Life after grad school also had its share of impermanence as I continued at the urban community college and had a brief stint teaching English at the FIDM. I then tried jumping ship by getting a more “regular” job at one hot mess of a labor union’s headquarters. That lasted for six months, followed by six months of unemployment. Then, during that time, I courted English department chairs and a director of a foreign language school, and I found myself on the freeway flier circuit in the fall of ’07. After a year and a half, I didn’t return to any classes with one district, continued to work for another until I got laid off.

After having been through the constant semester by semester patterns of working, with new students and new curricula every time, you’d think that I’d be used to impermanence. Even with the jobs that didn’t work out, you’d think I’d be equipped for it. With jobs of a temporary nature, such as the language school, it’s not every day that I get that “Mrs Peel, you’re needed” type of phone call. Even with being back at the urban college and working another education-related gig, things aren’t so permanent. After the end of the semester, I always have to figure out my employment situation for summer and beyond.

Despite my Asian roots (OK, only half my roots), I’ve longed for an American life and enjoying what it had to offer. When I was a young Army brat, we moved around quite a bit and we even got to live in Okinawa for a few years. I haven’t been back since. My mother is disappointed with me that I never took the opportunity to teach in Japan when I was younger and she still pushes me to do so. Perhaps it’s not too late. The American life I hoped for was a pipe-dream that sustained me through a McJob, college, and grad school, and even my pursuit of making a living after graduate school. Perhaps getting the MLIS is an extension of that, but I also want to gain skills where I can do something other than teaching. I could take that abroad with me, and every day, Japan or China doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

Whether one works as a contingent member of the workforce, as a freelancer, or both, no job situation is ever fully in place. One may have those long-term relationships with employers and/or clients, but they can be easily terminated by either party. Constantly having to find work and sources of income is a reality that something that most people don’t really have to face until times like now, when companies look out for their bottom line and trim jobs. This is definitely an upsetting lesson in impermanence as those who may have worked at their jobs for many years may come head on with financial difficulties and even have to deal with fundamental changes to their identities.

While there is a cliché in our culture that we are not our work, it’s not true. Many people do draw a sense of who they are from their jobs or professions. Seeking to define oneself professionally is a driving force in seeking and preparing for a career. These people would not be in their lines of work if it didn’t interest them and the pride they take in their jobs helps show their identification with them. With career change comes a shift in identity. People shift careers in good times, but that is often the result of much thought and soul-searching. In times like this “recession,” many people who lose their jobs are no longer who they thought they were. Being unemployed is depressing, even with the benefits, because it can deal a serious blow to one’s self-worth. Being defined as unemployed can feel worse than death. Even if one comes out of joblessness or even manages to escape it, the jobs may not be in line with what they prepared for or are interested in. For some people, the work they procure may be “beneath them.” For example, in Tokyo Sonata, a laid-off Japanese executive first pretends to go to work and then hides his job from his family when he finally gets one. He has gone from managing an office and not really knowing what he does to cleaning floors and toilets at a shopping mall. It is certainly not an easy period of adjustment.

Even then, joblessness and bad jobs do not last forever. Like the desirable careers, these two things are subject to change. It can spell doom for some, as losing one’s unemployment benefits or having them changed, or losing the awful gig that served as a lifeboat in the current economic storm. Or, these things don’t last because whoever needed them was able to move onto something else. Given that, I greatly hope the impermanence of this crisis will be a good thing.

The jobs were one lesson in impermanence since they were all short-term. Unlike the grocery store, where I stayed on for one reason or another even though I hated it, I didn’t have to stick around if I didn’t want to. I could always move on to something else, provided I found something. At the same time, I found my relationships with people weren’t always permanent, whether I had control or not.

With one good friend I had in the late 1990′s, I found him increasingly difficult to deal with and I ended the friendship. We have since reconciled and are good friends again, but I couldn’t handle his contrariness and what I perceived as his negativity at the time.

I found that even professional relationships weren’t always built on rock. With the professor I call Joseph K, this was definitely the case. This man who’s night course I took to satisfy an American Lit requirement quickly became my mentor, advocate, and friend. However, he ejected me as quickly as he took me in. At the same time, my loyalty did erode towards the end, and nothing could fix it. For a while, our relationship was a shaky one, but all it took was one act of betrayal. Expanding my professional ties resulted in one being severed.

