And as another $50 comes in for the phund, another $400 in projected real income goes out the door. As I toggled to send John's $50 from PayPal to my bank, a job I had actually signed a contract for, just went up in smoke, billed as a dual f-up between a bank and a previously dependable employer - and so that $400, which would have put the phone phund over the top, now will not materialize in the anytime foreseeable future. Which means I don't get a phone, yet. And that makes job search impossible. Is anyone tired of me just treading water and getting nowhere? I know I am. And so I sit, a fully functional, non-substance abused, not (yet) clinically depressed, university educated, extremely previously successful business person - benched for the spring season, the most probable season for me to have found employ. And the contract was not just $400, it was $800 over two months. Not a lot of money at all, but a whole lot more than zero. A whole lot more. And so back to the drawing board.
Last month I was asked to do a guest lecture at a class for Columbia University, the same class that has used this blog as a reference on contemporary homelessness. But when the subject of pay came up, there was a distinct stall. There was no pay, or to a point, the university did not pay. "So let me get this straight", I said, "the university is in the business of charging money to teach classes on public health and homelessness as a predominant social ill, but they do not pay homeless people who contribute to the content of the course?" My question was responded to immediately with the logic, if indeed this could be called logic, that "other speakers were not paid for these guest lecturing jobs either". And other speakers meant lawyers, other academics, public health officials and practitioners and essentially, people who already had a job that a CV credit from Columbia would certainly benefit - not homeless people. And indeed, I doubt there's a line of homeless people stretching around the block on campus just begging to go in and talk for free so they can burnish their CVs with that oh so valuable name. And so I turned the request down, despite the professor being a genuinely concerned and accomplished activist in the field, because his employer was doing nothing more than exacerbating the problem in my case. Shit, is this so difficult? I need paying work, not frigging public service work.
And so I refine this pitch. If anyone out there needs work done, writing work, research on homelessness work, advertising or international marketing work, please let me know. I'm a whole lot more keen to work than I am to beg. But if you can still help on the phone phund, I won't turn that down. A man simply does what he needs to do.
