Category Archives: Soapbox

It’s all so fucking TWEE, though, the shit people believe

Soapbox

In which blah blah Facebook blah.

Somebody from Fairfield posted this on Facebook:

And I wrote this in response, but didn’t post it. Because why bother.

Counterpoint: There is no good reason to shame people who need pharmaceutical antidepressants. Those meds save lives.

Humans suffering from mental health disorders do not need to hear that their meds are bad and what they REALLY need is… a drum circle? Seriously? It’s like telling someone with cancer that all they need is a good attitude. It’s judgemental, unloving, and ignorant.

People with serious illnesses need drugs to survive. Diseases like depression and cancer are NOT the sufferer’s fault, and these diseases can’t be treated with positivity alone. That’s why we invented drugs in the first place!

Are drugs side-effect free? No. Are they perfect? Also no. But do they save human lives? Yes, they absolutely do.

Sorry for the soapboxing, but I know a lot of humans on psych meds who don’t need to be shamed about it.

You’re not a skeptic, for fuck’s sake, you’re anti-vaxx

Health, Soapbox

In which I know they can’t be persuaded until they’re ready so I’m not bothering to post this on Facebook, where I wrote it in response to someone’s anti-vaxx post, but I didn’t want to delete it.

The risks of being exposed to diseases are known, and they are horrible.

The risks of vaccination are vanishingly low, verging on non-existent outside of allergies or contamination (generally associated with lack of refrigeration).

We have decade upon decade upon decade of proof that vaccines are both safe and effective. Vaccines truly are one of the best things humanity has ever invented! They’re amazing and wonderful and gorgeous! Vaccines have saved millions of humans from disease, disability, and death! Unlike so much of the shitshow that is modern life, VACCINES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH CELEBRATING.

We know that vaccines do not cause autism. We know they do not cause “immune disorders” (this term is vague and medically meaningless). We do know they prevent disease and that they save lives.

To be a vaccine “skeptic” — without actually being an epidemiologist or biologist or in some way genuinely qualified to meaningfully contribute to the science — is to be anti-vaccine.

And to be anti-vaccine is to actively contribute to disease and death. Full stop. You don’t get your shots, you don’t get your kids their shots, you encourage others not to get their shots, and then we get ants. No, sorry, not ants: we get FUCKING MEASLES. A disfiguring, miserable disease that can not only kill you, but depresses your immune system for years, making you susceptible to diseases you’d otherwise fight off.

Your decision to cling to ignorance because it feeds your ego to “know something” the unwashed masses do not is the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of loving compassion, and the height of hubris.

“My intention is to allow others to make their own choices” is a pat set of anti-vaccine weasel words. What you’re really saying is this: “I mistakenly (and probably in good faith, for what it’s worth) believe outright lies, and I cling to them. And, even though my beliefs are demonstrably wrong, I expect my privilege to be respected in spite of my ignorance, the whole of the scientific process, and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.”

People on chemo are catching measles because of the anti-vaccine movement. Babies are literally dying. Not very many yet, true, but this suffering IS PREVENTABLE.

The idea that letting a few people die in order to retain the privilege of flaunting one’s google university degree is AWFUL, and it absolutely breaks my heart to witness so many otherwise intelligent and loving people using their free time to be so-called vaccine-skeptics.

It’s a hobby that is LITERALLY killing human beings.

And yes, it’s a hobby. None of you are doctors or scientists or qualified in any way to do anything more than read shit online. And yet you “know” better than a over century of scientists and doctors and the self-correcting whole of scientific process?

No, you don’t know better. You’re not in on some secret. What you know is what you’ve read, and what you’ve read is garbage written by snake oil salesmen who want you to buy their cleanses and herbs and books and unregulated, useless supplements. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine not because he knew too much, but because he was an unethical bastard trying to sell an alternate vaccine he would have made money from. All the rest of the anti-vaxx brigade are shady at best, from Oz to Chopra to Mike Adams to Scudamore, and they’re all selling you something.

Supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry, as are “alternative” health books and retreats and seminars. The ridiculous irony of the anti-vaxx movement is that it makes more than actual vaccines do, but screams “Shill!” whenever presented with facts.

The anti-vaxx movement is like Trump: everything it accuses others of is something it is doing itself.

To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply

Admissions, Soapbox, Whining

(NOTE: I found this post in my drafts folder, it’s actually a couple of years old; apparently never published it. In it, I say I don’t care what she thinks, but then I wrote all these words, so I guess I did! Sometimes I’m full of shit, yo.)

In which my ex’s girlfriend posted a picture on Instagram of the deck on my old house, finally FINISHED, after all these years! It looks fantastic!

Dear my ex-husband’s girlfriend,

Thank you for your inexplicably bitchy comment on social media. You appear to misunderstand “snark.”

Having had no meaningful interaction with you (beyond clicking the occasional Like button, or sending you Christmas cards) for the past ten years, your apparent rage — coming, as it did, out of absolutely nowhere — rather upset me and hurt my feelings, as you and I were good friends the last time I saw you.

I’m guessing that you’re mad because I used a picture you took, in one of my many stupid blog posts about my stupid feels about my stupid marriage? This picture-stealing happened, according to my archives, seven years ago. (It took half an hour of paging through old posts to even find the post you were probably talking about.)

Apparently you tried to communicate your anger at the time by unfollowing me on social media, I think? I’m sorry to say that I didn’t even notice that you were “done” with me, because, seriously, who pays that much attention to their ex-husband’s girlfriend’s sporadically-maintained Instagram account?

Technically, I did not “steal” your image. You’d posted your images publicly, on Facebook, on the internet, where anybody on earth could see, use, download, or link to them. I’m sorry it made you mad that I used one, but I didn’t even think about it, really. I mean, nobody even reads my blog but Stanley and my parents anyway. Plus, it was a picture of my house.
Continue reading To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply →

Guns

Soapbox

In which I do an op-ed.

There’s a Twitter feed, called Well Regulated Militia (find it at @Well_Regulated_), that posts about nothing but the gun-related incidents and accidents that befall our, well, “militia.” Here’s a common example of its content:

“A member of our well regulated militia sleeps with a loaded gun under his pillow. His 2 year old son crawls into bed with him, finds the gun, and shoots himself. He dies at the hospital.”

The takeaway is that guns kill, even without human intent. All the time. Totally debunks the whole “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bullshit.

Guns have one purpose: to propel a bullet at high speed into things, particularly flesh. Yes, you can kill with a car or a plane or a knife, but all of those things — cars, planes, knives — have other, primary, purposes. You can’t get to work or Europe in a gun, or make dinner with one.

Guns are dangerous tools, and it turns out they’re unsecured a shocking amount of the time.

While there are very good reasons to own guns, a great many gun owners obviously do not need, or know how to properly use or secure, their guns. (Because if you needed your gun, it wouldn’t just be lying around, now, would it.)

There’s also a really long thread by members of the armed forces (under @iAmTheWarax, if you want to find it), who are rigorously trained to handle guns, who still fuck up regularly because even highly trained humans are, well, fallible. Guns should just not be lying around, for fuck’s sake, because they’re dangerous.

You need to get a license to drive a car; you should also need to get one to purchase, own, and keep a gun.

I don’t want to ban guns, or remove them from all owners, not at all.

But I do want gun owners to assert that they need one (even if it’s just to shoot rabbits in the garden), that they’re mentally competent, and that they’re trained to handle and secure one.

Submit some forms (your shooting certifications, your completed safety class, your gun safe receipt), take a written test. Re-up every decade. Bureaucracy, used for its proper purpose. Will the occasional qualified applicant be denied gun ownership? Probably. Will the masses who shouldn’t be own guns be denied? Yes.

Will some bad guys have guns anyway? Yes, but they’ll be outliers, just like unlicensed drivers are outliers, just like unlicensed doctors are outliers, just like unlicensed anythings are outliers.

But IT WILL HELP. We need to regulate gun ownership in this nation.

