Crosstown Traffic

This week has been eventful because I was made aware of, and then used connections to attain, a new temporary gig! The gig is for a social research company, and my role so far has been to read short written responses to survey questions and code them. The subject of the survey is the difficulty of transportation within the State of Washington. Survey responders were asked "What is the most urgent transportation issue facing your local area/your region/outside your region." I have 40 codes to use to categorize responses, which range from "traffic congestion in Seattle," to "roads," to "I don't want any of my money going to projects in Seattle where I don't use them." The survey had just a couple over 5,000 respondents.

In any event, after taking on two of these questions in the last two-and-a-half days and upon coding some 3,500 responses on Friday I think I have some thoughts about transportation policy that are worth sharing.

On Energy

I've pretty much grown up with the knowledge that people thought I was a little strange, or weird, or out there. I became used to it but I also take it for granted and forget it from time to time. My friends in high school were called "The Coalition of Nerds," by somebody. I'm not exactly sure who said it, but we took hold of that name for a while. Point to the story, I was attracted to Freaks N Geeks before I was a freshman at Willamette based on the name alone; I was atypical, and I knew it.

My strangeness comes from several areas, but for the most part I'm able to "pass" in regular society. Some of my interests are typical (baseball/sports), but the way in which I'm a fan of them is fairly extreme or geeky (closet of jerseys, regularly reading statistics-oriented blogs). The differentiating characteristic between me and the general population seems to be my energy.

Thoughts About Working, Pt. 1

I recently worked a temporary job at a Call Center. After a couple of weeks, I figured out that it really wasn't a type of job that worked for me. I started trying to put together a series of statements relating to work, what I like to do, and what I'm good at in hopes that I could use it to find my next job. I thought I would take a moment and share that list with you and flesh out some of the ideas within it.

Exploring the Title

I thought for a little while about getting off the old blog at LiveJournal and trying something a little new and different, especially with several of my friends having left the LJ for other places, such as Elliott Bangs' blog or Kira Bohm's new Blogspot and then there's Mary Simpson-Stanton over at Wordpress. The whole "friends page," which was half the reason for LJ in the first place, is becoming a little more sparse and a little more concentrated with webcomic syndications, people I don't know posting in communities and other friends whom I have fallen out of touch with.

There's definitely excitement in starting fresh. I think a lot of us felt that when Google+ opened up at first. A small number of people got on it and were really excited about it and then, well, looked around and noticed how few people were around and went back to Facebook where all the content is. I'm sure we all have people who show up on our News Feed on Facebook who we pass over but still either want to or feel obligated to keep a connection with that we could be free of on a new platform.

In any event, I'm excited to start something new here, but I couldn't just dive in with the "tworsandtwols" moniker that I've been using on everything for the last 5 years or so. Why? Because it's taken by some woman named Meghan in South Carolina. Why did she take it? I have no idea. I vaguely hope it's for the same reason I took it. So now I had to come up with a new title, a new name for my blog.

I wound up at "In Fair Play." Initially I was throwing titles around and I considered it because my baseball success while batting has occurred when I've hit the ball right down the foul line, in fair play, because I've been able to use my speed to get an extra base (or sometimes two).

Serendipitously enough, it also relates to a sort of ethos, as in "in the spirit of fair play." It wouldn't be a stretch to say that this ethos is what made me uncomfortable working for a payday loan company recently. I felt that in order to avoid feeling badly about asking for money from folks who fairly clearly don't have much I had to accept that the company was right and the people were wrong. Now in a legal sense, that's true; the customer used a service provided by the company and did not pay for it. On the other hand, such a read ignores a greater societal problem. I saw a number of profiles for customers who went past due who were working in low-rung service industry positions where they were unlikely to earn a living wage. After a month, I determined that I was supporting the system that causes that to happen more than I was willing to.

Then there's the word "play," itself. I think it's fairly safe to say that I put a high value on play, or having fun. Skip Kenitzer, exercise science professor at Willamette University, gave a Last Lecture called "If It's Not Fun, I'm Not Doing It," and I definitely appreciated his approach. It wound up something along the lines of a cliché I'm sure you've heard "don't do any job you wouldn't do for free." Sometimes I feel like I have been working for free, that the value I've provided has greatly outpaced my pay-rate, but I've been okay with that so long as I am able to do what I want to do when I'm not working and as long as I feel a good level of respect from my coworkers.

Finally, I'm hoping that doing something new, changing a name, starting a new blog, that all of these sort of little changes get me rolling on towards new work and my life in 2012. While I hang out, I hope to follow Ira Glass's advice. If you're not familiar, Ira Glass is the host of This American Life, an excellent radio program you can probably find on your local NPR station. I didn't know much about him or that show until I saw him talk at Willamette in 2006, and it was easily the greatest speaking engagement I had the opportunity to be at. That's no small thing, because I also had the opportunity to hear folks like Cokie Roberts, Colin Powell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Moore, Robert Putnam, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Tosh speak down in Salem.

Back to the point, Ira Glass said this:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I still think of this advice from time to time. Just now, since I don't have full-time work, I have some more time to pursue it.