My Work Experiences
One of my personal sort of philosophical reasons for doing things like making this website and writing weird little articles like this is that it gives me the opportunity to reexamine a phase of career and mental adolescence that most people experience much earlier in their lives. Time has changed a lot about youth in the last 2 decades, and there was a lot of value in the lessons I missed when I was a kid/teenager/young adult. In the 1990s, the idea of a simple blog was just starting out.
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I think my upbringing involved a lot more fear and reticence towards technology than I was aware of then. Even now I remain averse to new tech, hesitant to upgrade or change my workflow, struggling to approach problems in new ways.
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I think there’s a really obvious connection between art and technology, if you want to let yourself see it. Technology enables new forms of art, and art inspires new technologies. My aversion to flash and hype has kept me away from some stuff like NFTs and genAI, which I’m grateful for. But I also can’t help but feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunities like getting in on the ground floor of crypto. I think basically all of the skills I have now are things I was told to be ashamed of or told wouldn’t work out when I was a kid, and that’s essentially where I’m starting out with things like art and web development. I know we live in an anti-cringe society, and this is very much a whiny “couldn’t drag it out of me with wild horses” type post, but it’s a simple fact that I spent like 20 years of my life avoiding trying new things and asking for people to look at it and give me feedback. I was convinced, through personal experiences but also through massive cultural forces, both that feedback on creative work would always be bad, and more devastatingly, that the only way something could have merit is if it had specific value to others.
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I’ve also experienced a sort of soft gatekeeping everywhere from art to technology, where there are institutional and financial barriers that can only be passed with institutional or financial keys. Either it’s sponsorship, education, network, or basic wealth and access– and the places where those barriers are lowest have developed a cultural capital exchange to keep people safe. I’ve always struggled with a kind of impostor syndrome in those places- I am nonbinary, and experience a dysphoria and a guilt about the patriarchal society we live in and the role I play as a person that appears male to most others I meet. I don’t always feel that I deserve the space and attention that I would be demanding by asking to join those communities and networks, both morally and as an artist or thinker.
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Well guess what, the specific and only way to defeat all of these personal demons is to make things and show them to people. I’m passionate about the internet, about computers, and about communication- I want this website to grow and become something that provides value, but I also want to use this space as a playground for what I enjoy doing- exploring and learning! I’m deeply passionate about the arts, arts technology, and art history- and learning about art through experimentation and play is basically the best way to do it. Just the process of picking up an ipad and a laptop and going to work has been extremely fulfilling, and already brought me a lot of joy and opportunity.
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Anyway, this was all a long intro to a post about my job history. I’ve worked a huge number of jobs over the last 18 years, and basically all of them sucked for one reason or another. I’m gonna start by listing them out, but at some point I’m gonna come back through and talk shit about each place individually lol. The farther down the list I get, the more pressure there will be to either hurry up and get a real job before I trash my most recent references, or fully pivot to art and abandon the life of paychecks altogether.
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I started out working at a local pet store in my hometown when I was 16 years old. It was supposed to be a summer job, and I was at a bad point in my life and my relationship to school and my parents. I stopped working there around the time I dropped out of High School, which would have been like 3 or 4 months. I barely remember working there, but I still shop at the store all the time!
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My second job was right after I got my GED, maybe a year after I left the pet store- I was 18. My parents are… idk, not great about unconditional support. I think almost everyone who grew up before the minimum wage freeze had completely lost track of what jobs even are anymore by about 2005, so to my mom the idea of me going to work at the local college bar frying chicken wings should have been enough to support me and a family. It was not. I worked there for about 6 months before getting fired for smoking weed on my break, an omen of things to come.
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The friend who was smoking with me then got me my third job, working at Hedgehog Burgers (you know the one). I think I stayed there for a while, it was very uneventful and I got passed over for promotions. I would have been like 19.
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My fourth job was working at a little family-owned Vietnamese Cafe in the small downtown district. I worked there with my then-girlfriend, I started at about age 21. It sucked. I was there for like 6 months. If you’re sensing a pattern, your brain is working.
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I went a long time between jobs after leaving the Cafe. I worked odd jobs with a friend for his dad’s property management company, helped my mom with renovations, and sold weed for about a year. I was pretty badly burned out even then, and my home situation was terrible. I finally transitioned to working at Bagel Bro Cafe (you know the one) by the time I was 22-23. I say transitioned because I was just hanging out in the shop all day while my girlfriend worked, playing games and working on classes for community college. Eventually the manager just sort of handed me a broom.
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At some point, I went from being basic bageler to being the bagel baker bro. The hours were garbage, the pay was garbage, but boy did I love being alone at the store all by myself for half my shift. I was also insanely productive and efficient, and this was the start of my ego and awareness of my skills coming into MASSIVE conflict with my station in my career.
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I stayed with Bagel Bros for about 3 years, it was the longest I had held down a job until recently. I think I would have stayed longer, but half the staff quit all at once and the management team refused to hire people, leaving the crew screwed for weeks and working overtime without bonus pay. I had also been working at the same wage the entire time I had been at the shop, while watching management get regular annual raises.
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As an interlude, by this point I was like 25, had 7 years good experience in food service, and had been a loyal and valuable employee for more than 2 years with this company. I was making 11.25/hour– this was like 2016, not that long ago. I was told that raises weren’t possible for people in my role multiple times. I’m as angry today about the inequality and imbalance of the numbers at every one of these jobs as I was when I worked there.
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I’m gonna take a break for today and come back to edit this post in the future. I currently work full time, and making this website and working on art occupy a lot of my time, as well. I have to eat some time lol
