A roundup of the mostly or entirely unpaid labor I have been doing lately
tl;dr: Town Meeting is a lot of weird unpaid civic work, parenting is a lot of weird unpaid emotionally intensive work, art is a lot of weird and generally ill-paid work, all three can nevertheless be satisfying which does call into question whether the amount of money you’re paid to do something has any relationship whatsoever to its real value in the world. Also, pole dancing relies on friction. Also, I like reading books and I tell you about some books I’ve been reading. Finally, the best-paid thing I do right now is engineering-related career and leadership coaching so if you need that why not pay me some money I’m pretty good at it and as a bonus I do find it satisfying.
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Ugh I just sent a zillion emails thanking people for signing up for my newsletter (all the way back to December 2022 signups, please don’t be offended if you didn’t get one my filtering system is bad and imperfect) and promising I’d send out an issue this week. So here I am. This is called Deadline Accountability and I’m generally not a fan because deadlines are made up and accountability usually means someone else making up your deadline and then holding you accountable to it or even if you made it up yourself things change, impermanance happens, the Circumstances alter, but still you have to deliver the thing and if you don’t someone will Hold You Accountable.
Blessedly I can’t get fired or get a bad performance review for not sending a newsletter no one is much looking out for anyways, even the people who paid me money aren’t necessarily expecting the thing to come. But I do want to send the newsletter, because it is one of the ways I flap my little butterfly wings in this world, and while we never know what our flapping wings truly change, we know they matter, but only if we flap them.
Contrary to whatever the hustlebros tell you the only thing you have to do in this life is participate, and while even when I sit on the roof and do nothing at all besides bear witness to the sunset I AM PARTICIPATING I also like to participate with my words, hence all those emails insisting a newsletter was coming this week. SO HERE I WILL MAKE A NEWSLETTER.
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Everyone in my household is out of sorts, I am convinced this is because it is hazy and humid and too bright outside and the barometric pressure is probably wrong.
Outside there’s the sound of a chainsaw or a leafblower or a hedgetrimmer and inside somewhere there is a door slamming, repeatedly, and I just want to burn everything down STOP BEING SO IRRITATING, WORLD. I want to peel off my own skin, which is an annoyingly familiar state for me, so it seemed like a good time to sit down and write this thing I told everyone I would write. Every other possible task seems horrible anyways.
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Okay, well, what have I been up to, besides starting newsletters I didn’t finish about books I did read?
In early May I was elected to Brookline Town Meeting, a strange and antiquated form of participatory democracy we have here in my town, and much of late May and early June has been devoted to participating in that. I’m only one of 255 elected Town Meeting Members, so it is a relatively small role, but when Town Meeting is in session (over a few nights a week for a few weeks in spring and then some in fall), it’s fairly absorbing. I didn’t do Model UN or anything so this is the first time I’ve had to become familiar with parliamentary procedure. I learned a lot, I made a lot of new friends and comrades, became closer to some folks I already knew, felt frustrated, confused, bored, angry, excited, and pretty much everything else, but in the end I feel proud of the work that I did and glad to be participating in my local community in this particular way.
For all its frustrations and its utter lack of remuneration, becoming a Town Meeting Member is in alignment with several of the principles for my life right now, as described in this draft document that I share online for those who want to follow along as I remake my life. This includes #3 "Practice corporeal politics” (an instruction via Timothy Snyder’s little book On Tyranny), #6 Build collective power, #7 consciously build relationships across difference, #9 Take civic responsibility, #24 learn new things in new ways and #32 Show up. So, that’s good. Check, #34 letting my body lead the way is working out for this.
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Also happening: kid stuff. One of my kids is a very private person and the other would be delighted if this entire newsletter were just about them, but I’m not going to share personal details.
I will just say that parenting, mothering, continues to be emotionally intensive & logistically challenging labor that cannot be outsourced no matter how many times you or someone else convinces you that there are experts out there who will solve all your parenting problems for you. Those experts don’t know what they are talking about, the parenting challenges often arise at 11pm after you are already asleep but you have to wake up and deal with them anyways, and the older your children get the more complex their problems get and the less you can do about them.
It is a lesson in relinquishing the illusion of control and falling back, again and again, on the only thing I know for sure about parenting: making sure they feel loved is the only reliable lever you have.
Making sure your children feel loved is the only reliable lever you have.
Anyways I will just note that, as all parents know, the end of the school year is an exhausting time to be a parent and I have been spending a lot of energy on it. Please enjoy this McSweeney’s satire on end-of-school-year insanity.
Finally, my parenting work, also unpaid, does at least hit on some of those principles I mentioned above. Hilariously my list doesn’t actually include a single parenting-specific principle, which I’m sure we should go into more deeply in the future and maybe even add one in, but #2 Practice active hope and help others practice active hope too, #25 Let go of attachment to outcomes and #33 Spend time with those I love certainly fit the bill.
