Updated «Salad Days»

005/codex-005.tex

@@ -185,7 +185,7 @@ If you want to donate financial support for the creation of this zine (and all t
 
 A long time ago my stepdad had created a successful business screen-printing t-shirts. He had been in the music business (there is a long story here, but it doesn't fit in with this zine) and he realized he could make more money if he printed and sold his own band shirts.
 
-At some point, my parents decided to try to replicate this success. As the sure key to success at the time was to have a website and so I got roped in, because a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I had uploaded some HTML files to a free web server and told them "look, I made a web page!"  They immediately assumed I was an expert and knew everything about putting a business online, and that I could build a web page that would have us making millions of dollars in mere weeks.
+At some point, my parents decided to try to replicate this success. As the sure key to success at the time was to have a website I got roped in, because a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I had uploaded some HTML files to a free web server and told them "look, I made a web page!"  They immediately assumed I was an expert and knew everything about putting a business online, and that I could build a web page that would have us making millions of dollars in mere weeks.
 
 This was not the case, of course. What I learned was this:
 
@@ -201,8 +201,6 @@ That business died after three or four orders, which was probably a good thing,
 
 Unfortunately, that site did not live long. I had seriously underestimated how much money was required just to exist and when it came to putting gas in the tank \textit{or} paying webhosting fees, it was an easy decision. One of those things was helping me make money and the other was not. Something had to go, and so the website went. (Fortunately, it was so short-lived that \texttt{archive.org} never caught wind of it.)
 
-As it turns out, the education community is not as progressive as they would lead you to believe. Having a website wouldn't help me find substitute gigs. Only being a good substitute teacher would help me do that. Who knew?
-
 I kept trying. The educational-industrial complex was pushing ``Web 2.0''\footnote{which was basically social media, but also included blogs} really hard. I made another website (\kref{https://kjodle.net/}{kjodle.net}, which survives to this day) and my webhost at the time offered a one-click install of WordPress which at that time was pretty much a blogging platform and little else. So I clicked on the ``install'' button, wondered for a moment what I had done, and suddenly, \textit{The Big Bad Book Blog} was born.\footnote{\kref{https://bookblog.kjodle.net/}{bookblog.kjodle.net}}
 
 As a newly minted English teacher, I enjoyed having a place where I could talk about all the books I'd been reading. But as a nerdy computer person, having a WordPress blog made me really itch. It offered…\textit{possibilities}.
@@ -215,27 +213,27 @@ I eventually got to a point where I could create not just a child theme, but als
 
 I was having problems finding an actual teaching job (so many other people decided to get into teaching at the same time, so the market was saturated) and I thought that maybe I could become a developer. Why not? After all, I knew that I could learn whatever I needed to, as long as I set my mind to it.
 
-It was a happier, sunnier time, after all, despite the recession—at least if you knew something about ``coding''. I put that in quotation marks because it is a fuzzy word with fairly nebulous meaning. After all, I learned ``coding'' at the age of twelve by programming a TRS-80 in BASIC. I doubt that anybody now or in 2010 would hire me on the basis of \textit{that} particular skillset.
+It was a happier, sunnier time, after all, despite the recession—at least if you knew something about ``coding''. I put that in quotation marks because it is at best a fuzzy word with fairly nebulous meaning. After all, I learned ``coding'' at the age of twelve by programming a TRS-80 in BASIC. I doubt that anybody now or in 2010 or in 1980 would hire me on the basis of \textit{that} particular skillset.
 
-But I did try. I did some freelance development work for WordPress. I had learned how to make child themes fairly easily, and got a fair amount of work from people who wanted to customize their blogs, but had neither the time nor the skill nor the inclination to learn the skills required for this. Was I making enough money to pay the bills? No. Was I making enough money for a cheap, greasy pizza and a six-pack on the odd weekend? Yep!
+But I tried. I did some freelance development work for WordPress. I had learned how to make child themes fairly easily, and got a fair amount of work from people who wanted to customize their blogs, but had neither the time nor the skill nor the inclination to learn the skills required for this. Was I making enough money to pay the bills? No. Was I making enough money for a cheap, greasy pizza and a six-pack on the odd weekend? Yep!
 
 I was happy with that level of success and wanted more, but there are only so many hours in a day. I didn't have the time to learn everything I needed to know (I admit that JavaScript still eludes me) and I certainly didn't have any more money for coursework or marketing at that point.
 
