Working the Dissertation

First, I owe the idea for that title from a recent CE article by Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu, "Working Rhetoric and Composition."

It seems like I've always worked. When I was 12, 13 I started babysitting fairly regularly. (A shock, I know, to those of you who know my facility with younger humans.) On my 15th birthday, I went to the courthouse and applied for a work permit, a document that certifies to companies that they can hire you even though you're under the age of 16, the minimum age for corporatized employment. My first job was at Dairy Queen, and it was awful. I lasted two weeks, not because of the job but because of the manager, a nasty old woman (named Lorene, I'll never forget it) who would pinch the fat on the back of my arm and twist it HARD when I made a mistake.

I thought this was how all work was done. My dad would get up at 4 a.m. every morning to work on bulldozers. He'd come home after dark, greasy from climbing into the engine compartments of earthmovers, bathe, eat dinner, watch a little TV (if it wasn't too late), and get up the next morning to do it over again. I thought this was how all work was done. It took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and you had to be tired at the end of the day.

I stuck out my next job for close to four years. All of the urban myths about McDonalds are true. It's as dirty as you think. That job sustained me through high school, though looking back, the pace was brutal: I'd get to school by 7:30 a.m., leave around 3:30, work from 4 to close, around midnight, do the closing procedures (lots of cleaning, emptying of trash), and get home around 1:30 or 2:00. I did that most of the week and every weekend. I can see now why I was obese, exhausted, and sick most of the time. I ate the food at McDs most every night for dinner, and on weekends, it made up my daily meals. Saturdays meant biscuits and birthday parties. I'd open at 4:30 a.m., work until 11:00, and do McDonaldland parties until 4 or 5. When I got home, my legs were so tired that I couldn't sleep. Lots of twitching, but that may have been from too many games of Stack the Mac Boxes. Again, as much fun as it sounds. Sundays were buffet day. At that time, McDs offered a breakfast buffet, all you can eat for $3 or something like that. And my store was located off of I-77, so Sundays meant NasCAR traffic. You can guess how busy that was.

Other jobs came along, and I was able to quit the McDs grind. In college I tutored and worked in radio. Sketchy remotes felt almost like a vacation next to making fries all day and dealing with customers like one guy who, no kidding, pulled a gun on me because I gave him his ketchup packs in a disrespectful manner. I worked full time through college, piecing together 40 hours or so a week between 2 or 3 jobs at a time. It never occurred to me that people didn't take 20 hours of classes and work full time. It never occurred to me that it was odd to be so. damned. tired.

Some retail here. Some more radio there. And I moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where I had my first real 9-to-5. I loved it. I could get to the office at a reasonable time. I could leave at a reasonable time. I SLEPT A FULL 8 HOURS FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. It was amazing.

Now there's graduate school, which is a busy job, sure. But it's not hauling boxes of fries to the front of the store or ending up at some Woodchuck Festival in Nowhere, West Virginia, to do a radio remote. There are no grease burns. There are no abusive managers. It's just me and my time and my work. MY work. I think that's the difference.

I wanted this blog to start to parse out the iterations of labor I'm sensing throughout this process. The diss is about work. I'm working on the diss. My work now is different from other kinds of work I've done, but I still can't get away from that notion that 40 hours a week is what it takes to claim that I'm honest-to-God working. I guess what I'm getting at is that I am so, so, so grateful to have only this project to work on. My evenings I spend working out (a different kind of work, I guess) and straightening up and generally being a human being.