Looking up

I was feeling so full of fail last month. I had a mouse in my apartment; I stopped bringing my lunches to work; I got pulled over for going twice the speed limit in a school zone (and I DO NOT SPEED EVER, but it was an unfamiliar area and I didn't see the school zone sign); I got into debt, which I have never done before; haven't been reading or blogging about reading; and I have been stressed enough that I have not been doing my best work at work, though I'm just starting to see the fallout from that. It felt like I had a centipede dropping shoes at me and I was waiting for the next one.

But I finally feel like things have quieted down enough for me to catch my breath and go onwards. I paid my bills; I paid my ticket. And I have started saying, tomorrow I will eat responsibly, spend responsibly, clean up, do the things on my list... these are not things I am doing, but they are things I am telling myself I can do, and that's progress. And the recent weirdness in my life has actually been pretty good weirdness. (More on that later, if anything comes of it.)

A four-year degree in "Hey, I've had it pretty good"

I've heard a lot of snarking about The Trap, the book in which Daniel Brook bemoans how idealistic young people end up taking soulless corporate jobs when they find they can't live on the salary provided by a nonprofit or artistic job -- oh, how tragic. Admittedly "low-paid, liberal, nonprofit yuppies" are not at the top of the list of people I am concerned about.

But--well, everyone knows that teachers pay out of their own salaries for classroom supplies. And at our library system, which is very well funded as library systems go, the librarians will pay out of pocket for snacks for programs, for example. The very existence of teachers, librarians, social workers, and others, is predicated on the assumption that these people will be women whose husbands make the real money.

I don't need to be the eight millionth person to bemoan the difference between a teacher's salary and an NBA player's salary. But women are more likely to marry later, or not at all, than they used to be. Frankly, judging from the education majors I've met, I would have to say that the teaching profession is already suffering because well-educated women have so many other more lucrative options... the professions of teaching/librarianship/etc. would be in very dire straits were it not for the social pressures on women to go into altruistic jobs. And I think those pressures are decreasing.

There are a lot of pieces to this that amount to more than pity for people who gave up their dreams of do-gooding in order to be investment bankers. There's the cost of living in the large cities; and people don't just live in large cities out of some kind of blue-state intellectual snobbery. They live in large cities to have an alternative to driving cars. There's health care; I'm thoroughly convinced that we would see more art and more entrepreneurship if it weren't for the state of health care in this country, which keeps you tied down to a steady job.

I'm not really complaining about my own personal situation, mind you. If I had to fight it'd be for the library assistants who do everything the librarians do but don't get the money that the degree brings, and often can't find full-time jobs--and for retail workers everywhere. I get paid enough to deal with the public. They don't, and in a retail setting there's more pressure that the "customer is always right" and yet you also have to make a profit, which means you can't do anything substantive to solve the customer's problems... I can cancel fines if I hear a good sob story, which is a great luxury. I may not be 100% thrilled to get a 2% cost-of-living raise... but as long as I don't have kids to raise, I'm doing just fine. I may be running out of altruism, but I would self-destruct in three seconds in a corporate job.


It's not that I'm a naive socialist; but yeah. Why can't we as a society say that it's worth it to encourage people to teach, and nurture, and not just sell stuff?