On day jobs
When people ask me what I do I have two answers:
1. I'm a writer
2. I work at MIT (If I feel like playing, I tell them I'm a nuclear physicist--just to scare them.)
I rarely told people I was a writer until I'd sold my novel. That made me legitimate, or so I felt. But when they'd ask about my day job I'd be vague. I might mention finances or admin work, but I wouldn't offer many details. I figured it wasn't that interesting. When confronted by someone who says, "I'm in insurance" do you really press to hear the details of what type of insurance? Okay, you're more polite than I am.
My current job is interesting--it's in a very unique space known as "The Cube" in the MIT Media Lab. I do a lot of things, from balancing budgets to getting travel visas to ordering food for meetings. It keeps me busy. Very damn busy. But I like seeing the amazing work "my" graduate students (I often refer to them in the possessive) are producing. Being around smart people is stimulating. And I don't attend unecessary, boring staff meetings, which I've had to do for prior jobs and which drove me mental.
Today on the way to work I thought of Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was offered a faculty position at Harvard. He turned it down because it would have meant giving up his vice-presidency at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company where he had worked as a lawyer for nearly forty years. I thought of Wallace because I sometimes think of what it would mean to quit my day job and write full time. It isn't financially feasible yet, and it may never be, but more than that, I'm not sure it would suit me.
There is something satisfying in the work I do between 9-5 (and sometimes beyond). There is often human contact. As a writer I possess that splendid tendency toward escape. I worry that an all day opprtunity for fiction might lead to few (if any) human interractions on a daily basis. Not to mention I'm an absolute pill when bored. Sure, there are times I curse having to rise in the morning and abandon my work-in-progress for the daily commute but there's also something nice about working toward the return to home and story.