Staying engaged to survive…

Several weeks ago, Jon Stewart warned The Daily Show viewers that no matter who wins the presidential election this fall, we’re all going to need to be ready. It wasn’t said with a fear-mongering tone; he wasn’t saying things will be bad if Biden loses, so you better vote for him. Stewart recognized that even if Biden is re-elected (and that’s a big “if”), the populace will not be settled.

Fast forward to today where I got lost in the comment section of a “Gen-Xer’s” hot take about voting third party. Scrolling past would have been better for my blood pressure, but this creator was regurgitating the same bullshit we’ve heard before; that things will be worse under Trump, that it’s effectively pointless to vote third party, and that this is just the political reality we’re in. I consider this “bullshit” not because it isn’t true, but because it’s always leveraged in order to maintain the status quo.

I tried to curb my frustration when I commented saying, “Counterpoint: What if voting for Biden perpetuates the same political complacency of the masses, thus allowing someone like Biden to disenfranchise more people without them noticing?” It wasn’t taken lightly. He responded by saying my point was invalidated by the fact that I’m not offering a viable solution (though in his video, he dismissed “revolution” as ridiculous, so I don’t think he’d be ready for a conversation around the Land Back movement, which I pointed out later on), to which I responded by saying essentially that surrendering to the status quo wasn’t a solution either. I also pointed out that expecting a well-thought-out “solution” in the comment section of a TikTok with fewer than 200 views was probably more ridiculous than hoping for a revolution before November.

That didn’t seem to sit well. We exchanged a couple insults and then I blocked him because I don’t actually have that kind of time to argue in comment sections. And since he only seemed to be looking to attract people who already agreed with him, it wasn’t going to go anywhere.

But it’s not that I’m okay with a second Trump presidency. There are so many things that will get immeasurably worse if he’s elected again. Roe v. Wade getting overturned was the tip of the iceberg of the conservative agenda; so many human rights are now on the chopping block. And with the way Republicans were able to pack the courts at all levels through Trump, those human rights will be fast-tracked to the ultra-conservative Supreme Court. A second term under Biden might stop the bleeding and prevent another fundamental right from being overturned.

But I honestly don’t believe Biden will win – whether I vote for him or not. Democrats seem to forget that hardly anyone wanted Biden in the first place; he just happened to have more money in his campaign fund. And in the lead-up to the general election in the Fall of 2020, there was a lot of political chatter about Biden embracing the role of a one-term president. So why should I waste the energy trying to rally support for him when I don’t believe he’ll win, and even if he did, I’d rather have someone else as president?

Because I cannot support genocide. And Biden bypassed congress to send military support to Israel to help with their genocide against Palestine.

At this point, the only thing I feel compelled to support is a total overhaul of the entire political system. And not in the sense of trimming away a few bad branches, no; I’m talking about uprooting the whole fucking thing and starting new.

It’s wildly impractical, yes. But it’s what I want.

No more dead Palestinians.

No more billionaires hoarding land and resources while the rest of us side-gig our way through survival.

No more colonial states.

No more corporate pollution that leaves us with “Boil water” advisories for decades.

No more capitalism at all.

Like I said, it’s impractical. There are too many people who’ve internalized the false promises of the American Dream and still think that it’s a matter of small adjustments here and there before we achieve Utopia. As if individualism has been the right answer all along, but with the wrong implementation. Like the guy I argued with this morning, these are the folks who occupy the middle voter block; not in total agreement with either major party, but still obsessed with a capitalist mindset.

There’s a reason the phrase is “Two sides of the same coin,” in reference to the American political system; the real God of the US is money. It’s the most bipartisan cause in any Congress.

And that’s why the whole thing needs to go.

It was built by stolen labor on stolen land, and they’ve been trying to recreate the same thing in Palestine thinking we won’t notice. Thinking that we’re just immature, rebellious kids who don’t want to work.

And yeah, I don’t want to work. I want to write novels, learn how to grow vegetables, build my own furniture, cook meals for loved ones, and spend my nights reading. But none of that matters if it means Palestinian babies are bombed, to say nothing of the men and women who are tortured, raped, and murdered in front of their families. Some get their heads blown off by snipers while others are targeted by a drone strike – all while Israeli soldiers laugh and mock them.

I don’t want to work under these conditions.

When the spectrum of death goes from an infant victim of a drone strike to a man slowly run over by a tank (and whose only identifiable feature was a hand with a zip-tie around it), there’s no spinning this as a positive thing.

