@weeklyblogpost - Dream Job

Here goes my @weeklyblogpost on dream jobs.  (I think I still owe a blog on education and I'm excited to see what the new blog for this week will be.)

Since I can't tell you exactly what I want to do, here's some of the things I'd like to see out of my dream job or, since I have diverse interests and abilities, dream jobs that I would weave together the way that actors now all have clothing lines and such.

-Be creative and entrepreneurial.

-Be able to work from home sometimes and/or be able to have my dog at my workplace with me.

-Have vacation time in the quantity that Europeans get it.  (I know that my two weeks vacation is pretty decent for America but everybody else in the Western world probably finds it justifiably laughable.)

-Have a flexible (non 9-5) work schedule.  This could look like writing from home with breaks for yoga classes and going to my (future) kids' games and recitals or working a number of weeks or months on a film or theatrical production and then having time off.  

Part of the problem is that it's hard to know what jobs exist.  It would be great if there were some system where you input your talents and interests and it listed all sorts of jobs that maybe you never heard of but would love to have.  This doesn't exist at the moment and the one test like this I took in high school included mortician and grain elevator operator in things I might like.  I've seen Cosmo quizzes that were more relevant.  One thing that definitely appeals to me is movie producer because it involves a creative industry and would be served by my joy of networking and bringing people together on a team.  I don't think it's an exact fit or, if it's something I did that I'd do exclusively but it's something I'm considering and would probably fill a lot of my criteria.

@weeklyblogpost - Grid

(Better late than never.)

I think about grids, about living on them, about living off them, and about the Taoist notion that there is no paradox.  (A copy of the Tao Te Ching would be handy here for a brief quote, but alas, I've given away every copy I've ever purchased.  I'm sure I should get another, if only to have it at the ready to pass on yet again.)  Here are the grids I'm thinking about: city streets, life plans, connectivity to electricity and water, and connection to western capitalist life in general.  I'll just stick with the first two for now lest I get especially long winded, but remind me, dear reader, to address the others at some later time.

Here's one of the primary things I love about cities: they are largely laid out as grids.  By orienting myself to a few major streets I can secondarily orient myself to the four major directions on a compass and, even with only a vague concept of where I'm going in relation to where I am, set off confidently in a direction.  If you told me to meet you at 23rd and Tasker I definitely would not have any concept of the specific distance from where I'm sitting right now but I could get there without pausing to consult a map. 

 If, on the other hand, you told me you were anywhere in Fishtown I would envision myself panicking at a series of five way intersections of streets that run with no particular regard for cardinal direction.  Even worse is being somewhere that order is typically expected and then removing it.  To wit, nothing freaks me out faster than Passyunk Ave; it runs through the grid and, if it at least did so on a 45 degree angle I could (maybe) handle it.  It doesn't and I can't.  

Life is invariably more complicated than traffic and road design, and I grew up in Jersey's circles and jughandles so that's saying something about life.  Unlike my walks through the city, I prefer my walk through life to be without such a rigid path.  To continue the city-walk-as-life metaphor this is what it would look like for me: meandering into random homes and buidlings to take in the architecture.  Taking up residence for a month or a year if there were people there with interesting things to teach me.  If buildings didn't look interesting enough to enter and the block seemed to walk around, I might scale them just for a lark.  Why not?

Anytime I've tried to live my life on a logical grid I get drawn off into some more interesting cu-de-sac or labryinth or wooded path instead.  Instead of trying to find a role model who could show me what it looked like to be an artist in a sustainible way, I tried my parent's theory on going to college to get a degree that paid.  The big compromise was going for bio/secondary ed so that I could have a job that allowed me three months off to write.  They weren't happy that I was going to enter such a low paying profession (never mind that my dad is a techer) but it was better than going for English or even Enlish/educations since science and math teachers were and probably are in higher demand.  

As a result I never finished school because I showed up to classes that I hated and I failed them.  I did, however, get consistently high grades in courses such as Contemporary Moral Issues, Art History of Southesat Asia, Global Women Writers and Women and Health:  Power Politics and Change.  I love learning for the sake of learning and I love the intersections I find in seeminly unrelated subjects.  I like looking at veganism through the lens of radical feminist theory and I the Tao Te Ching really helped me understand nutrition, politics, yoga and quantum physics.  I could get a degree where each class logically followed the next and the right series of degree(s), internships and certifications yielded a predictable and profitable career.  I'm glad that lots of people do.  I don't want to, and I've stopped trying.  First of all, none of the destinations seem all that appealing to me.  Secondly, as mentioned in my first post on transit, I think it's all in the journey anyway and that every destination is really just a pit stop, at least for me.  I'll keep on keeping on with my bumbling life path, looking for the transcendtal connection betwen baseball, the Bronte sisters and Panck's constant.

