SkillZ





Have I got any?   Does it matter?  

I'm going to add a photo of my new flip-top mittens later today.  I bought them from a Latin American couple who are street vendors on the Strip District.  We'd already bought a few pairs for other people, some ceramic turtles, and I'm edging up to the nice sweaters, but they do look itchy and honestly, who has the money?   Anyway, my pair does not have the flip top thumb because I do not want to be free to text and freeze my fingers.   The inside of the entire mitten, including my thumb, has a nice fleece lining.  These are warm warm warm.  I wish I had the skills to make them, but I'm so glad to pay someone else who does.   Lately, most of my positive contributions to society have been food related (good felafel yesterday...).  

I am working on my spring course on the sociology of food and labor. (the course info is in the online catalogue) I am, of course, obsessive about covering everything.  I now know way too much about the history of agriculture, although I'm not sure I could explain it out loud at this point (the Brenner Thesis? Help me out!).   Ironically, I have found tons of interesting work on waiting tables and the invention of housework.   The whole thing is about skill. What counts? Who gets credit for what kind of work?  

I'm also focused on skills because being out of regular employment for so long is wearing on me. What do I have to offer?   I hear Leah's voice all the time, reminding me that there's dignity in any paycheck, whether it's from writing about health issues for truck drivers, blogging about  Chinese medicine for pets, ranting about the stupidity of market research in a lousy economy, or publishing a book.  Still, today I'm in one of those moods where I'd like to pull Marx and Engels out of their graves and do a full overhaul of the whole system -- I hate Maureen Dowd, but I must have been desperate for good reading material this morning as I read her column about journalists in India reporting on news in Pasedena and getting paid so little -- what does it do to the creative act if writing is a paid by the word endeavor?   The skill it took to make my mittens, to make the felafel, to write these words -- they're all necessary AND aesthetic at the same time and in different ways.  I just wonder how much beauty we can continue to squeeze out of people under the guise of wages.  



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