Israel is thirsty for blood and we keep empowering them to take it – the primary enabler of it all is none other than Joe Biden, the one who thinks he deserves our vote in the Fall. The one who thinks he’s better than Trump, when the reality is he’s no less violent; the violence is just being out-sourced instead of Made in America like an Israeli bomb.

In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, in response to Trump’s popularity, the Democrats embraced the strategy of “harm reduction.” The idea was we “vote Blue no matter who” as a means of minimizing the damage to Americans – reducing the numbers of COVID casualties and keeping the economy from becoming completely unstable. Whether or not we were successful is irrelevant at this point; Biden failed at many promises and created a monster in the Jordan Valley – one that he has been unwilling to control.

And I am simply one among many who think it’s time we have a system in place that can prevent genocides, that can roll Israel’s expansion back while granting Palestine its own statehood. We have too many elected officials who are, arguably, dead inside and okay with the colonial state of Israel because it helps protect the colonial united states here at home, which keeps them in power and the rest of us “working” ourselves to death.

We genuinely don’t know how long we have left on this planet. I would love to see my nephews and nieces go through college not for the false promise of a good job, but for the experience of being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. I want a revitalization of Indigenous communities that requires land being returned to its original occupants, and not as some gesture of charity for some politician, but for the replenishment of life to the land and its people. And I want to be able to live a healthy life well into my 70’s or 80’s instead of having to make sure my will and testament is in order whenever a new apocalyptic event looms on the horizon.

I want us all to dream beyond the limitations of capitalism. Sure, it’s unlikely in the next six months. But if not now, then when?

Jon Stewart was right. No matter who we are or how we vote, we’re going to need to stay engaged beyond November. And there’s no better time than right now.

Free Palestine.

A Decade Apart…

April 11^th, 2024 marked 10 years since my Grandpa’s passing. There are times where it’s easy to accept the reality that he’s gone, but there are times where it’s not. And those moments seem more frequent lately.

His passing wasn’t a surprise even if it was sudden. His health had been declining for several years and in January of 2014, he was rushed to the hospital because he had trouble breathing. That’s when they discovered a mass they believed to be cancerous. Based off of its perceived growth rate, the doctor gave a timeframe of 1-2 years of life left. But the cancer grew faster than they predicted and not even 3 months later, he was gone.

For many people, the passing of a grandparent is still sad, maybe even tragic, but not necessarily devastating. For my siblings and me, though, our Grandpa was one of the few stable father figures we’ve ever had – and for my older brother and me, he was the only father figure. It would take years to sift through the emotional turmoil I was thrust into in the wake of his passing, and I don’t think I’ll ever be done with the process. It’s like an injury suffered years ago that still requires physical therapy to manage the pain.

But I think I have the cause of the turmoil mostly figured out. For many orphans, there’s the stigma that we all have abandonment issues that cause us to become possessive and controlling over the people we love. Or we totally close ourselves off from the people around us so that we don’t get hurt again. All of this, we’re told as orphans, is because our parents left us and now we have this deeply seated insecurity, and we’ll always struggle with relationships.

Hardly any of this was ever true for me. Evangelicalism compelled me to internalize that narrative; that I’ll only ever find true fulfillment in God as my “real Father.” But the more I tried to believe it, the less emotionally stable I became. For a while I rationalized this as the Spirit “convicting” me and that to find true healing, I just had to have these emotional breakdowns a bunch. Eventually I’d be healed and living a full life dedicated to Jesus.

When you’re in the thick of evangelicalism, it’s not the community that holds it all together. It’s the cognitive dissonance. It’s the compulsion to believe a particular narrative regardless of the evidence in front of you. Starting with the base assumptions of the Bible being perfectly true and everything being within God’s plan, one could confidently reject any contradictory evidence because God does not mislead His children.

Watching my grandfather’s skin turn from a dusty pale to a ghastly yellow as all the air left his body and he became eerily still – this obliterated any cognitive dissonance I may have had. There was no going back to what I had left behind. Because it hadn’t been any abandonment issue that caused this pain; it was an all-encompassing loneliness. It was like I couldn’t breathe because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. Grandpa was supposed to live long enough to see me graduate my Master’s program and maybe even see me get married. He wasn’t supposed to go this soon.

When you don’t have what most of your classmates have in the way of parents, you cherish what you do actually have. But there was a part of me that, because everyone else’s dads were a key part of their adult lives well into their 30s and 40s, believed I’d be able to have that, too. Despite the orphan part. In my mind, because he had been there through pretty much every key event any normal kid might have, I didn’t really think of myself as an orphan. And then he was gone, and I was reminded all over again, and alone all over again – just like that time when I was taken from my birth mother in the back of a cop car and dropped off with some stranger whose kids were bullies.