Someone who can do anything…

Soapbox, Spiritual

In which there’s a repost, because I liked what I wrote.

My dad, no idiot, who has told me about his own experiences of the ineffable (while yet confusing “religion” with idiot American Christianity and considering himself an atheist), posted this on Facebook:

This was my reply:

Seriously, though, who believes in a God as a separate, remote, all-powerful entity in the ceiling, and not the whole of distributed consciousness? (We’re not the ancient Greeks, for fuck’s sake. We call it “weather” now, not “Zeus.”)

Children do, maybe, ideate such a “God” briefly, and also the pitifully indoctrinated, and the ignorant. Have pity on these, as you would on the idiots and the damaged, as you would on those who believe in ghosts or magic. They will either come to know better in their time, or are incapable of knowing better. Either way, let them be. (Unless they vote. Hah.)

Most atheist memes are raging against a “God” nobody worships, because truly that “God” is well known to be a caricature of a symbol of an icon of an idea of a koan, weakly and vaguely representing that inexpressible, ineffable state every conscious being knows intimately and yet seeks endlessly: love.

The truth is that the entity whose duty it is to feed those hungry and protect those kids and women from idiot ego’s bottomless and selfish hunger is that one who can perceive such suffering: You.

Me.

Us.

Every one of us.

We’re conscious, we’re consciousness; we’re consciousness embodied, distributed, and rarified, and WE’RE what’s capable of perceiving suffering and acting upon it.

We’re “God.” Us. We, alone (as far as we yet know) among all the elements of the manifest, immense, infinite physical universe, are the only ones who experience refined intelligence and consciousness. (Barring ET and cracking superluminal travel, of course, but I digress. So far, it’s just humans.)

In brief, bitching about suffering — and raging at some one-dimensional cartoon “god” nobody credible actually believes in — is really no more noble than ignoring suffering altogether. The problem is not with “God,” it is with that ridiculous definition of God as a thing apart from the world, an individual entity like our minds, separate and finite, capable of selfishness and laziness.

God is consciousness, or love. And infinite. This is plainly stated in most scriptures, but one has to, you know, actually put in the study time, in earnest, to learn it. Figuring out what “consciousness” means apart from our finite minds, knowing what the mystics know, takes time, introspection, and intense self-discipline.

I guarantee no earnest seeker thinks God is a white dude floating in the sky like a Marvel superhero.

TAT TVAM ASI: thou art That. (Or, as I learned it, lifted from a Beach Boys song: I am That, thou art That, all this is That.) Figuring out what that means is the only meaningful journey.

Depressed about work.

Soapbox, Work

In which I bitch about the job market.

I work for a distributed call center. (Yes, I’m white trash like that. Ye gods.)

A year ago, I moved off phones into a chat pilot, which was great. They made us take three chats at a time for awhile, which was fucking insane, but chats are chats and not calls.

Well, it’s been cancelled.

No more chat pilot. Finis. (Actually, it’s been turned into a proper department, so that’s why the pilot is over, but the contract to work it was given to another call center in Mumbai.) So, tonight, I was moved back, by my call center employer, to inbound phones.

It fucking SUCKED.

Taking calls for Giant Cable Company’s home security product is rough:

– One guy was a dick to me because he failed to pay his bill and got disconnected. This was somehow my fault.
– Another only responded to 40% of the things I said, and was unintelligible when he did respond (because the mic on his phone was garbage). He grunted and panted a lot. I was not able to solve his issue and he refused a tech visit.
– Another claimed slow internet (that diagnostics did not support; I think the real issue was a virus-infested laptop). Did the troubleshooting, issue not resolved, offered to send a tech. Caller was enraged that there weren’t any tech appointment times she liked, took it out on me.
– Another person was pissed because an install appointment had been moved for no apparent reason, which I completely understand. My department doesn’t handle installation appointments. Customer demanded a call back from the appropriate department the next day. Well, I can’t schedule callbacks from any department, not even my own. Sorry for the frustration. (You’d think they’d build a tool for that, but no: customers can schedule callbacks on the website, but it’s automated and just throws them into the goddamned queue with everyone else. It’s a raging insult, but hey, that’s corporate American customer service for you.)

