Topic # 18: A Good Life?
Dec. 1st, 2013 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I haven't written in more than a month, and this isn't the easiest topic. What does a good life look like in a time when there's little access to meaningful work and family relationships are flexible?
I guess in brief, what a good life today would be like is inherent in the question -- access to meaningful work, and the creation of family, one way or another. I think that this sounds like a question thatspringheel_jack might have made up. It's very focused and perceptive, about exactly what people have a strong desire for, and more difficulty now than ever obtaining. Families fracture or move great distances apart geographically. Wages are far beyond stagnant and low and interesting, fulfilling jobs hard to find or qualify for or both. Leisure seems like the opiate of the masses more than religion does, although I guess both work and neither supplants the other, necessarily.
I feel lucky, in that I am close to my small family, even those who are two time-zones away -- but also somewhat worried in that I have not created my own small nuclearesque family via partner and/or children. There's a certain amount of tradition in my family of older independent widowed or single women, so let's hope I embody that tradition. My mother's mother lived alone as a widow for most of her 50s on; her sister Kay divorced a drunken artist and made her own way from the 1950s until her death in the 1990s, and seemed perfectly fulfilled. Both of them reproduced, though. Hm. Let's see... my mother's father's sister... she was a quirkyalone if ever there was one, but also pretty unhappy and possibly nuts. Lived as an adult with her parents after her long-term lesbian partnership ended, however it did. I wish I knew that story. My father's father's sister: a nun. My father's father's cousin/aunt (some relationship: I can't do those second cousin-y things) a spinster schoolteacher in Milwaukee from about 1886 until the 1930s! Ancestry.com is instructive in these patterns. Apart from genetic connections, these days, there is also a stronger idea of created family after the 1960s. I like the idea of that, but it still feels less sure or stable (even if that sureness and stability can be illusory in a family of blood).
As for jobs, I am lucky there, too -- I chose to be a teacher because I felt like there was more political and union scope in public school teaching than in professoring, and the chance of getting a job was infinitely higher. And it does feel useful to teach middle school (as I am sure it would to teach elementary, as my sister and brother-in-law do, or high school, as I often feel I would like to). All jobs are stressful and difficult at one point or another, but in teaching, for me, there are many compensations. I like to make curriculum and invent projects and find new ways to get information across or teach skills to analyze and organize information. I like to learn more history and more background on what I teach, whether it's literature, young adult fiction, grammar, or various eras and cultures in history. I like to do the projects and assignments I give students, ostensibly as "models" but also because I just like to make an illuminated manuscript letter featuring events surrounding Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1175, or to do an illustrated Timeline of Muhammad's Life, or to draw maps, or birds' eye views of manors and medieval villages, or color in Islamic designs or Japanese Hiroshige prints I've recreated as line drawings. For me, all those things are fulfilling, even when the local teachers union I now belong to is much more boring than Oakland, and mostly exists to funnel phone banking for Democratic candidates, propositions, or certain local school board challengers. Ugh. It still feels more democratic, lowercase D, to work in public education as it is under assault than it seemed like it would be to work at the college level.
I guess in brief, what a good life today would be like is inherent in the question -- access to meaningful work, and the creation of family, one way or another. I think that this sounds like a question that
springheel_jack might have made up. It's very focused and perceptive, about exactly what people have a strong desire for, and more difficulty now than ever obtaining. Families fracture or move great distances apart geographically. Wages are far beyond stagnant and low and interesting, fulfilling jobs hard to find or qualify for or both. Leisure seems like the opiate of the masses more than religion does, although I guess both work and neither supplants the other, necessarily.I feel lucky, in that I am close to my small family, even those who are two time-zones away -- but also somewhat worried in that I have not created my own small nuclearesque family via partner and/or children. There's a certain amount of tradition in my family of older independent widowed or single women, so let's hope I embody that tradition. My mother's mother lived alone as a widow for most of her 50s on; her sister Kay divorced a drunken artist and made her own way from the 1950s until her death in the 1990s, and seemed perfectly fulfilled. Both of them reproduced, though. Hm. Let's see... my mother's father's sister... she was a quirkyalone if ever there was one, but also pretty unhappy and possibly nuts. Lived as an adult with her parents after her long-term lesbian partnership ended, however it did. I wish I knew that story. My father's father's sister: a nun. My father's father's cousin/aunt (some relationship: I can't do those second cousin-y things) a spinster schoolteacher in Milwaukee from about 1886 until the 1930s! Ancestry.com is instructive in these patterns. Apart from genetic connections, these days, there is also a stronger idea of created family after the 1960s. I like the idea of that, but it still feels less sure or stable (even if that sureness and stability can be illusory in a family of blood).
As for jobs, I am lucky there, too -- I chose to be a teacher because I felt like there was more political and union scope in public school teaching than in professoring, and the chance of getting a job was infinitely higher. And it does feel useful to teach middle school (as I am sure it would to teach elementary, as my sister and brother-in-law do, or high school, as I often feel I would like to). All jobs are stressful and difficult at one point or another, but in teaching, for me, there are many compensations. I like to make curriculum and invent projects and find new ways to get information across or teach skills to analyze and organize information. I like to learn more history and more background on what I teach, whether it's literature, young adult fiction, grammar, or various eras and cultures in history. I like to do the projects and assignments I give students, ostensibly as "models" but also because I just like to make an illuminated manuscript letter featuring events surrounding Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1175, or to do an illustrated Timeline of Muhammad's Life, or to draw maps, or birds' eye views of manors and medieval villages, or color in Islamic designs or Japanese Hiroshige prints I've recreated as line drawings. For me, all those things are fulfilling, even when the local teachers union I now belong to is much more boring than Oakland, and mostly exists to funnel phone banking for Democratic candidates, propositions, or certain local school board challengers. Ugh. It still feels more democratic, lowercase D, to work in public education as it is under assault than it seemed like it would be to work at the college level.