 Plus, I had just graduated with an English degree with the goal of being a teacher. I was still substituting in the hopes of landing a teaching job, though, so I taught myself how to use Moodle and MediaWiki and a few other ``Web 2.0'' technologies.
 
-And…it got me nowhere. Summer came, and I was out of substituting work, so I signed up with a temp agency, specifying that I was looking for second-shift work only. My thought was that if I could finagle a teaching interview, it would be during the day and so I wouldn't need to take time off from work. Also, assuming that I \textit{couldn't} find a teaching job, I could sub during the day and keep the second shift gig as a way to ensure I wouldn't starve.
+And…it got me nowhere. Summer came, and I was out of substituting work, so I signed up with a temp agency, specifying that I was looking for second-shift work \textit{only}. My thought was that if I could finagle a teaching interview, it would be during the day and so I wouldn't need to take time off from work. Also, assuming that I \textit{couldn't} find a teaching job, I could sub during the day and keep the second shift gig as a way to ensure I wouldn't starve.
 
-That was the plan anyway, but it wasn't exactly how things worked out. The agency sent me to interview for a position at a small local manufacturing company that needed someone to operate equipment and keep an eye on inventory during the second shift. I can operate machinery! I'm great at managing inventory! Woot!
+That was the plan anyway, but it wasn't exactly how things worked out. The agency sent me to interview for a position at a small local manufacturing company that needed someone to operate equipment and keep an eye on inventory during the second shift. I was elated! I can operate machinery! I'm great at managing inventory! Woot!
 
-What I didn't know (and what the agency also didn't know) was that this company also needed someone to completely rewrite all of their technical documentation\footnote{work instructions and processes, mainly}, and to create a training program out of whole cloth and then implement and manage that program. They also needed someone to handle their domestic and MRO\footnote{Maintenance, Repairs, Operations—that is, paint, duct tape, toilet paper.} purchasing as the part-time person they had doing this currently spent most of her time buying furniture on eBay for her rental properties.
+What I didn't know (and what the agency also didn't know) was that this company also needed someone to completely rewrite all of their technical documentation\footnote{work instructions and processes, mainly}, and to create a training program out of whole cloth and then implement and manage that program. They also needed someone to handle their domestic and MRO\footnote{Maintenance, Repairs, Operations—that is, paint, duct tape, toilet paper.} purchasing, as the part-time person they had doing this currently spent most of her time buying furniture on eBay for her rental properties.
 
 I've never had a job interview take such a dramatic turn before (which was the first of many red flags—in retrospect this place looked like a May Day parade in Leningrad) but the things they laid out—paid time off, a retirement plan, health insurance (including vision and dental)—were too much to resist. I pushed my tongue against a sore tooth and agreed to take the job. We all shook hands and I left, wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into. 
 
-Quite a bit, actually, as it turned out. I thought I might stay a year to get caught up on some things, and then try to get a teaching job again, but the educational-industrial complex is a jealous god who does not trust people who walk away, so the longer I stayed away, the lower my chances of returning.
+Quite a bit, actually, as it turned out. I thought I might stay a year to get caught up on some things, and then try to get a teaching job again, but the educational-industrial complex is a jealous god who does not trust people who walk away, so the longer I stayed away, the lower my chances of returning became.
 
 I ended up staying with that company for almost six years, despite the fact that I gave notice on three separate occasions. In retrospect, it was a terrible experience (and the subject of an entirely different zine) but I learned a lot. (The main thing I learned was to never work for a small company with no HR department where the boss is also the owner.)
 
-The biggest thing I learned is to never underestimate yourself. When a former student told me that his current employer had openings and that I should apply, I did. Six weeks later, I was sitting in the training room of my current employer, which brings us to today.
+The biggest thing I learned is to never underestimate \textit{yourself}. When a former student told me that his current employer had openings and that I should apply, I did. Six weeks later, I was sitting in the training room of my current employer, which brings us to today.
 
 \section{Today}
 
@@ -257,7 +255,7 @@ But it's not satisfying work. It pays the bills.\footnote{Well, barely (and by t
 
 Considering that my entire job exists to help keep the drug supply safe\footnote{Well, the \textit{legal} drug supply anyway.} that statement may sound frightening or even disturbing. But it's not really. You \textit{want} this job to be boring. When it's not boring, it's generally because something has gone wrong, and and this is one of those industries (like nuclear energy or air traffic control) where you really \textit{don't} want things to \textit{not} be boring.
 
