Tag Archives: work

abundance

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my friend deuce says i’m scrappy. and she’s right. i have managed to scrape by, scrounging all kinds of crazy work over the years without having to ever get a “real” job. though i’ve mostly been a freelance writer/editor, club dj, and most recently artist/crafter – my “main” gigs -  i’ve dabbled in all kinds of crap since my last days working at tower records in the french quarter back in 1993 – my last regular job out in the world where i worked 30-40 hours/week.

over the years, i’ve worked in some capacity as a: landscaper, bar back, house cleaner, community activist, paralegal/investigator, personal assistant, screen printer, dog sitter/walker, housesitter, blogger, eBay assistant, data entry/gallery assistant, photographer, film festival projectionist, a/v tech, film curator, publicist, promoter, booking agent, event organizer, graphic designer, and, most recently, census enumerator. i’m sure there are other things i’m not remembering right now.

but one thing i seem to keep coming back to, over the years, is selling stuff. i’ve always been a big fan of thrift/antique stores and yard sales, and have always been a collector of various things. but at many different points in my life, i have supplemented my income by reselling things, as varied as cds, records and books to random collectibles, clothing, furniture and all sorts of other items. it’s kind of where i first got the idea of doing art/craft out of recycled objects, this dealing in “things.” it’s a fun game, trying to figure out what items you can score for cheap and then find someone willing to pay you more for… but i guess it all comes down to the fact that i just love objects. things. i like to make them, i like to find them, i like to collect them, i like to sell them.

so yeah. in this time of flux in my life when what i keep thinking i really need to do is find some regularly occurring work – aka a “real” job, even if it’s just part time – what seems to keep dropping in my lap is more of the scrappy gigs. when i first returned from festival, my friend nita told me she really wanted to start liquidating her lifetime accumulation of collectibles with the eventual goal to clear out her house so she can sell it and move. it at first seemed really overwhelming, cuz let me tell you, she has a LOT of amazing stuff in her house. but we started breaking it down into manageable bites and we’ve been steadily listing things on eBay every week and slowly things are selling and moving out of the house. we’re not really on a time table – we’re moving pretty slowly, in fact – but it’s been a steady thing. i’m not making a ton of money on it but i think it will eventually pay off, and nita is a dear friend who has helped me a lot over the years and it feels good to be helping her do this big thing in her life.

i haven’t really been thinking of it like a “job”… more just like a “gig,” a side thing to keep a little money flowing, to pay for the groceries or whatever while i keep looking for other, more regular, work. but as i’ve been spreading the word that i’m working on nita’s “estate sale” via facebook and twitter postings, another friend has now approached me about helping her sell off a crazy amount of stuff she has had accumulating since well before katrina. this one feels more like a “job” cuz it has a time limit – she asked me to make a website with pictures of lots of the stuff that will be for sale, list bigger items on craigslist and eventually work towards a big yard sale in october – and she’s paying me a generous hourly rate. it’s less of the collectibles/art variety and more of the household every-day stuff variety, but it’s still a vast amount of stuff, much of it in new or gently-used condition and for which she should get decent money.

it occurred to me yesterday that, with a little effort, i could probably turn this into a “job” – self employment, obviously, but something regular enough to call it a job. i kind of really enjoy the work, even though much of the listing-on-the-computer part is tedious, it’s fun poking around in other people’s stuff and learning what other people are willing to pay money for. but are there enough people who want to de-clutter or sell unwanted things who are willing to pay me a decent hourly wage and/or percentage of their sales and don’t know how to do it themselves? it’s not rocket science, you know, selling things online. but there are some tricks and shortcuts and after doing it in one form or another for the last 15+ years, i guess i do know a thing or two about it. but enough to make my rent and bills each month? i don’t know. and how do i find those people who would be interested in this type of service?

so this is what i’m pondering right now, while i continue working on both of these projects. i haven’t stopped looking for other work – in fact in the past few days, i’ve registered with three different temp agencies, so maybe that will pay off with some kind of work, and i’m still hustling to get that security gig working saints games at the superdome – but i think i’m really just not very good at this “looking for a job” stuff. i write and send out resumes and cover letters for all kinds of jobs. i check craigslist, worknola.com, idea village, nola.com classifieds, simplyhired.com, and a dozen or more other local job boards on a regular basis. i check the internal job listings of and submit applications to all kinds of corporations and companies that i think sound good to work for (whole foods, ups, home depot, etc.). i’ve put my feelers out with friends who work all over the place.

so far, nothing. not even a call back. so how can i not keep doing this other stuff that keeps falling in my lap and is generating me some amount of money?

oh i just don’t know. i guess what would be ideal would be to get one or two part-time gigs that were closer to “real” jobs, meaning, working for someone else who was willing to cut me a paycheck, AND keeping doing the other gigs that seem to keep falling in my lap. wouldn’t it be a nice problem to have to be really super busy and have MORE money than i knew what to do with for a change?

that’s what i’ll be envisioning for now – more than enough. more than enough work. more than enough money. more than enough love. no more scarcity for me, thanks. it’s all about abundance now.

catching up, and… what’s next?

