Saturday, March 12, 2011

Happily Funemployed

Upon leaving Sacramento, we headed for the Bay Area, where Ryan and then band the Toy Soldiers used to pedal up big hills and play dance music to a crowd of eager listeners.  With a promise to meet them in San Francisco at Hotel Utah in time for the night’s show, I politely bowed out of a day in the recording studio and got dropped off in Oakland to spend time with college friends newly settled there.  (The show, by the way, fueled as it was by a full day of recording, was the best thus far in terms of vocal harmony.  They sounded really tight, and rode the wave of energy from recording right through to a sweaty encore.)

The Oakland crew is an intrepid and industrious one, with many of its members new to the circle or in a state of transition. I stayed with a house of four including John, Kasie, Nick and Ben.  Together with friends Lauren and Zak, John is establishing Doc’s on the Bay, a food truck to supply consciously assembled meals to customers and income and business experience to friends. Kasie is coaching lacrosse to high schoolers, gearing up for a gallery opening featuring her prints, and contemplating the principles of biodynamic farming.  Nick, settling now for the first time in over a year from the traveling life, works as an after-school tutor in math and spends his creative energies on singing and playing mandolin, writing songs, and performing with friends. Newest roommate Ben is spending his first week and a half cycling about his surroundings, doing yoga and working on building relationships within the friend group.

When I arrived at 12 in the afternoon, Kacie was home and John and Nick filtered in and out over the next few hours.  Not one of them works a traditional nine-to-five, and consciously so.  This is a group of friends that all value work/life balance, and recognize the merits of an economic perspective that provides for rent, food, and fun, but also for ample time to think, educate oneself, and foster skills in a variety of other venues.  I couldn’t help but make the parallel between such an existence and the ones that the band members choose for themselves back in Seattle.  Their jobs and living situations make space for music – for the flexibility of going on tour, the means to conserve money by living simply and communally, and the hours for practice. 

Such an existence breeds an industriousness and fortitude that I really admire, and that I believe characterizes many people in my age group.  I guess every generation says theirs is part of a new era or change in thinking, but I believe the twenty-somethings I know are making it cool again to diversify interests and practice self-reliance.  In an economic landscape that is harsh to workers of any kind, values flexibility to keep up with the technological leap-frog propelling the market, and faces political and ecological conundrums of epic magnitude, one HAS to be patient and willing to change.

One of the reasons I decided to go on this trip was as a way to mark my transition from full-time employed administrator to partly employed mental rejuvination seeker.  I’ll be starting medical school in the fall, and am committing myself to a place and a trade that from all accounts can be pretty consuming.  While I know this choice gives me little space for creatively configuring the coming professional years, I wanted to take some time to embrace the less regimented lifestyle of the freelance adventurer, to give myself the distance and unbounded days to think about how I’ve been living and how that might need to change.  It will also most importantly release me from some of the mental blockages that make such change difficult to implement.  I must then thank Oakland for a beautiful sunset run, lots of good coffee, 2am readings, and friendly pillow purges.  You’ve added to my ruminations on life post- 9 to 5 quite nicely. 

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