That was the core of the turmoil. My Grandpa had been my anchor when I was left adrift and his passing, though expected for literal decades, was like the tether snapping apart and I was immediately sucked into an emotional maelstrom. If it hadn’t been for my older brother, I don’t really know where I’d be right now. But I know that if I had tried to stay within evangelicalism, I would never have escaped that maelstrom.

I also know that whatever turmoil I may have suffered in the immediate wake of my Grandpa’s passing was far better than the absolute shitstorm he kept me and my siblings from. All things considered, he gave us a sense of peace and stability, which enabled a relatively normal childhood. We never went hungry, always had clothes (even if they weren’t always new), and we never had to wonder where we’d sleep each night. Through meeting these basic necessities, my Grandpa gave us a chance to dream.

And being able to dream feels like a superpower in a world of nightmares.

Reading “Diversely”…

I always feel late to whatever’s trending on TikTok. Admittedly, it’s an app that overwhelmed me when I first created a profile because it seemed like the videos just never stopped playing. But once I got the hang of things, it hasn’t been so bad. And recently, because I’m challenging myself to try different creative things, I’ve been watching a lot more of them to get a sense of how different people will try different things.

An interesting thing, though, is that my “Following” tab is still showing me videos from 4, 5, and even 6 months ago because I just simply hadn’t been using the app for a long, long time. So the discussion around reading diversely is by now old news for most avid TikTok users, it’s been fairly fresh for me.

And yet at the same time, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this conversation – a person who occupies more than one privilege (cis, white, abled, etc.) suddenly feels threatened because they’re being required to consider a vastly different perspective. Happened in my undergrad days, in seminary, and even in my MFA program from a supposedly “progressive” school.

In this recent TikTok (or rather, #BookTok) discussion, creators were responding to a racist rant from another creator (who might also be an author?) who basically said that she doesn’t feel the need to actively engage with books outside her own demographic. Of course, she did not respond well to the pushback and showed her true colors – that her critics were obsessed with race, which is usually only said when one doesn’t know anything about racism or how it works.

Now, nearly every response video I had seen dissected these comments effortlessly because, like I said above, it’s nothing new. Cis, abled white folks have been saying things like this for decades – at least publically; privately they’ve probably been saying it for much longer. Some talked about the practicality of reading from more than one perspective to enhance your own, even if race isn’t a factor. Others highlighted that “diversity” should never equal “non-white”; there’s diversity amongst queer writers, disabled writers, non-Black people of color (hi), etc. It’s actually been pretty nice to see so many allies step up and educate bigoted folks about all these issues while not talking over marginalized creators. It’s taken off a lot of labor for these creators.

Yet what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is the fact that this person (and people like her) was never placed in a situation where she had to imagine herself into the story. Somewhere in one of my journals from middle school (between the ages of 12 and 14, mind you) is an entry of where I wrote about making the conscious decision to no longer daydream about myself as a white person, and that I would imagine myself from then on as the person I saw in the mirror. And when I think back to what could have possibly influenced my imagination to only depict myself as white, I was obviously only ever exposed to white media – TV commercials, TV shows, books where every character was assumed to be white (because any non-white character who might have been mentioned was always written with a stereotype), and the fact that we had been taught almost exclusively white American history.

Even now, over 20 years later, I still struggle to cast myself into my own imagination. More often than not, I have to literally look in the mirror as I’m having a daydream just to get the right sense of myself in my imagination. And yet there are people out there for whom this isn’t a necessity – that they can simply read a story knowing full well that it was made with them in mind. The first time where I didn’t have to do this was when I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony… as a senior in college.

At 22 years old, I had encountered a book with characters who looked like me for the first time.

My hope for those who are genuinely reading diversely not for the sake of scoring brownie points for being seen as “progressive,” but because they want to broaden their understanding of what it’s like to be in a space that wasn’t made for them, is that you don’t make it a tourist stop. Read diversely so often that it’s no longer a novelty that you’re reading a Black author, or an Indigenous author, or a disabled author, or a queer author, etc. Because many things can change; publishers can start publishing more stories from under-represented demographics, educators can switch up their curriculums to include more diverse voices, and fewer books would get banned because of someone else’s bigotry.

But more importantly, there will be fewer kids who have to grow up like I did (and, all things considered, I had it relatively easy). And maybe more of our stories can get told.

My Weekend Reading 2.23.24

In an effort to de-stress and quell my anxiety while also refocusing on shit that actually matters, I thought I’d share what I’m reading this weekend.

Or at least trying to read.

