i was lying on the couch in the trailer at sauvies island listening to a sad, sad song when i realized that i had to quit my job. 13 hrs./day and 6 days/week, i decided, wasn't going to cut it.
it was a tough decision to make, so i slept on it. sometimes you gotta do that. i had this strange feeling that i was making a life-altering bad call, and at the same time i felt sure that quitting the job i had only just started would be best.
after the second night of sleeping on it, i was sure, if uneasy, that i needed to do something else with my time. i called the ceo and let him know i wasn't going out this season... and then i started free-falling into the uncertain world of recent college graduates with liberal arts degrees.
my first week as a jobless bloke found me applying for open positions like mad - at least six hours a day. i sent out a lot of applications, resumes, cover letters and references. as a seasonal landscaper/gardener/etc, i knew that the fact that i had so many temp jobs meant nothing. the work season is short here in oregon; once the rains hit, it's over.
i created a system for applying for jobs. my google docs account sprouted new documents - cover letters, first-contact emails and references were stored in a neat little row next to my newly-vamped-up resume and professional resume. i even kept an application log, which detailed each job, where i found it and the point in the application process which i had reached.
what kind of job do you get right out of college? i wanted something creative - not an easy task on today's job market. i also wanted to stay in the wilamette valley (talk about limited options!). the most limiting thing, however, was probably my attachment to certain ethical standards...
i have this theory that many people are trapped in jobs that they either hate or strongly dislike, doing things that the young idealist version of themselves would have punched them for. i know i am a young idealist, and i have quite different ideas about what is good for society/societies than many much more experienced people; however, i just couldn't imagine myself using my time and creativity in a way that helps to enlarge the financial means of a group of stock-holders at the direct expense of everyone and everything else.
why not work for a large corporation? i would likely end up drinking myself to death. i have seen too many folks going down that road - down into social alienation or depression. because i don't own any land, my only means of production is my physical body and what my hands can do. to place that in the hands of an institution would be a strange kind of suicide.
so i set out to find a job that wouldn't make me wish i wasn't living on this earth - and found one! i recently joined talino design's metroleta program as a writing and editing intern.
metroleta is a program which connects teachers to parents and other teachers and provides them with learning tools for free in a private online environment. ad revenues generated in other parts of the site (videos, articles and columns like mine) go to help elementary school teachers purchase school supplies and snack for their classrooms.
talino gave me one of the best interviews of my life, and i am very excited to be part of the team now. look for my new column on metroleta.com starting soon! : )
as ever,
joel
p.s. i also moved to corvallis and started working at the stables in trade for rent. you can check out happy trails riding center on facebook here.
amber and i graduated with our super nifty certificates of achievement (b.a., english) and launched ourselves into a brand new environment full of wonderful opportunities for learning, growth and personal development - homelessness.
we were actually a little more houseless than homeless. for almost two months we had friends, family, connections, a car and one and a half laptop computers... just not enough money for an apartment. we were also cows.
undeterred by our houselessness, we cows smile for the
camera with a famous plastic horsey.
if you'll recall part 1 of this story, amber and i had full-time jobs with a company that had just shifted our start date forward one month.
with no current job and no place to live, things changed very rapidly for us. we stopped thinking about papers that were due next week, and started thinking about where we were going to sleep that night. suddenly, there was no need to go clean the bathroom... instead we spent our time looking for a place to shower.
but with the lack of resources came a certain abundance of liberty. we were free to do whatever we wanted. the world was our sidewalk; here's what we did with it:
what to do with your houseless self (5 easy steps)
1. pick up some odd jobs
even for folks not paying rent someplace, food is still a need. it weighs heavily on the wallet. coffee, beer and gas can also be expensive. but, not not worry, you can offset these costs by working odd jobs. working on a job-to-job basis can be difficult to get the hang of. a couple of hints:
- craigslist.org has a site for most cities in the states. you can often pick up temporary gigs that require little to no experience in the general labor section under jobs. a more helpful, but perhaps less obvious place to look is the gigs section just below that. craigslist is extremely easy to navigate. the one drawback is that a large percentage of posts on there are scams; be careful.
- if you have attended any university or community college, they are likely to have a career center and a corresponding jobs site. i have sometimes picked up jobs from the lbcc job service in albany and uo joblink in eugene. many of these do not require special training or a college degree.
farm, yard work and weeding gardens kept us busy and sustained our finances while we waited for our brand new full-time jobs to start. sometimes we would...
