I’m still recovering from having to do taxes at the end of last week. Because I’m self-employed, my tax rate is about 20%, even though I make less than half the average annual income for my state. But it’s okay, and it’s okay that I haven’t had a vacation in a couple decades, and haven’t had health insurance since 1994, and couldn’t get unemployment compensation if my business flopped, because I love my work and I love being self-employed. Today, though, I took a break from making incense to have a look at this site. I read some of the stories, and I was profoundly moved. Not because there were stories of great hard luck and poverty, but because there are so very many of them, because their stories are so ordinary in our society.
And these are not even our poor.
I was raised in a time different from most folks reading this page, I’ll wager. We were taught if we got a good education and worked hard, we could have lives less financially precarious than those of our parents. The world was practically our oyster. We did what was expected of us, but that oyster had no pearl–for one thing because there were just too darn many of us. But I cannot imagine the lack of opportunities that young people today are now facing.
May the gods bless and protect us.
Today was my last day working for The Man. I am not wearing rose-colored glasses going forward, because I know the positives of having a regular day job outside the home. But I learned the hard way to not wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to having that regular day job outside the home, because in my case it led to chronic illness over time.
The biggest hurdle in coming to the conclusion that I had to go to self-employment was the paradigm shift related to basically tossing out the day-job obsessed bromides of my upbringing. Once I was able to dismiss much of the propaganda as… well, propaganda, I actually had a workable frame of reference to set goals upon. In Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes interviews quite a few workers who are stuck in the workforce almost specifically for the health coverage, come hell or high water. Even though the jobs themselves make them ill. When you read a passage and find yourself nodding, rather than joyfully exclaiming, “Woot! I have a doctor and health coverage!!” it becomes clear something is wrong with the dominant paradigm.
Congrats on your last day! The adventure begins.:)
There are definitely positives for having a regular job outside the home, but for me, they have always been outweighed by the negatives. Even now, almost 20 years later, I still don’t make as much as I did teaching (which was low paying) and I certainly have no benefits package and can’t get unemployment, but I have so many real benefits that I use every day. The one that I like most is that *I* decide when to do what I need to do. I also love that I can go outside any time I want. I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve had where I would sit there and gaze longingly out the window, wanting nothing more than to feel the sun on me. I like being able to do this when I want.
I do think being self-employed and working at home has been a boon to my health. I used to get bronchitis at least once a year and regularly got the flu, which would last for weeks. No evil eye, this just doesn’t happen any more.
The Radical Homemakers book made so much sense to me. I had never really thought about how much money I *didn’t* have to spend because I was not commuting to a job working for someone else.
Well, so far, the asthmatic coughing is gone. I can sleep on my side, on fewer pillows, etc. Stress triggers the cough go figure. I will cough if something irritates my throat, but that is something which was always the case. Stress tends to crank up the heat on everything, which is why commuting was such a pain in the ass.
Saturday was business as usual. Farmers’ market, cooking, catching up on laundry, while the dood was tinkering with and coaxing the truck so we have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing smog at the end of the month. I think he rebuilt the carburetor from two additional used carburetors, and discovered we’d been operating with just a partial for three years. If it doesn’t pass smog, the state is going to seize the truck, tell us to fuck off, and dangle an insult of a check which is supposed to constitute a “credit” for having turned it in-, I mean having the state seize it. While the truck is priceless, has a rebuilt tranny, you name it.
Yesterday I napped.
This morning I woke up at 3:45am, which was when my alarm always went off, and got up to pee like it was normal routine, etc. But the cats know something is up, and no one was meowing in the hallway for vittles, bwahaha. When I got up again at 6am to start the day by letting out the henny pennies, and kicking Pancho outside for his lengthy series of morning constitutionals in all parts of the yard, the day was officially begun. Once Lucy and I got the dood out the door to work, and Pancho was crashed and snoring in the living room, she squeaked and ran down the hallway, summoning me to nap. Smart girl. I am going to nap some more shortly. I wake up every now and again to refill the feeder and waterer for the feathered pigs-, I mean chicks in the brooder. I might start moving them outside tomorrow; we’ll see.
Tomorrow I will start working outside in the yard. Going to add more bedding to the coop, scoop a metric ton of turds from Pancho from all the open spots (he’s a busy little guy when we let him outside, sigh..) and I hope I’ll put together a quick and dirty chicken tractor for the little peeps, in a grassy weedy spot for them to mow down before I move them along to another square of “pasture”.
What is positive, outside of all this mundane stuff, is that I did not earn much at the job and was pretty tight with what we spent to begin with. No longer spending $200/month on public transportation seriously helps, too.
$200/mo for public transportation? Holy cats! That’s more than my averaged utilities. I think once you get rested up and recovered from all the stress and the sleep deprivation, you will be very healthy, no evil eye. And when a person is healthy, it is a lot easier to deal with the stress that does come down the road and to be creative and resilient in one’s business.
I hope your truck does pass. A rebuilt tranny, damn. I can imagine that CA has very stringent smog tests. We do have them here, but only for newer cars. I hope I will be able to get a vehicle next spring. I’m thinking a Kia or Hyundai hatchback or wagon, maybe a Subaru wagon (they are terrific in snow), or even a Honda Civic, what the heck. I like trucks, but I guess I don’t need one much. I rarely see the little ones for sale. Everyone here has the giant ones. The new Ford F-150 gets 33 mpg, but it’s going to be a while before those are available used. I like that truck.
Glad to hear the piglets have a good appetite!
I’m pretty big on trucks myself ( well, I live in Texas ) because they go very well with operating the kinds of small businesses that I’m attracted to and down here a used truck is easy to come by and doesnt cost so much. Basically, the transport possibilities that come with a pickup are considerable and when I compare that to what I got from my two vans…the truck wins out by far. Not that the vans dont carry fond memories. There was a time when I was semi-nomadic and did flea-marketting and contract labor and I’d be sleeping in those vans in the midst of all this hanging grisgris and potted Hibiscus and the boards and plywood I’d use in my stall. That was really priceless.
Trucks are almost mandatory in TX, from what I hear.:) Used trucks are very cheap here as well, lots of mechanics know how to fix them, and the parts are cheap. The big problem is the gas mileage. I am still mulling over whether to get a used truck instead of a sensible small car. Fact is I rarely go anywhere.
The sleeping in the van thing sounds really neat. In fact, I have thought that would be the major attraction of a van–that it could double as a home if necessary.