While browsing the grocery store aisles today, I looked twice at the price label on a loaf of bread before reluctantly putting it back on the shelf. The price of food staples keeps going up and up and we’re all feeling the pressures of working class life. Even as the government insists we're 'above the poverty line,' more and more Americans are finding it impossible to put food on the table, afford medical care, or save for the future.
I’ve been feeling the pressure more now, since I was laid off from two different jobs in less than a year. In the first instance, I was in the medical field as a caretaker for individuals with disabilities since 2015. Community-based residential facilities, once under the stewardship of county and municipal government, were sold off to a private company that cut workers’ wages and benefits. The company was later investigated for misconduct and neglect of residents in the same group home I once worked at. Heartbreaking. As luck would have it, I’d been accepted to a position with another healthcare system, this time in the field I’d been trying to break into for years -- networking. Six months later, the entire department was canned as the company outsourced those services and furloughed many IT functions as a cost-saving measure. That company is now being swallowed up by another conglomerate. These layoffs have been a stark reminder of how precarious even stable jobs, like working in long-term care, can be. They’ve forced me to garner resilience in a world where corporations prioritize profits over people.
Once again I was unemployed, but in a position to do something unconventional. A lot of us are disconnected with the food we buy at the grocery store. What I mean is: we don’t have the same connection to the food and soil that we’d get by driving out to buy from a farmer’s stand or actually growing plants ourselves. So I relished the opportunity to work as a farmhand on my friend’s organic farm this year. It was truly inspiring to see plants start from seedlings and to nurture them along. It was humbling to see how much blood, sweat, and tears goes into growing vegetables using organic techniques with restrictions on use of materials--such as insecticides and herbicides--and equipment. This means more manual labor. One hot day in June, I literally passed out from over-exertion tending the field. It’s easy to overlook the human element that goes into our food, which the global consumer is alienated from, including the fact that many immigrants work under difficult conditions everyday so that we can buy produce at the grocery store.
When my work at the farm ended, I wanted to keep some plants and decided to start a garden outside the apartment building. One plant led to two, which led to three...and things took off! I was so glad that I could apply some of what I learned about organic ag on a smaller scale. I kept things going all the way until mid-November by protecting the plants during frost. And some plants, like kale and brassicas, continued even after I had stopped covering them at night. And many are still thriving indoors!
2024 has been a year of avid reading. I started with science fiction, reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in January. I have so many good memories of that ‘snowy’ masterpiece -- it made me think about gender in totally unexpected ways. In February, I read by Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, a brilliant read about the sociology of health and the ways that providers and insurers extract value/profit out of patients and the many contradictions between public health and health capitalism. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Guns of the Dawn swept me away in March with its grand 600+ page adventure and thought-provoking portrayal of gender roles in wartime. Each book has felt like a companion on this year’s journey—whether it’s Haruki Murakami’s surreal Kafka on the Shore, Chelsea Manning’s deeply personal README.txt, or Ken Jennings’ quirky exploration in Maphead. These stories, alongside Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (which I’m savoring now), have been both escape and exploration.
Some other hobbies I enjoyed in 2024 included watching Jeopardy and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within with the guild “Bad Karma”.
Goals for next year are to read widely, write vividly, and explore deeply. 2025 is almost here, enjoy the rest of the year and best wishes in the new year.