What I'm learning is to meld the two ways of being.  I am walking boldly forward without any idea as to where that will take me.  I will not stop to jusitfy working 16 hour days on film sets with a burrito for payment or tell you how the networking I do there will eventually get me paid.  I don't know how it will.  It might or might not.  I don't know and I don't care.  What I know is that I feel more alive when I'm around the energy of creation that at any other time.  I do not think that getting a degree in art history would be a waste of time if I passed up a steady museum job to be a yoga instructor and freelance photographer anyway.  Just because I'm smart enough to get a degree and use it doesn't mean I should.  I'm going places I love and that doesn't need to satisfy andybody's value system but my own.  I can be happy for you on the grid as long as you can be happy for me meadering through corn fields and meadows.

@weeklyblogpost - Muse

I am inspired by artists who surprise us by leaving their messages of hope, beauty, frustration and anguish all around the city for me to find.

Sometimes they exist in communities like The Tiberino Museum in Powelton Village.

Other times they reclaim an area of urban decay.

Artists embolden me to speak my own truth, and to do so from a place of unconditional love.

Most amazing of all, when I need a kick in the ass they can sense it and they chalk my office building.

@weeklyblogpost - Transit

When I saw @stellargirl tweet about@weeklyblogpost I knew that my excuse for not regularly blogging had come to an end.  It is true that this blog was due a week ago yesterday and that, having moved the due dates to Sundays, that I will be turning in my "Muse" themed blog later today.  That's fine.  Whatever keeps me writing.

Beyond those blog assignments I intend for this blog to be a repository for sharing any experiences and thoughts that I feel speak to shared human experience. I could limit myself to being a vegan or health care or LGBT or film blog, but limits are stifling and I have to a lot to say.  At the moment, we're here to discuss transit.

The obvious route, city boy and SEPTA enthusiast that I am, would be to literally discuss mass transit.  Yes, I could get excited about it.  Ask me about that abandoned Franklin Square stop on the PATCO line some time and watch my face light up.  I read all about it on SEPTA's history page one day when work was slow and the khaki cubicle walls were pressing in on me. 

However, while the Broad Street Line isn't exactly interesting without end, the human condition is.  When I think about transit I think about myself my friends.  I think about the ways in which we are in transition.  We are transitioning careers, genders, marital statuses and street addresses.   It is exciting, frightening and heavy with risk; it is tantalizing with the possibility of reward.  This often seems as awkward and uncertain as our pubescent transition to sexual maturity but hopefully with greater wisdom and fewer breakouts.  

I don't personally know where I'm going.  I am a train departing 30th Street Station, bound for all destinations at once.  I'm trying a bit of everything.  I'm figuring out what makes me money, what makes me happy, what gets me laid.  I am busy wondering why I'm in debt, if film is the exact fit for my artistic and entrepreneurial interests, and if there is an herbal cure for a sexually transmitted intestinal parasite.  I  have stopped buying lunch at Whole Foods every day, I am working on sets, writing in a journal, starting a blog and just attended a social media conference with Jeff Pulver in NYC.  I took black walnut for two weeks and, yes, it killed the parasite.  I'm getting there, even if I don't know where that is.  

There are two ways to look at this (at least).  You can be transitioning between gears and for a (hopefully) brief time your bike pedals will spin furiously without engaging, without providing torque, without converting your energy into forward motion.  This is what I feel like when I answer phones and emails and coordinate surgeries and conferences that, in some vague sense, "help people."  Mostly these actions help earn other people and organizations tens of thousands of dollars *per day* while I earn little in monetary compensation or emotional or spiritual satisfaction.  At the moment all of my forward motion is derived from ancillary activities such as event designing for non-profit organizations or acting in indie shorts.

The second bit is interesting because it is not transition, but the actual act of transit.  It is not the road or the bike we pedal on it, but it is the journey itself.  It is engaging in the activities that challenge me intellectually, physically and spiritually.  It is pausing before rushing to defend the status quo.  It is moving purposefully in a direction.

I'm doing it without and without grace and dignity.  I like it.  This is gritty and exciting. Somewhere along the way I have realized that there is no destination, but only a series of refuelling stops on a journey that, if we're lucky, is engaging and uninterrupted from cradle to grave.  Any time we have stopped the journey we have fouled things up.  For example, if I got a degree in accounting (something, incidentally, that I could never do as I think numbers are somebody else's job) then the way I see it I would have two options: keep up the journey by finding challenge in growth within accounting or start taking a tap dancing class after I got done crunching numbers.  If I were an accountant who wasn't being challenged inside or outside of my career I would be reduced to living in just one dimension without growth in any direction.  When I'm a movie producer and entrepreuner I will certainly be studying astrophysics and art history on the side.

Transit is challenge, education and growth.  Transition is moving from one lesson to the next with all the beauty and strength that we can muster.