To earn or not to earn

Somehow I've managed to divorce earning money from receiving money. It's as if the hose got disconnected from the faucet or something. No, that's not right. It's as if I'm putting energy into a meatgrinder, cranking the handle for all I'm worth, sweating up a storm, and nothing is coming out the other end. Not meat juice, not water, not air. Then when I go look in my refrigerator, there's meat in there. Like, how did that happen? 

I am not a meat eater, so this is a bad analogy. All I know is, something is wacky with me and money. I'm turning the handle but nothing is coming out the spigot. It's similar to the wackiness between me and time, the challenge I discussed last week. 

What the heck am I talking about? Vertigo is clawing my brain into pieces. My head is reeling from a storm system moving through. Actual rain is coming down from the sky. Moisture. Falling from the sky. So weird. 

Anyway, I can't think very well when the bucket is sloshing in my head. I think what I'm trying to do right now is describe my experience this week of doing work for no pay. I seem to be caught up in swirls and eddies that take me nowhere. Words are failing me.

The past few weeks, I've edited three papers for the for-profit higher education institution that hired me as a part-time dissertation editor. I'm supposed to get paid a certain amount per student per term. It isn't hard work. The hardest part is learning the quirks of the institution's dissertation guidelines, which seriously depart from APA style. 

Enough palaver. What I'm saying is that I've done a bunch of work, the term is over, and I have not been paid. I think I recall the supervisor saying they pay twice per term. It's a paltry amount, minus taxes, so I'm not holding my breath, hoping to have money for bread. What am I saying? I don't eat bread. Okay, milk. I don't drink milk. Money for onions. I don't know. My brain is going sideways. 

The agency guy I sometimes edit for sent me a little paper to edit yesterday. A proposal thing in a weird institutional template. I polished it up and shipped it off. Five hours later, the guy writes back, oh hey, here's the institution's handbook, can you see if what you edited complies with the format in Appendix E? I wanted to yell at him (via email), you idiot, why didn't you send it to me before I edited the paper? But I thought, what would be the point, other than releasing my frustration? So I downloaded the handbook and looked at it. It had some examples of title page, copyright page, you know, all that front matter stuff nobody ever reads, as well as some formatting requirements.

I wrote to the agency guy: You want me to format this paper?

He wrote back: Yes, would you?

I'd already spent over two hours just editing the text. Now I was expected to reformat the paper and add a title page, copyright page, acknowledgments page, and a table of contents. 

Oh, did I tell you how much I am getting paid? Sixty dollars. 

I might as well be paying him for the privilege of being of service. Ditto the institution I supposedly work for. 

I recently decided to stop teaching online Zoom classes for artists who want to learn business. It's not worth the hassles. I'm intrinsically motivated, you know that. I have to be. The pay is $25 per hour to teach a class. Minus taxes. I'm paying transit tax for a county in which I no longer reside. I spend many hours gathering my material and refining it into presentations that I hope artists will enjoy and understand. I don't expect praise, although I get some now and then. I also don't expect to be reamed for using incorrect personal pronouns when students don't turn on their cameras or otherwise give me a clue. 

Have you tried speaking without any personal pronouns at all? It's quite challenging. I have changed all my business emails to "pronouns: any." Honestly, I don't care what you call me. Pronounce it any way you want, make up your own spelling. My sense of well-being does not depend on you using my preferred pronouns. 

What was I talking about? Oh yeah: the meatgrinder. I put in energy and effort, I turn handle, and no meat comes out. It's a metaphor. Not a good one. I have a commitment to self to blog every Sunday, no matter what. Sometimes I can't find the words. I don't even know what I am feeling, other than dizzy.

And yet, my fridge is full. Not of meat, but I have plenty of eggs, yogurt, vegetables, fruit, nuts, twigs, and gravel. I'm not starving. There is gas in my car (I hardly go anywhere, I think gas prices will probably drop by the time I need to fill up). I'm doing fine. 

The disconnect I perceive might not be real. 

