RE: An Honest Living II

I reread Steve Salaita’s blog on an honest living again this week. On second read, I’m not so sure I like his excessively verbose writing style; at best it makes his arguments less accessible and at worst it’s smug, although I do appreciate that perhaps that is a deliberate juxtaposition on his part as he aims to prove himself as the most eloquent bus driver in all the land. Really any kind of further comment on his writing deserves a lot more time and effort than I have to offer it today; a lot of what he says is nuanced and worth carefully analysing with a critical lens.

With that being said… I am once again hankering for an honest living, rather than one which despite my high professional standards, still frequently feels like I have acquired a spot under the money tree that I don’t deserve at all. I think there’s a lot of naïveté and potentially classism in romanticising blue collar jobs, and the grass is always greener, and I know this (and that’s why my fantasies of a radical career change remain only daydreams) but I am indulging myself with those thoughts a lot at the moment.

I don’t really know what I’m getting at. I guess being a cog in the capitalist machine is grinding me down, and I want to escape it. But that seems completely impossible, so instead I have to content myself with imagining what it’d be like to be a farmer or a fisherman or a lumberjack instead.