The Day Job Blog

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Are you hard at work on projects that bring you tremendous fulfillment but don’t exactly pay in folding money? Do you face the ever-harrowing struggle of balancing creative work with life’s other responsibilities? Is the job where you spend a substantial portion of your time not what really drives you, even though you do it anyway?

Then you’ve come to the right place. We all gotta keep the bills paid.

Come See Me and a Bunch of Other Cool Authors Read Online!

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Quick plug for anyone interested: On Thursday, March 4th from 6:00pm to 7:00pm EST I’ll be reading a five-minute excerpt from MFA Thesis Novel online via Zoom as part of a reading with seven other authors from Vine Leaves Press!

The reading is one I’m co-organizing with fellow writer Gina Troisi for the online SMOL Small Press book festival.   Our theme is Commercial Meets Experimental (which we took from the Vine Leaves Press mission statement), which I liked because both of these labels get a bad rap even though they can both do awesome things. I’m not sure which section from MFA Thesis Novel I’ll be reading yet, but I imagine it’ll be one with lots of jokes.

The whole thing is free and open to the first 100 people.  Mark your calendars, and save the Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/y6zqdrcu Continue reading »

I Got Offered a Moneymaking Gig I Wasn’t Comfortable With

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I have a category on this blog titled Doing the Right Thing in a not-so-subtle homage to the similarly named Spike Lee film. In it I tag posts that have to do with making good moral decisions in your creative and Day Job work.  Recently I had to make one of those decisions.

Quick flashback: Throughout my twenties, I was never in a good place with money.  I had enormous student loans, little savings, and most of the jobs I had either didn’t quite pay enough to let me live on my own, or left me scrambling to make ends meet every month.  I used to take on a LOT of side gigs to bring in extra cash: selling used books on Amazon, Craiglist gigs helping people move, weekends handing out cheap prizes at the racetrack, and other random stuff.  Even when I found full-time work as an elementary school secretary I still kept my old weekend gig feeding horses on a farm until the work ran out Continue reading »

Tools of the Creative Trade: Japanese Campus Notebooks are Awesome

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I’ve written before about my favorite tool of the writing trade, the blue Bic pen that’s been discontinued and that I bought a lifetime supply of on eBay.  Another of my staples is the hardbacked At-a-Glance schedule books I’ve been using since the mid-2010s, but there’s one more essential I discovered after coming to Japan and I’m no longer sure I can live without.

I love plain, simple Japanese Campus notebooks. Continue reading »

I’m Taking Time Off From My Day Job and Using That Time Productively (Oh Yeah!)

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As some of you may have heard, back in the fall I was planning a Christmas trip back to New Hampshire to visit family and friends…which I ended up calling off when COVID cases and restrictions ramped up.  This sucked pretty hard, and while I don’t regret calling off the trip, it’s unfortunate that circumstances forced me into making that tough decision.

Here’s the good point, though: while planning the trip, I got approved for a four-week vacation from my Day Job.  And when I called off the US trip I decided I’d still use the time off.

Quick bit of backstory: My job as an ALT on the JET Program comes with, among other perks, 20 paid days off per year that are pretty flexible, especially if I schedule them in advance.  Last year because of COVID I barely used any, so when my new JET contract started in August I found myself with a mouth-watering 29 days to use or lose as I see fit.

And I have no intention of losing them. Continue reading »

I Took a Stress Test at Work and Here’s What I Learned

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I’ve been taking it slow on the blogging front lately while I reorganize some of my priorities in my writing, my Day Job, and everywhere else.  One factor that ties all those things together, though, is stress.

Back in October, two weeks after I talked to my boss about my stress problems, a single-page multiple-choice English stress survey suddenly appeared on the desks of all the foreign teachers in my city with notes asking us to fill them out.  Now, even though the city had asked every ALT to fill out the survey, the timing seemed like quite a coincidence ;-)

I got my results back a few weeks ago (also in English!) and they were…about what I expected. However, they also reinforced that I’ve been on the right track about the challenges I’m facing right now, including where those challenges are coming from and how to fix them. Continue reading »

Fall TRAM Now Online, Plus Thoughts on Editing a Cool Indie Zine

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The TRAM (a.k.a. that zine I work on in Toyama) has a new issue out, one that I’m particularly proud of because of the quality of the material.  This was also our first new issue since our long hiatus earlier this year, and it has a mix of stuff that I’ll sincerely recommend here.

Those outside the Toyama JET community will be most interested in Mind Your Mindset, an article about Growth Mindsets vs. Fixed Mindsets by recent JET alum Rikio Inouye that shows how opening up to personal growth can lead to greater happiness and success.  I’d recommend anyone interested in improving their perspective and taking on new challenges check this one out.

