Working for a living.

I am not working for a living this summer, though I am still (how?) working--right now, on a paper with counterintuitive that we hope these people putting together a book on multimodality (what's that you ask? good question--we're not quite sure ourselves) will take. They took our abstract, and now, somehow, we're writing a draft on spec. Academic bastards. I hate them all and their footnoting kind.

The actual workers, as in, where you have to show up to a specific place mostly on time and get a paycheck, are: college daughter, running son, and the historian. Everyone except me, the dogs, and cat, in other words. (We're writing a paper. Also a poem a day for the rest of the summer.)

College daughter has settled in, for the most part, into her job managing a Subway that's located down the street from a Hooters, and hence is known as the Hooters store. She works like a dog for pay that's not quite as good as you think it should be. Also, fast food places hardly ever close, so she doesn't get many days off. (I'm complaining on her behalf, as she doesn't complain much, very impressive.)

Running son started his job as a laborer for a company of electricians. It's a union shop, so they get paid well even for unskilled labor, he gets a chance to be an apprentice electrician (he can carry on through all the steps if he wants to--mainly, he's working until he goes on an LDS mission in the fall sometime), he gets holidays, and he'll get a raise before long. The downside is he has to be at work at 6 a.m., and the job site is about 45 min. away. So he has to haul his butt out of bed at an hour when even God isn't awake. He hasn't quite adjusted--he comes home exhausted and it's very easy, in that case, to take a little nap, which takes the edge off his sleep. "I missed my window of sleeportunity," he told me tonight, which is hilarious but also sad. As a person for whom sleep is now occasionally elusive, I feel his pain.

The historian is his steady self. We both like to be up late and are always stunned by how, at seven a.m., it's already seven a.m. Time for the snooze button dance, after which he pulls on his dean suit and goes to work.