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.

Here’s What I’m Working on RIGHT NOW (Spring Edition)

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Hey all—this week has me caught in the middle of a mad cluster of deadlines, events, and a bunch of other things happening at once (lame…).  April’s also the start of the new school year in Japan, and the start of cherry blossom season, so I’ve been trying to make time for a bit of hanami as well…

With that in mind, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been spending my time on lately.  Some of it, like the TEFL class, have strict deadlines I don’t want to fuck around with, but most everything else is self-motivated as I try to get caught up after losing a lot of time in 2018.

In no particular order, I’ve been Continue reading »

Here’s How I’m Getting More Money Back on My Taxes

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So the American tax deadline’s almost here, and if you haven’t filed your taxes yet, you probably should get on that…

If you’re anything like me you usually file early to get that sweet refund cash, but this year I’m filing late because I’m out of the country and have to do some extra steps I’ll explain later. I’ve been doing my own taxes since the days of using pen and paper when I was in high school (!), though I graduated to electronic filing a few years later.  The mechanics of taxes are interesting to me, and learning the basics when I just had one grocery store job made it a whole lot easier to step up my tax game as my finances got more complicated.

That’s why I was always surprised to meet people who were like “Taxes? Whatever, my parents take care of that!” or who just threw a bunch of numbers into their tax filing software Continue reading »

Do People Cheer For Your Achievements, or Your Actual Art?

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This post is going to split some hairs.

Near the end of my time in grad school I got an academic paper on James Welch’s novel Fools Crow published in a literary journal, which was a first for me and a super big deal.  It also seemed worth celebrating to some extent, so I wrote a quick blurb (“Ian Rogers’s paper, Language as Immersion: The Blackfoot Mode of Experience in James Welch’s Fools Crow, was published in…” etc.) to send to the English department newsletter, then didn’t think much about it.

I remember missing that month’s newsletter amidst a pile of other emails, but I knew it had come out when people started stopping me after class, in the hallway, and even sending me messages to congratulate me on my paper.  It felt pretty good (not going to lie here), but after a while I started realizing that Continue reading »

Which Do You Value: Your Time or Your Money?

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In the original Legend of Zelda on NES, one of the dungeons holds an old man who refuses to let you pass unless you either give him 50 rupees (which can take a while to get) or one of your heart containers.  Fittingly, in the game’s terse narration, his caption reads “LEAVE YOUR LIFE OR MONEY.”

I remember finding this as a kid and thinking pretty hard about it—you could always get more rupees in the game by killing enemies, so paying the money seemed like the better option.  But, if you were short on cash and a really good player, could you potentially save some enemy-farming time by giving up the heart container?

I never seriously gave up the heart, but I always thought about it Continue reading »

Eikaiwa Bums is in a Brick and Mortar Bookstore!!!!

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The pictures don’t lie—that’s my chapbook short story, Eikaiwa Bums, on the shelf with the other authors at MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, New Hampshire.  The shelf price is a mere $3.00, with proceeds supporting both the author and a super-cool independent bookstore that’s been a staple of my hometown for over twenty years.

Here’s the coolest part—on Sunday, August 18th I’ll be at BookEnds giving an in-person reading and talking about what it’s really like to live and work in Japan.  The reading is totally FREE and will also be a good chance to catch up with me while I’m back in the States for summer break.  Watch for more updates closer to August…

It honestly feels pretty incredible to have something I wrote for sale in an actual bookstore and to have earned a place (albeit a very small one) among the writing community in my home state.  More than that, though, Continue reading »

Daily Creative Work Schedule in Japan!

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(This one took a couple of tries to iron out…)

After I got to Japan, I had trouble sorting out the best way to schedule my creative work time—like, a lot of trouble.  I finish work at 4:00 every day and get home soon after that, so it seemed pretty simple to walk in the door, throw down my bag, and get right to work on the novel, right?

Negative.

Looking back, I wasted a lot of time when I first got here, especially in the afternoons between 4:00 and 5:30, when I’d come home, plop down on my bed, and scroll through my phone or listen to a podcast for longer than I intended.  I was also losing a lot of time after dinner to inactivity Continue reading »

Does Your Day Job Have Power Over You?

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A while ago I heard a guest on Kelly Carlin’s podcast talking about power—who has it, and more importantly, how we know who has it.  His point was pretty simple: the people who have power over us are the ones we’re not allowed to criticize.