The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin
After binging through her Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Two days ago I finished The Killing Moon, the first in her Dreamblood duology, and immediately plunged into its sequel. There are many things I love about Jemisin’s world-building, but she has an incredible way of tying the lore into the current narrative and from multiple perspectives and expressions. Not only do you get the mythology told from different perspectives, but you also get multiple interpretations of the mythology even within similar expressions. Mix this with prose that’s almost lyrical in points, dialogue that makes you feel a part of the conversation, and character development so rich it’s like a freshly cut onion because it leaves you crying from its potency, and you get a series of stories that you feel sacreligious in putting down. So yeah, I’m hoping to get lost in this book.

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
This novel has been so vivid in detail that I’ve often had to reread portions to fully saturate the setting. It’s been a slow read for that and the fact that its content brings back some memories of my early childhood. But at about 100 pages in, it’s good. If you’ve ever listened to the story told in Tracey Chapman’s song “Fast Car,” this novel feels like a longer form of that song.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
I made the mistake of speed-reading through this during my MFA program, so I’m reading it again, but allowing myself to absorb his words. Baldwin’s prose is often poetic, but always incising through the bullshit of white supremacist societies. It’s hard to read his works and not come away thinking differently about everything.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis
Like I said at the start, I’m trying to refocus and pay greater attention to the things in life that actually matter. Davis’ work has always disrupted my thinking in tremendous ways, and while I don’t expect too much of that from this book, I look forward to being refreshed with wisdom from a veteran in liberation struggles. The subtitle reads “Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundation of a Movement,” which should stand out to the self-described allies who continue to balk at showing support for Palestine. If you only became an “activist” after George Floyd, I’m glad you’re getting involved, but trust that there’s more to learn. I can already tell that this book is a great place to start.

Taking advantage of a coupon and a sale this week, I also picked up a couple more books that I don’t think I’ll get to this weekend, but I hope to read soon: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (a Palestinian author) and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (with one of the coolest book designs). I don’t know if I’ll write reviews for any of these books just yet, but I imagine I’ll be writing about them for some time.

A quick update about my own content creation projects; I’ve fully removed everything from Substack because of their hesitation to de-platform Nazi content. Since I hadn’t really gotten going over there, it wasn’t much of a loss to leave. But I am hoping to build a whole new site dedicated to a weekly newsletter as well as sharing many of my projects. If you’d like to find out more, please subscribe to this blog so that you can catch all my updates. And if you’re looking to financially support my work, I have a Ko-Fi page set up as well. My long-term goal is to make the switch from regular, hourly wage jobs to doing creative stuff full time, and I have so many project ideas. Your support is greatly appreciated!

(Feel free to let me know what you’re reading in the comments, too!)

Twitter, Threads, and Finding an Online Home…

Last night (and for a little bit this morning), the dopamine was flowing. I, along with millions of others, had just joined Threads, Meta’s new social media app that is converting quite a few Twitter users. It… almost has me.

Being an Instagram app, all I had to do was log-in with the same credentials, copy and paste my Twitter bio, and follow everyone that I already follow on Instagram (and invite those who don’t yet have Threads). So the setup was super easy… probably a little too easy. In no time at all, I was receiving notification after notification with every new follower (again, easily imported from Instagram), and it seemed like every 10 or 15 seconds, my TL would refresh with dozens of “threads” from people I don’t follow (including people I have specifically blocked on Twitter; as of right now, it doesn’t look like there’s an option to only view posts from people you follow; the TL is always going to include a bunch of strangers based off of Threads’ algorithms).

I soon found myself bouncing back and forth between Threads and Twitter – reading peoples’ threads, then seeing other peoples’ commentary on the app.

Obviously, I got overwhelmed (eventually) and snoozed my notifications on my phone. Since I was still wide awake, though, I watched a couple episodes of The Bear, then read for a while before finally calling it a night. And yes, I did dip back into the app a couple times after snoozing the notifications just to see what kind of conversations were happening.

But today this experience has made me wonder what the point of all of this even is? Do I really need another social media app that will ultimately prove to refine the targeted ads even though I’ve asked every app “not to track” my data? Is there really so much happening in this new place that I can’t find somewhere else? I’ve already been feeling quite fatigued with social media in general, so is this really going to help?

I can’t remember the name of it now, but there was a Medium post I read a few weeks back that talked about how the constant need to be engaged on every platform is actually a myth for being a successful creator. It was something along the lines of “less is more”; find something you’re good at and one or two platforms you enjoy, and stick with those. While I’m not really aiming every single social media platform toward being a successful content creator, I do long for the days when I didn’t have it. When I could spend hours reading or writing instead of binging another TV show or endlessly scrolling through some app.

