July 10-18, 2023
A summer directive – Discussing:
Part I – Work
Q – Of your everyday activities, what do you define as “work”? In your mind, what differentiates “work” from other activities? (For instance, you may or may not think of unpaid activities such as housekeeping or caregiving as work. Let us know your ideas about what counts as work.)
A – I hate how hokey that old chestnut is – “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” – But I really see the wisdom in it. I have so much energy to put into things that I care about, and absolutely zero energy for things that I don’t. I have a very bad taste for the word “work”. To me, work is something that you have to put time and energy into that you have no real passion for in and of itself: things you do merely to keep the car insurance paid, etc. The empty & joyless labor vs. the rewarding and fulfilling labor. Luckily I love my career field, and I never feel like I go there only to keep food on the table. I know this is not the case for so many people out there, and I really pity them. I recently was in Detroit, and I went to Third Man Records. There, they press vinyl. You can go back there and watch the workers creating albums that they sell in-house. It is a VERY specific type of job, but you could really sense the joy in the room for being able to do this work for society. I sincerely wish that everyone could spend their time and energy on things they love, and offer it to the world so that we may all benefit from it. As far as “off-the-clock” things go, I HATE laundry – I detest having to put away clothes. I can’t tell you how many times I pull something off of a basket of clean clothes to wear to work in the morning. And cooking – I do not get joy out of spending an hour and a half in the kitchen, working to prepare food that I will just eat in 10 minutes. My evenings away from the job are so short as it is, I refuse to spend ? of my free time on a weekday evening preparing food. I do, however, feel very good after cleaning up around the house, so I don’t see where that is “work”.
Q – With this open definition in mind, what is the role of work on an ordinary day for you? (If you wish, describe the work you do on a typical day.)
A – As I said, I do not consider my job to be real “work” (but it is definitely a necessary endeavor for the community. I respect the job and my chosen field, and put a lot of energy into it), but there are some trying parts to it – namely, dealing with completely checked-out upper management that have no idea how things downstairs really work. Also, a couple of them can be quite homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, fatphobic, ageist, classist, or racist. We have heard through the grapevine that in 2024, 2-3 very high-ranking people will be retiring, and the company will be so much the better for it. Knowing the people who might-well fill those vacancies, it will create a much safer, accepting, and less emotionally-laborious work environment.
Q – How do you feel about your work?
A – I am more than happy to do it. I will not waste my time and energy on empty pursuits. I did that enough in college and grad school – working a number of retail positions so that I could afford my apartment. I paid my dues there – I am now lucky enough to be able to move beyond that. I always need that next rung up the ladder, and 2024 is looking like it holds some promise for me to work towards.
Part II – Online Life
Q – What roles does online activity play in your daily life?
A – Most things in life are accomplished online, so I do spend a good deal of time with direct access to the web (carrying around your phone guarantees that). Banking, person-to-person communication, news, weather, entertainment, research – it all requires an internet connection. I still don’t have much use for tiktok though.
Q – Discuss briefly the extent and the ways in which you do the following online:
Work
A – I try to maintain a very concrete work/life balance. While I have access to work email and work Zoom accounts, I try very hard to not ever use them when I am not in the building. Work-from-home is not much of a possibility, given the service nature my position can have. There has been some issue with my staff trying to contact me while I am having time off, and this has been an ongoing conversation with them.
Play
A – Our weekly Dungeons and Dragons games are played in the Roll20 tool. We are in-person, but we each bring laptops and go to the game site. I also play some games on my Playstation5, but really I find that an hour or so of that and I am ready to move on to something else. I used to do this cheezy little phone game – something about shooting blocks with a series of small balls – but I realized I was using this as a fidget toy and it was kind of starting to take over my life. I’d be mindlessly doing it all the time, wherever I was, and I was starting to annoy both myself and people around me. So I deleted it. I occasionally play disc golf with friends, and I track those rounds with an app that lists all local courses, and my game history. Google Fit monitors how much physical activity I don’t do.
Socialize
A – I communicate with people via Facebook messenger more than any other kind of method, although I am findling out that this is odd for some people, since most folks around me usually text instead. I believe I am looked at as being old for relying on Facebook so much – but then again I am 45 and I am inevitably the oldest person in my friends group, who range in age from 25-early 40s. I also now, since my separation, have begun dabbling half-heartedly with various dating tools. I get a decent amount of attention there, but it’s honestly something I’m not really looking for right now, and I constantly think I should just remove those from my phone. I keep thinking maybe a random hookup would be fun, but I never follow through.
Seek information
A – I always have some random question in my head, and I am constantly asking Google for things, like where the closest National Park is, or how long a fresh gallon of milk can sit in a car on the way home before it goes bad, etc. It’s just the sort of thing most people can do. I took classes in online searching and evaluation of online information as part of my grad degree, so I dare say I’m pretty good at finding thorough results quickly.
Seek entertainment
A – checking movie times, seeing what live music is playing nearby, buying baseball tickets, booking hotel/travel, looking for local events – that is the sort of thing I do lately. I am trying to have more experiential entertainment nowadays, what with my finally emerging from my pandemic/relationship/job depression of the first 3 years of this decade. As such, most entertainment I try and do is slightly larger-scale, out-of-doors, or out-of-town. I remember the other day at work, we were talking about what there is here downtown in Muncie, and what is going on locally, and a co-worker mentioned to me “I couldn’t really tell you; most stuff I do for fun is out of town”. I had to agree – everything I have done of value this year hasn’t even been in the state of Indiana. But on the daily, I find myself watching a lot of Youtube – I realized that I don’t actually watch much in the way of proper TV shows, but I can sit here for a whole night watching some Epicurious video, where a lady is showing you how to slice every fruit known to man.
Engage in other activities
A – I am thinking about this, and what else that would entail. Occasional shopping – especially grocery shopping. If the pandemic has taught me one thing, it is that I will never roam down aisles in a grocery store again.
Q – How do you feel about the time you spend online?
A – Technology is neither good nor bad – it is a tool in the hands of good or bad people, and I try to make it good, and as worth my time as I can. Time is important to me here of late, and I’d rather not waste any.