Now that GDU has rendered the teaching gig so outrageous, so underpaid, and so grossly immoral that even I, Queen of Creative Malingering and Dark Angel of Cynicism, will not take on another online course, I cast about for another way to generate the extra money needed to pay off the Renovation Loan during my lifetime.
One of my research assistants has been working for a small publisher of mystery novels. The proprietors are paying her $12 an hour to read page proofs. This works out to about 10 pages an hour or around $360 per book. She says they’ve given her four books to read since the first of the year.
By the month, that would come to about half of what I’m earning per class. But even if course enrollments were limited to the caps the university has had, reading page proofs of a mystery novel would amount to about a tenth of the work entailed in a month of teaching an online university writing course. And now that the caps are gone-well, the publisher’s pay would easily work out to far more, per hour, than an adjunct professor would earn pretending to teach “writing” to 100, 200, maybe 300 on-line students.
I called the publisher’s shop and was greeted with what sounded like sincere interest.
Given a Ph.D. in English, a job directing an editorial shop, several books of my own in print, and 20 years’ experience writing for and editing commercial publications, I suspect I’m a shoo-in.
If I could find one other publisher looking for someone to do similar work, it would replace the teaching pay.
Actually…. If they can keep me busy twelve months a year, just this one gig would come fairly close to replacing the teaching pay. As a practical matter, because GDU has a six-week-long winter break, the spring and fall semesters occupy only about 7 ½ months of your time.
$360/month over 12 months = gross $4,320 = net $3,110
Pay for one $3,500 course = gross $3,500 = net $2,110
Pay for two $3,500 courses = gross $7,000 = net $4,200
Of course, I’d have to pay taxes on the freelance editing pay, and I would forego the matching contribution of 7% of that $4,320 to my 403b plan (in fact, if I were teaching, the match would be 7% of $7,000 gross pay). However, because I deduct my entire life, I always end up with a couple thousand dollars of state and federal income tax refunds. Since I’m putting all the freelance money into savings anyway, I doubt the loss will matter. Moonlighting for GDU, because all sorts of deductions are ripped out of my paycheck, I only bring home about 60% of gross pay. I’ll cheerfully forego the $490 match to the retirement fund for the privilege of not teaching in the new madhouse regime, thank you very much. I mean…we’re talking about being paid to read mystery novels.
A second client paying comparably and giving me a comparable amount of work would bring the annual freelance pay to $8,640 (gross) or about $6,220 net. The amount of work-in terms of hours and of onorousness-would be significantly less than teaching two sections of undergraduate writing courses, and the pay, significantly more.
This weekend’s round-up of interesting and entertaining posts is a day late because I spent yesterday shopping, cleaning house, and preparing dinner for friends. A great time was had by all: following a Julia Child recipe for beef bourguignon, I turned a pot roast into something awesome.
A dollar short because pot roast is not pore folks’ food any more. Good grief! In the first place, I couldn’t find a decent roast. Neither Safeway nor Costco had a chuck roast capable of rising to the occasion: Safeway’s was actually chuck steak, an inch or so thick, and the only “chuck roast” in Costco’s meat case was two small pieces wrapped into a single package. Both choices were overpriced, higher than the much larger rump roast that I got on mark-down at the Safeway. By the time I finished buying the meat, some dried noodles, a few stewing vegetables, a box of relatively unadulterated beef broth, and a bottle of cheap wine, the dinner cost almost fifty bucks!
Rump being an altogether-too-chewy cut of lean meat capable of cooking up into shoe leather, I had to bard the darn thing with parboiled bacon fat, a lengthy process and a nuisance. But it turned out more than good enough for government work.
It seemed strange that no beef roasts, to speak of, were available at mid-morning on a Saturday. Are we looking at a meat shortage? Or should we join My First Million in contemplating the possibility of a coming famine?
For those of us who have been reduced to penury by the weekend grocery bill, Catherine Shaffer reminds us that DVDs are to be had for free at the local library; at Wisebread she explains how to get your hands on those perpetually loaned-out new releases and popular television shows. Trent and Mrs. Trent are experimenting with cloth diapers (hope they save enough to cover the cost of the extra diaper rash cream they’ll soon be needing…ouch!). Poorer Than You has an eye-opening post about how to foil those darn messages from your printer that tell you the ink cartridge is almost empty-when it’s not. And over at Get Rich Slowly, the project to track the cost of growing garden vegetables proceeds: so far, JD and Mrs. JD have spent $157.30 to arrive at the robust seedling stage.