I’m nice to people. I listen and empathize. I mirror. I try. I have very little ego left about any of it and don’t really take it personally when people are mad, but there’s so little I can actually do to help. I get paid (very little) to be ineffectual, replaceable, and to get yelled at. That’s how my job is designed. And it’s disappointing and frustrating for me. I used to be a fucking sysadmin. I had root on boxen, FFS!

I don’t have any authority. I don’t know the why or how. The company is too big, too broken, and too greedy. I am a cog; I am replaceable. Anybody who can sit in a chair can do my job. Turnover is fantastically high and the job is designed to take any warm body. I am expected to have no expertise.

The job itself is hostile: by the time my extension rings, the customer is already pissed off about navigating the IVR, authenticating, and long hold time. Tools don’t really work, I can only support some things and not others.

I have to say “I don’t know” a lot (but I’m not supposed to because the Quality Assurance document says “take ownership” right on it). Volume is always really high, because that’s how call centers work: they have historical call volume for this half hour on this day for the past decade, and never over-schedule employees. The majority of items tracked by metrics are hostile to customers and employees both (the shorter the calls, the better? really?) but are measured anyway and treated as real data.

You can’t say “deliver world-class service” and “keep your calls as short as possible” and mean both.

There’s almost nothing that isn’t terribly, terribly broken.

I do get to work from home, braless and shoeless, with no commute. But I also get shit on by both sides: tools that don’t work, problems I cannot solve, angry callers rightly frustrated by standard corporate American bullshit.

Obviously they told me chat was going away, so I’ve been job hunting. (Turned out it went away in 4-6 weeks rather than 4-6 months, but they did tell me, damn them to hell.) One place turned me down, twice, no idea why. Three others didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application. A few national work-from-home places that say they hire in Minnesota have no Minnesota positions available, likely due to a minimum wage hike (expected in four years, if I understand it correctly).

I live in Uptown, so there’s work in the neighborhood but it’s mostly food service. I applied at a deli and a coffee shop; neither replied. I’d never get a front-of-house job because I’m no longer young and hot, don’t even want to bake pizzas, I haven’t waitressed in decades, and the office jobs want young, enthusiastic, hard-working college kids to work shit hours for ten bucks an hour, or people with obscure licenses.

I’m feeling like shit about it. I hate my job and want a better one, but work, as I’ve been saying for years and years, is awful. Low pay, awful hours, and this horrific expectation of total devotion to the job on the employee’s part, with nothing whatsoever in return from the employer! Random scheduling, uncomfortable environments, no bennies, no holidays, no hope of promotion. You’re just supposed to bust your ass and say thank you for the abuse. It’s a shitshow.

I don’t want to get abused by angry callers five nights a week. I don’t want to apologize for shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I don’t want to pretend my audits aren’t ridiculous, nor do I want to pretend enthusiasm for a shitty, hostile position that has never given me a raise or a holiday off.

But I also don’t want to get an equally shitty other job, with a commute. Working from home means you don’t have to spend a dozen hours every week getting ready, dressed (fully suited up in wintertime just to step outside), walking, bussing, and walking, just to get to and from work. Working from home means you have half as much laundry. My work-from-home job is awful, but it’s at home. I can forgo makeup. I can not wash my hair for a week. I can wear what I slept in.

I want a job where they appreciate me for being useful, intelligent, dependable, and friendly. I’d like to work efficiently, do well at it, and feel decent about it. I’d like to make more than ten bucks an hour. I’d like my schedule to be the same every week, or get a decent amount of warning when it changes; I’d like to get holidays off. I’d like to do this work in a reasonably comfortable environment, with, like, climate control. I’d like to be able to walk there, or take a single bus. I’d like to have tools that work, I’d like to be able to actually solve problems or produce measurable output. And then I’d like to go home and not think about work until it’s time to go back again the next day.

How the fuck is that unreasonable?

