Free Time Isn't Free

Balancing your life against your artistic endeavors isn't always sustainable.

November 06, 2023

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Other writing:

Forever Balancing Making A Living With Making A Life

I didn’t write a newsletter last week because, well, I didn’t really want to. I write this letter in my free time, and that means balancing writing about stuff for fun with writing about stuff for money and the third thing, which is just living a life that’s enjoyable and pleasant to the best of my abilities. But free time is a misnomer: every worker pays for their free time each week with the amount of effort they have to deliver at work to offset it. And wouldn’t you know it, I was tired.

This study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is four years old, but it says that elder millennials spend more time sleeping, more time working, more time on personal care, and less time on household duties than other generations. Reports like this are often easy to extrapolate from the abstract into specific personal experiences as if it’s universal but in the 17 years since I graduated from college, I’ve never not had a side gig. During my first year entering the workforce I was a full-time secretary at a university dorm, I worked two evening shifts and one weekend shift at a coffee shop, I was the full-time volunteer copy editor for Punknews.org, I was the associate editor for a local print arts monthly magazine, I wrote reviews freelance, and I developed the web version of a quarterly music publication. Now that writing is my full-time job, writing is still my part-time job. And that’s just going to go on forever. Nine hours of sleep is nuts, though. I’m lucky to get a good seven.

Writing’s my full-time job, but writing’s also my hobby: I’m reworking a novel draft, I’ve got three short humor pieces I’ve been fine-tuning, I’ve got this newsletter, and I have a handful of short stories in various stages of disarray. When I’m not writing, I’m an avid baker, I love bowling, I’ve finally got a decent hi-fi setup to listen to records, movies, videogames, kayaking, bike rides, and I try to start every morning with some reading. There’s never really enough time to saturate myself in all the things I enjoy and like, and still, it’s easy to find myself on the couch looking at my phone for an average of, let’s say, five hours a day each week (it’s more, I know it’s more, you know it’s more, but shut up). I wrote about struggling with free time earlier this summer, but that’s not something that goes away seasonally.

I’m extremely fortunate. I’ve got a remote job that I like which affords me time to pursue my passions. Most people never have that opportunity. At least not in the United States. In Canada, you can just apply for grants that pay you to make the art you want to make. Mexico, too. That’s not to say there aren’t cultural grants awarded in the United States, they’re just usually on a larger scale and aimed at organizations, not individual artists. I can’t help but think about people like my brother, who’s a steelworker in New York City. He’s usually got an hour-long commute every morning, he works long and hard hours every day, and when he gets home he’s absolutely beat. He’s also a drummer who spent years touring in punk bands. I’m wondering what his music career would be like today if he was able to fund his life when he wasn’t touring with an arts grant. It’s not extremely likely he would have gotten one, or that it would have been enough to patch together a living, but maybe he wouldn’t have decided to join the steelworker’s union.

My brother makes a good wage as a union steelworker, however. There are around 38 million people in the United States living under the poverty line. That’s 11.6% of the people in this country who aren’t able to meet their basic human needs with their current income. The percentage of people who are fully employed but still struggling to make ends meet is way higher, too. I wonder about how much critical art and expression we’ve lost in the United States because people are being worked to the bone or forced to jump through never-ending hoops in order to receive government aid.

It’s hard not to become aware of this stuff and then fall into useless despair. Between spending quality time with my loved ones and doing some yardwork, that despair hit me a little harder last week than I realized.

I don’t have any answers; I have a free, weekly newsletter.

So I did what any good writer would do; I got a little drunk sitting by the firepit in the backyard and took a picture of it.

I don’t really have any answers for any of this stuff. But if I have time to look at my phone, I probably have time to harass my representatives on the phone more regularly. And with COVID precautions loosening for my immunocompromised ass, there’s probably more volunteer work I could sign up for. But I guess when I think about all the people who aren’t able to create the art they want to, I should be grateful for the time that I have, and more than anything, make it count.

Read

This is a great little read about how American brands enjoy some version of exotic popularity in Central Asia. It’s always fascinating learning what works in other places, and I’m trying to imagine what export products enjoy popularity here as a premium brand instead of a cheap daily purchase.

Watch

If I didn’t have smart friends I’d watch nothing but dumb movies. For our 1991 Movie Club watch today, I suggested Highlander II: The Quickening. They said we should watch Satyajit Ray’s last film, The Stranger. They were right: it’s brilliant. A middle-aged woman receives a letter from her long-lost uncle who disappeared from Bengal when she was only two. He’s traveled the world and now he’s come back and wants to see his last living relative before he goes off on more world travels again. Only, everyone’s suspicious that’s not who he says he is. The movie is a beautiful meditation on home, family, and civility, and instead of big flashy sequences, conversational scenes run long, taking up thirty minutes at a time. It also ends with one of the most beautiful moments in a film I’ve seen in a long time.

Listen

We went out to a music ethnography talk about African influence on music in Latin American popular music styles a few weeks ago, and the presenter, Betto Arcos, was brilliant. He went through cumbia, samba, son, and other styles, but mentioned off-hand having Arsenio Rodríguez albums in his personal collection. I have a mildly more informed idea of what structurally sets these different musical genres apart now but I still can’t really speak to what makes this song an early version of salsa music. You can go back to the Wikipedia link earlier in this paragraph and try to read his innovations in syncopation; I can’t really make sense of it. What I can talk about is how incredible the melody of “Bruca Manigua” is, along with the rhythmic shift from the intro to the main verse. Sonically, the horns meld in a really hauntingly beautiful way, and the guitar tone is out of this world incredible.

Consume

  • Not Sweets

I’ve got issues with restraint when it comes to baked goods. Why not grab a cookie while I’m out and about. If I’m snagging a slice of iced blueberry Japanese milk bread, I might need a gruyere croissant to compliment it. Ice cream: it’s fuckin’ delicious, man. But I’ve had an indulgent few years since we moved to Madison: good bakeries are plentiful and easy to visit. So I’ve quit cold turkey. I might have something sweet here or there, and I won’t deny a dessert if someone’s made something, but my days of picking up a box of pastries just because have ended. And you know what? I feel less bloated and wonky. And I fucking hate that it works.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.