20140930.0712

Payday has happened again, and thus bill-paying has happened again. I do seem to have a bit more left over this time than usual, though, which is a welcome surprise. Perhaps this time I will be lucky enough not to see it all flutter away from me, as so often happens. But, given some of the circumstances in which I find myself, I doubt I will. Something always seems to come up. Already, I am getting messages about renewing some of the memberships I hold--and since I benefit from them, I am inclined to do so. But they cost money...

That last thing, that money...it is a source of sorrow, of course. I and many others spend our time in trying to acquire it so that we can spend it to support our ability to try to acquire it, as has been pointed out and as remains something of a ridiculous cycle. But it does require doing; there is not a place that is not owned, that the presence of a person will go unremarked and unchallenged. Going "off the grid" as so many seek to do requires carving out a space from the omnipresent grid--and that can only be done through recourse to the resources controlled by the grid.

More, I and some others are caught because we need the resources of the grid to do the work that we seek to do. It accounts for part of the willingness of people to prostitute themselves adjunct for as long as they do; even an adjunct has (some) access to a college's resources, and that access enables the work that scholars do in a number of fields. I have yet to find recent journal articles or scholarly texts on the broader internet (and they do not seem the kinds of things to which pirates are like to attend), and those who work in the "harder" fields need access to equipment that far exceeds the ability of most every scholar I have ever known to purchase and operate. We are bound for our very identities as generators of knowledge to the systems that oppress us, and we can only extricate ourselves through amputation. How many will make the coyote's choice, then, and gnaw off a leg to escape the trap? And for those who might, what kind of life has the coyote afterward?

I do what I can against the circumstance. I work diligently, as I have been taught to do, and if the work I do seems not so much to be work...would I be making more to struggle in the sweltering sunlight? Does it seem that I would be happier doing otherwise than I do? Does it seem I would be less complicit in the structures that maintain the status quo? If I would not, why would I change what I do? For I do not see that so many others who stand near me have advancement, unless they have connections that I am too late to develop...I have not as much as I should like, perhaps, but I am not eager to give it up on a chance I see as unlikely to come.