I had a pretty good weekend. Maybe a handful of unforced errors, but nothing terrible, I think.
I want to really get into the details of what made my weekend so good, and I’ve written up multiple versions of a post about it. But I keep trashing the post, because it gets a bit too personal. I’m finding myself writing things I hadn’t thought of, or least hadn’t risen to the top of my conciseness, and I feel like it’s revealing too much. For my part, this has been one of the fun parts of reading other people’s blogs. But to be honest, when I first started this back up, I kind of envisioned it as a different type of blog, something closer to the type that became much more popular, the type that really isn’t what blog start out to be. Popular blogs these days aren’t a person’s personal journal anymore. The modern popular blog type that closest to that original style is something like a Travel Log, but even that has more focus on the doing and less focus on the living.
I don’t now, I didn’t set out to analyze blogs today, so maybe I’m off there. Anyway, I’ve been holding out on posting because I got busy and then I got stuck in a cycle of writing and then deciding that I didn’t want to post what I wrote. I haven’t decided, still, just how much I want to put out there. Nothing crazy happened, to be clear. I’m just not sure I want to dig into my thoughts and feelings like that. I guess we’ll see, but for the meantime, I guess I did get some writing practice in.
Speaking of which, I’ll give an actual update of sorts today. I’ve previously mentioned that I’m taking an English Composition class and that I did poorly on the first assignment. I’m not stuck on the second assignment, and it’s bumming me out.
I feel a lot more up to writing this one, so it’s not that. The assignment is to write a persuasive letter. It is a letter format, and it being a letter who’s intended audience, however fictional it may be, is someone you know. I don’t think it literally says that in the assignment, but that seems to be allowed if not implicated. Furthermore, I feel that the practice from the first assignment and the advice I’ve received during and since has really set me up to nail this. But the key advice that the instructor is clearly trying to hammer down is that it should be something you are passionate about. I’m passionate about many things, but they are things that I either really don’t want to put out there in a school assignment or that would need much longer than the 900ish word limit would allow.
The suggestions I find when I search online are almost all politics. I am rather passionate about politics, but I’m a bit of a lefty and I’m worried about anything I write in the space right now. I wouldn’t worry about putting those thoughts here on my stupid blog, but I do worry about putting them on a paper that I’ll be graded on. I also worry that in the format available, I’ll feel too penned in and end up truncating my real points down to garbage, and instead advance points that I don’t really care about.
The example that comes to mind is the minimum age. When I come across people talking about it, people tend to fall into two camps. The first is what many consider a sort of Libertarian view, though the term Libertarian doesn’t seem to mean what it’s supposed to. These days I find the average person calling themselves a Libertarian is just a type of Republican who’s clever enough to realize that MAGA people are dickwads. So they’re against the minimum wage because they’ve been convinced by the real Capitalists that actually it’s good that people can be paid under a living wage for a full time job. At least they have a job, right? God, they love that one. And the other side really only has the living wage argument. Not that it’s a bad argument, it should win every time, but when your opponents say they believe in the dignity of labor but don’t actually believe it, then any argument on the material condition of the laborer will always lose. They are the party that claims facts don’t have feelings, then get in their feelings and lie to your face. You’ve got to stop expecting reasonable arguments to work on unreasonable people.
But my view is actually also against the minimum wage, though not the concept of one, and also not in the short term. Mine isn’t a crazy or unpopular view, I don’t think, but it doesn’t get talked about in this way. We do need a minimum wage, but as a short term solution to bridge us to the long term one. I’m in the USA where we do have a minimum wage, but it’s terribly outdated in that it doesn’t really address the problem. I haven’t gone through all of the data, but I get the feeling that it never really did. I’m also in Maryland where, generally if not always, people tend to be paid above the minimum wage, and that we still have poverty should be a clue that this solution isn’t a panacea.
And this is where I start to get into trouble. What I want to talk about next is actual stats, go through the histories of labor and payment, and give a recap of American’s relationship with labor overall. Maybe sprinkle in some passages from The Jungle or whatever. But then I’d pivot to my ideas, which are fairly simple, though they would take some explaining. Well, maybe this is a good subject for a future paper, actually, but not for this one.
Actually, yeah, this little bitch session has been helpful. I won’t be writing about the minimum wage in this paper, but maybe I don’t feel so weird about a similar topic. Let me take another read through a few before I get going on it.
As I wrap up, I do want to acknowledge how often I stop myself short on getting into a topic and then quickly paper over it with a “well maybe another time” type of dismissive wave. I’m planning to follow up on a few of those. I’ve already putting together something for a recent brushed-off topic on my wardrobe refresh, so that’ll probably pop up sooner or later. I suppose we can add my thoughts on labor to that as well. But that’s it for today. Keep on keepin’ on?
Yeah, that’s not gunna be the sign-off.