If I have to choose between a "real" job that pays a "regular wage" and this weird quasi-freelancing editing gig, which is better for me? If I'm not going to get paid, is it better to be useful? Or is it better to work on my own projects and tell everyone else, no, I can no longer do your projects for a few pennies or no pennies at all? Rain is a suitable mood, and the Bat Cave is a perfect place to excavate the words that escape me.
 

Dodged another opportunity

I'm hoping my housing search is going to be a Goldilocks tale of too much, too little, and just enough. If I were any normal person with a normal life and a normal job, the just enough housing option would look something like a modern apartment in a safe walkable neighborhood with stores nearby and no snakes, lizards, or roaches living under the sink. However, as all seven of you blog readers know, I don't tend to take the road most traveled. Last week I dodged the opportunity to live in a tiny stone casita in the desert. This week I toured a tiny mobile home in an RV park situated by an open field next to the freeway that would take me south to the border or north to Phoenix, depending on my frame of mind. 

Mobile homes are bizarre, present living situation notwithstanding. Having grown up in an old farmhouse solidly squatting over a concrete basement dug into wet Pacific Northwest soil, this newfangled mode of building feels oddly unfinished. I'm not used to the prefab, temporary nature of mobile home living. These buildings begin their existence in a factory, getting outfitted with lightweight accoutrements made of plastic, fiberglass, and fake wood paneling. Then they get loaded on a massive truck for an aggressive trip to the mobile home sales lot. You've probably been stuck behind half a house leisurely blocking two freeway lanes during rush hour traffic. From the sales lot, they get purchased and trucked to their final destination, usually a mobile home park, where they perch primly on concrete piers a few feet above dry dirt. And there they sit fading in the sun, changing owners from time to time and moldering into vinyl dust. Manufactured homes aren't quite the same thing as mobile homes, being somewhat, well, less mobile, right? To be honest, anything that doesn't require a constantly replenished coat of paint on its peeling clapboard siding doesn't really deserve the moniker house. Just my opinion.

On Friday I found my way south and west to a straight two-lane stretch of road edged with several RV parks and mobile home parks. These are not the same thing, by the way. RVs, no matter how big their widescreen TVs, are not considered mobile homes, even if you live in them full time. As soon as the temperature hits 85°F, RVs unplug their shore power cables and drive away to cooler climes, leaving vacant concrete slabs. In RV parks, a few folks park their travel trailers and never leave. As gravity and weather take their toll, these little trailers sag and sink toward the dirt, weighed down by homemade awnings, canopies, gewgaws, and strings of lights. They start to look like weird plants that grew up out of the ground. To keep out these bottom feeders, mobile home parks don't allow transient RVs to overwinter. If you have an RV, you park it offsite in a respectable storage facility and fetch it when its time to make like a snowbird.

The property I sought was an RV park with a mix of buildings (can I call them buildings?). Some were tiny travel trailers, a few were larger trailers no longer near any sort of tow vehicle, and a couple were single wide mobile homes. The rental I was going to tour was one of these single wide mobile homes, renovated in the recent past with a small addition built to the side to create a dining area. This mobile home had three doors to the outside and a postage-stamp size yard that butted up next to the side yard of a heavily decorated sagging travel trailer parked in the next lot. I found this trailer mesmerizing. All my gypsy nomad genes sprang to attention. (I'm not sure I actually have any of those genes but I'm a romantic at heart, drawn to the caravan lifestyle, and I don't mean Dodge Caravan! More like circus wagon, festooned with flags and ribbons.)

I sort of wanted to tour that travel trailer but I dutifully followed the manager into the mobile home. Fake fireplace, check. Multiple doors, check. Oh hey, vinyl floor in imitation hardwood. That was a nice touch throughout. There wasn't much to see. The place was pint-sized, chopped into a tiny living room, a dining area, and a bedroom in the back. The kitchen was carved out of the space in the middle, edged in a half-wall like a taco bar. The sink was okay, the fridge was big, the cupboard under the sink was clean and mold-free. The bathroom was next to the kitchen, also very small, with a pale brown plastic tub circa the 1970s and a white porcelain toilet that looked much older. The owner apparently renovated the kitchen but spared the bathroom, no doubt wanting to retain some of the quaint old-fashioned charm. Well, who wouldn't.