And yet, it is. If you’ve read job descriptions for non-specialist work in the past ten years, apparently it is.

(What I would give to have my old U-B job back! It was part-time, I had a desk, it was 5 blocks from home, decent pay, and I got most major holidays off!)

Deleted.

Admissions, Life, Soapbox

In which I posted this on Facebook on a friend’s long piece about the Ansari thing and consent and #metoo in which she’d specifically invited thoughtful response, but then somebody immediately (so immediately that I sincerely doubt they’d actually read it) responded with “Jesus.”, as if I were so profoundly wrong they just couldn’t even, and it made me feel anxious because I’m probably not sex-positive and feminist enough for some circles, so I deleted it and am posting it here where no one will read it.

I think we collectively have this weird belief that sex is:
A. GREAT
B. always fun and satisfying
C. super meaningful and important.

Personally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that sex, alone of all human experiences, will always be great and fun and satisfying, or to believe that the quality matters much.

Even pizza can’t stand up to those expectations! Sometimes you get a burnt one or they left off the olives you really wanted or you’re not in the damn mood for pizza. Nothing is *always* great and fun and satisfying.

Sex isn’t even that important. It’s like elimination: it’s a problem when you can’t do it, sure, but there’s no need to obsess about your bowel movements. That’s weird. Stop it. Nobody cares.

Successful sex is sex that results in conception. The subjective experience of it doesn’t matter, even if our species does have sex for thousands of reasons that are not about conceiving and are specifically focused on the subjective experience. But really, the drives that cause sex are “for” procreation, and there’s really no promise it will be physically or emotionally enjoyable, and especially not every single time.

It’s also true that because there are so many reasons for doing it, it’s likely that your reason and your partner’s reason may not line up.

Also, it’s fine and absolutely okay to not want to have sex, or to not always like it when you do. I’ve had a lot of sex I didn’t care much for because my own “should” [the OP had listed a series of “shoulds” that resulted in her own experiences of not saying no when she wanted to say no, like “you should be helpful, you should be pleasant, you should be enthusiastic”] was “you should be Very Very Afraid of being called frigid, because apparently that’s the worst thing a girl could ever be.”

I feel like half of #metoo is women being disgusted by men’s higher libidos and not even realizing that that’s what’s happening, because they seem to believe that they’re just as horny as men and that they should want and need and have lots of sex in order to be “normal” and “healthy.”

Some women have high libidos, of course, but most don’t. So they’re not that horny, and they’re not driven to take risks to get off, and they srsly don’t understand why anybody would enjoy fucking for its own sake without the context of commitment until they eventually go through a period of super high libido. Lol hormones!

Another quarter of #metoo is women blaming men for not being psychic. When you give 37 “yes, please proceed” signals and one “um, maybe not” and he misses it, it’s not assault. It’s on par with not being able to hear the ticket guy through that little grille in the booth: it’s frustrating and stupid.

The remaining 25% is a heart-breaking gamut of actual rape and assault and abuse, to stuff you’d need a judge and jury and video footage to ever really know for certain either way since sexual encounters, especially for non-dominant partners, is so highly subjective. But most of the hashtag is not proof of rampant sexual abuse: it’s proof of rampant lack of taking responsibility for one’s own choices and actions.

Paglia says it really well in some video I can’t be bothered to look for right now when she’s talking about being in college in the late 60’s in a women’s dorm with a curfew the men didn’t have. She talks about how feminists at that time were saying they wanted to be responsible for their own safety, they wanted the same rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES the men had, to go where they wanted when they wanted, and to accept the outcomes of their own choices. They wanted society to stop forcing protection on them so that they could protect themselves as they saw fit.

I feel that people today, particularly women, have this expectation that they will be safe at all times in all places. That’s just dumb. There likely isn’t a man on earth who thinks like that, because they know there’s a difference, in expectations of safety, that is absolutely dependent on circumstances.

A church is generally safer than a foxhole. A dark alley in a “bad” part of town is generally less safe than a public library during the day. People cannot have an expectation of perfect safety in all situations, and should prepare for different situations appropriately.