The Mac is really annoyed at having been made to do things it didn’t want to do, and now it’s galloping along at the speed of a stampeding snail. So, it’s time to shut everything down and reboot.
Or better yet, to shut everything down and go dine on some leftover pot roast. Outta here! A fine Sunday evening to all!
The Great Desert University has put the eefus on my scheme to earn enough to pay off the Renovation Loan by teaching a couple of sections of excruciating undergraduate literacy courses each semester.
First, pleading penury, the West campus canceled all 2008 fall courses taught by adjunct faculty (part-timers).
Next, the administration announced that henceforth tenure-track faculty will be discouraged from teaching in summers and intersessions. Instead, adjunct faculty will teach those sections.
Why?
Consider: if you’re full-time faculty, GDU has to pay you a percentage of your salary for each summer course you teach. When I was on the teaching faculty, I earned over $4,000 for teaching a summer section; today, with the raises in pay I would have experienced during the past five years, they’d have to pay me around $6,000. But as adjunct? I earn $3,500. Without the Ph.D., an adjunct gets a munificent $3,200. So, you see the motivation.
Moving on, the next fiat announced that all on-line courses henceforth will have no enrollment caps!
Understand:
* The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that college writing courses enroll no more than 20 students per class.
* I personally did a study comparing two concurrent sections of Writing for the Professions, each with 30 enrolled students, with identical syllabi, one on-line and one face-to-face, and discovered that the online section required exactly twice as many hours to prepare and teach as the in-class section (“Parallel On-Line and In-Class Sections of ‘Writing for the Professions’: A Practical Experiment.” Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000).
At GDU, Writing for the Professions . . .
is one of two courses that fill the upper-division literacy requirement (the university has more than 64,000 students!)
is required for the global business major.
is required for the post-baccalaureate teaching certificate.
fills a requirement for the B.A. in English education (i.e., the undergraduate teaching certificate).
fills a requirement for the accounting major.
fills a requirement for the social work major.
is the course to which upper-division students with substandard writing skills and with learning disabilities are referred.
is a recommended course for students whose first language is other than English.
Every section offered on-line fills within days after the course schedule is published, leaving students begging for overrides.
All of which is to say that demand for the course is huge, students by and large loathe it, and half of them would kill to get into an online section that at least doesn’t make them traipse to campus and spend three hours a week sitting through a class they don’t think they should have to take in the first place.
It is, in short, a demonic course from Hell.
Removing the caps for on-line sections means any on-line section will enroll upwards of 100 students. Possibly LOTS upwards. Think 200. Think 300. In a writing course!
Well, thanks to GDU having “accidentally” double-enrolled the two sections I agreed to teach this semester, I have 80 students right now. But at least I’m being paid to teach the equivalent of four sections.
What this new policy will do is require FAs to teach possibly twice that many (possibly more) students for one-fourth of the pay. Yes. In a five-week summer session.
There’s only one way anyone dumb enough or naïve enough or desperate enough to agree to any such arrangement could possibly survive: cheat the students. Deny them anything even resembling “education.” The sole way you could cope would be to have every single assignment be a group project, so that instead of 100 or 200 papers to grade per assignment, you’d have 20 or 40.
I do group projects right now to cut down the workload. But I start with two or three individual assignments, so that I can identify the strongest and weakest students and so the students have an opportunity to get some one-on-one instruction. Reading the last raft 80 papers of drivel damn near killed me. The next five papers will come over my transom in the form of five group projects, each on average six or eight pages long. Let’s say the average length of papers handed in for these next five assignments is seven pages. That comes to FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE PAGES (count’em: 525) of copy in which verbs don’t agree with subjects, facts are wrong, words are used incorrectly, paragraphs are incoherent or nonexistent, logic is tortured, grammar is even more tortured, punctuation is wrong in every way imaginable. And on and on.
That’s for 80 students, divided into 15 groups. Five hundred twenty-five pages of bad copy to read, analyze, think about, comment upon understandably, and try to explain how to fix, in one month. That follows the two individual papers they’ve written so far (about 320 pages), coming to a total of 845 pages to process over the semester, in addition to three online quizzes. That’s more pages than War and Peace! And Leo Tolstoy this bunch ain’t.
