Author: thisgruntledworker

A girl quits her day job.
chronic illness

Being unremarkable

thisgruntledworker
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The cat stays in the picture.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my hands lately. Until now, my latest problem was some kind of muscular problem at the base of my thumb that doesn’t fit any singular diagnosis. After three more months of weekly occupational therapy and twenty minutes a day of hand, finger, and wrist-strengthening exercises, I can go for longer periods using my hands without pain. This is definitely progress. I also don’t type all day anymore, which definitely helps.

Now I have a new ailment to add to my keychain of pain: a knobby swelling of the knuckle on the middle finger on my left hand which feels a lot like osteoarthritis. According to the  radiologist’s report, my X-rays are “unremarkable.” Not even worth talking about. Hmph. All I know is that I wake up every morning feeling swollen and looking freakishly inflamed, like I have a bunion on my finger. Could it still be arthritis, but just not show up on the x-ray? I feel like all of the problems I’ve had with my hands and arms have been this way: not-quite carpal tunnel, not-quite tendinitis, not-quite pinched nerves. Not-quite legitimate.  

I have become quite the complainer.

Regardless of the (lack of) diagnosis, we still have to treat the symptoms. In the world of OT, that means more splints. I got a turquoise neoprene finger sleeve to wear at night (I imagine a factory somewhere where workers decapitate gloves, sending the resulting fingerless remnants to weightlifters). When my pain didn’t subside, she made a(nother) custom splint ($230 billed to Blue Cross), shaped like an old 110-film canister, that imprisons my middle finger between its two adjacent fingers. This is supposed to keep me from overextending it. Instead, it mainly restricts my ability to use my left hand and cuts off the circulation to my pointer finger.

My problem, they all say, is that I’m hypermobile. Allegedly my joints are very flexible and I can hold myself in unhealthy postures to compensate for muscle weakness and bad posture, even in my hands. Giving me a splint usually means that my body will just create a workaround that will do even more damage. And so, the cycle continues.

It’s kind of funny that my body is set up to unwittingly sabotage my progress. Every time I go to the OT “gym” (where the hardest exercises include picking pennies hidden in of a huge blob of putty), I feel like I am being reprimanded for my hyperflexibility. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Am I bending to meet everyone else’s needs, instead of making myself stronger?

Hmph.

My story

Here’s my story.

thisgruntledworker

desk-new-2For years, I was perfectly fine with the double life of an office-worker-by-day and artist and student by night. When my hands, wrists, neck and back all went on strike and I lost my ability to type, to write, or to draw, I felt completely useless. I was in constant pain and I blamed myself for not getting better. Maybe this was more than just a physical issue, I wondered. Is it work itself that’s making me unhappy? After a year of deliberation, I made a radical change.

I quit my job.

That’s right. I ended up becoming so obsessed with the idea of sustainable, meaningful work that I actually left my job to study it. As my body began to heal, I asked other women about their work lives, and heard stories of otherwise high-achieving women who were happy enough, but who had this other thing that they really wanted to do. In some cases, it was a creative side project; in others, it was a complete career overhaul. I suddenly realized: these are the people I need to serve.

Keep scrolling to hear about my process.

Uncategorized, Work tools

In Praise of Dotted Pages

thisgruntledworker

You might say that I have a bit of a problem. My friends would say it’s more like an addiction. I am constantly on the search for the ultimate notebook, planner, or organization system. When it comes to notebooks for my writing and drawings, I’m not terribly faithful, and I have been known to abandon many an otherwise perfectly useful system after a delirious bender at the art supply store (RIP, Artist & Craftsman Supply Harlem!).

I’ve tried them all: hard-backed, black-covered sketchbooks with thick blank white pages (pros: you can draw; cons: lack of lines or grid makes it difficult for writing), more modern iterations of composition notebooks (pros: nostalgia factor; cons: cheaply made and you can’t rip out pages without destroying the whole thing), and of course, the beloved Moleskine (pros: elastic keeps the notebook closed, high quality paper, convenient back pocket; cons: way too expensive). So when I found Muji, I was in notebook heaven.