Which is to say, if you’re a girl at a frat party dressed like a whore, your expectations of sexual safety are going to be different than they would be if you were at home with your friends. (And clothing does matter. A business suit says something, a cassock says something, a gimp suit says something. Insisting that deliberately dressing in a sexually provocative way doesn’t have intrinsic meaning? Is ridiculous. It signals sexual availability. Period. Full stop.)

So we need to accept responsibility for our decisions and our actions. Yes, there are actual predators, and they’re absolute rat-fucking bastards, but they’re the exception and not the rule. Most of #metoo is people putting themselves in harm’s way and blaming the world for it. Most of the stories are stories about failing to self-protect on a variety of levels, from physical to emotional, being disappointed when there are bad results, and blaming “the patriarchy.”

My unpopular opinion is that having a disappointing or uncomfortable sexual experience is generally not harm, but believing that it is harm causes a great deal of unnecessary emotional suffering.

It’s like getting a burnt pizza. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to affect your psyche unless you decide to freak out about it. There are gradations of trauma, and a lame fuck is not going to give you PTSD unless you have a bizarre and unrealistic set of beliefs about the world owing you absolute safety and happiness at all times no matter what you do.

Yes, there are definitely problems in the sexual sphere, obviously, that society should be — and is — conversing about, but I feel that we really need women in particular to accept that with freedom comes responsibility.

I mean, you can’t drink a bottle of wine and blame society because you’re drunk, and you can’t blame society when you find out that fucking isn’t love and you feel icky walk-of-shaming home in your little black dress the next morning with your 4″ heels in your purse.

You put yourself in that situation, you made those choices, you ended up with the so-frequently unfulfilling and disappointing results. It’s not society’s fault that you made a string of choices that didn’t produce the results you wanted, it’s not the patriarchy, it’s not sexism: YOU did that because you’re free to do so, nobody stopped you, there’s no chaperone, there’s no taboo, there’s no longer any shame in the walk of shame.

Random casual sex is normalized, and maybe, just maybe you just don’t actually happen to like it, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe he’s not a creep, maybe you’re not a victim, maybe you just don’t happen to like it. And maybe that’s just absolutely fine and okay.

Ringing out the old

Finance, Soapbox

In which we ring in the new!

In 2017, I discovered that a lot of people are racists and honestly don’t know it. They’ll say they’re not racist, and in the next breath explain that marginalized non-white communities are that way because, well, you see, that’s how “those people” are; they deserve it, it’s inherent.

And also classist: They’ll say, “the American dream lives and anyone can make it!” But show them a single fucked-up white community and they’ll dismiss them all as ignorant, low-class trash, rather than the victims of poverty and societal abandonment.

I learned that a lot of Americans who enjoy/ed luck and privilege never learned how to think about it. They believe they have what they do because of their own hard work and initiative, and never do they credit the fully-functioning society—schools, vaccines, food, healthcare, roads—that actually launched them.

If we’re lacking anything in spades, it’s compassion and humility — and the fully-functioning society created by these qualities. Nobody makes it alone, ever: everyone who succeeds does so from a platform of outside assistance. Nobody ever made it in America without using public roads, public education, public resources, entitlements paid for by ALL. But when we close libraries and national parks, and refuse to pay K-12 teachers a living wage for so long that every state in the nation is suffering a critical shortage of teachers, well, society is no longer functioning well at all.

Nobody ever makes it without knowing somebody, or knowing someone who knows somebody, who helps them. With an interview, a tip, guidance. We’re all in this together, even “them.” Because “them” are us, and pretending they’re other makes you an asshole.

You may think you’ve made it due to your hard work and initiative, but YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO WORK HARD HANDED TO YOU ON A PLATE. There are millions who work harder than you ever did, but they present at inner city ERs with late stage cancer because they couldn’t stop working and go in when it was Stage 1. Sure, maybe you studied hard, but there are millions of Americans (and billions of human beings) who would love the chance to merely study hard. Oh, to only have to worry about studying hard, and not calories, disease, war, and shelter!