2. crash with friends
in areas that you know people, staying on a friend's couch or floor at night can be a great way to get out of the weather and into some great conversations. amber and i did this on numerous occasions, though you may find that it's significantly easier to pull off in areas where you have lots of friends and/or family.
crashing with friends is also a great way to get to use a kitchen when you're houseless. you can get some grocery store food and cook a big meal for you and your hosts. suddenly, everyone's happy and your visit has been a help rather than a potential annoyance. make sure you do the dishes.
3. rice and beans
for
home cooks like amber and i, the transition to lacking access to a
kitchen was kind of difficult. living in a car, we'd often have to
resort to eating prepared food from a fast food restaurant. that can be
pretty nasty, and surprisingly expensive. to get around this, we started
getting rice and beans from baja fresh.
baja fresh offers rice and beans for $2 in many u.s. locations. when you add in complimentary chips and free salsa, you have enough food for 2-3 people at .75-$1 apiece. and we were full. this was a huge help.
4. become a carnie!
back to the getting-jobs-on-craigslist thing: amber and i were digging through sketchy little cl postings, and found a brilliant opportunity to join the carnival! she sold ride tickets and i handed out snow cones to little children.
working at the fair is a great way to make some cash and stay on your feet during houselessness adventures, but beware: there is a strong possibility that they will try to cheat you.
inconclusive proof that carnival fixtures are, indeed, strung together with paper clips.
5. sleep at community college
folks who are staying in rural or suburban areas have the opportunity of sleeping at their local community college. amber and i found this extremely entertaining. we had a safe and inexpensive (free) place to sleep, free and uncrowded showers (rec building), and plenty of peace and quiet - a nice contrast from the bustle of the streets. we even had 24-hour free internet access (courtesy of a friend with a student login).
sleeping at community college is a great way to have a safe base camp from which to venture into the world. thanks to recent budget cuts, the security team at your local community college may be too short-staffed to worry about courteous folk with bachelor's degrees sleeping in their woods and lawns. i would highly recommend this option for anyone who pays taxes.
so, there you have it. you now have some idea of what it takes to stay on your feet when you have no steady place to live. it's important to me to stay houseless, and not cross the line into homelessness... but that's another story. on to bigger and better things!
as ever,
joel
p.s. this may not be true, but definitely it's definitely classic:
what do you do after college? i started thinking about this exactly three days after graduation. kind of a weird time, really. all i wnated to do was be done, but then i graduated. and now this...
so i got a real job. i called a couple of times on the best lead i had (a friend's friend) and landed an extraordinarily well-paying position working a desk at various nuclear power facilities. this was the plan: move around from site to site staying in fancy condos for free and making bank doing paperwork 85 hours a week.
week one found amber and i commuting through portland suburb traffic. we were leaving her dad's house at 5:30 a.m only to weave and lurch our way through what the great mark bowser would call "traffic drama."
the training was supposed to take us four days, afterwhich we were to be immediately shipped out to the southeast for on-site experience training. we worked hard and took notes. as soon as we finished, we were offered the opportunity of a lifetime: a golden job in the middle of the seemingly inevitable recession that has ravaged a good number of the world's economies. it had one catch - it didn't start for a month.
so what do you do when your graduate from college? we were just finding out...
here's one thing i've been thinking about: separation.
separateness, like separation of church and state or separation of curds and whey is a conceptual divider that serves to define both entities that it stands between and establish their boundaries.
sometimes the difference between two things is visual, like the separation of sea and shore seen here:
other times, however, things may not be so clean-cut. sometimes
differences boil down to words; the separation between to a simple
linguistic splitoftentimes the only difference between things is their purpose, as indicated by the linguistic designators by which we refer to them:
i guess this second kind of separation leaves room for a lot of shifting when it comes to talking about objects in the world. one man's trash is another man's treasure is another man's recycling. how do we decide who's right?
maybe the way that we talk about things really depends on what we want to see in the world. some people want to recycle bottles, and others don't really see the point. but the way we describe things definitely has a serious effect on what we do in the world.
what about the united states? what kind of separations can we talk about here?
i guess the popular ones are separation of church and state, separation of business and pleasure and separation of texas from everything else (funny story about that)...
but i don't hear much about the separation between government and people. and this might be because, in america, we are supposed to have "government of the people, by the people, for the people." (lincoln)
the lack of separation between government and people is what a lot of people (me included) idealize. but is that what's really happening? it depends on how you look at it.
the u.s. government is comprised of a group of offices that uses $3,830,000,000,000 per year to build things, buy things, sell things and in some cases take over entire countries. sometimes governmental departments take their orders from a group of wealthy elected officials and sometimes they simply act on their own.
sure, we make decisions through our senators and representatives, but doesn't the u.s. government answer to us? doesn't it represent us, the people born within the borders of the u.s.? aren't we the real u.s.?
