What the Pandemic Has Meant for Me, a Lower-Level Professional, in Terms of Work, Motivation, Capital, and Opportunities

I have found a sudden wealth of time coupled with an existential uncertainty.

What I have worked for, in terms of liquid capital (or really, debt) has taken on a absurdist sheen. The ease and speed it is dispensed with if say, I have to move or am unable to supplement my "primary" source of income, has highlighted my precarious position. I look back over notebook after notebook I'd filled with budgets, projections, debts, etc., and see my effort (it's not unnoticed), but I also see how little I have moved really relative to my position to poverty.

But strange, I'm okay. What I had/have seems to have done little more than rotate as if playing musical chairs. I mean, we'll see I suppose, when I include the ledger of my accounts further down.

Immediately before the lockdown, I applied to another job that would bring me more joy. And a little more money -- not too much more. When I got the email telling me they would like to take me on as literary agent, we were at that point mid-lockdown in the city and working remotely. With an incredible final sprint, I wrapped up what I had to wrap up at my previous company and gave my notice.

The motivation, however, to excel at work, is in a complicated place. There's a sort of confusion of space and time right? I'm at once always at work, never at work, and I find myself often considering what sort of personal projects I am neglecting because either my head isn't in it, or my head must "be" at work, even if my person has not left my house.

The strange purgatory (which is by no means hell, to be clear, essential workers should be paid so much more, they certainly should have health insurance, what is this) has forced myself to look at myself and what I produce and whether it is actually meaningful... and to what extent the fall of the American empire should be considered when I think of my future. (Elsewhere?) There's a lot of work to be done on the ecological, feminist, philosophical, human front. I found myself less interested in "promoting" myself as a "unique" offering to letters on social media and more political than I have ever been. I don't think it is merely the rapid fire instances of police brutality. I also think that it has been purgatory. Reflection. Time to read.

Perhaps without getting too deep into it, I see a lot of systems in publishing that are dead on the page. There exists the networks (and I'm thinking both the digital and human networks) to engage more deeply with what we're thinking and writing, how those things connect to our history, how those things sit relative to the present discourse. There's ways of publishing that could really utilize and respect those who contribute to this effort. I want to be directly involved in its development. I don't want to contribute further to the banality and senselessness of the commercial effort.

So. That's where I'm at spiritually.

We're in the "Capital" portion of this entry (see title), so without further ado, this is what my accounts look like now in comparison to my last entry in September 2019:

Debts:

	Sept. 2019	July 2020
Visa Credit Card	$4997	$9730
AMEX Gold Card	$2375	$1650
Loan From Parents	$1300	$1300
Fedloan*	$140314	$143482

*Not included in "Total Paid Down". This is just here for horror.

Total Paid Down: -$4008


Assets:

	Sept. 2019	July 2020
Individual Brokerage	$122	$1737
Acorns	$1205	$103
Vanguard	$1009	$3021
Fidelity	$596	$0

TOTAL SAVED/ACCRUED: $1929

Why this new debt? What the fuck happened?

I have rationalizations. The major expense was my new laptop, which accounts for half of the debt. My old computer from 2012 was wigging out and unreliable, and I needed this for remote work. Or, to work. At all. There's also expenses from the holidays and some traveling, which at the time I thought would easily be recuperated with a couple bar shifts on the weekends for a couple months and 💥 *COVID*

BUT LOOK, I did manage to save. Vanguard account tripled in size, and my savings is approaching 2K. For my mental health at least, even though I have more debt than I did last year, I no longer feel like I'm living on a line, that one trip to the grocery would drain it all.

I have recently taken on some remote tutoring students. Through the summer anyway, I should be able to make a dent in that Visa card debt.

***

I'm sitting with those numbers and really feeling my smallness. And perhaps a new freedom. I really enjoy tutoring, and this might be something that will be especially important for families in the city dealing with remote classrooms where individualized focus on students is compromised. I spent some time reading Jean Anyon this afternoon, the education scholar, who had conducted an observation in the late seventies of different schools representative of different socioeconomic strata, and felt the injustice of it all from the earliest age. One of my students now has had what Anyon would have definitely classified as a "working class education", which demanded little in the way of critical or creative engagement with material. I see my work cut out for me, and this feels meaningful.