I've got skillz!

Where I am with life right now.

So I'm feeling like I'm just going to step back and do a quick assessment of life as it exists for me right now.  I graduated from college in 1999.  I spent about four years figuring a little bit of life out, worked in NYC, went to Prague and got some invaluable experience both personally and professionally, and then came back to the US to look at schools and the Peace Corps, while doing odd jobs until settling on school in England and another football season in Prague.  That gets us up to starting school in 2004. 

Going into school I had some good but eclectic business experience including managing a non-profit in Prague for a couple years.  2004 started a 5 year rather specific career path that really moved me forward.  I spent two years working on a masters that focused on post-conflict reconstruction and post/socialist societies.  After a summer in China I went back to Prague and got a job working for two years on post conflict areas doing research, development, management, etc.  I was really moving things forward even if the job itself and the company was an absolute and complete  nightmare.  I was getting valuable experience. 

When this job ended I went for more schooling focusing on anthropological perspectives on international development with a continued focus on post war areas.  Five years straight working towards one end which was going to culminate in getting in to  PhD program and keeping things moving forward.  It was a struggle for sure and I didn't always know that it was the right thing.  But the point was, at that point in my life I was carving out a niche for myself.  I applied to Phd programs for 2009 but didn't get in anywhere.  At that point I had little money, my EU work visa had expired, and I felt like I wanted to come back to the United States, get some stability, a job, and spend time with my elderly Grandparents.  It seemed like a good plan.  There would be no language issues, no visa concerns, no cultural variances.  Things would be simple right?

So here I am three plus years later.  What do I have to show for this?  During this three years the best I've done is 15 dollars per hour working with people with disabilities in Connecticut.  I was driving an hour and a half both ways every day (22,000 miles/35,000km in 6 months) and couldn't afford to keep the car going and pay rent.  I was living with my grandparents.  Over those three years I sold running shoes, I officiated girls lacrosse, I volunteered in local government, I tried starting several businesses and non-profits, and even lived in the woods for a brief time.

At some point in there, I said fuck it, and planned a trip and went to Sierra Leone.  I was wallowing away in suburbia, doing nothing.  Applying for hundreds of jobs, getting no where, and figured hey, if no one is going to give me a job, then I'll just go out and make my own.  I fundraised, I planned, mapped out a walking tour of the country for three months and just did it.  It was invaluable and I set up some amazing opportunities that you can read about in this blog.  But of course I got malaria and spent much of the next six months trying to get right.  Everything in Africa went on hold, life took over and I just tried to find work.  Yet I remained underemployed, disheartened, and disappointed.

I worked hard at it and put in a number of Phd Applications again.  I put my focus back into academia and a PhD.  I did an amazing amount of research on the programs in the US.  I was all ready to apply.  Then Occupy happened.  A broad based systemic critique of american and global society.  Exactly what I had been carrying with me my entire adult life.  I, like so many others, had been trying to make things work in our little American Utopia, yet it had been a disaster for me.  The country had been spiralling downward for decades and it was time to take a stand and try to make things happen.  So I left the underemployed shitty ass suburban existence I was meandering through and went all in with Occupy.  In the first few weeks I was engageing in incredible things, talking to truly important and exemplary people .  I was networking myself into a great community and surrounded for the first time in my life by people that shared my views of the world and my values.  It was amazing.

Now here we are almost a year later.  I have been steadily looking for work since January.  In that time I have been a failed political fundraiser, an unpaid hiking store employee, worked at a farmers market until it went under, and as a Nanny.  Luckily I have had a free place to stay due to some of the best people out there.  However, that time is up.