Open your heart. See and acknowledge and feel suffering. Sure, beggars at intersections can be grifters, but maybe, just maybe, that sign is true? Half of America doesn’t have $400 for an emergency. That’s how we end up on the streets. FEEL THAT.

And, oh, happy New Year!

Low-quality jobs are increasingly the norm out there.

Soapbox

In which I wrote a Facebook response so long I didn’t bother to post it.

“Uber pays out $200mm per month to drivers.” And? To how many drivers and for how many hours of work? The grand total is irrelevant, it merely indicates the size of the racket.

I don’t use Uber because their model is utter rot. I don’t use DoorDash, and now I don’t use Instacart, either. These jobs are awful and these companies should die, because their aim and goal is to put billions in the pockets of a few app bros and some shareholders/investors by effectively stealing it — primarily from their own employees, but also from the communities they operate in by ignoring and circumventing licensing and regulatory requirements with douchy legalese.

Uber, for example, is not a free market solution to a real market pain point — we already had licensed and regulated cabs and taxis — it’s theft. Calling an employee an independent contractor to avoid paying them for their work is illegal, and it’s why all of these gig economy companies have been repeatedly sued.

“Not happy that your employer is illegally not paying you? Well, go improve yourself and get a better job” is crap advice when better jobs increasingly do not exist.

One, more people go to college than ever before, so much of the workforce is already degreed, and going back to school does little to increase hireability and just increases debt (unless you happen to trade in your lit degree for a specialized, high-demand engineering degree, not easy when you’re a mature adult). Two, decade upon decade of automation and international outsourcing mean vastly fewer decent jobs overall. Three, the jobs that do exist pay what they did 30 years ago, because wage growth has been stagnant that long.

For example, being a warehouse worker was once a decent so-called unskilled job; you could work an honest day and support a family modestly. Today warehouse work is likely to be for Nike or Amazon or Walmart and part-time, temporary, and terrifically stressful, paying less than a living wage.

When economists talk about the number of jobs added every term it seems like net growth, but the majority of these jobs are low-quality, temporary, part-time or gig economy jobs, lacking security, bennies, or even reasonable scheduling.

If you haven’t worked a random schedule, week after week, in a shitty or dangerous or high-stress environment, for years on end, you are probably incapable of modeling how exhausting and stressful and inhumane it is.

Try working every single holiday for five years straight like the support technician you spoke with on the phone who solved your internet issues. Try closing at night and then being forced to open the next morning several times a month for several years straight like the home improvement store associate who solved your DIY plumbing problem or the young mom who made your latte.

Hell, try making $15 an hour working required 24-hour shifts like the EMT who stabilized your uncle after his heart attack. Try working 60 hour weeks for decades like the nurses who tended you at the hospital.

Telling people in those circumstances to try harder is pure asshattery. For a lot of the middle-sliding-rapidly-into-lower class workforce, there simply isn’t better work. The jobs are gone. There’s other, different shitty work, but millions barely have time to even look for other, different shitty work anyway, because scheduling is so terrible for everyone who isn’t fortunate enough to have a job with banker’s hours… which is the overwhelming majority of the workforce, skilled or unskilled, these days.

I realize that many white men still have good jobs, and believe they have them due to merit and skill and self-effort (rather than privilege and luck, which is actually the case), but even despite these beliefs they’re not inherently better than everyone else.

Stating that there are plenty of great jobs out there if only people would try harder is untrue, no matter how much they believe it. The facts are the facts: wage stagnation, automation and technology, outsourcing everything from manufacturing to call center jobs, the death of unions, the gutting of worker protections: low-quality jobs are increasingly the norm out there.

And suggesting that people up sticks and move to where the good jobs are is more elitist bullshit, considering half the nation doesn’t even have $400 on hand for an emergency. Moving is expensive and presupposes a financial buffer that just isn’t there anymore.

So I repeat myself: people don’t take shitty jobs because they’re idiots. They take them because they have to earn and, increasingly, that’s all there is.

Just having a little trip down memory lane

Admissions, Life, Miscarriage, Soapbox, Whining

In which there’s The Past.