maybe not. a lot of things are really out o the hands of the people living here. for instance, take a look at this proposed discretionary budget for 2011:
proposed u.s. discretionary budget 2011 (source: costofwar.com)
though almost everyone i've talked to (liberal and conservative and otherwise) wants to rein in government spending and end the wars abroad, congress and the president saw increases in military spending as the top priority for last year's budget. they want more spent on it than everything else combined.
what this says to me is that the government of the u.s. is not the same thing as the people of the u.s. if it were, maybe people everywhere would start seeing the money that we pay in taxes go to things they support instead of things they oppose. that would be nice, wouldn't it?
as ever,
joel
p.s. you may want to read about trapwire, an "anti-terrorism" system the u.s. government set up that uses use facial recognition software to track people in public places. here's a recent article about it that appeared in russia today: http://bit.ly/NPkL8k
what do you do in asheville, north carolina? we were hard-pressed for answers when we rolled off the interstate early one morning after a less-than-restful night sleeping in a field. we had little money, and what everyone regarded as the only hostel wanted $30 per head minimum. where would we sleep? we decided to drink some coffee...
this is sort of how i look before i drink coffee.
... and then we met some nice people on the street. we decided to stick with this town, not staying anywhere formally instead, we slept in the car and at least one storage shed (shhh). that left us free to spend what little money we had where our heart was: pizza.
in case you're wondering, barley's is about as good as it gets (and not too spendy either). we got pizza for $4 apiece that blew our minds into oblivion and back! but before that we saw this kid:
jonathan, a fellow traveller, showed us
his strange instrument of wonder!
everyone told us about asheville's beer, and how nice a town it was. when we told them we were from oregon, they insisted that all their friends said they would fit right in in portland. and indeed asheville is much like portland, with a few key differences.
key disparities between asheville and portland:
1. the houseless population is low and/or in hiding.
2. even the hip folk say 'y'all.'
3. our beer is better. we had a chance to test this:
if you do, for any reason, need to check for yourself whether "beer city, usa" lives up to its name, you need to check out a couple of brews that will render you sockless. (beer is about $3/ pint if you do it right folks)
3rd place fire escape pale ale (asheville pizza and brewing co.) --> has actual jalepenos in it!!! brilliant flavor, if a little light for my taste. 2nd place shiva ipa (asheville pizza and brewing co.) --> description insists "shiva will destroy all your preconceptions of ipa" well done! bitter has never tasted so entrancingly great! 1st place kashmir ipa (highland brewing company) --> rich and incredibly chill. this beer is the richest brew on asheville's side of the rockies (ninkasilove forever!).
baby, it's no place for you and me
- bergquist/detweiler
i could hear the silvery poetry dripping slowly off the lips of karin bergquist from just the other side of the trees. she slipped through line after line of anecdotal evidences of the "the holy ghost haunting" that is poetry, is travel, is life. it's her smooth and effortless tone that makes me feel as if she is mystical... or happy... or else always stoned.
there isn't much more beautiful than over the rhine, i thought from my perch atop the dumpster. i pulled another garbage bag off the truck and swung it into the mass of rotting rubbish below. surely this is the junkyard of love...
musician david crowder and his beard
on the mainstage at wild goose. photo: susi sahlman
and in fact i heard snatches of two great acts while emptying trash cans and filling up the portable landfill just behind the trees form the main stage at wild goose festival. aaron weiss, who sings for the folk band mewithoutyou played a set at the open mic with joyful jam-band the collection. brilliant stuff, from what i gathered.
i actually caught the end of the over the rhine show with some friends. there i ran into aaron weiss, and got to tell him that i loved his music earlier. no big deal. wild goose is one of those places where the universe converges in very beneficial ways for eating and drinking and conversation, where the next person you meet might be a famous speaker or an up-and-coming author.
the wild goose festival, which organizers say was influenced by hits such as greenbelt, sxsw and burning man, seeks to unite the christian left (and a bit of the not-so-christian left) together in a healing and empowering yearly event. a dual focus on art and theology functions for festival-goers as little more than a pretext for hugs and dance parties... for sharing food and staying up late together... for beer and hymns, and then more beer (and then more hymns).
what is unique about wild goose is its safe and loving atmosphere; its a place committed to caring for those deeply hurt by the harsh environments that are shaping so many in their everyday lives. for once, they find a place of safety and freedom. for some, the goose is the only safe family they know.
for me, the goose is a reminder of who i am; it's an environment in which i don't have to pretend to be secure or confident just to be accepted and loved. and for that, i am grateful.
oh, and...
corvallis folk: check out the wild goose happening at benton county fairgrounds august 31-september 2.