All this while I have been trying to work on Occupy.  Everything was supposed to be temporary until school started in September.  But then I didn't get in anywhere.  I found out April 15th, and have been working on what the heck am I going to do.  Do I apply next year, again?  Do I look at a new career choice?  Push for my Africa stuff?  Legitimize the Occupy Think Tank?  Just look for any work?  The bottom line is that on April 16th I started perhaps a new phase of my life.  Most profoundly I decided to start networking myself in to the development community here in NYC.  As I got back into my Africa work I realized how much I love and am passionate about all of these things that I had been doing for years.  It was what my PhD work was going to be about and what I have always wanted to be a part of.  Occupy, gave me a domestic outlet, but my heart has always been in international issues and injustices.  So be it.  Network network network while trying to peice things together here is where I came to.  Combining them would be great. 

But there just aren't a lot of jobs in this arena.  You don't just go out and start helping people around the world fro one day to the next as the glacial pace of my Africa project shows.  You have to eat, you have to have housing.  Also in the midst of all this here I am going through a tough break up as well.  It really sucks.

So I find myself today on August 8th, with no job, the several interviews I've had over the last couple weeks having fallen through or morphed into unsustainble things, my nannying work has dried up and I have no housing come September 1st if I still have no job to pay for it.

I have been back in this country for over three years now and I have nothing to show for it professionally.  I can't even put Occupy on the applications for the UN that I'm putting in.  Yes, the Sierra Leone thing is a huge thing from the last few years, but only because I left here!!  So what is the point.  I had this wonderful progressive carreer going, step by step for five plus years and then it just fell off a cliff, and now I have nothing really to show for the last three years of my life.  The worst thing about it all as well is that people look at me and they see an unfocused person.  They see someone that is thinking of a new thing to do every day.  One day I'm a nanny, one day I'm an occupier, a writer, a development expert, thinking about africa, a phd, organizing, food justice, athletic training, whatever.  I must seem like my own three ring circus.  But I'm not, I'm just desperate.  I had a plan and I was working towards it.  Then I came back to America.  In three years, it all just disipated into the fumes of an ever more marginalizing American and global economy.

So at what point do you say enough is enough?  For how long do you keep fighting the same fight and expect differeent results?  I want to stay in NYC.  I want to just get a job here that matters, that does not compromise all of my moral and ethical standards of human dignity and such and just work away on a career.  But that isn't happening.  I want to wake up every morning at 6, do chi gung, go to work all day, excercise and come home and work on Africa and Occupy stuff.  But its not happening.  When do you say fuck it and reavaluate what you are doing and what your expectations of 'the self' are?  At what point do you give in and just get some shit ass job and work for the man's system hoping that you can have a family and TV to distract yourself from the everyday bullshit that has become human life in America.

I'm not there yet, I still have hope.  I will hopefully never give up.  But it is about as low as it gets rigth now.  I hurt on every level.  I am not eating enough, I have no home, I have a car I can't maintain but am stuck with, no job, and little reason to hope on most accounting of the last few years.  But I have skills!  A lot of them.  It's just too bad they are skills only an employer couldn't like... 

Sustaining an Occupation

So as you may have noticed for an Occupier this blog is decidedly not so much about Occupy events and outings as one would expect thus far.  This is because of the ever increasing realities of an occupier's life.  It is not about sitting in a park and simply shouting at cops or marching through the streets while the kitchen group gives you free food.  It is about sitting through meeting after meeting, reading over a hundred emails a day from any multiple number of people and working groups, and most importantly in trying to find a way to sustain the occupation within you.

This wasn't such a stress at the outset.  When I first got down to the park, I had been setting aside money for the trip/work in Africa written about earlier in this blog.  I had projects set up and ready to go and had been slowly saving money for them.  When the occupation started I went all in and used that money.  It bothered me a bit, but ultimately the occupation and any true socio-economic and political change that would happen as a result would have a tremendously positive effect on the areas of the world being expropriated by our system of exploitation abroad.  Hence, Sierra Leone without having structural adjustment programs and private corporate interests raping their land and resources for a quick profit (to very little local benefit) seemed like a good cause.  So I used that money to live off of while I was in Manhattan.  I was lucky to have this.