Here’s me, 16 years ago, standing in my kitchen.

2001

See how rough and unfinished that shit was? The whole place looked like that. It never got better, just worse. It was barely a step above living in a car. (Well, a very large car, with a bug-infested shower, but still, roughly the comfort and insulation of living in a car. Or maybe a super ghetto mobile home.)

That secretary desk, on the left? Was really cool. Wish there’d been some way I could have kept that. It was old and in shitty shape, but it had cubbies and a hinged desk and I adored it.

I feel that way about a remarkably small number of the things that I had in that house and lost. My grandfather’s table. A couple of leather coats that molded. And I did rather like that samovar. My hard drives, the ones he left in a filthy, shitty, open-to-the-elements “room.” But that was later; I digress.

leak

That house was a piece of shit. We never should have bought it. I never would have, except my husband was a professional fucking contractor and said it was a good idea, it was fine, he could handle it, no problem. And, idiot I was, I chose to believe him. I thought he had expertise!

We bought it on contract, and, like fucking morons, we used the same lawyer the sellers used. I don’t think we even had it inspected, because I was home when an inspector showed up after we’d bought it and moved in, and he told us the electrical was nowhere near code and that we’d be fined if we didn’t correct it. (Husband’s solution was to just destroy the entire mud room/porch, rather than correct the issue. Huzzah.)

We hadn’t even been there a month when the roof leaked and a bunch of ceiling fell in. Oh, and then the well-head pole fell over while I was in a hot shower in a literally freezing house.

The kitchen was in the basement and you could see dirt through the cracked concrete slabs of the floor. Cobwebs in the unfinished ceiling. Main bathroom had a countertop on a raw 2×4 frame, cement floors, and unfinished brick walls with no cupboards. Kitchen “cupboards” were the same: just unfinished, open 2×4 shelving with salvaged countertops stuck on by hippies. There had been cloth curtains on the front when they showed us the house; when we moved in, just raw shelves.

Then he tore the already shitty disaster up even more. Refused to fix the decent bathroom on the second floor, the one with walls and a bathtub and ceilings. Destroyed the only decent or useful spaces in the house — the finished attic, the mud porch, the greenhouse.

Oh, the greenhouse, where it was sun-warm in the winter and one could have grown herbs and sat to read!

He covered most of the basement windows with a massive porch he never finished*, so the main living space became not just dirty and unfinished, but lightless as well, and we had an unusable porch!

I mean, he did re-roof the house, which was actually necessary and good, and a lot of incredibly hard work, certainly, but even that was embarrassing as fuck because I later saw him refuse to honor the markers he’d traded for his friends’ hard work on it, because he was honorless and lazy.

It’s not like he didn’t do shit; he did a lot of shit. I realized later that he just did shit he wanted to do. He was good at getting firewood, for example, but he’d spend inordinate amounts of time on it — cutting down whole trees, hauling them, cutting them, splitting them, renting machinery to do so — rather than just fucking buying it and working on the house. He made it so much more complicated and involved and time-consuming than it needed to be; we could have just worked on the furnace, and maybe, I don’t know, installed some fucking insulation?, and bought more propane. But no, he’d spend months of weekends “getting us firewood to heat the house.”

Firewood I had to haul from the barn, in a wheelbarrow, through the snow, half a city block. Yeah.

He did do a lot of work, sure, but he never did what we needed or finished anything. He’d do shit like spend tons of time building a really cool but ultimately unnecessary trailer for the riding lawnmower, or sawing holes in the roof to frame in dormers he never actually completed (covering shit in plastic sheeting for a year is not completing something), or putting in external doors that didn’t actually go anywhere yet and wouldn’t for years.

And then those fucking hippies had the balls to threaten to sue us! They sold us a total piece of shit of a house [caveat emptor], then forced us (well, not us, because I’d bailed just before then, and not him — because he had no money, per the usual — but J., who paid it off for reasons I will probably never understand) to honor the entire mortgage over a decade early!

What a fucking shit show!

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