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.

There Are Other Weird People Out There Like Me: An Interview with Krissy Diggs

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Krissy Diggs posts illustrations on Instagram, where she has a lot of followers but doesn’t make a big deal about it.  She first achieved internet fame in the late 2000s making videos as That Chick With the Goggles for what would become Channel Awesome, and briefly produced her own Youtube show, Challenge Accepted!!!  Her art has been featured in exhibitions, on concert posters, a novel cover, and a Japanese beer label, and she’s worked as a waitress, an art director for a major cellular company, and an English teacher in Kanazawa, Japan.

Krissy and I first collaborated in 2019 when she shared some of her drawings with the TRAM zine in nearby Toyama.  When pandemic restrictions eased up I took the train out to meet her in Kanazawa, where we enjoyed a lunch of hanton rice and she shared her insights on the Day Job life.

 

I. I Just Thought of It as Fun

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So when did you join Instagram?

Krissy Diggs: I was an early adapter, so I joined when it was a new thing.  When I first started I never took it seriously as a platform to share art or anything.  I was kind of using it the way everyone else was—sharing pictures of food, etc.  I tend to have my name on all of my handles because I get in early enough.  I have that for Twitter, Instagram, and I think TikTok too.  I don’t know how to do TikTok, but I’m trying to learn. Continue reading »

Life Upheavals Make It REALLY Difficult to Do Your Creative Work

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Yeah, I’m here.

I just packed up my entire apartment, said goodbye to all my Toyama friends, spent two and a half days traveling halfway across the world, finished another round of developmental edits on my novel, and met up with my New Hampshire family and friends for the first time in two years, all while battling jet lag and struggling to find the clean socks I’d scattered throughout the darkest regions of my luggage to save space.

How you doing? Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 4: Why I Switched to a Shorter-Term Day Job

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the last post in my series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. If you missed the beginning you can get start with Part 1 here.

The cover photo shows decorations for a festival on a street in my town of Namerikawa, Toyama, sometime in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

Today I had my last day of work, and it was really sad.

There were a lot of goodbyes, a lot of farewell cards, a few presents, a last-day lunch, and one of my old supervisors even came from a different school to say goodbye and thank me for my service.  For Japanese-style goodbyes, coworkers will usually gather at the door to wave to someone as they leave for the last time, and that was really nice too.

I also gave a speech during my main school’s end-of-semester ceremony, which was really meaningful as well.  I talked about the shock of working in a Japanese elementary school for the first time, how I always Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 3: Doing Creative Work at My Day Job

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the third in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. If you missed the beginning you can get caught up with Part 1 and Part 2.

The cover photo shows the local government office in Namerikawa City, Toyama (役場, yakuba) sometime in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

Last week I talked about how hard it’s been to leave a job I really, really like and gain tremendous fulfillment from because I want to move on to a new stage of my life, especially with writing and creative work.  It’s been getting harder and harder to both teach as an elementary school ALT, work on my new novel, and keep up with all the other activities and commitments I have, including this blog.

This balancing act has actually gotten a lot harder since I first got to Toyama in 2018.  Back then, I had a lot more free time, Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 2: Honing My Life Focus

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the second in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. You can check out Part 1 here.

The cover photo shows an actual girls elementary school (which later became Tanaka elementary school) in my town of Namerikawa, Toyama, from the early- to mid-20th century.

As I wrote about last week, I really like my job teaching English with the JET Program, but it’s time for me to move on.  Besides some problems with one of my co-teachers and not being able to see family and friends in the States, there’s one really, really important reason for my leaving that deserved its own post:

It’s time for me to focus more on creative work, and not on Day Job work. Continue reading »

Leaving the JET Program, Part 1: I Love My Day Job, But I’m Leaving

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At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about.  This is the first in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future.

Also, the cover photo shows an actual boys elementary school from my town of Namerikawa, Toyama, from the early- to mid-20th century.

I really like teaching English in Japan.  A lot.

I work as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) in Toyama, Japan as part of the JET Program, a Japanese government program that recruits teachers from overseas to teach in elementary, junior high, and high schools.  I live in a small town, and work at 3-5 elementary schools per semester, often a different school every day.

