This week I’m continuing my list of every job I’ve ever worked with my first four years after college. If you missed the high school and undergrad years, check out Part I here. Continue reading
Every Job I’ve Ever Had Part II
Author: Ian
Golgo 13: Supergun, by Takao Saito (1979 & 1997)
Golgo 13 is Japan’s longest-running manga series, chronicling the exploits of super-tough, laconic sniper Duke Togo, alias Golgo 13. The two jobs in this collection involve an Iraqi ballistic superweapon (a story where both Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein feature prominently) and a mafia hit and run, plus a background dossier on Togo himself. If you’re looking for an intro to pulp Japanese action manga, start here—the drawings are dark and the midnight cityscapes majestic, with plenty of guns, planes, action, and sex to capture the feel of an ‘80s action movie in comic form.
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Where I Got It
Christmas 2016, from a friend who knew I loved the Golgo 13 NES games. While every convenience store in Japan sells the Japanese manga books, I never got to the chance to check them out when I lived there since English translations are harder to find, .
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Playthrough video of Golgo 13 – Top Secret Episode on the NES
Every Job I’ve Ever Had, Part I
I blatantly stole the idea for this post from one J. Money did a few years ago, since laying out people’s actual job histories shows how work doesn’t always form some straightforward linear path. We tend to think of careers as a track that goes from College, to a Job, then to a Better Job, and then to Even Better Jobs that steadily pay more Continue reading
Updike, by Adam Begley (2014)
Begley’s biography of writer John Updike exhaustively covers its hero’s rural Pennsylvania childhood, his stint as a twentysomething New Yorker writer, his years in suburban Massachusetts, his elderly descent into isolation, and his many, many novels. Though Updike’s serial adultery plays a key role, Begley keeps the details vague for privacy reasons—unfortunate, since it often feels like there’s more we’re not getting as Begley instead summarizes the autobiographical facets of Updike’s vast oeuvre. The result reads more like literary criticism than biography, but still decently flushes out one of America’s most prolific 20th century writers.
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Where I Got It
Ordered online in Fall 2016.
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If you haven’t already, you should probably read Rabbit, Run instead, because it’s excellent.
Schedule Books and To-Do Lists Are Awesome
Staying focused is important—and hard. My biggest faults in this area are procrastinating, getting distracted during worktime, and taking on too much and getting overwhelmed (especially when I’m supposed to be writing). Case in point: I probably should have started this entry an hour ago.
As I’ve talked about before, structured Day Jobs make it easier to get things done because they provide goals, timelines, Continue reading
The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (1967)
Marshall McLuhan is the guy Woody Allen pulls from offscreen to prove his point to the pretentious academic in Annie Hall. His work in the 1960s tackles the power of media and its ability to deliver information in different forms; this book is a short, coherent explanation of how media affects us, assembled by graphic designer Quentin Fiore with black and white photos to enhance McLuhan’s points. There are comics, two-page spreads, ‘60s pop culture, and a page printed in backwards text to keep things interesting, pushing the limits of what the printed form can do. Very cool.
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Where I Got It
Found in a free box outside my apartment building with a bunch of other textbooks and books on programming, sometime in the fall of 2015. This was the only one that looked interesting.
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Why I Went to Grad School (and didn’t stay for more)
I get asked this question a lot.
When I applied to grad school, I was at a crossroads (wanted to become a writer but wasn’t sure how) and had a Day Job I needed to get out of since I wasn’t yet at the point where I thought of it as a Day Job. Years before, someone had suggested grad school as the main path Continue reading
Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, by David Lodge (1975)
Two English professors, one American and one British, join their universities’ annual exchange program to escape disconcerting ruts in their respective countries. Lodge’s west-coast America is torn amidst the uproar of 1960s counterculture, while his small-town industrial Britain is chilly, polite, and exaggeratedly tame. By showing each world from the other country’s POV, Lodge creates a witty and poignant commentary on academic and social life on two continents. The novel itself also takes different forms in each of its six sections (letters, a screenplay, etc.), a cool twist on the relationship between fiction and reality.
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Where I Got It
Bought from a used bookstore in Columbus, Ohio this past summer. I’d been meaning to read this book for literally ten years, after a former coworker recommended David Lodge to me in 2006. WHY OH WHY DIDN’T I LISTEN TO HIM SOONER? I enjoyed this book too damned much to have gone without it for so long.
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Rules for “Humiliation,” a reading game Lodge invented for the novel
Set Your Own Goals, Not Somebody Else’s
When you’re a kid, life’s easy because you don’t have to make any scary, life-changing decisions. Mom and Dad buy the food, decide where you’re going to live, take care of Christmas, and send you off to school. All of your goals are clearly laid out, and until age 18, they pretty much look like this: Continue reading
Rose of No Man’s Land by Michelle Tea (2005)
Fourteen-year-old Trisha has a hypochondriac mother, a sister who wants to be on The Real World, and not much else. Her new job at a teenybopper mall store leads her to Rose, a rebel who smokes and otherwise does what she wants, and together they set out on a late-night adventure through the sprawl of northeastern Massachusetts. Tea’s writing hums with crazy energy, sharp observations, and madcap scenes that leave you racing. This is a book about when everything was exciting and meant something, a book for those of us who play by our own rules. Read it.
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Where I Got It:
Christmas gift from a friend who was like, “I’ve got a book for you.”
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What I Learned From Working 70-Hour Weeks for Two Months
Writing about overtime hours last week reminded me of last spring when I took on the challenge of working 70 hours a week, every week, between three different jobs. It was pretty intense.
How did this happen, you ask? Since there wasn’t much to do at my regular Day Job working at the research greenhouse, I sought out a work from home opportunity (a.k.a. my Continue reading
1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (2011)
A man and a woman in different parts of Tokyo find themselves drawn into the bizarre world of 1Q84 (kyū is Japanese for nine) where everything looks the same but a sinister religious cult is wreaking havoc. I enjoyed parts of this book immensely, but others dragged on through its 1,100 pages, and a lot of the slower portions could have been trimmed. The novel explores the idea of parallel worlds in classic Murakami fashion, and though the ending makes the whole read worth it, I recommend starting with something lighter for your first Murakami experience.
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Where I Got It
Christmas, 2015.
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Murakami Interview about 1Q84, his early life, and running every day