Think about this for a bit: the people who have power over you are the ones you’re not allowed to criticize.

His counterexample was the government, because in America people criticize the government all the time.  When President Trump, say, talks about grabbing women, or looks the other way when the Saudis assassinate a dissenting journalist, or declares a national emergency because he couldn’t get boarder wall funding from congress, or even looks at the sun during an eclipse, journalists, writers, pundits, and random people on Twitter will all be there to criticize him, with their only consequence being some childish name-calling.  In these cases, people feel safe voicing criticisms knowing that speaking out won’t directly take away their livelihoods or affect their personal lives.  This suggests Continue reading »

Stuff I Do Before Bed to Help Me De-Stress

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Two weeks ago I talked about reducing stress and slowing down, a subject that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I work to, well, feel better about things.  And getting a decent night’s sleep is a big part of that.

Let me rephrase—when I say “getting a decent night’s sleep” I’m talking about more than just the actual body-rejuvenating sleep I try to get eight hours of per night.  I’m talking about an overall end of the night routine that’ll relax me overall, and that includes the part before I actually go to sleep.

So here’s a list of things I do before going to bed—I don’t manage to do all of them every night, but I think of them as general guidelines I like to follow.  (On a side note, I once had a friend who kept an elaborate 3+ hour going-to-bed routine from which she never, ever deviated, to the point where Continue reading »

I’m Querying My New Novel! (Here’s How That Works)

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Quick Note: If you’re a literary agent who’s stumbled across my blog, this might be a good place to start reading ;-)

I’ve had this one in the works for a LONG time—MFA Thesis Novel is my satirical novel inspired by my experiences in grad school at the University of Nebraska.  It’s about a twentysomething writer from the Northeast named Flip (who’s totally not based on me at all, btw) who leaves his mind-numbing office job to start an MFA in creative writing program in an unnamed midwestern state.  The problem, though, is that Flip’s a literature nerd who’s stuck in the past—his heroes are Joseph Heller, John Updike, and Kingsley Amis, and he hasn’t read much of anything from the past twenty years—which means his fellow grad students are more than happy to tear his novel to pieces on the first day of workshop.

While Flip’s main goal is to create great writing, the other grad students…think differently.  Everyone around him is obsessed with getting published, beefing up their CVs, Continue reading »

A Kind of Sappy Post About Why You Should Keep Your Space Clean

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This is my Japanese-style shower.

It’s a separate room from both the sink and the toilet, with stone walls, a stone floor, and a sliding plastic door.  The bathtub is deep enough so you can sit with your knees hugging your chest with the water up to your neck, and it’s surprisingly comfortable.  The shower head detaches and can be held in your hand, fastened up high (my preferred style), or clipped at waist-height so you can wash yourself while sitting down.  Because the walls, door, and window are all watertight you can spray water anywhere you want, and it all runs down that big drain in the lower left-hand corner.

I’m showing you this because 1) It’s a pretty cool way to take a shower, and 2) It’s a bitch to clean. Continue reading »

Productivity, Burnout, and Trying to Do It All

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I’ll start this (short) entry by doing something I don’t normally do: pointing you toward something I didn’t write.

That something is this BuzzFeed News article by Anne Helen Peterson entitled How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and it covers a social phenomenon I’ve talked about elsewhere but haven’t seen explored in this kind of depth.  The gist is that by trying to do it all—and by trying to harness every ounce of our productivity and working efficiency—we’re not only burning ourselves out, we’re overlooking simple errands like registering to vote or taking knives to get sharpened (something I’ve never done, btw.), which in turn is having adverse effects on our sense of fulfillment.

In addition, the article reads like a laundry list of issues that I’ve dealt with myself and/or have had friends deal with, including putting off low-reward errands, maximizing time by cutting meal prep, excessive multitasking, learning to overwork while in grad school (!), Continue reading »

Good Art Breaks Us Out of the Monotony

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A bunch of years ago I read a book of letters and short pieces by the writer Franz Kafka, and one of his reflections struck me hard at the time, in reference to how really great books affect us:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

(bold emphasis mine)

I thought about this axe for the frozen sea idea a lot, so much so that I talked about it on my old blog over a decade ago.  I didn’t go into much detail about it the time, but I feel like it deserves my attention more than ever now. Continue reading »