No but truly the word family isn’t in my list ANYWHERE. I might have it written down on an index card somewhere and I never claimed this list is complete THAT IS WHY IT IS DRAFT but I’m truly shocked to see I didn’t mention the word once in all that verbiage. It absolutely warrants more investigation/explanation, but whatever it means it certainly would seem that whatever I quit my job to do, it really wasn’t “spend more time with my family” BECAUSE THAT IS NOT ON THIS LIST, despite the fact that I actually spend a lot of time with my family, although maybe that’s why it wasn’t on the list.
anyhoo no risk that I’ll start espousing the values of a tradwife.
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I have also been continuing to work on my pole dancing skills. Here’s a video. It’s a little bit ass-forward so if you don’t want to see me hanging upside down in skimpy clothing then don’t click.
One interesting fact about pole dancing is that there is actually a technical reason to wear so little, not just a sexiness reason. To be clear, I didn’t know this going in and mostly got into it for reasons of sexiness and the opportunity to wear maximally skimpy outfits, even skimpier than the usual yoga attire. But it turns out that pole is not just about strength, agility, and flexibility, but also and crucially about friction.
Many pole tricks rely on the friction of your skin against the pole to work; it is strength plus geometry in relation to gravity plus friction that make them possible, so in this movie when I am hanging upside down it is because I have enough stickiness from the insides and back of my thick thighs to the back of my upper calf to just hang there like that. While you can buy polewear that is sticky (and I have some), in the absence of sticky polewear, the more skin you have showing, the more points of contact you’ve got for the pole, and the less likely you are to just inelegantly slide down it like a lackadaisical firefighter.1
Learning pole has been about #11 make art and #24 learn new things in new ways. I’ve never been this strong in my life, and I’ve never really explored dance as an art form. In addition, my pole studio is a queer-owned small business so when I pay money for pole lessons I am #4 paying individuals (well, not precisely, but close) not platforms and when I go to them I take 2 buses to a part of Boston I otherwise have never had opportunity to go to and I meet new people with very different lives from mine.
If you’re a local reader and are curious about learning pole I encourage you to try an intro class there! If we’re already friends and you’re curious to see me do pole in person you may invite yourself over with a bottle of wine or ginger-turmeric kombucha and I will show you. If we are not already friends especially if you identify as a man I trust you know enough not to decide that the most appropriate way to make friends with me is to ask to come over to my home so I can pole dance for you. Use your damn common sense, ppl.
Pole dancing currently costs me more money than it earns me, because it earns me 0 money and I pay for lessons. That said, I do hope to be able to perform sometime within the next year and then I hope it will move from “expensive hobby” to “ill-paid or break-even art” though I bet I can get paid more for a pole dance performance than I can for a poem (max I’ve earned for a poem has been 50 bucks).
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I’ve also been painting and I continue to do self-portraits, including a set of photos I did in honor of pride over the weekend, like this one. The painting costs money and pays nothing, I have a trickle of income from the photography.
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Finally, what have I been reading?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which has been a fascinating look at just how limited most of our stories about human society are and how much more leeway we have to change things than we often believe. Very inspiring as well as fascinating.
Not exactly reading but my hard copy of The Anti-Planner: How to Get Sh*t Done When You Don’t Feel Like It, by Dani Donovan, finally arrived and it has been very worth the wait. Particularly as I move back into this less-structured, more creative period, where a lot of the work I feel called to do depends on my own impulse to do it, it’s a really great book to have at my side. I wish everyone in my family would make use of it, but, unfortunately, all I can do is leave it around where they can see it and hope they bother to try. It’s a way better solution to procrastination and overwhelm than a book you’re supposed to READ all the way through or an app you have to pay a subscription for and let all up in your data.
The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century, by Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige. I have been reading about Grace Lee Boggs and her work in Detroit for a few years now, from a variety of sources including Adrienne Marie Brown, Joanna Macy, and Rebecca Solnit, three activists I deeply admire, so it was great to finally get around to reading some of her work. “Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens”.
Become Unbutterable, a zine about Jorts and Disability Accommodations. I trust I don’t actually have to tell you more about this, but if I do, just note that Jorts is a cat and you should read the zine.
I’m reading some other stuff too but that’s already too many things. Would love to hear what you’ve been reading, why not reply and tell me?
Don’t forget to flap your butterfly wings!
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The end part, where I ask you for money and publicity and also tell you about my leadership coaching which is the most remunerative activity I do right now.
If you like it why don’t you put a ring on it, or at least five bucks a month?
If you liked it quite a bit you could forward it to a friend or share it on social or you could:
If you think I’m cool and want career or leadership advice from me (look I can still play capitalism’s games, and my psychopharmacologist is not cheap), consider my engineering career and leadership coaching, which you can read more about here. I’ll note I recently received a powerful endorsement for my engineering leadership when I was told "You're a shitty tech bro”. That was and is certainly true, I have always been shitty at being a tech bro, but I was actually very good at my job leading engineers and I can still help you do that job and/or help you figure out what to do with your engineering career that won't drive you to drink or despair.
And yes, obviously this results in pole burn sometimes. Hazard of the art form.