And yes, this is largely a bed of my own making. I signed up for these damned apps and repeatedly make the choice to engage with them. But honestly there’s now so much of our everyday lives that almost depend on these apps – news, local weather warnings, keeping up with loved ones who happen to live halfway across the country, etc. So there’s a part of this that I can’t really completely bow out of it.

But this constant shuffling of apps and hustling over to The Chosen One to replace Twitter is exhausting. I just want to post things I enjoy and interact with people I like – the rest is just noise. Of course, these things don’t drive ad revenue, so these companies are always going to be jockeying for user engagement by adding weird things and/or cutting our favorite things. They aren’t really about socializing however you want; they’re about socializing in particular ways that wind up making them more money.

I’m sure that I’ll change my mind in a few months when Bluesky(Net) goes active or when the Melon Husk makes another move that renders Twitter (more of) a shell of what it once was. But for now, I’m trying to rein in my online involvement – getting back into blogging, reading more (for fun), and focus on quality over quantity when it comes to friendships.

I am curious, though, if you’ve been an avid Twitter user in the past, do you have a favorite lined up to replace it? Or are you going down with the ship, for better or for worse?

A belated Father’s Day reflection… sort of…

As I’ve mentioned several times before, leaving Starbucks was not fun. The company made it a simpler decision by continually cutting my hours while demanding greater performance, but leaving that specific group of coworkers was tough. In the final week, especially the last couple of days, I struggled to keep it together, to not cry over every little moment – the last time I’d see my favorite regulars, the last time I’d make drinks, or the last time I’d take orders for the drive-thru (I often described this role as a sort of radio-DJ type of experience because customers only interact with your voice – it was one of my favorite spots to work). Focusing on each of those fianl moments would have made leaving impossible.

What I realized, though, was that this is a common problem for me whenever it’s clear that a career change is in order (or at least a job change; honestly it’s starting to look like changing jobs is my career). Something about the job becomes unsustainable, but there’s always something else that tries to compel me to stay. For a long time, I had assumed that this compulsion was something I inherited from my Grandpa (who raised me). He always urged caution when I was considering a change that would effect my finances – going off to college, dropping from two jobs down to one, going off to seminary. Were he still here, it would have been impossible to convince him that going from one job to no job was the right move.

I mean, I hear his voice whenever I’m considering buying the name-brand item instead of the store-brand item, so it’d be a safe assumption that my hesitancy to depart this time around was a result of his influence.

But I think it’s only partially true in this case.

When I was an evangelical, I was led to believe that having an absent father was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to me. It was drilled into me that becasue I didn’t have a dad, I would struggle to maintain healthy (read “Godly”) relationships – especially my relationship with God. More than a few pastors often leveraged my fatherlessness to convince me I needed God. This became my core identity as an evangelical; I was fatherless before, but now I was a son of God.

All of this to say that I believed the biggest challenge I faced was the “abandonment issues”; the type of heightened insecurity I’d experience when people “left” my life. As the narrative was often told to me, I’d be more upset everytime someone moved away or I’d be completely closed off and callous to people leaving. It would only ever be some variation of one of these two options – all because my father was never around.

What none of these pastors (of course, all men) ever realized or ever allowed me to realize was that I did actually have a father, we just called him “Grandpa” (always with a capital ‘G,’ by the way). So every talking point about fatherlessness that they had thrown at me was meaningless because it didn’t apply to me.
In order to abandon someone, not only do you have to show up in the first place, but you have to show up often enough to garner a person’s trust. If you only show up once or twice, you’re just an acquaintance. But if you show up consistently enough, reliably enough, and then depart? That is abandoning someone. That’s how you betray their trust.

And that’s how I felt about leaving the coworkers I had at Starbucks; I felt like I had betrayed people I cared about deeply. People who had relied on me or looked up to me in some way. I left when they needed me.

Again, this is the manifestation of insecurities that developed over the last 35 years – insecurities that originated by a specific ideology manipulating my life experience to internalize the narrative that I’m broken, and in need of yet another absent Father to come fix me. My departure from Starbucks mimicked in many ways my exodus out of evangelicalism – I was repeatedly lied to about how valuable I was, the leveraging of my past experiences for the monetary profits of someone else, and never being allowed to express myself as I wish to. In both worlds, I was expected to conform to someone else’s version of me.

Leaving, then, wasn’t just a result of excessive burnout. It was, in miniature form, an act of liberation.

Being away from Starbucks has actually been relieving in critical ways, even if the financial anxiety has often been overwhelming. I finally have energy to write, read, and draw. I have a clearer sense of what I value most out of life and I honestly find no better way to honor those friendships I made at Starbucks.