Imagine the workload for a class of 200 “writing” students. Even if you made every assignment a group project, the number of hours required to cope with the tsunami of careless, toss-it-away, don’t-give-a-damn copy would reduce your $3,500 pay to well below minimum wage.
Better to greet customers at Walmart! At least most of the customers want to be there.
And indeed, what on earth would be the point of enrolling in such a course? The only point is to get a rubber stamp in your transcript so you can proceed through to your rubber-stamp degree in accountancy or social work or global management, a meaningless degree if ever there was one. To say nothing of the vacant teaching certificate that ensues from courses like this.
So it is that one of the great universities in the land (as it would style itself) defrauds its students, exploits part-time faculty, and makes a joke of what America calls education.
Last Friday, after contemplating the age-old process of preparing dried beans for human consumption, I remembered another ancient food craft lurking in my past: curing fresh olives.
Olive curing dates back at least to ancient Greece, and probably further than that. I do not know how long people have been curing and eating olives, which are unpalatably bitter when picked fresh from the tree. But if you’ll recall, Ali Baba hid from the thieves in an olive jar, so presumably this is a process that stretches back to our remote ancestors.
First, you’ll need access to a bearing olive tree. In the United States, these grow mostly in the Southwest, and even here, states such as my own have banned flowering olives, because their pollen is highly allergenic. (Notice that they haven’t outlawed the ponderosa pine, whose extremely irritating pollen drifts from logging country to afflict legions of sufferers-money crops get a pass.) Nevertheless, olive trees are very long-lived, and so if you look around, you’ll probably find an old one in a neighbor’s yard or on public property.
Most people are thrilled to have you pick their olive trees, for they regard the fruit as nothing but a nuisance. Tant pis pour eux, say we!
This recipe calls for ripe olives. So pick the ones that are still on the tree-DO NOT use olives that have fallen on the ground! These will introduce mildew. Choose olives that are cherry red to purple. Dead black ones make a mushy product. To avoid bruising, drop them into a container of water.
Wash the olives and make a small slit down to the pit at the blossom end (opposite stem). Cover with water in a nonmetallic container. Glass or crockery is best; plastic will do. Change the water every day for 5 to 6 weeks to leach out bitterness. When ready, they will be rather tasteless but should still have a slight bite.
Now wash the olives again in clear water and layer with table salt, placing them back into the clean nonmetallic container. Each olive should be well sprinkled. Let them stand five to seven days, pouring off collected liquid daily.
At the end of this period, wash the olives again.
Put them into clean lidded jars. Add your choice of spices (see below) and cover with this pickling solution: 4 Tbsp. salt, 2/3 cup vinegar laced (if desired) with lemon or lime juice, and bottled water to make one quart. Do not use home-made wine vinegar, since its level of acidity is not constant.
Leave an inch or more of headroom in each jar, with all the olives submerged in pickling solution. Add about 1/2 inch of olive oil. If your jar narrows at the top, olive oil should cover the wider part below.
For seasoning, use your spice shelf and your imagination. Combine or use separately garlic, celery seed, dried onion, rosemary, oregano, dill, etc. You can substitute the juice from a jar of dill pickles for all or part of the water.
Jane Reinl’s “Mother India” Olives
To a quart of pickling solution, add 1 tsp. curry powder, 2 tsp. minced dried onion, and 1/2 to 1 tsp. crushed red pepper.
Garlic Dill Olives
To a quart of pickling solution, add 2 Tbsp dried dill and a half-dozen cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced lengthwise.
Fennel Olives
Pulverize a tablespoon or two of fennel seeds in a mortar, an old coffee grinder, or the blender (don’t reduce them to powder-just break them up). Add the pulverized fennel to a quart of pickling solution. If desired, add chopped leaves from a fresh anise bulb.
If you would like to flavor commercially prepared olives with these spices, pour off the liquid and drown the olives in olive oil. Then add the spice combination, experimenting with the flavor until you arrive at the amounts that suit your taste.
The credit union’s mortgage rates dropped to 5.375% this morning. Last time they hit this point, we decided to wait to see if they fell to their previous low of 5.25%. That was many a week ago.
Dang! Jump at it, or not jump?
Put in a call to my financial advisor. He said it was reasonable to expect rates to go back up and stay there. Mortgage rates, as he explained, aren’t closely tied to the Fed’s rates but depend more on the long-term prospects for the economy. In his opinion, the recession is On. Over the next year or so, he thinks things will get better-and he claims others think that, too-and so we can expect lending rates to rise.
