The Third Job

October brought beautiful weather and, as always, so many wonderful neighborhood fairs, concerts, and happenings to the city that the population probably doubled every weekend. I went to almost none of these as I was busy working the two jobs and trying to keep up with the teenagers, so it shouldn’t have been a real surprise when I hit my breaking point by the end.

In years past the weekend of the local Halloween Parade was a huge event for our household. I’d take the kids all dressed up, and we’d have friends in from outside the city, back when we lived in Little Five Points. For over a dozen years we attended faithfully until we got gentrified out of walking distance and the kids felt they were too big to attend. This year, as my former neighbors cheered friends of mine walking in the parade, I was riding my bike down the Beltline on the way to the restaurant job, so I could start the final seven hours of my sixty-five-hour workweek. As I pedaled I suddenly I had to choose between running over tourists that decided to stop and block the entire path under the North Highland bridge or go off the side into the loose gravel. I wasn’t going so fast that I couldn’t feel the wreck about to happen, but I was going fast enough that I couldn’t stop the fall. As the gravel slid out from under me, I had one of those moments where time slows down, and I was aware that everyone around me was watching me lose control. I knew the injuries were coming despite my helmet and leather boots. I hit the gravel at a roll, sprawling out my whole body as witnesses rushed over.

After the fall I spit out dirt, reclaimed my now scratched glasses, said I was okay, and rode the final mile into work bleeding. There I limped to the back of the restaurant and picked small gravel out of one of my knees, cleaned the wound on my numb right hand where the palm was split a good inch, slapped on the biggest band-aids from the first aid kit and just…worked my shift. There wasn’t anything else to do. The wrist was sprained badly enough that I wore a brace for a week from CVS, but I was going to be damned if I spent an entire week’s second job wages on stitches, so now I have a scar on my right palm.

Just to underscore that what I’m doing has to stop – I can’t keep working sixty-five hours per week at these wages, both monetarily and bodily – a few things happened at my day job and in my personal life that were both frustrating a ridiculous. By the time the bandages came off my split palm a week ago, I broke and caved. The City of Atlanta was never going to put Cop City on the ballot, my socially concious day job was never going to pay me enough to get out of the debts of COVID, and I need to admit I’m beating myself up literally at this point trying to make those unrealistic things happen. Time to face reality. I picked up the phone and made the text I should have made two years ago. I let Henrik know I was ready to get back into Digital Asset Management in the private sector.

I didn’t stop blogging for a decade *just* because I was busy raising my babies. I also didn’t blog during that time because I was also professionally peaking. Ten years ago, in 2014, I had my biggest year, where I published a textbook and worked everywhere from Honolulu to Berlin. There are a lot of reasons why I left all that behind and shrunk my work area from worldwide covered by flights to a five-mile radius I cover on bike. Henrik, a good friend, was happy to hear from me. He laid it out straight, as he always does, something I’ve always valued in colleagues. The good news is that absolutely nothing has changed in the last eight years since I was on the job market. The bad news is that absolutely nothing has changed in the last eight years since I’ve been on the job market.

So, I took a deep breath, and started a third job this week – pulling myself back together professionally. I typed STOP COP CITY in as a candidate on my ballot in an uncontested race, knocked the dust off my resume, and did what I always do to get myself together. I started working even more.