Happy Monday, and welcome to another Circling Homework! Before we begin, a reminder of our upcoming two-stop series of events happening the first week of July in Indianapolis. Tickets below, including a pay-what-you-can option which is open to everyone. Please share, please tell your Midwest friends, please join us!
I have way too many jobs.
I text my friend during a bathroom break. She asks if I would like to pawn one of them off on her, and the answer is YES. I would love to do that.
For as long as I have had jobs, I have usually had more than one. There have been exceptions — the one semester during grad school when I had no job, or my first year and a half in my new town when I decided I could do with less income and more free time (a noble pursuit!). But then, the inevitable happens — I start to panic about money, and why I don’t feel more financially adept for my age, and whether I will be a burden to my partner.
I have a full-time job. I have more or less always had a full-time job since finishing school. I work for an education nonprofit as a grant writer and data manager (recently promoted from the “coordinator” to “manager” level, which sounds pedantic but means something in job world!). I am good at it, I like the people I work with, and I believe in the mission. I have been there for two years, and this summer I am getting a raise which tips my yearly salary from the 40,000s to the low 50s. This will actually be the highest income I have ever had from one job. In Memphis1 , where I currently live for my partner’s job, it is a livable wage and gently over the threshold into the middle class.
It’s also not enough for a huge margin for things like savings, or running a fledgling arts publication/event studio, or the ability to ever not be worried about what I will do in my car-dependent city when my car breaks down. Enter: the second job. Late in 2023, I put my name back on the nanny job boards, and began sacrificing my evenings and weekends to the gods of my ambition to pay off a credit card debt and start establishing a bit more savings. To briefly toot my own horn: this plan worked! I am now wrapping up this job commitment, and I am chagrined to admit that it turns out making extra money is helpful and nice. This week, I bought a rain jacket from Poshmark. I booked the Airbnb for an upcoming trip. I bought flowers at the farmer’s market. I even sent some money over to my savings account and I am not too worried that I will need to immediately withdraw it when rent comes due.
This is because I am working a lot. Between my day job which assumes a schedule of 40+ hours, my nanny commitment which oscillates unpredictably between 10-25 hours, and the time Lynnette and I spend on Circling (side hustle work is work!), I am often working 70+ hours per week. This does not count art time — the writing and sewing and creating that I consider theoretically to be the love of my life(??) and which is pressed into the tiniest corners of my weekends like pizza dough smushed to the edge of the pan. It also does not include the general work of being a person — walking my energetic dog, cleaning my apartment, doing my laundry, cooking food, getting exercise, reading books, maintaining relationships, etc.
If you are wondering, this is proving taxing and not great! I do not recommend! 0/10 stars! I am grumpy, I cry a lot, my employee morale is haha quite low!
But as we weave through our examinations of the lives of artists, I know I am not unusual. Almost without exception, every single artist we speak to eventually gestures at what you might call their capitalist context: the work they are currently doing to support their art work, the ways in which their day job is or is not related to art as well, the way it has changed in different seasons, the demands it makes on their time, the demands it makes on their spirit.
So for this issue of Homework, and during our ad-hoc series on day jobs2 I decided to snapshot one actual day doing my three jobs.
I log onto work early to check my email and catch up on things since this morning I will technically be carving into daytime business hours a bit with Circling work. I get an email notification that we won a grant I had written for, which is a nice gust of wind in the sails on a Monday morning! I brew coffee in the French press and take it to my desk in the office/studio/guestroom.
Lynnette and I meet first thing this morning to run through our plans for a workshop we are hosting the next day. (If you are here because you subscribed after our CreativeMornings FieldTrip, thank you, and welcome!) We also set up the Zoom meeting room and recording for the interview I’m about to do. Lynnette has to duck out before the interview due to, obviously, her day job.
This morning, I am interviewing an author about her book which came out this spring and which I adore. I have been thinking about and recommending this beautiful book for months, and am so happy to meet her and to share her interview soon. I try for in-person interviews when I can get them, but obviously since we cannot be . . . everywhere . . . Zoom makes many of these features possible for now.