I’ve been working on many things in this past month and while they’re each taking longer than I had originally hoped, I am actually quite excited about them. One thing in particular is a podcast I’m calling “Existentially Speaking,” and it’ll be a space to deconstruct my time as an evangelical – both rejecting the horrible things and redefining the wonderful things. More on that later.

For now, though, I’m just focused on breathing deeply and loving well.

Thanks for reading.

The adjustment sucks…

Depression has been hitting hard lately.

When I put in my notice, I felt a slight bit of relief – relief that the physical pain I was in would subside, the stress I was feeling from being over socialized would drop, and that I’d have more time and energy to be creative. I still wasn’t happy about leaving a group of coworkers that I quickly grew to love, but I was relieved that some things wouldn’t be so intense.

Leading up to, right in the middle of, and for a little while after my last week, I often cried about having to leave Starbucks. In the wake of it all, I realized there are many reasons why leaving was the wiser route – the details of which I’ll save for another time. But one of the things that I did not account for was the overall impact of losing my main community.

I’m still friends with most of my former coworkers, and still in the group chats where all the hangouts get planned. But these were people I saw nearly every day for more than a year. To go from that level of being socially engaged with them to nothing… it’s been rough. And this has definitely had an impact on my motivation to be creative because most mornings, all I want to do is roll through and check in on everyone.

I still could, sure. But when you’re still looking for a source of income, being a coffeeshop writer can get expensive quickly. Plus, the loud music that gets played at a lot of Starbucks locations was tolerable when I was working there, but I think I’d hate if I were to pop in to read or write. I just don’t focus well with most kinds of music; usually instramental stuff is better for me.

It just sucks being in a spot where they aren’t around anymore is all. I loved making folks laugh and being there for my coworkers – friends, really – when a customer was being shitty and made them cry (happens quite a bit in food service, but especially at Starbucks). I loved remembering our regulars’ orders by heart, often making them feel even more welcomed at our store. There were a lot of good vibes that were associated with the job.

It just sucks that Starbucks doesn’t seem to give a shit.

Leaving a job has definitely been a more common occurrence than I thought it would be when I was younger and (more) naïve. And this one has hit harder than most other places I’ve left – mostly because I know that I’m never going back. But it has solidified a few things for me. For one, money is important only because capitalism keeps making things more expensive for those of us on the bottom rung. But it’s not everything, and certainly not worth the shit that some jobs will definitely put you through. Your wellbeing is far more important, even if it means taking a pay cut (though, as I’m also finding out, it does get pretty turbulant).

Second, I hate when corporations leverage the familial terminology when talking about a work environment (“it’s like we’re a family here”), but some jobs definitely have an energy about them that will last longer than the job itself. In a week, I’m returning to a job I’ve had before primarily because the vibes have always been good, even if it is a pay cut from what I left behind. It may not be a long-term option, but it might help me get back on my feet in a way.

Lastly, regardless of where you find your community, there’ll always be ways to keep them close, even if everyone finds new jobs. The folks I had the privilege of working with for the last year and some change are people I want to keep around as long as they want to be around. We don’t always see eye to eye on every little thing, but the energy has always been nurturing and positive. This group gave me what I was always searching for from church: a sense of belonging. I had found my people.

Honestly, I could write another 1,000 words comparing the church community I used to have and this group of coworkers, but maybe some other time. For now, I’m just looking forward to the next karaoke night (even though I am quite horrible at singing), and finding ways to be a part of each others’ lives as we all take different paths. I miss them dearly, but that’s all the more reason to keep in touch and often.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant.

The Right Fit? Or a Good Fit?

Job hunting fucking sucks.

Not only do I have to suddenly pretend that I care about corporate interests, but I have to adopt a certain voice that carries the intimation that I am sincere about caring about those corporate interests. Like when Starbucks customers sometimes asked me what it’s like working there, I’d be expected to talk about the great benefits, better pay, and positive work environment. In those moments, I had to forget how often it was I consoled a barista who was crying in the back, or how we were expected to churn out the same sales numbers when a couple people called out (arguably because they didn’t want to cry in the back at work… again).

Truthfully, no matter how much I’ve enjoyed a job, I have never cared more about the company’s sales or public image than about mine and my coworkers’ wellbeing. I just haven’t. And I never will.

But not having a steady means of income is messing with my mind. Not only do I have to deal with judgement from others for leaving a job I grew to hate with no backup plan, but I have to juggle expenses. Tonight I had a PB&J for the third night in a row because I have three bills going out this week that will take pretty much everything I have left. And the shitty thing I’m trying not to focus on is that even if I had stayed at Starbucks, I’d likely still be in this situation because they cut my hours. So not only would I still be eating PB&Js, but I’d be way more exhausted than I am now.