In contrast to those two examples, I have been fortunate to have some longtime friends. My longtime friend Avril is one such person. We’ve known each other for almost 20 years, meeting at FIDM and then loosely staying in contact for a few years on and off until the late 1990′s. We even managed to find time to hang out and transportation was bitch for both of us.* A few years ago, Avril discovered she had British citizenship connected with her mother and having been born in Scotland, so she got her passport, flew off to Europe, and never looked back. She’s been back to visit here in San Diego a few times, but she’s found her home in Europe. Obviously, we can’t hang out as much, but I count her among my closest friends.

Friends and acquaintances have come and gone from my life, but now we’re one big happy digital family on Facebook. Even that doesn’t provide any measure of permanence as some unfriend for a variety of reasons, especially as one can unfriend me or I unfriend them. Co-workers may drift back into my online life, but do I really connect with them? Or did those relationships proved to be as impermanent as the jobs I knew them from?

If there’s anything to learn from this recession is that nothing is permanent. Way before our economy tanked to where it is now, corporations adopted the layoff as a quick road to profits during the Clinton years. Downsizing, reducing redundancies, etc – it became the popular way for companies to slim down their expensive American workforce and seek cheaper labor abroad. Even when times appeared to be prosperous, such as the late Clinton years or the middle Bush years, the stable job was not as easily obtainable as it once was.

After WWII and up to the early 1990′s, a whole generation raised their children under a paternalistic employment system. Susan Faludi in Stiffed observes a whole generation of men who found that the defense contractors they spent their lives working for had no loyalty to them, especially after they were restructured at the “end” of the Cold War. G.J. Meyers‘s Executive Blues chronicles his desperate job search in the late 1980′s after getting the axe from his executive position with McDonnell-Douglas. Both authors observe that this paternalistic employment system had an air of permanence, but Faludi’s interviewees and Meyers have first-hand knowledge that their jobs weren’t so permanent and that these companies had no loyalty towards them.

For Gen X’ers like me, the instability of jobs was a reality in our young adult lives. Douglas Coupland, best known for Generation X, coined the term McJobs for the not-so-sexy jobs young people coming of age in the late 1980′s would take on to survive, albeit with no personal investment. I wound up spending over a decade in a McJob, working in a grocery store. I hated it, felt grimy every night I worked there, and felt the need to wash the dirt and the bad customers off me when I got home from work. I told myself it wasn’t my career, that my real job as a teacher or something else would be within reach once I got my diploma. That said, the grocery store kept me employed during the fiscal crises of the late 1980′s/early 1990′s and it gave me a means to pay for my college education. Being averse to risk, I didn’t quit my job in the supermarket until the end of 2000.

I wouldn’t learn about impermanence until a little before I left the job. In my late 20′s, being disillusioned with the Christian fundamentalism of my late teens/early twenties, I read up on Buddhism and even came across this concept. Yes, I knew nothing lasts forever and I understood the doctrine. I understood I was feeling dukkha, a sense of dissatisfaction, but wasn’t every one of my co-workers. Then some unknown grocery chain from the midwest bought up the supermarket chain my store was with and then came changes, all at once and everyday. Of course, many of my co-workers quit, including me. I looked to the future of finishing my degree and getting into graduate school.

And I had no idea of the impermanence to come.

Losing a job during these times is painful, but losing one after a several year probationary period can be quite infuriating. Last week, Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at University of Alabama in Huntsville, shot at her colleagues at a department meeting, her motive largely that her tenure was denied. She was described as eccentric, which isn’t unusual for a professor. Academia is full of misfits. At the behest of her attorney, the assertion is made that she is crazy, therefore not responsible for her actions. Of course, the insane are full of rage and literary aspirations, as it has been revealed that she wrote not just one, but two novels, one of them reflecting her anxiety over tenure denial. Perhaps if she read “Life after Tenure Denial” right on time, the whole massacre might have been prevented. Or, maybe not. Unfortunately, for Bishop, life after tenure denial most likely means behind bars or in the mental hospital.

While “going postal” is never right, the anger in investing so much time to gain job security, in this case tenure, is understandable. Tenure track, unlike the typical probationary period of 90 days, can take a few years for the department to evaluate and decide if they want to retain the professor.

In this age of disposable employees, a New York Times career column (which really should be on Monster) tells us how to make ourselves indispensable to our workplaces. So cheery, optimistic, and guaranteed to get you the axe. Watch your back while following that piece of pop wisdom. You never know who else is trying to keep their job.

If you want to wait out this crisis until it’s over, you might want to consider this mid-1930′s idea.

