opportunity to pursue the writing career I’d always wanted (maybe because what people will pay and are paying me to write is much less fun than the fiction I write on my own) or the legal career (maybe because it’s hard to pay a mortgage and return to law school). So, I’m in a quandary about my next steps but I’m also gloriously happy with the time I have to reflect on it all.

Yes, the fear of how to pay the bills will keep me searching for a job to pay those bills. That fear is one that drives millions across this country to keep searching and to keep hoping that Obama’s stimulus plan will have some job hopes for them. The bright side, he can’t do worse than W. The darker side, as with WWII’s “how’re you going to get them back on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” The question President Obama might consider now is, “how’re you going to bring them back to the rat race after they’ve seen their families, homes, hopes and opportunities?” I think the many in America who have had a rare opportunity to spend time with children, to linger over making dinner, to spend time reading or canning or walking in the park are finding that these time-consuming activities hold a real value. While all of these people are hard working folk fallen on really scary tough times, they are also bringing to their job searches an awareness that there is more to a job than a paycheck and more to life than hours at the office. Hopefully that will translate into more work-from-home opportunities (better for the environment) and more realistic job expectations (what’s so wrong with an eight hour day that really is eight hours?). A job that offers time for a life beyond the office but will still pay the mortgage, you know, one of the non-essential essentials.

You can never have all three

Several years ago, when I was living in New York, a friend gave me a great piece of advice. “New York is a tough city,” she told me, and she should have known, working in theater. “There are three things everyone needs to find, keep and try to balance here: a relationship, a job and an apartment. New York is a city in which you can never have all three work out well.” If you change apartment to apartment/condo/house/living space and relationship to relationship/family, then I think her advice regarding New York can be applied to life lived almost anywhere. Balancing these three aspects of a life are never easy and the three are rarely all working well at once.

A year ago I had started a job that required long, long days and many weekends. I was working in a setting so rife with political turmoil, gossip mongering and backbiting that would have impressed Machiavelli. The people I worked with ranged from supportive and helpful (generally those in other departments) to manipulative and craftily cruel to harassers in every possible form. However, I truly believed that what I was doing mattered and thus the difficult, then challenging, then miserable setting was a necessary cost. However, I did not notice the other costs, as they crept up on me. In changing jobs, I had gone from a job with colleagues that I generally respected and adored to one that was much less socially and personally attractive—though there was a pay raise which was the main reason I took it. However, the new job also required that I move, becoming a resident of the hiring city. Thus, I moved from a gorgeous, custom decorated condominium to a distressingly pathetic, dark, dank, city apartment. Add to the above the eighteen hour work days and also work on weekends and suffice it to say that my social life and health suffered. I was able to squeeze in a few dates with some potential men, but unable to maintain any of the connections due to work hours. I also stopped regularly attending my gym. So, you would think when I left that job I would have been ecstatic. . .

BUT, I was also a workaholic for a reason. I had grown up without a clear sense of financial security as my parents had the financial acumen of Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic protagonist, but without her fashionable taste. I had always known that I needed to make enough to support myself as I would never be able to rely on anyone else to support me,. I learned that lesson through supporting my parents through their many economic debacles, thus I could not rely on them, and through watching my mother become mad and miserly trying to supplement the family income without ever working to simply support herself. Needless to say, my parents are now divorced. Suffice it to say, I had always considered work the one constant and necessity in my life—that other aspects like shelter and relationships were relatively superfluous.

Leaving that job without another lined up, and leaving in the midst of a huge economic disaster that I did not foresee, has forced me to re-examine my thinking. The good news—I am in a relationship that, while not perfect (is there such a thing?) is fairing well and I have moved into a condo that I like if not adore. The bad news, the job I have secured does not become full-time (though it is the closest thing to a ‘perfect job’ I could imagine) until one fully year after I left my last job and it’s in another state, halfway across the country. So much for the condo and relationship.

Given all the queasy ups and downs of this past year, what has helped me keep my sanity? Well, there is far more time for exercise, rest, reflection, volunteering (I’ve rejoined several boards), and cooking. The most important support, though, I found circuitously when I joined a group of writers participating in the National Novel Writers Month of November. There were two groups that met, one in the morning and one in the evenings. The evening group quickly filled and was more than half male—rare for a group of writers. The morning group was all female and most of us were in varying stages of ‘underemployed.’ The only exceptions were the retired women, whom we all envied until the recession caught up with their retirement accounts.

Well, November ended and we had each met the requisite 50,000 words required by the contest rules. However, through general acknowledgement amongst ourselves at our last meeting, we all agreed we were in varying stages of not done or in desperate need of editing. A group of four of us, about a third of the original morning writing group, agreed to meet once per week to share work, bring critiques, write, participate in writing exercises, and to generally support each other in the writing process. Thus, regardless of how my week goes, I find myself with at least one appointment weekly that I make regardless—the writing group. There is something wonderful about meeting with a group of women regularly with a convenient ‘excuse’ that makes the meeting appear ‘official’ rather than ‘frivolous.’

The way I spend my days has changed rather radically. I am ashamed to admit that I am definitely less efficient—often taking all day to finish tasks that I used to finish in hours. However, I am definitely happier, and definitely less financially solvent, though I have yet to hit bottom, thank someone up there. What I have discovered is that it is my new women friends that seem to help me survive the difficult days and the relationship that helps me sustain a positive outlook. Yes, I have the consulting for the new job (in hopes of keeping me through the off year they are throwing some work my way) and the writing. But it is the people in my life that keep me going. The one thing missing on my friends’ list, likely missing because it is less challenging to find and sustain, the network of one’s women friends.