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wow. it’s been a while since i posted here. i had such high hopes when i switched over to wordpress from blogger, that it would inspire me to write so much more cuz the page looked so much prettier. didn’t really happen, though. i got kinda caught up in the whirlwind of information about the oil disaster and mostly utilized my facebook page as a resource for reposting pertinent articles and my commentary on such. i only used the blog here to talk about design responses – mostly t-shirts – and got a little obsessed with that topic for a while. and then promptly lost interest when it seemed there were more t-shirts than barrels of oil in the gulf.

and then i went on vacation to dyke summer camp for 3 weeks. i just got back on saturday night.

i have a lot on my mind upon returning from the woods, not the least of which is what i will be doing for a job. the census gig is up now (it sure was sweet while it lasted!), and i’ve realized i really enjoyed having a regular paycheck and didn’t miss hauling all my arty-crafty stuff around every weekend and freaking out when i barely make my booth fee back at a market. i’m not saying i won’t continue art by mags!, but for now, i’m not particularly inspired (and also i’m flat broke, and thus don’t have start-up funds to get my inventory back up). so it seems to make sense to start the job hunt for some kind of regular work… and then hopefully when my finances even back out, i’ll feel less stressed and be more inspired to want to get back to the crafty life.

i’m not exactly sure what that job will be, though. i don’t really know what i’m looking for. i’m basically open to what the universe throws at me, and pray she throws it quickly. i’d like it to be something i felt some level of passion about, cuz i’ve learned i don’t really do so well with things i’m not particularly interested in. (i get bored easily.) i have a LOT of varied skills, but not any super focused specialties. i’m really good at social media, but not school-trained, just intuited. same goes for basic web design, stuff like wordpress and blogger and even some rudimentary html (cuz i’ve used both to make my own websites for years). i’m diy baby all the way!

i have a lot of strong left-leaning political views and can be really passionate about the environment, queer/women’s issues, racism, poverty, and many other social issues. i’ve been writing professionally since i was 22, so for more than 20 years, mostly about music but also film, politics, and general interest stuff. i edited my own magazine for 3 years too (again, music – DJs, nightlife, the club scene). and i’ve been a volunteer PR/publicity person for just about every grassroots/community/nonprofit group i’ve ever been involved with, ranging from the lgbtq film festival in nola to a variety of nola queer community groups to the roller derby league in louisville, ky (during my katrina displacement) and currently the new orleans craft mafia. oh yeah, and i was a club DJ, too, for almost 20 years. i also have managed the film tent and outdoor movies at dyke summer camp for 12 years (av club!). and then i worked for the census for three months and surprisingly LOVED it and was really good at it. (who knew?)

i’ve done a lot of different things over the years. i’m not even going into all the grunt-like jobs i’ve done for $$ that i didn’t particularly like (landscaping, house cleaning, investigator for a law firm, etc.) but i feel like i’m at some kind of a crossroads right now. i’m 43. i’ve been self-employed or a contract worker for most of my adult life. i have no health insurance. i have no savings. i don’t own a house or a car. i need just a tiny little bit of financial stability, at least for a little while. or who knows – maybe i can find that dream job that uses my skills and background in a creative way and challenges me and taps into my passions and, well, pays me decently. i just don’t quite know what that dream job is right now. i’m waiting for it to make itself known to me. (i wish it would hurry up!)

i know it’s hard to look for a job when you don’t really know what you are looking for, but i’m just trusting in the universe that if i put it out there enough, it will come to me. either i will figure out what i am looking for, or it will find me and let me know that’s what i’ve been looking for.

so here’s me, putting it out there. i’m all ears. whatcha got for me?

bayou boogaloo!

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i love the bayou boogaloo. for all the years i was away in kentucky post-federal-flood, i was so sad i could never seem to make it here during memorial day weekend (too soon after jazzfest) so i could partake – either as a vendor or just a mid-citizen – in the boogaloo. i mean, come on – a music festival in my own neighborhood! (well i guess an argument could be made that jazzfest is also a music festival in my own neighborhood, but the boogaloo is more of a community, grassroots event, and even closer to where i live than the fairgrounds.) last year, i was FINALLY able to participate as a vendor, and it was glorious. so much fun, so many sales (thanks everyone!), and so great to see so many of my mid-city neighbors!