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photo credit: @mujiusa

For the uninitiated, Muji is kind of like a Japanese IKEA, but for office, beauty, and household supplies, clothing, and accessories. Their aesthetic is very minimalist—most items are in neutral tones of gray, beige, and white. Their office supply section is my favorite. You can choose between .25 and .38mm pens in a rainbow of colors, should you be so discerning. And whenever I go there, the pen display is swarming with nerds like me test-scribbling on newsprint scrap paper pads.

The hidden gem of the Muji stationery department is the A5 Dotted Notebook. It retails for a mere four dollars, and instead of rigidly oppressive lines or anal-retentive grids, it has subtle gray dots, suggesting a tiny bit of structure without bombarding you with it. I have been using this notebook—or rather, a series of them—for the past three years.

muji love

Until this September. I finished my most recent notebook and headed to their Times Square store, only to find that they were out of stock. I figured, OK, it’s back-to-school time; they will order more. I tried the Fifth Avenue flagship store. Same story. That weekend, I called the Flatiron store to avoid having to make an extra trip, and was told that they had them in stock. When I got there, they somehow didn’t. I spoke with Jasmine, the kind woman at the register who said they might be planning to discontinue them.

I was frantic. Was there anywhere else where they had them? Luckily, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn store did. Jasmine, my new best friend, demanded that the guy in Brooklyn check the floor to make sure. He didn’t find any. Undeterred, she said check the basement, and he did. They had 50.

I am embarrassed to say that I took a 70 minute train trip from upper Manhattan to Brooklyn in order to buy 10 of these notebooks (and more embarrassed to say I thought about buying all 50). As clutched my shopping bag on the train, I thought about how tenacious I can be about seemingly inconsequential things. You might call me a perfectionist.

For now, I will stay faithful to my dotted pages— balancing myself delicately between the constraints of lines and the chaos of the blank page.

But you don’t want to be around me if I have to detox.

Alienated Labor

Ikiru, Busy Work and Bullshit Jobs

thisgruntledworker

I’ve been thinking a lot about “busy work” lately…

 

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Our protagonist.

I just watched Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru. Kanji Wantanabe, the film’s protagonist and a Japanese public affairs section chief whose main responsibility seems to be (literally) rubber-stamping proposals, learns that he is dying of stomach cancer. The man, who had never taken a vacation or a sick day in his 25 years of service, does not know how much longer he has, and overhears his son and daughter–in-law planning to spend his retirement money and pension on a new house. Kenji leaves his home and his job, withdraws his retirement bonus, and befriends a novelist who takes him on an improvised tour of the city’s pachinko parlors and speakeasies. Later, he encounters Toyo, a vibrant and spirited young former employee who leaves her paper-pushing desk job to take a job assembling animated stuffed toy bunnies. She may be a lowly factory worker, but she can at least see the value in her work: bringing happiness to kids.

Ikiru, which translates into English as “to live,” is less about a man dying than about a man’s desire  for a sense of purpose in his remaining days. He becomes a champion of a group of local mothers who have been petitioning, to no avail, to turn a hazardous liquid waste site into a park for their kids. Until Kenji gets involved, this gaggle of mild-mannered women (who serve as the embodiment of failed not-my-job bureaucracy), dutifully go from office to office to plead their case until they reach a breaking point, unleashing a tirade on the clerk who had taken their initial complaint and sent them in circles.

Without giving any further spoilers, the film’s work-worn archetypal hero’s plight can be seen in fiction: Bartleby the Scrivener and The Death of Ivan Illych, and in modern films: Office Space, Up in the Air, and Zootopia (Remember that DMV sloth?). TV is riddled with them: The Office (obviously), Workaholics, The IT Crowd, and Silicon Valley.

Why are these sad working stiffs so relatable?  They seem to have what David Graeber, anthropologist from the London School of Economics, would call “bullshit” jobs. Graeber received such an overwhelming response to his  essay on this topic that he wrote an entire book about it. Just what constitutes a bullshit job? On the September 3 podcast of The Hidden Brain, Graeber tells host Shankar Vadantham that “between 37 and 40% of all people who had jobs were convinced that if their job didn’t exist, it would make no difference at all.”  These jobs are not usually menial, as you might expect—they’re “clerical, managerial, administrative sort of positions… or marketing [or] human resources…[workers who would] really rather be doing something useful with their lives.”