-The irony is that I took this job because I \textit{knew} it would be boring. My last job had been so nerve wracking that mentally I was completely spent by the time I got home and creating anything at that point was damn difficult if not impossible. I figured that if I had a job that was boring where creativity was not encouraged (that is, we have a procedure, so just stick to the procedure) I could store my creative juices during the day the and use them during the evening to create things.
+The irony is that I took this job because I \textit{knew} it would be boring. My last job had been so nerve wracking that mentally I was completely spent by the time I got home and creating anything at that point was damn near difficult if not impossible. I figured that if I had a boring job where creativity was not encouraged (that is, we have a procedure, so just stick to the procedure) I could store my creative juices during the day the and use them during the evening to create things.
 
 As it turns out creativity doesn't exactly work this way. One of the things that attracted me to teaching was that I got to be creative all day. What I forgot about teaching is that when I got home I was still charged up creatively. I hadn't used up all my creativity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
 
@@ -277,23 +275,23 @@ Given all that, I need to find myself in a place I was back when I was a kid—a
 
 Those are the two things I have always been. I don't mean those two trajectories revealed themselves to me when I was in college. I mean that I knew these thing when I was eight or nine years old.
 
-I have always scribbled. I got a hold of a manual typewriter at the age of eight or nine and never looked back.\footnote{I am fairly certain it was an old K-Mart model—I know for sure that it was blue and that I found it in our attic, and I'm pretty sure it looked like this one: \kref{https://gallery.kjodle.net/picture.php?/628/category/76}{https://gallery.kjodle.net/picture.php?/628/category/76}.}
+I have always scribbled. I found a manual typewriter at the age of eight or nine and never looked back.\footnote{I am fairly certain it was an old K-Mart model—I know for sure that it was blue and that I found it in our attic, and I'm pretty sure it looked like this one: \kref{https://gallery.kjodle.net/picture.php?/628/category/76}{https://gallery.kjodle.net/picture.php?/628/category/76}.}
 
 As for the teaching thing, I'm not quite sure. I've always enjoyed learning things and knowing how to do things and sharing that knowlege with other people in the hopes that that might change their life for the better.
 
 Long ago, I realized that information is just data—which you can get from encyclopedias and dictionaries (and these these days from the internet if you know how to look). But knowledge is information \textit{in context}, where it's part of a whole that helps you understand how the universe is put together and how it works. Most people think that teaching is just about providing information, which is no doubt a result of our over-reliance on worksheets and scantron sheets and Bush II's policy of ``no child left untested''. That is unfortunately what a lot of teachers do—they force feed kids information, which most kids retain just long enough to regurgitate on a test and then promptly forget.\footnote{Although some of it sticks with us—My high school social studies teacher Mr. Rex insisted that we would need to know the definition the ``mercantilism'' to succeed in college comes to mind. Oddly, the last placed I was asked for that definition was on his final exam. (I've written about this in a different zine. See \textit{just13} \#2 at \kref{https://just13.click/just13/002.php}{https://just13.click/just13/002.php}.)}
 
-Good teachers provide that context. They provide context along with the information and then guide their students through the process of building knowledge out of those. If you can figure out the information and figure out the context and know how to weave those two things into actual knowledge you'll always be able to figure out any task, any role, any job. You'll be able to do anything you set your mind to.\footnote{I haven't even talked about wisdom yet, which is knowledge tempered by experience. And I don't want to discuss it, perhaps mostly because I lack it.}
+Good teachers provide that context, along with the information and then guide their students through the process of building knowledge from them. If you can figure out the information and figure out the context and know how to weave those two things into actual knowledge you'll always be able to figure out any task, any role, any job. You'll be able to do anything you set your mind to.\footnote{I haven't even talked about wisdom yet, which is knowledge tempered by experience. And I don't want to discuss it, perhaps mostly because I lack it. In essence, information is about the \textit{what}, knowledge is about the \textit{how}, and wisdom is about the \textit{should}.}
 
