Work

In my profession, it has always been easy to find work. It seemed that there was always a place in need of my services, and there were more than enough students to go around. After I returned from Peace Corps I found a job within 3 days of sending out my first resume. In Hawaii, I didn't even have to send out a resume. My next door neighbor "knew a guy," and I had a job within a day of talking with her.

On the other hand, L has never had it easy in getting a job. In Boston it was tough, and in Hawaii, it was next to impossible. It was truly depressing for her, and for me. In fact, one of the major reasons for our relocation was the job issue. In moving here, I hoped that it would get easier for her to find work, and I secretly harbored the odd wish that our situations would be reversed - in terms of job availability.

Well, it looks pretty much like I'm going to get my wish. I have looked high and low for jobs in my field, and there are few (whereas L is having no difficulty finding places to apply to). What's worse is that the population of students here is just as homogeneous as it was in Hawaii, only, this time all the students are from Latin America.

I have no problem with students from any part of the world, but I do enjoy diversity in my classes. I love it when there are four or five different countries and languages represented in my class. In Hawaii, it was boringly Japanese. Even the students agreed. Here, I don't know if it is going to be boring, but I know the students here are not cash-rich, as the ones in Japan were.

This dynamic is what worries me. If the students are poor immigrants, and the programs catering to them are free - which they are - then what can the pay be? It can't be very high. This means either that I have to work multiple jobs, as I did in Boston, or it means I'm going to have to try to change what I do for a living. In addition, immigrant teaching is depressing work in some cases. For example, there is: teaching in the basement of a supermarket, with pipes oozing stuff onto the table, trying to shout the lesson over the din of a busy cafeteria because the managers think the conference room is too good for the likes of the workers in the warehouse, and, worst of all, teaching welfare moms, illegal immigrants all, when they know they will never be allowed to "naturalize" or ever get a green card; they are doomed to a life of cleaning the projects' common areas, places animals wouldn't stay. All of these things made me never want to work at the "vocational" end of the spectrum again.

And so I try to keep a positive outlook. I've got money to live on in the mean time, although I'd rather be making money than slowly draining my account of the gains I had made at the end in Hawaii. I have to bear in mind that I am searching at a bad time in the academic sense. This is the beginning of the semester, and I would need at least a two month advance application date to get consideration for any jobs that might open up. Plus, January is a bad time to hunt for jobs in academia, since it is in the middle of the school year, and most contracts start in September. Ideally, I should have gotten out of Hawaii back in May. But that just wasn't possible.

In the meantime, there is Netflix, the gym, home stuff, new friends, and the Internet to keep me occupied.

I always wanted to have nothing to do, but now that I have it, all I want is something to do again!