21.3.10

unemployment is the new black

loved the article i read in time magazine this week - 'the dropout economy' by reinan salam. i read it and felt even farther tapped in to what has been going on for me since my arrival back in the states. something that has been brewing in my mind for quite a long time, but is now starting to surface as more real than imagined.

salam talked about how more and more young people in the us are opting out of education, jobs, and the taxable economy. his vision of the future is one of intentional communities, barter systems, virtual classrooms, and a throwback to traditional agriculture. these subcultures are simultaneously local and global, traditional and modern.

they are the very things that i am seeing throughout my life and the lives of my friends. people are heading to the wilds to homestead, staying home to create photography or life coaching businesses, and keeping their kids home to attend online high schools. at wintercount there seemed to be more and more apprenticeships offered for people to learn self-sufficiency. friends' parents are become steadfast to the slow foods movement, shopping mostly at farmers' markets.

if you know me well you know that i am constantly balancing between this world and the mainstream. i struggle with issues of ego that push me to value my experiences and situation on a more conventional scale. at the same time i long to live outside of the chorus that presses me to seek the higher paying job or prestigious degree. it's why i came to the utah desert - to opt out of the 'what's next' phenomenon that i followed blindly through two college degrees and into a closet full of pants suits i tried not to wear. i say this not to dis this way of life, but simply to demonstrate that though for several years i wondered if it was for me, i stayed in it because i felt i had to.

it was a huge deal for me to work in the desert of utah with troubled teens. i took a big pay cut and derailed my career plans. i took phone calls and emails for the first six months or so from people in the student affairs field who thought that tossing job opportunities my way might coax me out of my quixotic journey. i lived in my car and in the basement at aspen.

i loved it.

four years later i sit where the end of my fourth year intersects with my thirtieth birthday. i have spent the past 5 months traveling, reflecting, playing, learning, and enjoying being essentially unemployed. it was a very scary thing for me to decide to take off this past winter. i'd really not been without work since i started taking part-time jobs in middle school. i left aspen knowing i was giving up the job and situation i had built over three years. it was the ultimate in letting go.

getting back into things i realize that i am forever changed by that decision. it slid me farther down the slope i'd been on for years - since my third year at wsu when i switched from pantsuits to cords and sweaters despite the professional warnings of colleagues. when i did that i thought i was a rebel. i was in a way. it was a step away from established ways of being. as i read about postmodern thought and toyed with the romantic idea of subverting existing paradigms i did not realize that i had already started to do so in my own goody-two-shoes way.

so what now? well...i think on the salam article with excitement as it unveils ways of being that i dream about. i want to homestead. i want to work for myself. i want to hunt and grow my own food. i want to live off the grid. i find myself thinking about how i can work less and less in a conventional job and more and more in my own sphere. i want to help people. i want to be involved in a community that is local and global, traditional and technological. i don't know how this is going to pan out, but i also don't need to know. instead i keep dreaming and thinking and subverting and waiting. though i have done some work i am still what the census bureau deems unemployed. oddly enough in the midst of all this opting out i made for damn sure i was counted.

i guess i am still teetering in my own way.

3.3.10

30 rocks

been doing some thinking...of course i have - i was in the field.

when you are in the field things are slow. i appreciated that considering that upon my arrival back in the states things are feeling more like warp speed. the only slow time i got before returning to the utah desert was the three days i spent in bed with bronchitis...and those days went by fast from my perspective, being asleep and all. so it was nice to hop into a truck and drive out to where life moves in the circle of the sun, and everything takes time.

in the midst of making a set of spindles to match my set of defiant girls i let my mind wander, as it has a tendency to do. i came upon a memory from the day before in which one of my students asked me my age. usually when a new staff goes into the field an "intro group" is held in which we all rattle off a series of predetermined bits of personal information - one of these being your age. i generally go out of my way to avoid doing these groups. i prefer to get information from my students by chatting them up rather than watching them zone out to the point of drooling while they hear their group-mates intone the same schtick that they did last week. as a result i had not shared my age with my students.

it is interesting to note that teenagers have no concept of age or time. most see the world as a series of things that are either "cool" (read - around my age) or "old" (read - around my parents' age). my boyfriend has a great tale to illustrate this. in a conversation about bob dylan, the beatles, and the doors, one kid stated to him "wow - music was so good when you were kids." he's 31, and that happened in 2009.

i used to amuse myself by answering the question "how old are you?" with a question of my own, "how old do you think i am?" eventually i got tired of kids telling me i looked about forty...not because i harbor some vanity about my looks, but simply because this kind of assertion is so pathetically unobservant that it pains me. i moved on to simply stating my age as it is and leaving it at that.

so i surprised myself when i answered "i will be 30 in may," instead of claiming my current age of 29.

i wondered why i did this. in the end i came up with a couple of reasons. first, being born in 1980, i generally align my age with the last digit of the year. once the year turns over i start thinking like i have already aged accordingly. i also will find that because at the new year i am more than halfway to my next age that i start thinking of myself as older. perhaps i did it out of wishful thinking while growing up and just never got out of the habit. i also could have done it because there is more shock value in being 30, and it got me the answer "really? you don't look 30," (be still my vain vain heart). i also considered that i abhor the cliche of the woman who always says she is 29. ever since i hit that overused age i have been avoiding telling people for fear they will not actually believe me.

but really i think that the reason i answered that i was going to be 30 was that i have been anticipating what that will mean for some time now. i know that there are lots of women out there who fear aging and are unhappy about a 3 at the start of their age instead of a 2, but i do not fall into that category. instead i have been looking forward to leaving the world of twenty-somethings and being, what seems to me, more substantial.

not that i think that simply changing a number associated with my time on earth makes me wiser or better or stronger. indeed there is little change in going to sleep one number and waking up another. however, the prospect of turning 30 has led me to reflect on my life and who i am growing to be. it seems an accomplishment to make it this far and to look back down the path behind me. i can see all the experiences and epiphanies - the things that make me, me. it feels good to look at all that and feel happy with where i am in life. though i know that i can do that at any moment, i think that completing a three-decades long trip around the sun lends itself to introspection.

of course, the saturn return helps...

though i still have a couple of months until i am thirty in any place more than my mind, i am glad to have this period of thought and self-searching. i feel like i am seeking to embrace a new era in my life. i wonder what will come of it.