With the Christmas and New Year Specials giving David Tennant’s 10th Doctor a proper send-off and effectively ending the Russell T Davies’ era of Doctor Who, this trailer helps whet our appetites for the coming season with Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor and Steven Moffat, who wrote some brilliant episodes in the past such as “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Blink” among others, taking the helm as executive producer. The trailer above, recently posted to BBC America‘s Doctor Who site, definitely promises the season to be a good one. The previous trailer gives more of a dramatic sense with actual scenes, whereas this one simply sells it. Best Doctor Who teaser since Christopher Eccleston’s offer of a “trip of a lifetime.”

The New York Times declares after New York Fashion week that “The Big New Idea Is Modesty” – so we’ll finally get a break from all those breastesses? The Bush era, strangely with its de-emphasis on sex and heightened paranoia, was all about conspicuous consumption, marked by dresses that left more than a peek-a-boo in the cleavage department. Perhaps there is something to that idea that skirt lengths hang lower in harder economic times.

Speaking of fashion and politics, Tina Fey talks to Vogue about herself through the lens of her fashion choices. The actor/comedienne/writer, who did a dead-on impersonation of 2008 vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, rocks a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

Now on to another topic. In this recession, one would think there’d be a huge backlash against all things money  and wealth-related. Apparently not, as the Prosperity Gospel is alive, well, and ravenously hungry with enough people desperate enough to go for the shiny bait. In this month’s Harper’s, Benjamin Anastas writes about the megachurches who preach this gospel* with parishioners trying to give to get, exhausting their bank accounts, credit limits, and much more with the hopes that their devotion will gain them their gigantic cash advance against their heavenly fortune. Then I discovered this post on a dead blog, referencing a Nigerian/European preacher who views poverty as an infectious disease. How come the Center for Disease Control doesn’t know this?

Hanna Rosin asks in the Dec 2009 issue of Atlantic Monthly if the Prosperity Gospel cause the Recession.

In these hard times, the insurance companies gouge their existing customers and try to make it law so that all of us become captive customers. Here’s what I must say to the insurance companies:

It’s not about the healthy opting out. The reason you have no customers is a) people simply CANNOT AFFORD to have a health plan, b) when times were good, you guys practically rejected potentially paying customers because you could, c) you have decided to play by marketplace conditions when it was in YOUR favor.

If you want to play by the marketplace, you should be prepared to die by the marketplace. That goes for any corporation or major business that pushes for laissez-faire, deregulation, favorable regulations, or laws that force the public to buy your services.

Our Great State of California wants to tax Amazon.Com and other online companies sales tax for transactions with California residents. They really should have thought of this before, when it would have been in their best interest to do so. Amazon.Com has been around since the late 1990′s. Naive me always assumed that I was paying tax on top of my orders with Amazon.Com. I really need to look at my order history to see what’s going on. Also, I never knew I was supposed to put a check in an envelope and send it to the State Controller.

To end this post on a book note, Virginia Woolf rocks! The woman was “green” before her time! Her  wit and wisdom when it comes to making books was to make them accessible and degradable at the same time. Do we really need to kill a bunch of trees for all those bad novels that belong in the bin? Instead of making them bin waste, they can decompose.Woolf is timeless!

*The article in Harper’s is subscriber-locked, but is in print this March.

A year ago, I read about Cloutier in Robert Frank’s Richistan and forgot about it. Much of the people profiled in that book were new money, especially those that became rich in the late Clinton or Bush years. Apparently, the guilded age Frank mentions is no longer a reality, but Cloutier is still in business because he has a “strong sales organization.” Of course, his customer base, ailing small businesses, is even more desperate than ever and should keep sales going for some time.

According to him, businesses should not blame the recession, saying it “has been an excuse for poor performance.” Businesses need “strong sales organization,” which he’ll happily teach for a fee and the privilege of getting his hands dirty on the job. They, in return, make it possible for him and his wife to attend charity balls and gain social status.

Getting back to why I find this man fascinating is that the interview and his business are about a teaching style. The tough talk and the hard truths, as glib as they can be, center around teachable moments. To teach something, one has to be as direct and succeint like Cloutier. Ramsay has taken this approach with some pop psychology mumbo jumbo and has ruined his clients though airing their dirty laundry on TV. I looked through American Management Service’s list of clients served, and everything listed by industry, not companies. On one hand, Cloutier’s clients are protected by confidentiality, but on the other hand, there isn’t concrete evidence to go on with AMS’s success stories. But money is to be made on some kind of education, especially if the client needs it to survive these uncertain times.