Calculation: On the amount we owe, the difference between 5.25% and 5.375% is $16 a month. The difference in mortgage payments: more than $200 a month.
This morning as I was pouring tap water into the Brita filter pitcher and cussing because I’d forgotten to do it before I went to bed last night, it occurred to me to cuss some more because in The Good Old Days clean, safe, good-tasting water came out of the tap. Yes. Back in my callow youth, people actually drank water that came right out of the kitchen faucet, and they liked it. Today, most people will drink untreated tap water only under the direst circumstances.
Were things really so great back in the mid-twentieth century’s Golden Age, when men were men and tomatoes tasted like tomatoes? Well, kids, I can remember the 1950s, and I’m here to tell ya…umh…I dunno.
It’s ambiguous: we’ve come to where we are through a long series of trade-offs.
We have a lot of new stuff that changes the way we live and even the way we look at life. The computer, of course, leaps to mind first. The computer and the Internet enrich our lives in many ways, making our work easier and faster, bringing us news and acquaintances from around the world, enlarging our worldviews, and entertaining us no end. Is this a good thing? In some ways yes, in some no.
As a writer and journalist, I was thrilled when the first PCs transformed the drudgery of typing, revising and rewriting by “disappearing” white-out, white-out sheets, erasers, waxy erasable paper, and the hated Smith-Corona and replaced them with little glowing characters on a screen. This changed the entire nature of writing, making it easy to churn out words at a fantastic rate and easy to create clean(-looking) copy for our editors.
However, as time passed and I became one of those editors…well. An editor in 2008 does work that was covered by three people just twenty or thirty years ago: a secretary, an editor, and a layout artist. Some editors also do the photographer’s job. My office presently puts out six journals (one of them an annual book) with a staff of four, three of whom are part-timers. Twenty years ago, when I worked at Arizona Highways, a staff of five editors, a research assistant, three secretaries, a photo editor, and four graphic artists produced one magazine, two or three books a year, and a few ancillary products such as calendars and notecards. One issue of Arizona Highways is about 48 pages long, much of it occupied by photography. A typical scholarly journal runs upward of 150 pages, with few illustrations. In other words, we are doing more work with the equivalent of 2½ full-time workers than a staff of fourteen did in the good old days.
Very efficient, I’m sure. As long as you overlook a few minor details:
1. We don’t do our work as well. Fewer eyes read the copy and there’s lots more of it. So, more errors get past us.
2. Whole classes of creative workers have been effectively put out of business. When editors become graphic designers, graphic designers line up at the food stamp counter.
3. Editors are not artists, and so the design of our print and web-based publications suffers.
4. Because we farm out a fair amount of graphic design to underpaid freelancers, young newly hired editors never see designers at work and, because they do not understand what designers really do, never learn how to communicate meaningfully with them.
5. Secretarial and clerical help is vastly undervalued, so that when we do hire such workers we pay them even less than they used to be paid, which was not much. My late, great secretary took home $240 per paycheck from her 50% FTE job. No one can make a living on that—or even supplement another job in any useful way.
Okay, so we all know more productive means overworked and underpaid. Tell us something else.
How about the status of women? In 1958, my mother got a job working in the front office of the apartment development where we lived. The place covered acres and acres with high-rises and garden apartments and was owned by a huge insurance company. She was beside herself with joy at earning $68 a week: “Such good pay for a woman,” she crowed.
“Such good pay for a woman” would not have paid a month’s rent on our apartment.
From childhood, my dream was to become an astrophysicist. Out of the question, of course. Not to worry, I was told: while I was working as a secretary and bringing up kids, I could “always have astronomy as a hobby.” As a college freshman, I was introduced to microbiology, a subject I found fascinating. No entry there, either.
As a girl, your job was to grow up to be a wife and mother. And God help you if you got pregnant before you landed a husband. Your life would be “ruined.” Even if you managed to arrange a back-alley abortion and you survived it, you would come out of it with a reputation as “used goods,” making it difficult or impossible to find a man to support you. When you did marry, you moved from being the ward of your parents to the ward of your husband. While my father went to sea, my mother had to present a notarized power of attorney to sell their car and buy a new one-in cash, with no loan involved. She had to have powers of attorney to perform any routine financial activity and many things having to do with the upbringing of her child. In effect she, like all other women, was regarded as not quite fully adult, a de facto child by virtue of her gender.
