I had generous doctoral funding in the humanities with a very light teaching load and left to be a stable-hand, mucking stalls and throwing breakfast and lunchbhay to the horses. (So this kinda sorta counts, since I was still in school, and the labor job was always going to be temporary. Having said that I loved it and still miss it). In the end I worked at the stable for about a year.
It paid almost nothing. I rented a room and was broke. But the work was cathartic and interesting and completely altered my world— or dropped the world I’d known away, leaving this really interesting (again temporary) moment of peace in its place. Status wise, when you do something like
that, you meet new people. There are different ways of comparing status— and of not even caring at all about it.
It took me a while to adjust away from academic thinking, which manifested largely as an extreme lack of confidence if I wasn’t quoting someone else’s argument or surrounded by piles of books.
The stable was a great place to sort some of that and to like regain a sense of self (and people in the world, more broadly than in the university) in a really tangible way.
I wound up doing a bunch of different work over time. A mix seems to me ideal at this point. Ha still trying to figure it out.
Even if you chose to argue statistical frames, as I'm seeing so much in this thread, you're not factoring the ripple effects that must surely be caused by the knowledge that official agents of power view you and your family as inherently, or very potentially inherently, dangerous. It doesn't take a critical mass of groundless violence (even if that mass does indeed exist)-- but just some of it, left unaccounted (or even defended) by those same official agents. Such a message is bound to resonate broadly and cause what should be a comprehensible outcry from, for example, the mother quoted in this article. I'm saying that you might consider the nonchalant (at best) response to such violent incidents.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Especially great if you enjoy seeing mathematical concepts kind of bent into the background texture of rigorous yet fancicful stories.
it's a fantastic book, philosophical and silly, beautiful and funny and sad, & arguably made more moving by the fact that bulgakov left it in a drawer when he died, broke and obscure. it's one of my all time favorite books and perfect for rn. sidenote, here's a pretty (non-spoiler-y) animation that someone made about it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BrA-XHXZ07E
agreed. i teach yoga a lot and that's all i've been dealing with. "out of an abundance of caution we'll be limiting class size to x" (which number does not allow for even four feet of space between students). they're coming around but the phrase is like an eye roll in these cases. it could be asterisk'd with "people get sick, grow the f up"