I also put together another edition of my Let’s Talk About Japan Books! column, this one covering two nonfiction books about the JET Program itself.  While Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow isn’t worth getting excited over (despite its popularity, I didn’t like the book all that much), the centerpiece is my review of a book called Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program by David McConnell, a for-serious academic study about the early years of the JET Program. The book leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the problems faced by ALTs and is incredibly relevant to anyone currently working on or considering JET. Continue reading »

I Like Doing Everything: An Interview with Jeff Gill

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Jeff Gill is an animator, editor, and voice actor (plus a whole bunch of other stuff) who’s worked on South Park and Ask the StoryBots, a children’s educational show currently airing on Netflix for which he’s won Emmys in the Writing and Directing categories.  He’s also worked as the Director of eCards for JibJab and has a hilarious Soundcloud page of songs he’s recorded while stuck in Los Angeles traffic.

I talked to Jeff via Skype to discuss his path to animation success, how to network and get jobs, and what it’s like to work in the industry.

 

I. It Was Really Through Sheer Passion for Learning

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So what made you want to become an animator?

Jeff Gill: Becoming an animator was something I wanted to do from a very young age.  As a kid, your vision of what an adult job is involves working at a bank or being a lawyer, or doing something where you’re in a suit.  The first time I saw a job that wasn’t that was a behind-the-scenes of either Ren and Stimpy or Rocko’s Modern Life where they showed a Nickelodeon animator at his desk, which was covered with toys, and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  I just remember looking at this guy and thinking “Man, that’s what I want to be when I grow up.” Continue reading »

Do You Shut Down or Check Out When You’re at Work?

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In my last few posts I’ve talked about my recent stresses and how I’m slowly making things better.  While some of those stresses are related to my daily life and creative work, a few of them have been Day Job-related—though again, I won’t be talking about them here for Day Job-related secrecy reasons.

What I have been doing, though, is talking to some coworkers I trust (both Japanese and Western) about the problem.  Talking to people I work with about work problems has a few benefits, including:

  1. It makes me feel better
  2. It lets my coworkers know about the problem so it’s not a secret anymore
  3. It lets me gain their perspective and hear their advice

As a result of Benefit Number 3, I’ve been hearing different ways that my coworkers deal with their own stresses, one of which I’d like to write about this week… Continue reading »

How I Changed My Routine to Reduce Stress – A Rundown

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks, but things have been getting better.  (And on that note, MANY thanks to everyone who reached out to see how I was doing—it means a lot.)

As I wrote about last week, I’ve been having some issues with stress and general pessimism both in- and outside of my Day Job, and earlier this month I sat down and talked with my boss about it.  This was a pretty big step for me—and not just because of the language barrier.  Rather, it was me admitting to myself that I needed to slow down, step back, and reprioritize some aspects of my life.

This understandably involved a few changes—some big, some small, some I implemented right away, and some that were more gradual.  In order from most to least significant, here’s a rundown of what changes I’ve made, why I made them, and what effects they’ve been having…. Continue reading »

I Was Having Problems at My Day Job and Talked to My Boss About It

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Yep, this is kind of a serious post.

Things in general haven’t been going well for a while, and I’ve kind of been in denial about it.  My writing’s still stalled, I’ve been way too insanely busy, and I’ve been pushing myself too hard during the week and then crashing hard on weekends.  None of these has been doing me any good.

Apart from all this I’ve been experiencing some pretty bad lows, many of which can be indirectly traced back to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Even though Japan’s been grappling with the virus far better than the States, over here I still have to deal with cancelled plans, limited activities, and lot of other negative changes.

Here’s a big negative change: I had to cancel my trip back to the States in August, when I was planning on meeting friends, seeing family, and attending my brother’s wedding.  That sucked pretty hard. Continue reading »

Eliminate Distractions by Unplugging Your Internet

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I wrote this article a few (well, many) months ago as a guest post for another blog…that didn’t end up getting picked up :-(  Rather than relegate it to a folder on my hard drive I decided to share it here.  While the app I mention in the opening paragraphs is old news, whether you eliminate distractions through internal or external means is an important question to consider when taking back more of your time.

A while back I read about an app designed to improve focus for writers.  Cleverly named The Most Dangerous Writing App, it serves as your word processing program and monitors how long since you’ve actually pressed the keys to write. After five minutes of inactivity the app will assume you’ve gotten distracted and your writing will start to fade; go for much longer and it disappears completely. How’s that for incentive to stay focused? Continue reading »

Is Too Much Freedom With Your Time a Bad Thing?

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Short answer: Sometimes.  Long answer:

Recently someone asked me how I felt about the idea of having total freedom to write or do whatever creative work I wanted—and whether that much freedom would be overwhelming.

The question took me back to the last time I had a lot of freedom with my time, after I left my job where my boss was crooked and before I started my current job in Japan.  I was editing the fourth or so draft of MFA Thesis Novel during the day, editing the first New Hampshire Writers Project Anthology in the afternoons, and in between that I was brushing up my Japanese, doing editing side gigs, and trying to read a lot of books.  I also had to find time to move all my stuff into storage and vacate my apartment.

In short, I was pretty busy. Continue reading »