-That was what I loved about teaching—that if I were allowed to do it right I could empower people just now but for the rest of their lives. I once answered a question in a job interview that when it comes to teaching of course I take the long view. The kid I'm teaching today might be working on my brakes in ten years. The kid I'm teaching today might be doing heart surgery on me in twenty years. This is not selfishness. The kid who is working on my brakes is also working on lots of other people's brakes and the kid doing open heart surgery on me is obviously not doing this as a one-off.
+That was what I loved about teaching—that if I were allowed to do it right I could empower people just now but for the rest of their lives. I've always taken the long vie when it comes to teaching: the kid I'm teaching today might be working on my brakes in ten years. The kid I'm teaching today might be doing heart surgery on me in twenty years. This is not selfishness. The kid who is working on my brakes is also working on lots of other people's brakes and the kid doing open heart surgery on me is obviously not doing this as a one-off.
 
-The point is that human existence is a tapestry. We're all connected, like it or not, to other people. That tapestry has a lot of holes in it (thanks to war, disease, capitalism, etc.) so of course most of the time we can't see a direct connection to some other people simply because it isn't apparent. But we are all connected nevertheless, whether directly or indirectly. Our choices and our actions have effects that we cannot predict on people we cannot even see, sometimes because they don't exist yet.
+The point is that human existence is a tapestry. We're all connected, like it or not, to other people. That tapestry has a lot of holes in it (thanks to war, disease, capitalism, etc.) so of course most of the time we can't see a direct connection to certain other people simply because it isn't apparent. But we are all connected nevertheless, directly or indirectly. Our choices and our actions have effects that we cannot predict on people we cannot even see, sometimes because they don't exist yet.
 
-That is what teaching was about for me—showing kids that they are part of a rich tapestry and that it's okay if they can't see the entire thing because \textit{none} of us can.\footnote{I would like to carve out an exception here for someone like the Dalai Lama, but I think he would be the first person to say that he can't see everything. He can merely see further than most.} The important thing is knowing that you are part of something larger than yourself and to know how to reach out to others when you need help and knowing how to respond to others reaching out to you when they need help. That was my mission as a teacher. I suppose now it's my mission with this zine.
+That is what teaching was about for me—showing kids that they are part of a rich tapestry and that it's okay if they can't see the entire thing because \textit{none} of us can.\footnote{I would like to carve out an exception here for someone like the Dalai Lama, but I think he would be the first person to say that he can't see everything. He can merely see further than most.} The important thing is knowing that you are part of something larger than yourself and to know how to reach out to others when you need help and knowing how to respond to others reaching out to you when \textit{they} need help. That was my mission as a teacher. I suppose now it's my mission with this zine.
 
-It's also why I am not a teacher or now and never will be again—because there is no fucking way that any part of that can ever be converted to a multiple choice question that can be graded by running a scantron sheet through some 1970s-style technology.
+It's also why I am not a teacher now and never will be again—because there is no fucking way that any part of that philosophy can ever be converted to a multiple choice question that can be graded by running a scantron sheet through some 1970s-style technology.
 
-Fortunately there there's a sweet spot in all of this that is small but doable. That sweet spot is technical writing. I actually did a lot of technical writing in my last job.\footnote{One of the best compliments I've ever received is that a former colleague who also left that company and eventually went back to it told me that she could ``see my hand in everything we do'' which is a great compliment, but after all, I \textit{literally} wrote the book on that place. She wanted me to come back, but nope, there were reasons that I left, and they haven't changed.} I took my current job because I was led to believe that it would include a lot of technical writing. The amount of technical writing I've done so far is zero. 
+Fortunately there's a sweet spot in all of this that is small but doable. That sweet spot is technical writing. I actually did a lot of technical writing in my last job.\footnote{One of the best compliments I've ever received is that a former colleague who also left that company and eventually went back to it told me that she could ``see my hand in everything we do'' which is a great compliment, but after all, I \textit{literally} wrote the book on that place. She wanted me to come back, but nope, there were reasons that I left, and they haven't changed.} I took my current job because I was led to believe that it would include a lot of technical writing. The amount of technical writing I've done so far is pretty much zero. 
 
 Technical writing—that is, writing instruction manuals and work instructions and translating what the chemists and engineers wrote into something that regular people can understand—is what I need to do because it lands smack dab in the middle of this Venn diagram:
 
@@ -306,13 +304,13 @@ Technical writing—that is, writing instruction manuals and work instructions a
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