Fear of a Minimum Wage Planet

Whew! Finally finished those essays, which now can be found on my website. Funny how they seemed much longer when I was printing them out and editing them. I immediately jumped back into reading, but I'll never be able to keep up with my 27-year-old self.

November 25 to December 4, 1975

The Occult: A History, Colin Wilson
Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle, William A. Nolan, MD
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, P.D. James
Adventures in Consciousness, Jane Roberts
Orbit 10, Damon Knight, Ed
Inheritors of Earth, Gordon Eklund & Poul Anderson
Shakespeare, a Biography, Peter Quennell (gave up at last, very simplistically done)
The Lively Dead, Peter Dickinson

November 25 to December 4, 2005

Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich goes "undercover" looking for entry level jobs and trying to live on the wages. This book was much scarier than the ghost book noted below. Scary because it's so real.

I worked that sort of minimum wage jobs Ehrenreich described throughout college (and that was an unusual number of undergraduate years)! But rents were cheaper then. I'm not so sure I could physically do what she did as a 50-something, stepping into housekeeping, waitressing and shelf stocking at Wal-mart. On the other hand, the life she describes returning to looks equally unimaginable to me.

The turning point for me out of minimum wage jobs was not finally finishing a college degree. It was learning word processing machines in 1974 (the noble IBM Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter—may it rest in peace) that made a difference. That primitive proto-computer was difficult enough for many to masterk that know it allowed me to make a living and work unconventional hours so as to support a writing habit. One of my friends recently summed up my life in one sentence. "I get that you don't work well within the system." Some variation of that should go on my tombstone….except…

If, as a Buddhist, I would want a tombstone... Finishing those essays has brought out my inner Gracie Allen.

Ghost Walk, Heather Graham
Romantic suspense a la Phyllis Whitney, not quite Barbara Michaels. It was the ghost in the title, couldn't resist it. Set in New Orleans in pre-hurricane Katrina 2005, which gave it an unexpected patina of sadness.