 

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from Simon & Schuster

Graeber explained how he was first introduced to “bullshit” at work: as a teenager, he was a dishwasher. Eager to get the dishes done so he could relax, he and his friend worked quickly and efficiently and then took a break. The boss, finding the two boys loafing, protested, yelling, “You’re on MY time, and you can’t loaf around!” This idea, of someone purchasing or renting our time, is one that didn’t always exist until the Industrial Era. Heidegger and Marx saw it coming. When we’re so removed from actually making decorative or utilitarian objects, as artisans and craftsmen once did, it becomes harder to see the value in the work we are doing.

Graeber divides classifies bullshit jobs as follows:

  1. Flunkies who make their boss feel important
  2. Goons who act aggressively on behalf of their bosses or clients (this includes lawyers)
  3. Duct tapers hide a problem rather than fixing it (he gives the example of an administrator who takes messages for a single repair person who is overburdened. This guy’s whole job is to apologize for his boss. Wouldn’t it be more efficient, Graeber asks, to just hire another technician?
  4. Box-Tickers create paperwork rather than take action
  5. Taskmasters create meaningless work for their subordinates in order to have a mechanism to evaluate them:
    1. Supervisors of people who don’t need supervision
    2. People who create paperwork and other unnecessary tasks (he sees this as a huge problem in universities, where administrative staff outnumber faculty, and where high-level administrators are assigned multiple assistants).

Are there any jobs that are bullshit-proof?  I think I’m creating one —I’ll keep you posted.

Makers

Making It: Competitive Crafting

thisgruntledworker

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I am obsessed with Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman’s show Making It. If you’re a crafter like me, and use the word glitter as a verb, you’ll like it, too. I knew from his standup special that Offerman was a talented woodworker, but I didn’t know that he also ran his own woodworking studio in East L.A. Amy Poehler is not crafty at all, so it is fun to watch her bounce around the craft barn in overalls, marvelling at words like decoupage and pool noodles (the latter feature in many of the winning projects). The overall winner gets “the satisfaction of a job well done” along with $100,000.

This show is a crafter’s dream. Eight contestants undertake a series of two challenges per episode: a three-hour “Faster Craft,” like a spirit animal or a Halloween costume, which is followed by a more time-intensive “Master Craft,” such as a kids’ play space or a holiday front porch decoration. The winner of each challenge wins an embroidered patch for their denim apron, and one contestant is sent home each week. The judges are Simon Doonan (known for his iconic Barneys window displays) and Dayna Kim Johnson, who works as a trend scout for Etsy.

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Billy’s Beefcake costume

The contestants are a fairly diverse bunch in terms of their backgrounds and preferred media. My favorites are Billy, who makes a taco truck stocked with felt cartoon pig head-filled pork tacos. While Johanna and Amber can be counted on for colorful, upbeat displays, woodworker Tiem reliably comes up with dark and moody interpretations of the challenges (his Rice Krispies Roman Colosseum is filled with the candy carnage of beheaded gummy bears). Paper artist Jeffrey attests to the healing nature of crafting; when tasked with creating a family heirloom display, he shares that upon hearing that he was gay, his parents sent a black funeral wreath to his workplace.

As a crafter myself, my only beef with this show (and carnivore Offerman would say you can’t have too much beef) was that we don’t really get to see the anguish of the initial planning process or the actual sourcing of materials for these projects. Is there a huge storeroom in the back of the barn that contains candy bones and pool noodles, or do the contestants get to order these supplies ahead of time? I need to know this.

What is also missing from this show is the typical backstabbing antics of the contestants and the harsh cruelty of the judges. The contestants even help each other as the deadlines approach, sharing supplies or helping to assemble the final pieces of a costume. We don’t see what goes on between episodes; we do not have unlimited access to night-vision video footage of the contestants in their bedrooms. When each challenge is over and the eliminated contestant leaves, the show simply ends.

When interviewed by her former colleagues Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, Poehler said she wanted to make a show “that didn’t make you feel stressed out or humiliated.” Her onscreen chemistry with Offerman seems effortless, and their ad-libbed banter (including groan-worthy pun competitions) is adorable.

Before each episode, we hear the tagline Life is stressful enough. Let’s make a show that makes you feel good!  The show delivers on its promise.