Saturday, March 25, 2023

I guess I've come up a bit

 Friday night here just late, so it shows up as Saturday. I got up in time to pack all the things that needed to be packed and was out the door at 6 (it's staying light outside until past 7 now) and delivering them went fine. I got a cucumber in H Mart and two chicken thighs at the chicken place and ate those outside. 

I got some veggies behind H Mart and put some in a bag for Tom but he wasn't in so I left the bag hanging on his doorknob. There was a biscuit from the chicken place too so I hope he got the stuff. 

Some more things about last night's shakuhachi club meeting: Rinban actually has a Monty Levinson shakuhachi, one of his ones that don't have a root end but since they're made by him is sure to be a good player. He insists on using his humble PVC one in the class though. We did all right on Nori No Miyama and he wants us to work on this Golden Chain song, which we worked on the first two lines of. So I have a goal for the next month, to work on that song, to "show my work" at the next meeting. Also, Rinban can blow tones longer than any of us by far. I guess he's only been playing the shakuhachi for 20 years, or maybe even 30 or 40, as he's my age and say he first dabbled in it at age 20 which is not unimaginable at all. 

I was thinking today, about how I can understand a bit of Spanish but I've not learned the language fluently because in the caste system here on the mainland, I would actually drop in social position by knowing it well. That led me to ponder how my siblings and I have done with regard to this caste system. 

When we were middle, perhaps "lower upper middle class" as Orwell put it, the expectation would have been that the oldest was to have been a writer, my older brother probably an engineer, myself an engineer or a scientist but it was hoped an artist, and the younger two would "marry well". Once we became really poor, my oldest sister was able to just squeak through without too much of the stain of poverty clinging to her, and indeed was able to marry well. 

The rest of us were firmly on the school-to-prison-or-welfare pipeline that had been hastily established in the late 1970s. As it was, my older bro went into the Navy and was a tool and die maker and was able to work for Grumman afterward, apparently until he retired. The youngest married well, as well as one does when working-class, marrying a guy who worked in a warehouse but who eventually joined the police and is now a police chief on Maui. The next youngest went into the Army, married well with regard to finances but poorly with regard to sanity as the guy was nuts. Then she married a loser who never worked but she got in with a credit-card company, nagging people for money and then supervising people who nag people for money, and it's a good fit. Past that I don't know, but credit card companies always need bossy people like her so I figure she's OK. 

As for myself, I'm the one out of us five (and not one of the two out of us five who actually graduated high school) who fell for the college scam. Thus was wasted the best part of my young adulthood. Oh, and the hangover! Paying off those student loans! I got about half of them paid off on my own and then a small inheritance from my grandfather enabled me to pay off the rest and buy my first car. 

Because I have the most formal education (getting into college even if you're a HS dropout with a GED isn't hard if you just take the SAT) I'm of course the poorest. I'm rich in "street smarts" though, at least I like to think. 

Because I'm the one who knows how to be self-employed. Yes I work for Ken now but I do that because it's relatively simple and there's a lot I don't have to worry about. But I could easily rent a storage unit, buy a new used laptop, rent a small office to work out of, and start up on my own. My knee-jerk reaction to "I need money" isn't "I'd better find someone to work for" but rather, "I need to go out and make some money". 

My father had always talked about being self-employed although I don't think he'd have been able to make it work - he was really bad at managing money. My older sister had tried, has qualifications and skills out the wazoo as a jeweler, but it's hard in a business everyone wants to be in, like jewelry. I really feel for her, as she did such wonderful designs and she'd enter pieces in design contests and the winner would always be the nephew of the judge or something. 

The thing is, by the time I was 18 there were three possible futures for me. Some scut job like cleaning hotel rooms or being a janitor, for life. Going into crime and ending up in and out of the penal system. Or a lifetime on welfare, like so many of the people I did odd jobs for as a teen. 

I tried to break out of this bleak future by going to college, and at least it got me out of falling down one of those three paths. 3 years of living like a monk, 10 grand in student loans (early 80s) and some years paying those off. So for a tiny nudge upward in caste I had to pay quite a bit in money and in time. 

Getting into the sport I did for a while was another expensive - more in time than in money - small nudge upward. It taught me a bit about buying and selling because people were always buying and selling equipment. And after I was done with it, I just didn't want to work for anyone else any more, at least not in the usual awful, demeaning, master-slave relationship a job implies. 

There's quite a difference between being someone who, desperate for a living, has to go around hoping some business needs someone to sweep their floors or clean their bathrooms, and someone who knows how to buy and sell things, make things they hustle, play music, or a bit of all of those things. The person sweeping floors might make more money, but the hustler is a bit more free. A hustler doesn't have to worry about everyone being happy with them, all the time. A hustler can stand on their own two legs and say, "I don't need to do that" and "I don't want to" etc. You can't do that as an employee. 

So unlike my parents who were both nothing if they didn't work for someone else, and unlike my siblings who have had to work for someone else or be good hausfrauen, I've actually moved up a bit. Not a lot, as a lot of movement is not possible in a class system as rigid as ours. Just a bit. 

I'd not mind so much being a writer, but everyone writes for free these days. Newspapers from rags to the big ones don't need reporters any more. No one needs problems solved or data gathered an analyzed as an engineer or scientist would do, so that's out. In art, it's all been done. In music, too, but at least music feels good. So that's what my mind is to be turned to, scrounging around finding things to resell if I care to do that back home for a while, playing music, and maybe writing things for free occasionally. 


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