When I first went down to Zuccotti park (liberty plaza) it wasn't as difficult either.  There was nothing I needed to spend money on.  There was this amazing community of people all working together.  There was a safe enough place to sleep (Yeah, it was outside, but I had my sleeping bag and camping gear from my Africa trip and life).  We had sanitation, we had the kitchen, comfort (for a jacket or toothbrush), there was medical, meditation, whatever.  There was nothing that I/we needed or wanted really (other than a complete and total reassessment of the way we as a society lived our lives!).  The library, teach-ins, the think tank, we had it all..

Now truth be told, I wasn't eating enough and was running all over the place, but sustainable can be different at different times in one's life!  In general, the food situation was great at first, but then there became less and less, and the situation more and more tenuous.  There had been a time when the entirety of Manhattan's soup kitchen community was sending their people down to liberty plaza when they didn't have enough food or at times they weren't open.  We were feeding over a thousand people a day, and sometimes at each meal!

Food however, slowly went from being available all day in some capacity (usually however it was donated/when) to being cut down to designated servings usually in two hour blocks.  This certainly made it tough if you were facilitating the think tank from 12-6 every day and couldn't wait in line, or there was no food being served when you could wait.  The kitchen group was great though, they worked around it all and helped working groups in this situation out, delivering a few plates when they could or even a whole box of pizza at a time.  All told though, I lost a lot of weight during the original months of the occupation as a lot of people did.  It topped out for me at about 20 pounds (9 kilos) at  its height (I've since gained a little back though).  But so be it, I was carrying more weight than I needed anyway!  

Anyway, point is, that while it was getting tougher, things were still manageable.  I was spending a lot of nights outside of the park at this point as well, and also still working some upstate/eating up there, sleeping in my car, whatever.  But then the park was raided.  The NYMD (New York Military Department) destroyed virtually everything: 4500 of the library's 5500 books, computers, the entire kitchen, all of the think tank's stuff and much of the data we'd been collecting on what people wanted out of the movement.  After this, there was no place to go; no home, and food was much tougher to come by as there was no longer three meals a day, only whatever you could get your hands on when you were down at the park and/or the kitchen delivered food.  It was a lot of cold beans!  All of a sudden, sustainability was a huge question for everyone. 

I was really lucky in all of this though.  I had gotten to know some really great people and was connected with a family that invited me to stay in a room in their their basement.  There were some catches as other people used the room for work things during the day and I didn't want to be too far in their way in terms of the kitchen.  So things got much more expensive as I had to eat out a lot more.  And they live in Greenwich Village, where eating out is a practice in financial humility.  I found one place to get Pho (Vietnamese soup) for under 10 bucks and ate there a lot.  But hey, who cares!!  I didn't have to pay rent and with a little money in the bank I was living A LOT better than A LOT of people.  But still, time adds up with time while money does not.  The room and the savings went a very long way, but it has been over six months now and the money ran out long ago.

So this is the reality of the occupation.  Individual's are not funded as best as I can see (though Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame have tried to interject there financial will upon us in quite negative manner I might add, and much like a structural adjustment program!).  People as a result of the lack of means are falling off to the side or minimizing their time at Occupy due to the strict human needs of food and shelter (and who's effects are magnified by capitalist exploitation).  We all need to eat, and most are not used to being homeless and sleeping "rough" - especially on a cold night in NY.

So here we are an occupation that no longer gets donations (which it had difficulty allocating through its processes anyway) and no longer has a designated place to live and eat for its members.  We must find ways of supporting ourselves, as it is within these confines that the occupation is struggling.  While we are all horizontally living in our hearts, we are all living individually in our day-to-day realities.  My food is my responsibility, your roof is yours, her income her's.  This is weighing very heavily on many people including myself, and it feels very heavy in a down economy where jobs in general are very tough to come by, nevermind jobs one is actually qualified for and stimulated by. 

So that is my point of departure with my job.  I have to have it to support my occupation, even while it so profoundly detracts from my occupation.  I work evenings.  I miss all the meetings it seems worth being at.  I am constantly stressed about whether I'll have my job by the end of the week, and wasting time thinking about minute details of telephone calls.  For 5 plus hours a day I am treading water, not really moving forward much in terms of personal or occupational growth.  But that is the way things are right now for the occupation.  There is a tremendous amount going on.  The working groups are doing countless things and making countless things happen at each and every corner, but we have lost a lot of people - not in heart - but in time and commitment.

