Right now I am feeling very glad that this space exists. I don’t have to pray for the rain. I have stuff I want to tell you. <\/p>\n
It’s very early on the 12th. I thought for sure I’d be asleep now readying myself for the unwelcome return to wage slavery. Instead … well, I didn’t find myself a way out of that slavery yet, but I have found a powerful antidote to some of the fearhate. Maybe two antidotes.<\/p>\n
In the previous edition of the Spill, one of the most important posts was about a sort of epiphanic moment I had in my driveway up north. It came during the worst of the hell I was getting from my employer there, when things were beginning to look untenable.<\/p>\n
I stood in the middle of the concrete slab and I whispered to myself that I wasn’t the Professor any more, but only just the mannish boy I’d always been, free of the constraints and bereft of the advantages; that this academic part of my life was over. <\/p>\n
In the end though, when it all fell apart and I needed something fast, what I found was another prof job. It was just as bad really, and so after a year of it I found a third prof job, in this prettier place. Which I have now performed for yet another year, and am poised this very day to move forward with for another still. <\/p>\n
I should have listened better to myself, sooner, but there will be no self-beating about that tonight. <\/p>\n
The problem with Professing is two-fold. First, no one gives a shit about a real education anymore, least of all the people who administer colleges. I could go on and on about it, but I won’t. The entire point of college now, almost everyone on the inside agrees, is getting those kids nice safe white-collar jobs that pay a lot. Whether they have the ability to think rationally or feel genuinely has no place in the discourse. Thus, the pride I once felt in the mission has eroded away to nothing. <\/p>\n
Second, the pay is a joke. With two Master’s degrees under my belt, I make what a cop makes. I make less than a similarly qualified K-12 teacher makes (because they organized politically and got a fat raise to a living wage–god bless them for it). I can’t afford to do this charity work any more in the last few years running up to my retirement, and I especially<\/em> can’t afford it for a charity whose mission isn’t aligned with my own values anymore. <\/p>\n (Big edit, cutting to the chase)<\/p>\n I finally started looking into real practical alternatives instead of sleeping tonight and I immediately stumbled over a ‘governmentjobs’ site that piles up a great big chunk of the possibilities in one place. I looked a bunch of them over. <\/p>\n I learned that I could make the same money doing ‘desktop support’ (a very low level job) for a suburb. I learned that an ‘Educational Specialist’ for the elections board of a county would be a big step up in pay. Among five or six interesting examples drawn from a selection of preferred zip codes, and for which I’d easily qualify.<\/p>\n There wasn’t anything that made me leap with delight and throw down an application this minute. But there were a whole lot of maybes that were nothing near the kinds of things I’ve been considering–and we are at the very beginning of the year. <\/p>\n I am cautiously but genuinely stoked by the options, and made happy by the prospect of digging deeper (the practice of it, like I did tonight) and settling into a rhythm of regular applying. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt that, or anything like it really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Right now I am feeling very glad that this space exists. I don’t have to pray for the rain. I have stuff I want to tell you. It’s very early on the 12th. I thought for sure I’d be asleep now readying myself for the unwelcome return to wage slavery. Instead … well, I didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":447,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}