ALTs on the JET Program work alongside Japanese teachers in the classroom, rather than teaching alone.  While this can often lead to dull, repetitive work that JET researcher David McConnell and others call Human Tape-Recorder syndrome, I take a more active role in lesson planning Continue reading »

June 2021 Novel Update: I Stepped Away From Writing, But That’s OK

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Yep, I jinxed myself.

I’m not going to lie—June was a busy month for me.  In addition to polishing up MFA Thesis Novel in preparation for my developmental edit, a lot of my attention has been focused on a Secret Change that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet (but will be soon!).

The problem with this Secret Change is that it turned out to be a MUCH bigger undertaking than I expected.  It also required a LOT of email checking and sending, since information was constantly changing and I needed to stay on the ball.  The Secret Change also involved a lot of stress, which affected my sleeping patterns and kept me up one night until two am to make a deadline, which threw off my sleep schedule for the entire week Continue reading »

MFA Thesis Novel is Off to the Editor!

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Welp, I finished a big project last week.

As many of you know, last year I signed a contract with Vine Leaves Press to publish MFA Thesis Novel, my comic novel about grad school life in the Midwest.  After that, I did a lot of waiting.

That’s because prepping a novel for publication takes a LONG time—most presses schedule their release dates 1-2 years (or more!) in advance, and MFA Thesis Novel is slated for publication in April 2022.

There’s a lot of things to be done before next April: designing the cover (VLP editor Jessica Bell’s bringing her expertise to that!), proofreading the manuscript, formatting the pages, obtaining permissions, and a bunch of other stuff.  And one of those things is a developmental edit. Continue reading »

What Do You Compromise On When You’re Busy?

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I didn’t post last week (d’oh!) because I had a lot going on and needed to catch up on some things.  Fortunately I caught back up (yay!) and things look to be more chill this week, but the experience made me think about what I cut back on when I’m busy, and how I prioritize my time.

Here’s a quick list of things I’m likely to stop doing if I’m busy so I can focus on what’s more important.  The ones at the top are less important (and thus more likely to get dropped!) while the ones farther down down are things I’ll cut out more reluctantly.

Making this list has helped me understand some of the prioritizing I’ve been doing naturally, and I’m planning on keeping it as a reference to guide me through future busy weeks.  As such, it might be worth making your own list of compromises for your own benefit—if you can spare the time of course ;-) Continue reading »

May Novel Progress: Slow and Steady…

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During my last novel update in March I talked about how I was setting the small, reasonable goal of working for 2-3 hours a week drafting my new novel.  This involved a lot of planning with my creative time in that I’d set aside one 2-3 session (usually after work, but sometimes on the weekend) a few days ahead of time, then treat it like a regular appointment and not schedule anything else during that time.

This has been going really well—I literally haven’t missed a week since New Year’s, and that’s equaled out to a LOT of novel progress.

The disadvantage to this system, of course, is that it’s SLOW Continue reading »

Companies Treat Their Employees Like Garbage Kind of Often – A Pattern Explored

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A while ago I was talking to a friend who was having trouble at his job.  His company had gone through a merger with another company and was in the middle of a major consolidation/reorganization.  As part of this consolidation/reorganization, some higher-up got on a video call (this happened during COVID) to announce that they were instigating major layoffs, then immediately signed off and declined to comment because he was too cowardly to face the repercussions of what the company was doing.

Man, what a douchebag!

Anyway, my friend was fortunate enough not to be affected by said layoffs, but when the smoke cleared he found that his department was badly understaffed and everyone was overworked.  As a result, he started working a lot of (thankfully paid) overtime and having an overall rough time at work.  My friend had also been promised a raise several months previous, but Continue reading »

How is a Career Different Than a Job?

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I talk about Jobs a lot on this blog—as in, Day Jobs vs. Real Jobs, a Day Job as separate from a job you’re passionate about, a job as a way to establish your credibility, and so on.

What I don’t talk as much about, though, is the idea of a Career, which is something I’ve been overlooking both in my own life and in my philosophy about work in general.

I imagine a Career as a way of defining all the work you’ve done in a way you can be proud of.  A Career is something you’d openly tell others about when introducing yourself at a cocktail party, or something you’d write below your name on a business card.  A career is a way of defining yourself, and it establishes a kind of identity for you as a working person. Continue reading »