I've been talking to a lot of people about this and we've been thinking about ways to make the movement more sustainable, but it is tough.  It will take a great deal of planning and fine tuning to get a proposal together that could be acceptable and within the principles of the Occupy movement.  But it is the essence of where we need to be right now though.  While the "movement" being sustainable is a given at this point, we need to be able to sustain the daily lives of individuals within it - while maximizing their and our power and/or capacity to work for the movement.

Another day in the life...

And as is life... with every positive, there must always be a negative, for you can not have one without the other as life could then never find its balance...

The day (Friday) was going so well.  I had been in the city in the morning, walked across Manhattan, gotten my visa... jumped on a train back upstate, and even got to Beacon and found NO parking ticket for my forced night in the city!!  Good stuff.  I said my hello's to my people in Beacon, went into Mountain Tops and poked around, tried on the Vibram treks, chatted it up, and then headed out.  I grabbed a snack on my way towards taking the scenic route through Wiccopee and where the Appalachian trail runs through it on my way home.  Sun was out, gorgeous autumn day.  Upon getting in, my new phone was there.  I spent the next couple hours trying to figure out what the heck all this technology stuff was, and then headed off to spend some time with my grandparents...

Whoops..  Half way there... CRASH!!  I got in a car accident.  I completely wrecked my car in a three car accident.  Everyone else there seemed to by OK (some nice people I might add which don't deserve to have had their day and car's in shambles).  I certainly seemed to get the worst of it, both personally and for my car.  I just sat there completely dazed...  what and end to a day, to a lot really.  But I'll be fine, I've had worse collisions on the football field - and one only a couple of weeks ago.  

The real travesty in all this though is to my psyche and life scenario.  I have struggled for years in always putting my principles and ideals so much above life's practicalities.  Always "living in the world as I want it to be" - which I completely believe in and will continue to do.  No matter what general practices are, I will do everything I can to be honest and ethical, even at my own expense - which it usually seems to be.  This makes life very difficult.  People don't pay people to be nice.  I carry different priorities than most and as a result I tend to have to struggle.  Here I am unemployed, looking for work for over a year, on food stamps, in the application process for Medicaid, and still struggling to put together the funds to go on a three month humanitarian trek in West Africa - a smaller part of my incessant effort to try to make a difference.  All the while I am fielding questions about "what I am thinking", "what is wrong with me", "why can't I just balance my ideals with real life?" (i.e. compromise them).  I am pretty much standing on my own to try to make a difference.  (yes, I do have some great support from a few... you know who you are!!)

Anyway, I have been running completely against the grain for years, I have no money, that car was my only real asset, I am staying with my parents, taking state assistance (and hearing about it from people), and all the while trying to make the world a 'better' place for the future of humanity, and to get myself better qualified to do this.  But I just... can't... catch a break.  Living in the Hudson Valley you have to have a car.  I am already losing friends and contacts because I live a long way away from people and am not in a position to spend money on gas versus money on this project.  Yet, if I take a job for a couple weeks or take a job that sacrifices time and compromises principles, then I am not living by my beliefs or example.  Now, with no car and no public transportation in the area, I am in a really tough spot.  Never mind when I return.  I had work set up, but now have no car.  It changes things.  I had security to return to from this incredibly insecure venture.  Now, I almost have to either come back from Sierra Leone with a job here, or find one there.  Both my personal and emotional safety nets vanished into the back of that minivan...

But it is tough times that challenge us and make us stronger.  I feel at times like I am doing nothing but "training" to make myself stronger, yet I'm never actually getting to use my strength.  I just can't find that place within the system that allows me to shine and do the type of work I believe in and am capable of.  That day, of course, will come... but it wasn't yesterday...  ;)