In the interstice between the end of World War II and the 1970s, normal women did not work outside the home. And during the 1950s the pressure to be “normal” was well-nigh irresistible. The only jobs open to most women, other than running a home and raising children, were clerical or secretarial work and teaching. The occasional woman who did elect a life-long career would never be paid as much as a man in the same job, even if she outperformed him, because after all a man had to support a family.
Now a woman can do just about anything she pleases: sell stocks, practice law or medicine, be an engineer, profess English literature, lead a congregation, run a business, drive trucks, fix the plumbing, push paper, count beans, go to war, even fly to outer space. In fact, since it now takes two respectable salaries to keep a roof over a family’s heads and food on their table, few women have any choice: most of us have to work. Is that really better for a woman who has small children?
Okay, okay, so when women are privileged to go to work, only the most privileged can raise their kids at home. So all our children are parked in day-care centers or plugged into televisions. What about discrimination and diversity? Aren’t things better for minority groups?
Compared to 1958 or so, you bet they are. What my mother did to earn her “good pay for a woman” was to quietly assess everyone who applied to rent an apartment from that huge nationwide insurance company. She was required to enter a code at the bottom of each application showing whether she thought they were black, Asian, Hispanic, or Jewish. None of the above were eligible.
Today I’m sure that apartment development, which still stands near Lake Merced in San Francisco, is filled with people from all walks of life and from all ethnicities and is much the better for it. Life in a place where everybody looks, dresses, and thinks like you is pretty boring. Nowadays we have many choices of places to live where we can enjoy a variety of neighbors—back in the Golden Age, those were few and far between.
On the other hand, we’d be kidding ourselves to think bigotry is a thing of the past—all you have to do is listen to the immigration “debate” to see how much fear of the Other is still with us.
Okay, okay, so we have a sheriff who wants to shake down everyone with a dusky complexion, and an electorate that votes him in and loudly applauds him. Moral issues aside, what about all the great gadgets we have? Look how much better they are!
No question about, we have got a lot of great stuff. Refrigerators are huge and they defrost themselves. Ovens clean themselves. Lights turn themselves on and off and hardly use any electricity. We’ve got iPods and Dick Tracy wrist phones and machines that answer our telephones and satellite TV and jet planes that take us from one end of the continent to the other in a few hours and World of Warcraft and calculators so we don’t have to add on our fingers anymore and magical digital cameras and skateboards and spaceships that set down on a moon of Jupiter.
And best of all, we’ve got cars. Boy, do we have cars. And they are better. Not only do they run forever, they’re hugely safer than the jalopies of the 50s and the 60s. In the good old days, cars were engineered to fall apart in three years; until they were challenged by the Germans and the Japanese, American manufacturers brainwashed the public to think we needed to buy a new style of tailfins and garish headlights every couple of years, and the more gas the thing guzzled, the better. Those dinosaurs had no seat belts—in fact, for years manufacturers refused to install seat belts, arguing that American consumers weren’t interested in safety. Nor did we have car seats for infants and small children. You carried the baby in your lap and the kids bounced around the back seat, and if the car got into a minor accident….well, too bad. Fewer mouths to feed, anyway.
Today automobiles are better. They’re safer, they’re prettier, and they run better.
Sure are a lot of ’em.
My great-aunt managed to get herself a good office job before the Depression, when women had an easier time in the workplace, and as a committed widow hung on to the job all the way through the 1960s. She used to commute from Berkeley to San Francisco on an electric train with huge windows that gave you a view of the entire Bay Area. Think of that. Each morning she walked a half-block up the hill to the train stop, climbed on a car lined with windows as big as my living-room window, and took a scenic ride over the water, across Treasure Island, past the deliciously perfumed bread factory and through a fragrant cloud emanating from the coffee plant, got out in downtown San Francisco, and then walked or took a trolley to the bank where she worked. As the train breezed along, she read a book or looked at the vista. She never had to fight her way across a gridlocked freeway (“road rage” was unknown), she never had to pay to park a car, and she never had to worry about someone breaking into or stealing a car.
In 1958 they shut down the train, pulled the tracks up off the Bay Bridge, and made both decks one-way roads, so that commuters could crawl back and forth bumper-to-bumper between the East Bay and the City, the way everyone does in every other city in this country. Since the citizenry didn’t ask to mothball the trains, rumor has it the move was made at the quiet behest of the oil and automobile industries.
