Today’s Random Prompt: What is a top priority for you right now?
I hate to be crass and materialistic about it, but my actual top priority right now is making enough money to pay the bills and help my kids out when they need it on the road to financial independence. The job always takes priority in terms of time, because if the work doesn’t get done, I don’t get paid, and the whole thing collapses from the top down.
This is America, and it sucks. It doesn’t have to be this way, but the collective priority since 1980 seems to be that the wealthiest among us get to make the rules, so the rest of us are stuck doing literally anything else other than the thing we want to do the most.
Don’t get me wrong—I love teaching, and I’m grateful to have a job that I enjoy doing and can enjoy doing for years to come. I don’t take that for granted because I’ve had some really shitty, soul-sucking jobs in years past.
But here’s the thing: I work way more than I should. I have a full-time job in which I teach 24 credit hours in a full semester when the base credit load is 15. I have never been able to pay the household bills on my base salary, so I teach extra classes. So does almost everyone else at my college. It’s the financial reality we live with.
I also teach adjunct (part-time) for another college, which fills in the gaps, and I’m a freelance writer/reporter for our local newspaper, which I use for vacation money, but it’s available for bills in a financial emergency.
I’d love to make time with my family, time spent pursuing spirituality, time spent writing, running, gardening, playing the drums, acting, singing, cooking, home improvements, and a host of other things I’d rather be doing than grading essays and discussions as my top priorities, but a priority is something that dominates your time, energy, and concentration, and while all those other things are orders of magnitude more important to me that working and earning money, they are the things I have to cram into the cracks of my working schedule.
One of the things that pisses me off more than anything is when people say all you have to do is work hard, and you can get ahead and succeed. That’s bullshit, and every working person in this country knows it. We work as hard as we do to stay afloat, and we hope we might get a few good years at the end—the cusp of our seventies for my generation—to sit back and relax.
I want a life where hard work is no longer required to be my priority. If hard work led to that result, most of us would already be there.
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