So why the hell did I tell a friend who offered me a job that it wouldn’t work out? It had full time hours and even offered OT pay. “You can work whatever you want,” he told me. All I had to do was take a quick drug test (job involves operating a lot of heavy machinery), and show up on time. And it’s a job I’ve worked before, so there would be virtually no training involved. All things considered, for what I need right now, it would be a good fit.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the right fit.

I left Starbucks not just because I was tired of the entitled customers or wearing myself out for some millionaire CEO. I left because it was no longer a viable option for what I want to be doing in life. Do I wish I had something else lined up? Sure, but I actually had something lined up after I left my last job, as I did the job before that and the job before that.

All my adult life, albeit somewhat waylayed by a few college degrees, I have left one job to the next thinking I’d finally be able to do the things I want to do – I’d be able to write the stories I wanted to, or spend my weekends reading. And each time I wound up disappointed (again), that regardless of how hard I worked, we still weren’t making enough. Or I had underestimated the level of exhaustion I’d feel after coming home.

Each job offered new promises and instead delivered the same struggles. And when, in late 2017, a former manager told me that what I was experiencing was the result of “being stuck taking low-paying jobs,” I started to believe her, despite the insulting undertone. I really was stuck.

Truthfully I’m still stuck. I don’t know the formula for landing that salaried desk job that covers all my main expenses and allows me some time off to go watch some hockey games once in a while or pursue my dreams of being a published author on the side. I thought it was having a college degree, then I was told I needed more experience… or another degree. Then I got that degree and was told I needed more experience… or another degree. So it turns out I wasn’t just stuck taking low-paying jobs, I was stuck believing that what worked for others would work for me.

One positive side to unemployment is being able to catch up on the stacks of magazines I’ve collected over the last couple of years. Today I was reading through last July/August’s issue of WIRED and there’s an article on Taika Waititi, the eccentric writer/director/actor who’s churned out some incredible stories over the past few years. As the article’s author, Jennifer Kahn, highlights, Taika didn’t attend any film school, and that most of his projects are conducted intuitively. He aims for something new, something different, so when he’s working for an EP who wants something formulaic and safe, “he will agree to everything [they say] and then simply do what he wants. As he put it, ‘It’s literally me trying to not do whatever the grown-ups say,’” (50).

I’m not saying I’m aiming to be successful like Taika – that would take some serious luck and I feel like I’ve used up a lot already. But I am saying that maybe it’s time I stop listening to what the proverbial grown-ups tell me to do and simply pursue what I want to do. Start choosing the right fit over a good fit.

I guess I’m writing all of this to say you’ll probably see me doing a lot of self-promos over the next few weeks and months. Either that or I’ll cave and take another good fit and you won’t see me for a few months.

C’est la vie or whatever.

What’s next?

A friend asked me today if I felt nervous about not having a new job lined up. I said that I was, but that it wasn’t enough to keep me in my current job. As I mentioned last time, my current job has become unsustainable even from a pragmatic standpoint; I’m putting more effort into it than what I’m being compensated for. Fluctuating hours, intentional understaffing from Starbucks, endless orders through the mobile app and drive-thru – it is simply not a healthy place for me right now, and arguably not for anyone. And after talking with several store managers, it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to return to the way it was before.

But the thought of having another job lined up is not comforting. Right now, with where I am mentally and emotionally, another job would only perpetuate the same angst I currently have. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” as they say. Trading one capitalist mess for another doesn’t seem like a viable solution. I’m not leaving because the job I have doesn’t pay well enough; it helped us stabilize our rent situation and keep up with our bills. I’m leaving primarily because it’s causing me more harm than I’m willing to tolerate. And I have growing fear that finding another job of a similar caliber would only yield a similar situation.

Since dropping off my notice on Tuesday, I have actually felt a lot lighter mentally and emotionally. Even though last work week was particularly hellish – several call-outs, a huge technology problem that made the job way more stressful, a high volume of customers, etc. – I woke up Wednesday morning with a ton of energy. And unlike any week prior, I was feeling significantly less pain. It was like a pinched nerve suddenly being relaxed; I felt a little care-free. All I wanted to do in this feeling was create, so I sat down and outlined several categories of projects I want to try my hand at.

I’ve been applying to jobs that I think would be a better fit for what I want to do from home, though I don’t know if any of them will work out. But I also think I owe it to myself to push my own creative limits and see what I can produce. I have some time – not much, but some. Maybe get the ball rolling with a Substack, then a podcast, and then maybe start storyboarding my next comic series, and who knows? Maybe between the different platforms, I could carve out something that pays the bills?