Today in the low desert, where once the vistas were almost as spectacular as the Bay Area’s, I drive almost an hour to work through a concrete arroyo flanked by 25-foot-high concrete sound barriers. My view is the rear ends of a thousand cars in front of me, and what I smell is automobile exhaust. A trip either way is dangerous and scary, often punctuated by episodes of raw aggression. When I get to campus I have to fight for a place to park. When I leave work to drive back home, I never know whether my car will still be where I left it or still be in one piece. On the other hand, I do have two layers of steel between me and the next guy. And seat belts, air bags, safety glass, and antilock brakes.
The cars are safer. But are we better off?
Mighty fine gadgets we have. Just don’t drink the water.
My Mum was saying just yesterday how she felt sorry for me and my sister because houses are so much more expensive and we are both working hard to get our mortgages paid. She said they didn’t have that worry. However, she saved up for 5 years before getting married so when they bought their first house they had a substantial deposit to put down against their £7000 three bedroomed house. She also collected things for her bottom drawer while she was engaged. Perhaps we can learn something here. We are all in such a rush to get onto the housing ladder that we do not give ourselves time to save up for all of the expenses that we will have once we buy that house.
Housing prices are objectively ridiculous. They were ridiculous even before the run-up that was the “bubble.”
In 1967, my husband and I paid more than he thought we could afford for out first house: $33,000. That was about three times what he earned in one year.
The house was drop-down dead gorgeous: a recently renovated vintage 1929 beauty in a prime downtown neighborhood where, today, only the wealthy can afford to live–I couldn’t touch that house for its asking price when it was last on the market. It had a two-story-high French window in the living room, huge wooden beams spanning spanning 20-foot-high walls, a private screened atrium with translucent roofing that allowed one to grow tropical plants, watered by a fountain, bedrooms the size of an African savannah, hardwood flooring, original antique tiling in like-new condition, two separate work areas with their own sinks in the huge kitchen, a breakfast nook large enough to accommodate a dining-room table and chairs…and on and on and on.
Today I live in a much more ordinary house in a significantly more modest neighborhood. Recently it was valued at $300,000. That is FIVE times what I earn in one year.
So we’ve gone from three times a decent salary (for a pretty house in a nice neighborhood surrounded by inner-city blight) to five times a decent salary (for a lesser house in a lesser neighborhood surrounded by inner-city blight).
Of course, you’d expect property values to rise over time. But the problem is, salaries have not risen commensurately. Relatively speaking, housing costs are much higher than they were when we–your parents’ generation–were young.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – 09:43 AM
Mayana
Well, you raise a great question.I’m not quite sure how to weigh things.In my case I’ve definitely experienced class mobility from a working class background and childhood to a solidly middle class income and lifestyle.But am I better off?Do I feel better off?
Food was huge in our family, largely because as it got closer to Dad’s pay day we were increasingly running short on food. So there was a daily kind of strain to our lives (all 8 of us in addition to our parents) about food and having enough of it.I grew up with a sense that we were an economic burden and that our existence made everyone’s else existence just that much more meager.So today, even though I can pretty much buy what I want at the grocery store and indulge in pricey items that I couldn’t have dreamed about as a child, my memories about almost being without affects me quite profoundly today–in terms of guilt, knowing that so many barely live day-to-day and here I am spending $7 on a loaf of “real” bread, and, in terms of having lived and struggled to be at a point where I can presumably be comfortable in my middle class life. In a way it’s almost as if being haunted by the prospect of poverty as a child continues to haunt me today–and it simply doesn’t go away.
