End-of-Year Change, pt1/2
Greetings all – a few announcements / notifications of coming changes.
This writing project began about six weeks ago when a friend of mine suggested making concrete strides towards monetizing my work. He has been hearing of my almighty struggle to make any decent money as a graduate student worker over the last four years and is especially sensitive to the degrading conditions of being a Teaching Assistant. When he heard I would have to commute four hours per day to take home less than $19K, he finally broke his classic lonesome-cowboy silence to offer some advice.
Over vanilla porters at their kitchen table, before their baby came, my friend told me about streamers on Twitch in the gaming world as a way of analogizing. You would only need 100 subscribers paying $20 a month to live off of your writing, he reasoned. There are people out there who care about the stuff you care about, and who would love to read whatever you write on your weird topics. Write 500 words a day every day for six months. Post the link to your social media accounts. When you’re ready, he joked, come talk to me about hot tub streaming. I’m kidding, but I’m also not.
What he didn’t need to say, but gave with his expression and a tenderness of tone, was, The way you’re being treated as an employee of the university is beyond bullshit (cf. the latest: our having entered illegally private ‘voluntary pre-impasse mediation’ with the Mayor of Sacramento as the university escalates its retaliation against strikers). You have always been a writer, and you’ve never been paid to be one. The MFA was technically a grant – an award – a special circumstance, a gimme, not something sustainable, not lifeforce. It was kind of like redoing middle school – back to the (sexual/emotional) sandbox.
I am very grateful for the MFA funding. My time in Michigan was crucial for my personal/interpersonal/spiritual development. And, I have to move on from being a parasite on the ankle of the rotting behemoth that is higher ed in the US. I have seen graduates from the cohorts around my time there go on to make veritable careers (but again, they’re not structured quite like careers) around “residency-hopping.” They are grant-writers extraordinaire, hawking the wares of themselves and the manuscripts brewing in their nether regions to boards and panels of wealthier writers, endowments. I’m worth it, they shout, or coo, and you must recognize this and incorporate me into your rewards system for one tax cycle, or we will both be doomed.
This circles back to the issues of the eighth house in astrology – “other people’s money”! For my own timeline this life, the Saturn Return spelled a real break from what I would call Five of Pentacles energy, or “poverty consciousness” as the New Agers say. Poverty consciousness describes a survivalist mode of being and thinking and feeling. (It does not correlate to financial oppression under capitalism.) It does not feel it can afford rest, creativity, vulnerability, pleasure. It has a limited, outdated, egoically-defined notion of value. It overworks to compensate for this innate lack of ‘worthiness’, and rationalizes that it must overwork, or the person will be punished, and will die.
Economically, and therefore emotionally, being a ward of the university has always been just like being in the monastery. (Need I clarify that this refers only to my spiritual experience of the erstwhile-apprentice positionality?) No longer to assent to being a charity case requires breaking the spell that keeps you (and your writing) psychologically beholden to the ideologies and customs of the other people whose money you have needed to survive physically.
(Long post… to be continued tomorrow!)
image: Wednesday, December 14, 2022. Dawn breaks on the day grades are due to the University of California. Strikers are withholding over 40,000 final grades to leverage their labor power for a living wage, but the bargaining table has split because the UC is only offering substantial wage increases to preferred campuses [Berkeley, LA, SD] and are deliberately squeezing radical campuses, whose workers need the most support [Santa Cruz, Davis], out of the negotiations. The union representatives from the more moneyed campuses seem likely to cave to the uneven minor treats being thrown their way, like summer wage top-ups, leaving the poorest campuses to continue to lose precious research resources (like time). The mediator (the mayor of Sacramento) has requested that these sessions be private, which is neither required nor fully legal; Santa Cruz reps voted against mediation, but the split at the table is 10 union reps caving and 9 staying strong. The brilliance of bureaucracy continues to blind.