Encountering this declaration at the Quickly bubble tea shop in Cupertino led to a sudden uplift in spirits.

That’s right! Who care if nobody else notices all the energy and meticulousness and love we put into making the fresh thing that matters to us, as long as we care and can derive a direct form of satisfaction from that labor.

It made me guzzle my milk tea and chew my boba with honest and renewed vigor.

Ever since moving back to California some three months back, it’s been rather difficult to get back up to speed with the Marxist-sounding pride or online journal jotting with so many long bouts of pondering and heart wrestling to mold post-Japan life into shape getting in the way. The months have involved lots of job searching, odd-job taking, longterm future projecting, deciding what job skills might need brushing up, weighing the risks worth taking… also recognizing that I share this process with so many other intelligent and talented people who’d also been let go from their previous occupations. Then also I had to sing and dance in front of the family about what their precise demands were regarding my presence in their lives. Though my mother would have me on the “stay” side, it seems the results of that would be more constrictive to my adult sensibilities than could be justified for economic purposes.

So are you really the one, California? You with your troubles and financial baggage and huge question mark to offer me about where we’re headed. I like your warmth and familiar feeling, but I still find myself fantasizing about so many place I’ve yet to discover and the unimagined possibilities that might lay outside of what most folks in-state can conceive. If security is merely an illusion, if stability can’t be guaranteed for anyone especially at a time like now, then what good is it to just sit and wait and let your fresh fries grow cold?

Words to Chew On

Been reading a couple of good, philosophic finds at the library… ah yes, English books for free again!… starting with the first one found by accident.

Reporting the Universe by E. L. Doctorow– I hadn’t read his fiction before this book, but these essays are absorbing and digestible as they let you consider what it means to be a writer. For Doctorow, as he describes in one essay, the writer is a generalist by nature and by trade, but being general grants the fluidity to wander through all sorts of different disciplines and is part of having the ability to imagine and report the unseen or unknowable. (Jacks of all trades rejoice! And get to writing…)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford–This one goes in the direction of specialized trade labor, but also giving mad props to vocations that involve your hands and problem-solving skills to repair or create a tangible finished product. Certain types of smart folks might just find greater intellectual satisfaction in “blue-collar” work, an idea I find myself agreeing with more and more over time. Crawford made fresh. Who care? He do.