frugality Archives

Hey, I’ll work for sex, too. Feet, not really but thanks.

I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, and the reason behind that is (as well as my usual procrastination issues, but beyond that) that I’ve started working. That’s right, working, on a regular basis. Like in permanent, reliable part-time, something I’ve not seen in my economic life for the last four years.

I wanted to document it as part of the posts on the blog regarding my unemployment experience, or my underemployment experience.

It’s odd, it ended as simply as it started. How did it start? A phone call to meet a boss (who is now dead, btw, not that it’s pertinent to this part of the story. But. She is. Dead.) at a coffee shop near the airport, a mere 20 0r so miles from where I was living at the time, for a meeting to discuss, well, exactly what? So it was a ruse, the only agenda for this meeting was to fire four people in our tiny communications department (so they just axed the entire department and outsourced the function – sound familiar?).

If it sounds like I’m resentful it’s because I still don’t understand why this simply could not be done with an easy phone call or an email (or even a text – do people get fired by text now? They must). No, instead, we’re going to make you suffer on the L.A. freeways, on a Friday, pointlessly, to do this horrible thing. Grrrr.

Anyway.

What happened was I’d been posting semi-regular reminders on Facebook, of all places, that I was looking for a seasonal or part-time position and one of them actually came through. Shocker, right?

So I’ll try not to say anything bad about Facebook for a few minutes. What am I doing, work-wise? Well, part-time, working 3 days a week, doing some selling, some blogsite maintenance, some communications, right here in L.A. Don’t want to be more specific than that, but indeed it looks like it could be as permanent as I’d like it to be.

One can go with any of the forms on premise of taste and comfort as deeprootsmag.org cialis 10mg well. With the advancement in medical science, ED and impotency can be treated viagra on line by medicines. This helps to a great viagra online cheap deeprootsmag.org extend in regaining youth strength and power. Men should massage Mast Mood buy viagra oil regularly onto his genital organ.

Some final thoughts (for now) on the past four years of unemployment, underemployment, self-employment:

It really is all about networking. All of the good freelance gigs I’ve gotten as well as this permanent job came through friends or work contacts – nobody posted a wanted ad for any of these. So what everyone says, including all the advice gurus, is true.
I believe the world of work and of looking for work has fundamentally changed. We have not recovered much at all from the crash of 2008. I still cannot believe how hard it’s been to find a job, any kind of job, really, with 40+ years in the work force and a pretty decent resume. Kind of unbelievable, but that’s what it is.
Not everybody needs to have a job anymore. We can now produce everything we need with minimum workers, so many of us don’t have to actually work. We, as a society, have to figure out the economics of that. Productivity gains have all gone to the top, and are not shared with the workers. In the future, eventually, this will change, one way or the other to a more equitable footing.
It could all happen – the crash – again, tomorrow. I hold no illusions that things will ever go back to the way they used to be. It’s good to be resilient, and I’m glad I’m pretty good at frugality.

That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more and add to the list.

Photo copyright by beep beep.

Just add beard?

Any neighborhood where the denizens have (nicely trimmed, please) beards, wear suspenders and sport a few tattoos would be a place I wouldn’t mind visiting – hey, a lot!

In Sara Horowitz’s story in The Altlantic on the new (old) mutualism, she describes the movement (at least in Portland) as thus. As in, the male folks involved in cooperative ventures have this aesthetic.

More important, of course, is the movement behind the fashion – cooperatives filling a void to which neither government nor the private sector has been able or willing to provide good solutions.

I remember back during my one year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison – where I lived within walking distance of the Mifflin Street Co-op, which was a thriving holdover from the 1960s countercultural movement (it seemed like a long time from the anti-war riot days, but it was really just 1977-78). I tried to support it as best I could, but I do remember the healthy offerings weren’t often what my college-age junk food-loving body wanted.

But I digress. Horowitz goes on to talk about some of the bigger successes, like the Freelancer’s Union insurance programs, as well as more glamorous enterprises like Etsy and Kickstarter, which has funded thousands of art/music/film/design projects over the last year.

The cooperative movement couldn’t be more American or traditional than Ben Franklin, who started a “fire insurance company, Philadelphia Contributionship, which still operates today.”
Eat Good, Eat http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/2019-4.pdf buy cheap cialis Right: In accordance to a study conducted on male sperm donors, it was concluded that the disorder could stay with the person for lifetime and goes away only after a proper treatment. One can also ask any query or question related to sex problem if they find embarrassment in asking it from a doctor face-to-face. levitra 60 mg Obviously tadalafil super active your penis will not grow in a night or two but it’s just that you can take it once a day every day. The reviews that we got for the pill named viagra prices 100mg for treating impotence from men around the globe.
I found this definition of a social-purpose venture: It needs to:

Be financially sustainable
Have a social impact

So that’s pretty broad. I think the main differences between the old mutualism and what passes as the new version will have to do with technology – specifically the internet and crowd-sourcing, avenues simply not available to our ancestors in the 1890s. Maybe that and the tattoos – I can see the men of the 1890s in suspenders and beards, but were tattoos really the thing back then? I think that’s a more modern wrinkle. Then again, I could be wrong.

And, I learned a new word: locavore. I bet you, smart reader, don’t even have to look it up.

Jimbolaya

Tag Archives: frugality

And, Just Like That, It Ends (unemployment)