It's About Time

Not having enough of it specifically. I'm suffering from what Em and I joke is the Poet's Lament: "I had to work five whole days this week!"

Which is actually pretty normal for the vast majority of people but also the exact antithesis of what I want my life to be. Instead of working my normal 24 hour/week gig at my regular job (plust whatever freelancing I've got) I worked a moderately grueling 40 hour week that involved early mornings and late nights, getting out a proposal that should have taken half the time it did, except for the fact that I spent half the time herding cats. Actually getting the proposal together is not that much work. Getting everyone to contribute their parts on time is. Add to this that it's being signed by the ultimate micromanager who obsesses over the size of the header on the second page of the introductory letter, who's changing things even as I'm trying to put the book together for Monday morning delivery.

I know, I know: "And your point is?"

My point is that I did not sign on for this. If I wanted a full-time job with a business, I could have one, at this company, for the asking. My boss has been bugging me for more hours since I started working for her. The trouble is that my boss and I want two different things for me, and this is a common problem. It's also the reason I've stayed in pink-collar ghetto jobs like word processing for so long, instead of moving into white collar jobs. Nobody expects ambition out of you if you're a service worker. The moment you move into the management mainstream, you're expected to want to get ahead.

Ahead of what?

It's not that I don't have ambition, but not in my job, which I want to do competently but not necessarily shine at. My ambitions lie in entirely different areas: my writing and Long Meg Press. Mostly, as Dr. Em as pointed out elsewhere, my ambition is to have a good life. Working 40 hours a week for someone else, even for the good of the privately owned company that employs me (which is better than a company in which you're working for stockholders, in that sense; at least there's a greater sense of self-interest involved, since we're all in the same lifeboat) does not figure in that. I understand that my boss would really like to have a crackerjack marketing team, mostly because marketing gets so little respect here (we've only had a marketing department for two years), but I'm not interested in being a star in that department. It's nice to be respected by the people I work for, but I don't really consider them my peers, with the exception of Jennifer, who's more or less trying to do the same thing I am, as a performer and writer. I want to do well the work I'm assigned for my own satisfaction, not because I'm eager to climb the ladder. I certainly don't want to devote my life and energy to it.

The difference between my boss and I is that I never thought marketing was my calling. She's always wanted to do this, and she's really good at it, and I respect her for that. I'm not all that interested in it (except as it serves my own businesses) because, frankly, it's not that challenging, though it can be a fairly creative pursuit (if you're not hampered by the lack of imaginating of those around you, the way our poor graphic artist so often is). Once I have time to sit down to it without phone calls and e-mails and other projects interrupting, I can write up an entire markting kit in a couple of hours. It's very simplistic writing because it's so cliched. (I realize that it doesn't have to be, but this is not a company or industry for high-power creativity; most scientific types don't trust it, with good reason.) Even the writing involved in the newsletter doesn't take long and isn't all that difficult.

And money's not really the issue. As I discovered yesterday, my hourly rate is already more than some of the senior professionals in the company (though they're also getting benefits). Working part-time I'm making plenty to live on comfortably. Making more money would just give more to the tax man at this point. I've actually managed to strike a good balance between getting killed with taxes as most single people do, and having to worry about how I'm going to avoid that.

The real issue with working for other people is . . . working for other people. I am not, in the end, a team player, though I really enjoy my collaborations with Marcia and, to a large extent, with Kath, but that's because we've been working on projects we're emotionally invested in, and I enjoy the brainstorm of making something happen. I'm not emotionally invested in selling the services of the company I work for to private developers and state agencies. This is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem: am I not invested in the work because the company's not mine, or am I not a team player because I can't emotionally engage with other people's projects?

Actually I think the real issue is the nature of the work. Somehow, I can't look at a marketing kit or a proposal, or even the newsletter as particularly creative, at least not for me. This is not to say that I don't admire some advertising work. Some of it is smart and clever and very creative. Most of it is just serviceable, however, and that's not the direction in whch my talents lie.

There's also something in the purpose behind it that makes me squirm. The only thing that makes it barely palatable at present is that we're advertising necessary services and not consumer goods. I couldn't bear working for a regular ad agency for that reason. I can't even imagine devoting my life to selling people more Pepsi by telling them it'll make them cool. I might even feel better about what I'm doing if I didn't know that one of the reasons we're as successful as we are is that we can make any environmental impact look like an insignificant one. When even one of the founders of the company says the "we're responsible for the rape of New York," all is not joy in Mudville.

(In this sense, I'd be better off working for some non-profit, except that the money is so dismal, which means you have to work twice as long for the same amount of money and your time is still not your own.)

In short, most of the work I do is not soul-filling, and this includes most of my freelance editing. When I went into English in college, it was not because I dreamed of being a marketing hack, or an editor. I wanted to learn how to tell stories. Editing is more satisfying, sometimes, because at least it's about shaping stories. Marketing is not telling stories, though a lot of it is pretty fictional. So the emotional return on it is virtually nil for me. I have to be making something, either up out of the whole cloth in my head (stories, poems), or out of various disparate "raw" materials (books) for it to have an emotional return for me. (Devoting most of my life to work that has no emotional return isn't even a consideration. That way lies madness.)

And creation takes time. Art takes time. So this is why I resent giving so much of mine to something that merely gets me money. Money's just a tool, and only a moderately useful one at that. There's an inherent contradiction in it: time can get me money, but money can't buy me time, unless it's saved up and used for a long vacation, like the one I'm planning to Japan. But on a day to day basis, we all basically trade our time for money. I'm only willing to trade so much of it, and this week was too much.