Nina Lois Turtledove

Rocks and Hard Spaces

I thought I should feel grateful to the universe for giving me a push in the direction I’d asked for. I want to transition out of the restaurant business, and into my professional field. I need to do this. I have a year left before I graduate with my Masters of Humanities. Thus far, parental help and student loans have made it possible for me to not have to have a very strict budget. I am a pretty modest person when it comes to spending on day-to-day living. However, soon I will have the hard pragmatics of fixed incomes and an array of expenditures (including student loan payments). There are unavoidable expenses and a limited amount of resources. Or are they unlimited and it just takes tapping into? In light of the present, dire economic state of the United States, it seems that at least at the present, money is tight. It reveals just how dependent we are on each other to spend money. In the restaurant business, I am feeling the squeeze. And just now, my boss decided to change our set-schedule system to more of a weekly lottery of shift assignments. It has thrown a wrench into the benefit I have earned of working there long enough- a steady schedule of Friday and Saturday night wait shifts. Those are the best money nights, and it is the most money for time scenario at the restaurant. Jen, Josh and I, who have had the weekends for years now, have all worked there for at least seven-and-a-half years. But maybe Jen, Josh and I have been monopolizing them long enough. Sure, it would be nice to throw some of those shifts to the other long-timers, but in the mean-time, I’m shorted. I have to do something. I have started to look for a part-time job. Politics, or academics.

I wanted to do transition out of the restaurant world with teaching yoga, but this is not a realistic money-making option, at least right now. There is some tightness in that market, as everywhere. Thanks to some pragmatic infusion into my thinking. I need to be making on average of $65 a day.

These days, I have become inspired again- in this political climate. I really like what Barack Obama has said about education being a priority in the United States. If we have good qualified people in the government, what’s really wrong with the government being a large employer? Programs in civil service and investing in our infra-structure; education, academics and sciences; green technology…

The ultimate responsibility: the people ensuring the government works for the people. A much needed revival of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Open | 11.10.2008 13:23 |