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.

New Erochikan Zine Available! Plus Thoughts on Satire and Putting Out Your Own Work

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Combatting Life’s Challenges Through Learned Helplnessness: A User’s Guide is the third zine I’ve put together for the Erochikan collection, and it’s now available in my webstore.  This 18 page guide shows readers the many advantages to giving up on your aspirations and finding complacency with your current, mediocre life.  It’s illustrated with a selection of superficially appealing stock photos to help you visualize the surface-level happiness that awaits you!

For those of you not in the know, the Erochikan Zine project is something I started a few years ago for the now on-hiatus Art Swaps.  I had fun making them and people really liked them, so when I opened my webstore I printed some more copies and started selling them along with my Eikaiwa Bums chapbook, where they got even more positive responses.  (BTW, thanks to everyone who bought copies, either online, or at my reading back in August—you’re all awesome.)

The name Erochikan comes from the ero in erotic and the Japanese word chikan, a pervert who gropes women on crowded subways.  The fictitious company Continue reading »

An Honest Post About Mental Health and the Academic Life

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Last week a woman I went to graduate school with killed herself.  After graduation she’d gotten a tenure-track job as an assistant professor at a large university, and it was there that she threw herself off one of the buildings on campus.  In a majorly bad move, the university where she worked neglected to cancel classes the next day, and students had to attend class in the building she’d jumped from.  Not cool, guys, not cool.

My former classmate and I hadn’t spoken in nearly four years, though there was a time when we were very close and confided in each other about a lot of things.  We talked about the difficulties that we were going through as grad students, our fears for the future, our frustrations with how the system was run, and the difficulties we faced teaching first-year composition to undergrads in Nebraska.  She was one of a small handful of people I could be open with about my insecurities, and she in turn was open with me.

Our falling out wasn’t a dramatic one, but it was a falling out nonetheless.  After I graduated and stayed in the city to work an editing/greenhouse assistant job in the university’s agronomy department, my skepticism Continue reading »

Good Work Will Find Its Way: An Interview with Author Jonathan Face

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Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction.  We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there.  We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life. Continue reading »

Whiteboard Visual Organizers Are Awesome: Part 2

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Last week I wrote about my new whiteboard organizational system and how it’s helped me divide my goals, projects, and daily life habits into different categories so I can keep track of what I’m working on.  In addition, by giving each category a rating from 1 to 10, I can easily see how well I’m doing in each category, and what needs improving.

The categories I made are going to look different than the categories you might be thinking about for your own goals and projects.  Several of mine are Japan-specific, and a few are specific to my goals as a writer.  I’m listing them here so you can get an idea of what I’m trying to improve in my own life, but also so you might get some ideas for how to sort your own future goals.  In no particular order: Continue reading »

Whiteboard Visual Organizers Are Awesome: Part 1

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Organizing your shit is hard.  I don’t mean your physical shit like papers or clothes or books, which I tend to do a pretty good job keeping track of—I’m talking about organizing your ideas.

Organizing my ideas is hard because there’s a lot of things I’m trying to keep track of on any given day, week, month, or year, ranging from big-picture shit like how in God’s name I’m going to get my writing out into the world to little things like remembering to get a haircut.  If ideas were physical objects I could see, line up, and sort using a predetermined system, I’d have an easier time dealing with them, but because ideas are non-visual and frustratingly ephemeral, I’m prone to forgetting them or not knowing how to bring them to fruition (lame…).

Writing my goals and tasks down on paper so I can visualize them has been a HUGE help to me over the years—I started keeping schedule books back in 2011 and never looked back.  More recently, though, I realized that I was still having trouble keeping track of the dozens, if not HUNDREDS of things I want to do, Continue reading »

Recap: I Gave a Book Talk and It Went Super Well!

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I just flew back to Japan, and boy are my arms tired *drum fill*

For those of you just joining me, last Sunday I gave a presentation and reading at MainStreet BookEnds, the independent bookstore in my hometown of Warner, New Hampshire, about what it’s like to live and work in Japan.  The owner had agreed to stock my Japan chapbook, Eikaiwa Bums, back in March, and offered to let me do a reading when I was back in the States.  I’d planned to come back for a three-week August vacation anyway, so doing a reading while I was back seemed like a great idea.

