vandewal's New Writeups

December 21, 2009 (idea)

2009-12-21T00:23:00Z

There's a house about half a block down College Avenue from 17th Street in Holland: a common two story affair with a driveway and a garage, nondescript in comparison to the surrounding neighborhood. It is still there today, although it seems to have foreclosed and abandoned for a few months now. I lived by myself in the second floor of that house for six months.

It wasn't exactly the most hospitable place I had ever been in. The stairway to get up to the apartment was at least a 60° angle, and required dedication and precision to use. The floors were a little weak and creaky, and tended to tilt a bit with the building. The ceilings were very low, and the doorways were slightly less that six feet tall. I discovered this the first time I was there, knocking my head off of door casings at least three times before I learned my lesson. There was a solid overuse of chintzy wood…

December 12, 2009 (idea)

2009-12-12T00:11:44Z

Ten years ago:

Life working at the mall is universal wherever you are. There aren't a lot of surprises to be had there. There are good customers and annoying customers. There are people happy to find what they were looking for, and people angry and berating whoever is closest. There are boxes coming in, and boxes coming back out again. The pattern is set before one takes a retail job, and continues well after they have left. In that respect, the first two weeks working at Westshore were mundane. To spice things up a bit, my first two weeks there were centered on Black Friday. This sent the sharks into the mall early, and resulted in a line waiting for me to finally throw the gate open and let the feeding frenzy begin. I have been through all of this before, so the sudden increase in volume and distress was not a surprise for me.

But being the new guy trying to throw a little weight at the part-timers was an…

odd job (thing)

2009-12-04T06:35:23Z

An odd job is an informal method of irregular employment, usually manual or menial unskilled work. Odd jobs are often temporary and short term, picked up to supplement income. An odd job differs from temporary employment in that there is usually no contract between parties, and pay is given under the table. Sometimes pay is skipped entirely in favor of a barter. Odd jobs are classified as part of the informal economy.

A simple example of an odd job is paying your neighbor to mow your lawn for $20. This can be extended into mowing the lawn every two weeks, or maybe giving him beer in instead of money. Or perhaps the neighbor's kid is mowing the lawn instead, thus gently circumventing child labor laws in order for the kid to gain some extra money. A classic cliche odd job is washing dishes at a restaurant when you can't pay for your meal.

Odd jobs take place at all levels of an economic structure, but employment is always voluntary between the two parties. Odd jobs…

November 22, 2009 (idea)

2009-11-22T00:14:02Z

Ten years ago:

There is something about working the photo lab at your local convenience store that sends one instantly spiraling downward into despair. Life at the photo counter, with a little apron and twenty-six bins full of people who never came back for their pictures, is not as simple as working the little machine and handing out brightly colored packets. The impatience of the customers, people who always seem to need their photographs immediately, was only one of a variety of concerns. There is still the rest of the store to contend with, and it is unfamiliar and hostile territory.

Out there, in the land of shelves and prescriptions, there were trucks that needed unloading. There were health-threatening chemicals that needed constant lugging and mixing in order to keep the print machine alive. There were also other coworkers who knew how things worked there. They wandered over by the photo stand with…

November 14, 2009 (idea)

2009-11-14T01:31:48Z

Ten years ago:

These conversations are hard to have without making a short note about self-identity, so maybe I should start there. By the time I had washed up at my brother's apartment in Holland, I was in the midst of existential despair. The things that I thought I was had been utterly destroyed by the previous six months, and I was left trying to resolve how those beliefs had been so vulnerable. I was starting from scratch again, and the shaky first steps into rediscovering myself were negotiated and painful.

Growing up in one Dutch-American community and moving into another Dutch-American community seems like it should be an easy transition. But there were two factors that prevented this from happening: I had spent the previous few years rejecting large swaths of my upbringing, and this community tended to highlight and celebrate those parts I had done away with. There was no way I was…

November 4, 2009 (idea)

2009-11-04T03:55:37Z

Ten years ago, things in my life had taken one too many corkscrews and I found myself in a desperately unsustainable situation. The previous six months had been a devastating storm of personal upheaval, and I was not handing those events very well at all. My girlfriend, whom I had been living with for the previous year and a half, dumped me for my ex-girlfriend after a series of increasingly traumatizing events. I was forced to leave Horseheads on short notice, which also forced me to leave the job I had been sustaining myself with for all that time. The kids in Cortland took pity on me, and invited me to live with them while I tried to put all of the pieces back together.

I took the time that summer to develop a somewhat impressive drinking problem in a foolhardy attempt to avoid thinking about things too much. I was unemployable in a town without jobs, which drove me further down…