In response to a question about whether the African American community was better off today than they were in the 60s, Cornell West made a great point. Yes, there was greater poverty back then BUT the systems of caring and nurturing were intact.Its those very systems that have eroded for so many of us, especially those of us who once lived in what scholars call ethnic enclaves.We have films from my childhood that show the neighbors we grew up with in our home, celebrating with everyone, laughing, crowded, and having a great time, all because someone was having a baby (my oldest sister).I can’t imagine that much fuss happening today. In fact, relations seem so divided in my personal realm that I wouldn’t want to have 3/4 of the people in my personal familial realm around me, much less in crowded conditions.I remember the generosity of my parents’ neighbors, bringing over boxes of broccoli, lettuce, whatever was in season and being harvested.I remember feeling SAFE in our neighborhood.That same neighborhood, which my mother still lives in is now seething with “drog addictos” –as my 86 year old mother refers to them.Drug addicts that park their vehicles in front of my mother’s house; drug addicts that can be seen bringing in the “goods” after their late-night burglarizing, drug addicts who blast their music so loudat any time of the day that one can’t even consider going out to sit in the front lawn, because it no longer feels safe.It’s a very different barrio from the one I grew up in.Everyone knew everyone and we kept an eye on each other. As I’m writing this I’m feeling quite the old fogey, but the reality is that I couldn’t tell you what my neighbor’s last names are, on either side of me or across the street.While we wave hello & goodbye when we happen to cross each other’s path, after 5 years of living in this wonderfully old phx neighborhood, I can’t say, with the exception of one friend that lives in the neighborhood, that I feel the kind of trust and warmth that I experienced growing up.
Am I better off than my parents? Sure, I have an education (phd); i own 2 homes, I travel with my partner, and I have medical care, which is something that was completely unknown in my childhood home.My parents taught themselves to read. My father, who only had a first-grade education in Mexico was always reading newspapers.No, he never read any of the classics but when he wasn’t watching boxing he was reading. The same with my mother. She quit school in the U.S. in the 2nd grade because she was ashamed to have to wash her one dress every night in order to go to school. But today, she’ll proudly read English out loud at her church and she’s SO proud of herself. Meanwhile, adopting the middle class way of life and all the neuroses that come with graduate education, I suffer from severe feelings of inadequacy and being constantly overwhelmed by the myriad of expectations, anger around compressed pay, and being surrounded by academics that are SO narrow in their life-scope that going to work feels like I’m going to a mausoleum, where no organic energy or joy is to be found ANYWHERE around me.My father worked really hard but at the end of the day he left work confident about what he’d done, whether it was to plow 100 acres or irrigate the fields. He didn’t have to engage in psychological warfare to get through his day. I, on the other hand, have to put on my armor, my masks, and call upon my old soul to get me through one week of lying administrators, incompetent directors, idiosyncratic faculty, burned out staff, and hundreds of students (half of whom should never have been admitted into college) and I’m somehow supposed to think I’m better off?
Hmmm…..I think not…..I lived in Santa Cruz, California when the big earthquake hit in ’89(?) and the bay bridge collapsed and downtown Santa Cruz took a major hit.Gadgets didn’t matter then; no running water for three days, no gas to pump because there was no elecricity; no money from machines because NOTHING WORKED!That’s when you realize that you’re glad you kept a manual can opener in your drawer, even though the electric one is supposed to be so much better.Yes, I sound like I’m romanticizing but…..why not?It’s notlike the neighbors are over having a beer………………..
Have a good night!
Thursday, April 3, 2008 – 09:26 PM
Bill
Standard of living is far higher than our parents.
Houses are 3 to 4 times as large as the sub-1000 sqft. 3 bedroom/1 bath houses in which our parents raised 4 kids – and the houses have many more amenities (no central anything back then)
Consumer goods are cheap and plentiful. Any electronic toy you want, cheap.
(research 1960s televsion prices in today’s money)
However, there were tradeoffs.
I grew up in a huge WWI-era house (almost 6,000 sqft), but it was a money pit, and ultimately ended up costing several hundred thousand over and above the purchase price (upgrading electric/HVAC/etc.)
Don’t forget property taxes if you yearn for the McMansion – 30 years ago on the above house they were under $1,000 – 20 years ago when we sold it taxes were $3,000 – today taxes are $12,000/year and it’s on the market.
Imagine what income that house will eat in taxes alone if the next owner keeps it 20 years.
Good words and true, Bill. I grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Three bedrooms: a mansion! My mother and I washed clothes with a wringer washer, rinsed them in a big concrete sink, and hauled everything outside to hang on clotheslines in the back yard.
That was before I walked to school ten miles through the snow… Oh! Fantasy….sorreee.
But while taxes may have been less than $1,000 thirty years ago, remember that thirty years ago a thousand bucks was a LOT of money! A young man fresh out of college envisioned a $12,000 annual salary as something to strive for, the pinnacle of his future career. And I can recall my father driving us through Beverly Hills one day. He paused in front of some star’s palatial mansion, through whose two-story front window we could see a fantastic winding staircase.
“Wow!” he murmured, his jaw slack with awe. “That place must be worth A HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