Is it time to explore my prejudices at the idea of living in an RV park? As the manager advised me on how to present my finances for best results, I imagined myself telling my sister I rented a mobile home in an RV park next to an open field by a freeway. It took me a moment to identify the feeling that frissoned up my spine. Was it . . ? Yes, it was shame. Why? Who do I think my ancestors were? My grandmother came from South Dakota and put half-and-half on her Rice Krispies. I cannot deny my roots. My genes would fit right in at a trailer park. It's just my snobby education and upbringing that tells me I deserve something better. 

I’m really out of my comfort zone here in the desert.  Landowners own the wealth and rent slum-pit trailers to elderly, low income, and undocumented. There are no laws to protect tenants from unscrupulous slumlords. Maintaining trailer homes and mobile homes is expensive. People in RV parks are often living in substandard housing with no recourse. Complaining results in evictions. The only way to win in the desert is to own the land.

Homes in Tucson's neighborhoods reflect the culture and the weather. Buildings are low profile, built out of cinder block or brick, stucco or adobe. The architecture is so different from the northwest. The heat dictates design. There is no water here, not in the air, not in the soil. Lack of water dictates landscape design. I'm shocked at the rare sight of green lawn. The ground is dust. There is no dirt, just dust. Roofs are flat (no need for slopes to handle snow). Awnings are deep to cover doorways and windows (or they should be, but not all apartment windows have awnings). Windows are tiny, barely letting in light. Everyone covers their windows to ward off the blazing sun. In the middle of the day, they hunker in their dark air-conditioned caves or blaze around the streets at 50 mph in their air-conditioned SUVs. 

The light here is a miracle. The moment I step outside, the heat is a strange toasty blessing I can't refuse. It envelopes me and sucks the air from my lungs. It cannot be ignored or avoided, only embraced. Bare mountains encircle the city, crisp and clear viewed through air that contains zero moisture. The blue sky canopy beckons me up, up, up. This place is closer to God than a lot of places, I bet. It's bathed constantly in raw sunshine. The sun strips off the veneer of lubrication and hydration and leaves only the parched elegant bones. No meat, just a bit of tough sinew holding moments together in a string of experiences, which I gather for blog fodder when I venture out to compete with the speedsters. This is not an oasis. This pueblo is not built on clouds but on desiccation and dehydration and dryness. D-words denoting desertification. The only waves are in my inner ear, washing me up on the shores of BPPV where I’ve been many times before, hoping to find a place to rest without losing my balance.

Which is why I can’t take showers.

Wait, time out. Joe Biden needs me to send money right away. Sorry, Joe. Okay. I'm back.   

Digging for drawings to illustrate my blogposts is fraught these days. To find the drawings I scanned last year, I have to scroll through photos of my former life. It hurts. I scroll past photos of my domicile, my neighborhood, my mother, and the one I really want to avoid, the last one of her lying dead in the ER, eyes closed, mouth open. I see photos of all the stuff I donated on Freecycle and Craigslist. I get weepy over photos of my efforts to downsize, to sort, to pack, and to pare my life to fit into a U-Box and a Dodge Grand Caravan. (I don't know what is so damn grand about it.) 

I filled out the application for the mobile home, attracted to the open fields next door, which reminded me of the fields behind the farmhouse of my childhood. It would only cost $35 to apply and I would probably be approved. But after a night to contemplate the prospect of living in an RV park, I decided once again that I'm not the right person for that place. I don't know what interesting experiences I'm passing up, but we know that when we turn away from one path, we end up going down another. No matter where I end up, there will always be things to blog about, and as long as I have internet access, I remain your faithful chronic malcontent blogging from the Hellish Hand-basket.