It’s been 19 months since I wrote on this site. Do you know what happened 19 months ago? I started working full-time again. Actually, I worked FULLEST time meaning I started my new full-time job while also teaching my evening class until they found someone to replace me AND I kept working my restaurant job because I liked it, and I am crazy, and my new full-time job did not pay me very much money.

How on earth was my brain to also do the type of processing I like it to do most? Impossible! And now I find myself in between jobs with some time for brain processing and here I am! Back to it! Even better, I recently spent 8-ish days in Mexico City, and I wrote 22 pages of a manuscript I hope to turn in for application to a writer’s workshop.

Halfway through this creativity-killing time at my job(s), my friend Romy recommended I read Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum. I love me a good bookshop book and requested it from the library right away. This is a story about a Korean woman named Yeongju who quits working for The Company and opens a bookshop in an out-of-the-way location. The main plot is about the employees and customers at the shop and all the ways Yeongju works to make sure the bookshop can survive more than two years.

What surprises me is the underlying tone about the state of work. This is a theme throughout the book and multiple characters struggle in different ways. One woman starts coming into the bookshop and spends hours crocheting or knitting. After she’s been coming there for a while, she eventually shares she had to quit work because she was so angry about being a contract employee for 8 years and having been promised a permanent position time and time again for it never to happen.

Yeongju worked and worked and worked at The Company until she realized she had no passion for it and couldn’t continue in the same capacity which would end her marriage thus ending her relationship with her mother. All because of work!

There are other stories of other characters struggles to figure out how to live a good life and do the necessary work required. One character says, “The problem here is not that the labour process presents no opportunities for expression and identification, but that the employer expects workers to become fully involved and invested in the job.”

I find this so true. In an interview, if you make any indication you want to make sure the salary will fit your needs, you might be looked at as being all about the money and not passionate enough about the job. In my full-time job helping refugees find work, I coached them on this – telling them not to inquire about the salary in the interview. Focus only on the job and the company. It feels so superficial.

Are businesses so delusional that they think the pay, hours, conditions, etc. don’t matter to us? That the work itself will sustain us? Can I eat a memo for dinner? Will that presentation work as a rent check?  

Well, sure they are. Because often, we are afraid of not getting the job so we go along with it and make it sound like the job is more important than our families and outside lives and whatever else we want to be doing with our time. Like writing, learning new needle crafts, and sewing with our mothers. Walking in the park with our dogs and the children in our lives. Sitting on a bench in the park and listening. Just listening.

Another character says, “That said, the problem is that our society is too obsessed with work, and working takes away too many things from us. It’s like we surface from the depths of work to get a breather, only to feel thoroughly spent. And when we return home after a long workday, we no longer have energy for leisure time or hobbies.”

I know it sounds like I am anti-work, and I am not. I like working. I like the sense of accomplishment work brings me. I like having structure in my day. I often like having co-workers. And I think the way we work is so, so broken. We get this one life. We all die. We spend most of this life working for others. I started working at 14 years old and have only had a few months off since then. The way things are going, who knows if I will ever get to stop.

Maybe I just need to adopt the mindset of Minjun, the barista at the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop:

“His simple life -yoga, work, movies, sleep – was starting to feel like a well-put-together routine. Perhaps life was enough as it was.”

Blergh. I didn’t mean for this to come out as a complaining post but alas -that’s what happened.

Lets take a moment to focus on the positive. Since I am in between jobs I’ve started an embroidery project, a sewing project and a knitting project. I started writing this post! I started writing 22 pages of my non-fiction memoir thingamajig!

I’ve been working with my dog and he is becoming a very good dog! He and I walk MILES a day – here’s to our health!

I have not stained my deck or taken my shed parts to the town dump. But. That’ll happen someday.

I am certain no one is reading this anymore, so I’ll sign off now. Here’s to someday, hopefully, everyone going on strike and fighting for 6-hour work days and universal healthcare not tied to our jobs. That’s reasonable, right?