In the interest of showing you how the sausage was made, here’s a rundown of the entire event from start to finish: Continue reading »

Sometimes I Have Adventures in Japan – Series 7

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Toyama’s prefectural animal is the kamoshika, a subspecies of an Asian animal called a serow in English (though no one here calls it that). Its appearance is similar to a goat or antelope, and it’s actually the most primitive member of the same family, with fossils dating back 35 million years.  Sadly, this is only a stuffed replica from the Buried Forest Museum in Uozu, though I saw a real one from far away during my second trip to Kurobe Gorge.  Though endangered at one point in the 1950s, the kamoshika has since recovered and can often be seen in the mountains throughout Japan.

Also, if you’re just joining in and want to see more Japan pics, check out the rest of my Adventures in Japan series, or follow me on Instagram. Continue reading »

New Hampshire Folks: Come Hear Me Talk About Life in Japan!

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Hey all,

No post this week since I’m back in New Hampshire enjoying some much-needed time off and doing a whole bunch of things I haven’t been able to do for the past 12 or so months.  In no particular order, here’s a quick list:

Continue reading »

Can You Trust Your Coworkers With Your Creative Goals?

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Last week I wrote about how, during a night out with my Japanese coworkers while mildly under the influence, I revealed to one of my superiors that I wanted to be a novelist.  In addition to helping me reflect on my personal goals, the episode got me thinking about the question in the title: when is it OK to talk with your coworkers about your creative goals?

I’ve written at length about how and why I’ve kept my creative goals a secret at my different Day Jobs, but there have also been times when I’ve felt comfortable telling coworkers, and even bosses, that my real goal was to be a writer.  This was usually because I’d developed comfortable relationships with them, so revealing more of who I really was felt natural, and helped strengthen those relationships significantly.

There’s a few things to consider when debating whether to tell your coworkers about your creative goals, so here’s a quick list: Continue reading »

A Kind of Short Post About Why I Want to Write Novels

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Two weeks ago I was at a work party with a lot of my Japanese coworkers and some of the higher-ups.  As with most Japanese work parties, this one involved a fair amount of drinking, which meant that everyone felt more relaxed, which in turn meant they could have more open and honest conversations.

One of these conversations was with an older coworker who’s not quite my boss, exactly, but is definitely my superior.  He asked me about my goals and general life purpose, and as one thing led to another I ended up telling him about my novel writing and showing him this photo of Eikaiwa Bums for sale in an actual bookstore, which interested and excited him in a way that felt genuine.

I wouldn’t have told him these things if I didn’t trust him (at least to some extent), and while he clearly responded positively to my quest, he also seemed confused Continue reading »

I Used to Have This Weird Afterschool Addiction to Computer Minesweeper and In Some Ways I’m Still Dealing With It

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I haven’t played Minesweeper (or any preinstalled Windows game) in at least five years, and probably longer than that.  Back in the days of Windows 3.1 though, Minesweeper was definitely the shit.

This would have been back in the mid- to late-‘90s when I was in middle school and my computer use was restricted to the family desktop we kept in the computer room (which is itself a laughable concept now) and that I had to fight my younger brothers for on a regular basis.  This was in the days of dial-up internet when doing anything online required real planning and thought, so most of my computer use back then consisted of games and word processing.

…except that we didn’t have that many games because our outdated, clunky PC had trouble running them.  So I found myself playing Continue reading »

Summer Progress Report – How Am I Doing?

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It’s been…a busy few weeks, which, as I talked about last month, was entirely my own fault for taking on too much.

I’m realizing that more than anything else, my tendency to say “Yes” to things (sometimes with an exclamation point attached) is really having an adverse effect on my productivity, because not only does having more things to do quantitatively reduce my amount of free time, it also pulls me in multiple directions, giving me more things to juggle and making me exponentially more stressed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make this problem better, and though the solution definitely involves taking on less things, making this happen Continue reading »