After wrapping up, I transition back to my day job. I also grab a protein shake from the fridge. I’m lucky to usually be able to work from home 1-2 days a week, and today is a home day. My job is mostly lots of spreadsheets and emails and Salesforce pages and google docs and is boring to explain but actually not bad at all to do. I enjoy it. I don’t have any work meetings today, so my to-do list is mostly self-directed. I chip away at my spreadsheets.
At some point, I take a break for lunch.
I work through the afternoon, and then when I’m done I transition back to Circling work. This means preparing an upcoming artist feature — I listen back to the audio of our interview to transcribe and trim it, I edit the object photos for it (we usually don’t make lots of edits if the artist sends us their own photos because we like the DIY vibes, but in this case I took the photos), and then exchange emails with the artist to approve the write-up. I also send this morning’s artist her honorarium and email her a thank-you.
During this time, I also bounce intermittently in and out of the kitchen to make dinner. I am making pasta with tomato sauce. My favorite way to make red sauce is to start with a mountain of cherry tomatoes and blister them in one entire stick of butter until they get split apart and juicy and caramelized into an almost reduction. I add some hot pepper paste that I buy from Trader Joe’s and swear by, and season to taste: a pinch of sugar, salt, pepper, basil — the first cuts of the summer from my balcony garden!
I don’t actually get time to eat this dinner before I have to leave for my third job, which is nannying for the evening. Nanny is a very loose term. The tasks I do for this family encompass, nanny, driver, TA, personal assistant, house organizer, cleaner, driver, and neurodivergence coach. But tonight, I will feed someone else’s children a dinner they will mostly reject (child #1 shouts that these dumplings have ruined her day, while child #2 simply gets up and toddles off to find the cat). I will blow bubbles and read books and change diapers; I will put a baby to sleep and chat with an elementary-schooler until her parents come home.
I get home around 10:30pm, eat pasta that I made hours earlier, and half-watch a show with my partner before going to bed. I think about an essay I started writing but never finished, I think about a quilt I began but haven’t touched in weeks. Neither of those things will get done today. I have been working for over fifteen hours. Tomorrow, I will start again at 7am. I will help run a program onsite in a different town. I will start a new grant request. I will look at so many spreadsheets. I will also run a virtual zine workshop through CreativeMornings (it will go well!), and work with Lynnette to debrief and discuss some admin around the summer.
I will do this, more or less, every day. In a sense, we all will.
We are all doing so many jobs all the damn time. If we are not juggling between day jobs and art work, we are doing care work or parenting or domestic labor or school work or the logistical labor that comes with being poor or disabled or otherwise marginalized under capitalism.
In a month, one of my jobs will be done, and when the tide of that work recedes, the tide pools of those liberated hours will once again be mine, and I will fill them with my little watery ecosystem of art and rest and being human once again.
I dream, as we all do, of a life with less labor. But also, I am cognizant that I am choosing this. I do all of this and also I actually do make art. I do all of it for the same reason that every single person making art chooses to keep making it — because we feel that, if we did not do it, we would cease to be ourselves. We would cease to exist. We would float away with the tide, and the tide pools of work we are not making would gurgle and backfill with sand until nobody would know they were there.
I keep working and I keep making because it is worth it to me, because I am here and because I love being here. I fight for my tide pools on the edge of the giant sea. I do my myriad jobs, I multitask and I fuss to my friends, I sacrifice my weekends and evenings, waking up early for interviews and typing in Substack documents from my phone on a break. I stay up late on a Sunday night writing this essay. I am working and I am making because I am carving out my life in sand.
Because I do not want to disappear.
Recently named the most dangerous town in America — amazing, love it, no notes!
Next week’s feature talks extensively about an artist’s day job — partly because it is a very cool job, but also because even with an arts dream job, we end up talking as always about how the job accommodates being an artist off the clock.
It is always a delight to read your writing, Krystiana. <3
I laugh out loud reading anything you write - be it a text or an essay. The imagery of carving life in sand is so choice. Also I'm exhausted reading this and by my own life. Where do any of us find the energy to live everyday??