Welcome to the workin' week

I’ve maintained this gag all my life — that as for work, well… I’ll just play and explore and keep on living a maximal yet minimal life, doing cool interesting things, til I’m old – and then I’ll just kick back and enjoy the best cat food money can buy until I die.

It’s a viable modus operandi, given that I carry no debts or children. But now that I’m deep into my 6th decade and there’s still rent to pay and a coffee habit to maintain, the joke is starting to wear a bit thin. Rev Canada assures me that if I make it over the line I’ll be eligible for a grand pension of $224 a month. When that blessed day comes I’ll be livin’ large. In the meantime, to stave off the Meow Mix diet I am, as ever, beating the bushes for work.

Looking for work has been my lifelong pursuit. It is a full-time job in itself (can I claim EI for that?). Even when I’m not actively looking for work, I am walking around with my antennae up waiting for work to find me. But lately, as I begin to overhear my friends discussing retirement like it’s an actual thing on the visible horizon, the endless job search feels a tad disconcerting.

It’s not like I don’t have a resumé.

Here follows just a sampling of the things I’ve done so far in my life, for money:

Telemarketer.
Camera sales.
Chopper of cabbages.
Newsstand operator.
Video rental company (would you like that in VHS or Beta?).
Typesetter, late-Jurassic Kay Pro computer period.
Director of arthritis videos.
Projectionist.
Archival book restorer.
Tour coordinator for famous Canadian writers.
Laundry at remote heli-skiing lodge.
Nude model.
Graphic designer.
Manager of a zillion public events.
Magazine publisher.
Host, marketer, kitchen-worker, housekeeper, Volunteer Manager: Hollyhock.
Laundress for sex workers (expert at removing stains from sheets and lingerie).
Decorator of artificial Christmas trees.
Writer of mind-numbing marketing bumpf.
Wrangler of 400 teenaged volunteers for The Children’s Festival.
Podcast producer.
Bike shop.
Bike shop.
Bike shop.

And on. And that’s not even touching the many more peculiar employments I’ve done for free.

It is a life of odd jobs – each one an education and a calling.

My friend Jenn Chan worked it exactly the opposite way. She beavered away from graduation through to age 50, carefully tending her investments and stashing her dough. Like me, she has always lived light – never owning a car or a house, or taking on children or debts. She just put her head down and enjoyed her bike commute to work every day, living for frequent intermissions of deep exploratory travel. She didn’t hate her job, but it was always just a means to an end. At 50 (and looking 35) she called it quits and now devotes herself full-time to leisure and exploration. She knew how to work it, and it worked out well for her.

Jenn is a diligent ant and I am a flighty grasshopper. My resume reads like Swiss cheese, with lengthy spiritual or hedonistic detours punched between the bits of cheese. (Job interviewer: so what exactly were you doing between 2014 and 2017 …? Ummm….). I’ve done a shit ton of things, learned a lot of stuff, had a lot of fun. The one thing I completely forgot to do was make money. And so as the world turns and technologies go obsolete and my resumé runs to several pages in 9 pt type, the rent comes due.

People who have taken the conventional job route sometimes feel stuck in a rut, and they tell me they envy my ‘freedom’, just as I envy their ‘security’. But freedom and security are flip sides of the same illusory coin. We are never really safe and we are never really free. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose, and once in a while I still wake in a panic thinking hey maybe it’s time to knuckle down and finally accept that six-figure CEO job I’ve turned my nose up at, next time the headhunters call. Uh huh yeah right that’s just not gonna happen. It’s not only that the headhunters aren’t calling. It’s also that at this point I know that I simply cannot devote a big chunk of the remaining years of my precious life to work that doesn’t bring me some measure of joy, and that doesn’t push me to give myself more fully to the world. It’s not that I stubbornly won’t – I just truly can’t. I’ve tried. I don’t last a week if every day’s end leaves me feeling dirty or diminished.

So then the mortal heebie-jeebies subside, and I calm myself down. I make a strong coffee and scroll through the job listings. I flip through my patchwork quilt of a life and I think – yeah this job, sure, why not? I can deliver microgreens, I can wipe tables, I can figure out how to work a boom mic. I’ll apply. What the heck it might be fun. And maybe I can put off the cat food for just a few more years.

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