this year, i have been looking forward to the boogaloo for months. the new orleans craft mafia is again, like last year, offering a free t-shirt recycling workshop adjacent to the kid’s tent, in the “eco” area of the festival. (see the festival map below.) we’ll be out there both saturday and sunday – saturday from noon til 5pm, and sunday from 1-4pm – teaching people how to make tote bags, halter tops and other fun stuff out of old t-shirts, with a minimal amount of sewing. we have a good stash of donated t-shirts already, but we’re still accepting donations – just bring ’em on out to the fest and throw ’em in our bin. if you don’t have any t-shirts to work with, don’t worry – we got ya covered. oh, and at the end of the weekend, we’ll have a little fashion show at 5pm on sunday for you to strut your stuff with your new creations, too!

so yeah. i’ve been looking forward to it. but at the same time, freaking out… because a) i had a really successful jazzfest show at jen’s and sold a lot of t-shirts and signs – which is good, yay for money and sales, but also has left me with not as many of the signs and t-shirts i would like to have to sell at the boogaloo; and b) i started this census job that has been kicking my ass! it’s been a long time since i had any kind of “real” job (meaning worked a job outside of my own house), and it’s been a hard adjustment getting used to both that aspect as well as the strange start/stop nature of census work. for example, on any given day, i: have a daily meeting at 9am for a half hour; might go out to make rounds on a new block i’ve been assigned in the morning for a couple of hours; come home for lunch; spend an hour or so going over all the paperwork from the morning to make sure i have it all correct; go back out to a different block for 2nd or 3rd or 4th rounds, trying to find folks who weren’t home the first time; come home again to cool off and do paperwork; go back out in the early evening trying to catch folks coming home from work who i’m having a particularly hard time trying to find; come home, eat dinner, and maybe even go back out again after dinner before dark, for the pesky hard-to-find folks. and then spend more time on paperwork when i’m home. (and then collapse!)

and all of that only got me like 6-7 hours of actual on-the-clock work. but i’ve been working since 8:45am! so it’s been a big adjustment, to say the least. and has left me little time to think about things like ordering t-shirts to print (much less finding time to actually print them), cutting/sanding/painting wood for signs, and making clocks. and, to top it all off, though i did well at jazzfest at jen’s, it’s the only good market/sale i’ve had in months, so i’ve been begging/borrowing/stealing to pay my bills and am deeply in debt… and we’ve only gotten one paycheck so far from the census. so i didn’t even have the money to invest in buying t-shirts to print, or paint to make signs, etc. (much less the booth fee for vending at the boogaloo.)

so this all came to a head on saturday night, as fae and i were hanging out at home and i was surfing the internet, trying to find some wholesale outlet that actually had the style/color of t-shirts i wanted to order (all my usual outlets were sold out of at least one size and most of them several sizes) so i could order them in time for them to actually arrive in enough time to be able to print them… and i realized, what am i doing? i don’t even have the money to pay for these. nor do i have the money to pay for my booth. and even if i could scrape that up, there’s no guarantee that i’d make it back… just because i sold a lot of 70119 t-shirts last year at the boogaloo doesn’t mean i will this year. sales at markets has SUCKED overall so far in 2010, so why would the boogaloo be any different?

and, as an aside, i have been wracking my brain trying to come up with an oil disaster related design, which i thought might be the biggest seller due to the timing, but i haven’t even been able to find the time to work on coming up with that. (and even if i did, i’d be donating the proceeds to the gulf restoration network, so it wouldn’t be something i’d be making money off of. which i still really want to do, but, it was just one more piece of the puzzle that wasn’t coming together for me.)

so. all of a sudden, it came to me. i can’t do the boogaloo. i can’t afford it, i don’t have inventory, and i don’t have time to think about it. and the second i started thinking about not doing it, i instantly felt relief. i immediately posted something on my facebook page, and thought i was done with it. i slept better and the next few days i didn’t think anything about it. it was actually really nice. sad, but also stress-relieving.

and then yesterday, my friend rachelle offered to share her booth with me, which was so sweet. i thought about refusing, but then i figured if i don’t really need to spend any time making stuff and i just take what i’ve got and make as much fit as i can in part of rachelle’s booth, around her stuff, then it doesn’t have to be stressful and maybe i’ll still make a little money anyways. and i always have fun hanging out with rachelle at markets – we almost always set up next to each other. so thanks, rachelle.

so now i am once again doing the bayou boogaloo. and of course, i am going to try to make a few signs this week, maybe a few 70119 clocks. but i’ll only have a literal handful of t-shirts, and a weird assortment of clocks and signs and cufflinks… and that’s it. not a big effort. but at least i’ll be there.

hope to see y’all there!

unitasker blues…

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oh my god, i’m SO not good at multitasking. my girlfriend calls me a unitasker – and she’s right. my brain just works that way. when i have something i’m working on, i like finishing it entirely before i move on to the next. and more often than not, i have a hard time switching gears to do something else if the previous thing isn’t done. so i will own it – i’m a unitasker, yep.