I guess I’m just tired of trying the same damn schtick and expecting a different result.

Anyhow, I’m gonna go read.

To be a partner no more…

“To be honest, it’s a bad time to be a partner right now.”

Sitting on a case of tri-fold paper towels, holding my strawberry lemonade refresher with light ice and a couple pumps of raspberry, I nodded in agreement. It had been a rough week for me – running the floor 3 out of 5 shifts between 2 stores and having to deal with multiple call-outs each of those days. Customers had been patient for the most part, so that was a relief. But I still needed to talk to someone about the stress and frustration of it all and this store manager happened to be there.

Yesterday I made the difficult, but necessary decision to put in my two-week notice. Difficult not only because of the financial toll this will likely take, but mostly because I love my coworkers. It has become cliché and is often dangerous for corporations to leverage familial language with regard to coworkers and the work environment, but this store did actually feel like a type of family for me. There were many stressful days that we all survived together, but there were many other days that were fun. It was a place where I felt like I could come out of my introvert shell a bit and be the weirdo that I really am.

But like all giant corporations, Starbucks started to make our lives difficult. Throughout my short tenure as both a barista and shift supervisor (not quite a year and a half in total), upper management had told us that we had to earn our labor through high sales, low drive times, and high Customer Connection scores. Essentially, Starbucks uses an algorithm to determine each store’s labor budget and despite our sales consistently being among the highest for our district and also for our region, we kept seeing fewer and fewer hours.

And then in January, our district manager announced Starbucks’ plans to reduce each store’s shift supervisors back to pre-pandemic levels (since the pandemic is, you know, totally over or whatever). But, weirdly, no one was being laid off; we were just going to divvy up the horrendously-reduced labor budget between us. Before this announcement, we each were able to work 35 hours or more each week. It was the primary reason why I applied to be a supervisor in the first place. With the new ratio, though, none of us would see more than 30 hours a week, and in most cases would hardly see 20. The labor budget for supervisors went from about 280 hours a week down to below 130. They wanted our store to have only 5 supervisors and at the time of the announcement, there were 8 of us.

All approved by our working-for-the-company-for-less-than-a-year district manager.

With drastically reduced hours, we had to be borrowed out to other stores. At first they told us that we could pick up any shift, but less than a week later, they said we were technically only supposed to pick up keyholder shifts – the kind of shifts that were now coveted by every supervisor because of their extreme rarity. Essentially, Starbucks made it like a lottery pick as to whether or not we would be able to cover our basic needs.

For a short while, things were going alright. I was split almost equally between two stores and still grinding out about 35-38 hours a week. But then they started to micro-manage when baristas were scheduled to where we operating with 1-2 fewer people during our busiest times – all of this with the justification that sales were down (not really) and we had to be “fiscally responsible” (as if paying the CEO over $20 million a year fit that description). When peak would hit, our store would flood with walk-in customers, mobiles, and tons of people through our drive-thru. Even when I was borrowed out to café stores, the lines would be out the door and mobiles never seemed to stop. Despite all of us constantly being overwhelmed, we were also no longer allowed to funnel the traffic in any way; we couldn’t close our café or drive-thru if we were severely understaffed, and we definitely could not shut off mobiles. We couldn’t even shut off deliveries even though no employee at Starbucks gets tipped from those.

But of course, Starbucks has the reputation that they care about their employees partners.

As you might guess, this is not conducive to a viable creative practice, which was a key goal of mine when I started at the coffee company. I wanted to work the early mornings and write in the afternoons. And for a short while, I was able to do that. I’d open the store with a couple others at 4:30 in the morning, then come home to either read or write for a couple more hours before winding down for the evening. My Word journal very quickly eclipsed over 300 pages and 200,000 words in less than a year. When I started, I didn’t even have 50 pages.

For the last five or six months, however, I’ve hardly done anything for writing, and absolutely nothing for the other creative projects I have in mind.

So leaving this company is, in a way, taking back my creativity. Taking back my energy.

In the coming weeks, while I peruse for another job, I’m going to be revamping my creative outlets, starting with this blog. This space will be more like my journal; short, free-form entries mostly about the goings-on of my life. I’m also looking into launching a Substack where I’ll share more in-depth musings and even stories that I’m working on. With the extra time and energy, though, I’m also going to get back into drawing for my Write On Comics page. Lastly, and the thing I’m actually most excited about, I’ll be launching a podcast, but more on that later.

For now, though, I’m just relishing the fact that there’s an end date to the stress that Starbucks has become.

Tip your baristas, please.