"I'm taking my ten" jobs versus "Are you going to the meeting later?" jobs

First order of business: Today some friends and I are starting a new website! (I am always starting new websites.) The website is called Coyote Media. It’s a Bay Area worker-owned news collective. You can visit it here.

The other worker-owners are Amir Aziz, Nuala Bishari, Alan Chazaro, Reo Eveleth, Estefany Gonzalez, Rahawa Haile, Soleil Ho, Cecilia Lei, Emma Silvers, and Supriya Yelimeli.

My first piece for the site, “How to flake like a true Bay Area local,” is up now.

Any newcomer to the Bay Area is likely to be met with a chorus of people happily informing them that everybody else who lives here is a flake. I’m not convinced that it’s a problem exclusive to us — short of living several lives simultaneously in different cities, I’m not even sure how you’d test that theory.

I think no matter where you are, there’s a horseshoe effect when it comes to flakiness. Siblings and childhood friends know they have a long leash, and feel free to reschedule at the last minute because it’s unlikely you’re going to cut them off over it. New friends are just starting to incorporate you into their lives. Even if they like you, you can’t be very high on their list of priorities yet.

To minimize flaking in your social circle, then, you really need a robust cross-section of relationships that are neither very old nor very recent. But who has time for that? We can’t all just sit around and wait for an old-growth forest with multigenerational tree networks to spring up around us. Especially if you just moved to the Bay, you need friends now, which means you’re going to have to adapt to your surroundings: You’re going to have to get a little flakier, and fast.

Start small, and before you know it, you too can be the kind of person who will text, “I miss you! Let’s get together sometime soon” fitfully, with no meaningful follow up, over a six-month period. (No one knows, incidentally, what “let’s get together soon” means. It can cover anything from “I want to make concrete plans with you, imminently” to “I wish you no real harm,” and a great swath of territory in between.)

Aren’t there other solutions, you might ask? To be sure, some people will suggest you mitigate flakiness in others by dialing up your own decisiveness. They would have you issue exploding offers that make spending time together sound like an exclusive collaboration with a limited window: “I’m going to be at the farmer’s market this Saturday at 11am. Be there or don’t,” that sort of thing.

You could waste half your life trying to parse “Let’s get together”s and gaming your social invitations for maximum engagement. But I think a better policy is to embrace flakiness yourself. It always feels good to fit in! Besides, there are few pleasures more keenly felt than anticipation, and the secret joy of the flake is that they are always experiencing it. A flake truly believes, even as they are in the middle of canceling plans, that they are going to make up for it soon. Imagine your own brain, ceaselessly bathed in the delight of anticipation, without ever having to do anything. What is the key to achieving a personally gratifying degree of flakiness? A distinct combination of delusional optimism, avoidance (not only of conflict but of anything definite), congenital tardiness, and mental vagueness to the point of obstructionism.

You can read the rest here, if you like. And of course if you don’t care to read my more Bay Area-specific work, you can continue to find my more general thoughts at The Chatner (still going strong after more than eight years and 1000 posts, incidentally).

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Second order of business: I also have a day job now, working as an activities assistant at a senior residence in the East Bay. Three months ago I got into a certified nursing assistant training program that was abruptly canceled the day before orientation. Two months ago I got into a different CNA training program that was repeatedly postponed for reasons that remain opaque to me. In the midst of everything I applied for this job and have found it invigorating and pleasant.

It’s the sort of job where I get a free shift meal¹ and a state-mandated ten-minute break every three hours, which is the sort of job I like very much. I love being professionally useful until my ten starts, and then importantly saying, “Sorry, I’m on my ten,” when anyone tries to talk to me.

There’s a lot of walking around and saying hello to people in the hallways — the inconsequential but necessary bustling that makes life interesting, and that I desperately need to balance out the number of hours I spend sitting in solitude in front of a computer.

I’d like to write about my work here from time to time, but only on general themes: food, best practices when calling Bingo, adapting oneself to a new community, rather than discussing anything personal about individual staff members or residents.

I feel happy and lucky to be busy. I was looking for a job for so long. I do better when I am a trifle too busy than when I have too much unstructured free time, and I dearly love walking around and saying hello.

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Third order of business: I’m working on edits for my third novel, Meeting New People, which are due at the end of the month. This is my seventh book, and the first time I have ever printed out a manuscript in order to review edits and make changes by hand. Turns out this is a very helpful practice!

It is good, when life feels busy like this.

It’s been a lot of fun writing Barbara, the narrator of Meeting New People, particularly after spending so much time in the Women’s Hotel universe, where the narrative perspective is so evenly shared between a lot of relatively-reasonable people. Stay tuned for more details of when the book is out!

And of course Christmas at the Women’s Hotel will be out next month, on October 14th. Be seeing you.

1. And what a generous shift meal policy it is! They serve that hearty midcentury food I am so fond of — Chicken Rockefeller, broccoli and rice, rocky road brownies, chicken Caesar salads, mushroom risottos, lentil sloppy joes…