this is relevant only to explain just how scattered i feel right now. i think i mentioned in previous posts that i got hired for a temporary job enumerating for the census. (that means i go door to door trying to count/get info on all the folks who didn’t turn in their census form by april 1st.) it pays really well, and i made it through the first week of training last week just fine. (it was kinda boring to have the training manual read verbatim to me, but that’s how the gov’t does it and i was happy to take their $17.50/hr to sit there and listen.) this week has been sort of on-the-job training in the field, as we’ve all been sent out to tackle our first assignments. strangely enough, i’m finding i actually kinda like the work. it’s a little like being a detective sometimes, and since they started me off in my own neighborhood, it’s been nice getting to meet and get to know some of my neighbors. also contrary to my expectations, i’ve learned i’m pretty good at this. i guess my ever-so-brief stint as a paralegal/investigator for the death penalty defense law firm a decade ago taught me a few handy skills after all.

so yeah, i like the census work ok but the hours have slowed down as the week has gone on, because the higher-ups want us all to finish our first assignments completely before giving us any more. quality control, i guess. many of us, including me, have just one or two locations in our assigned areas to complete (can’t find the folks that live there home, keep going back at all hours of the day/evening trying to find them but so far no luck), which ends up meaning that on a day like today, i only get to log in the 10-15 minutes it takes me to knock on each door and have no one answer. i’ll be lucky if i clock in 2 hours of work today, sadly, unless i get lucky later in the day and find them. (that ain’t gonna pay the bills!)

in the absence of census work today, though, i’m finally getting the time to start listening to all the cds that have been piling up on my desk for my music column that was due, of course, several days ago. so far, lots of interesting stuff, including the new kelis album, deluka (which sorta sounds like a uk version of von iva to me), and this really great queer ragtime/vaudeville artist named sabrina chap (who sounds just like ani difranco vocally on several cuts, but her music is more diverse). i hope i can get through the whole stack today and decide what i’ll be featuring, and maybe even start writing.

meanwhile, fae’s son charles is in town for a week visiting – he just arrived yesterday. they are out running errands right now, but, you know, i’m trying to make time to hang out and do stuff with them, too, while he’s here.

and have i mentioned? i have to finish watching about a dozen lesbian/feminist films so i can then sit down and program the film fest for michfest this summer. by the end of may. ugh.

sadly, my crafty life seems a bit on hold at the moment until i get better at managing my work flow and extraneous projects. i did really well at jen’s jazz fest art show, selling lots of t-shirts, several signs and one clock. better than last year, even, which makes me really happy and grateful (thanks again jen!). but it leaves me in a bit of a dilemma, feeling like i don’t really have a very good amount of stock to be heading into the bayou boogaloo on the 22nd-23rd, which is my next and only market i have scheduled before the crippling heat of summer hits us. so i have to find time to strategize about that: make some more clocks and signs, print some more t-shirts, maybe even come up with a new design or two? it’s just one of my biggest opportunities all year to sell a lot of crafty wares, so i’d hate to miss out. but how to find the time?

also, while i’m talking about the bayou boogaloo… some of you will remember that last year the new orleans craft mafia did a wildly successful t-shirt recycling/reconstructing workshop out at the boogaloo. we were mobbed with people excited to learn how to make tote bags, halter tops and skirts out of their old t-shirts, and we got a lot of great press from it, too. plus it was a lot of fun! so how could we not do it again this year? therefore, of course, we are. we’ll be out there selling our eco-friendly and recycled wares, and then also doing two days of free workshops – 12pm-5pm on saturday the 22nd and 1pm-4pm on sunday. we’re looking for volunteers who’d like to help us cut and sew and direct traffic, and we’re also looking for your old t-shirt donations! (now i’m not talking stained and holes-worn-through old t-shirts, but rather stuff you’re not wearing anymore that’s still in nice wearable shape that you’d like to get out of your house and perhaps onto someone else as a skirt or halter or bag!) t-shirt donations can be dropped off early to unique products (2038 magazine street) or whole foods uptown during biz hours or just bring it to the boogaloo – we’ll have a donation box out. spread the word!

so see – what’s a unitasker to do? i really need to be working on ALL these things at the same time, but wow is that hard for me. it’s a major accomplishment that i’ve even managed to update this blog today while doing something else – even if it is just listening to cds. (don’t even get me started on all the various blog posts i want to be writing, on topics ranging from the last few episodes of treme, which i finally found online to watch, to the new police chief in nola, and the goddamn oilpocalypse happening out in the gulf and currently washing up on louisiana’s shores.)

i guess i’ll just keep trucking along, doing the best i can. it’s all i can do.