On Reading, Cussing, Listening, And Other Diversions
On Reading, Cussing, Listening, And Other Diversions
Together with some thoughts on near-homelessness during the pandemic
Landing as it did in the runup to Labor Day, this stark and sobering Washington Post feature — about flight attendants going hungry, working themselves to death with “side hustles” that consume as much time as their “real” job, and sometimes even living rough — made me remember why I used to drink:
I didn’t have it quite this bad, mind you. Even given the awful timing of my career detour — I left my radio-host gig and graduated from a month of unpaid FA training late in February of 2020, just as lockdown rumblings grew unmissably noisy across the United States — I managed to avoid living out of my car, even in the tightest of months.
But I did give up “real” housing for a couple of months in 2021, living between some family property I was lucky enough to have access to and a flight-attendant crash pad. (Mine was nicer than the bug-infested barracks described in the article.)
I didn’t have much choice about it, either. Because we hadn’t been laid off entirely or even furloughed, my brand-new Spirit Airlines colleagues and I didn’t qualify for unemployment — not the pathetic $275 baseline Florida offers, not the $600 temporary weekly federal supplement. Not a penny.
Which is why I lived through much of the lockdown on my contract-minimum guarantee of 72 base-rate hours a month, whether I flew or (mostly) didn’t. I don’t remember exactly what I was earning, but the current Spirit contract starts flight-attendant pay at under $22 an hour, so the very most I could have been grossing was (squints, does math, painfully)… 72 hours x $22 = $1,584 a month. Before taxes and other deductions.
So yeah, the only thing that kept me from straight-up homelessness during that stretch of my life was the CDC’s early-COVID eviction moratorium — that, and a landlord with a conscience, who didn’t bang on the door too hard while I worked out how to apply for pandemic-era rental assistance programs funded by the feds.
Again, though: That was during worst of the pandemic. This current WashPost piece is about what it’s like now, in a recovering economy, every single day.
This is what life is like as a flight attendant, at least until you’re a few years in and have earned some seniority. (That’s another thing I didn’t do: Spirit froze hiring right after I started, so I remained one of the company’s most junior FAs, which meant I never stopped flying “reserve.” More on reserve, which is its own special kind of inhumane, another time.)
The reporting in this piece is solid and sobering, but for me it’s the photos that really drive home the message: that shot of a working FA’s suitcase, with the captioned notation that s/he is living out of it. The shot of the car one flight attendant sleeps in. Oof.
The bottom line? An industry that’s utterly essential to the U.S. economy survives almost entirely because some of its most critical front-line workers don’t get paid for some or most of the hours they devote to the job. It’s not sustainable.
I’ve been more than usually useless lately, and it’s largely because of a creature named Libby that’s been sucking up most of my time.
And I mean hours at a stretch, for days and weeks in a row. Libby is a needy, greedy succubus.
Libby is of course an app — a reading app powered by thousands of local libraries across the U.S. — and she has changed my life.
No, seriously — when a friend asked this week how I stay busy during slower shifts, the answer surprised even me:
Also on my virtual nightstand, in various states of having been read or re-read: a fascinating reassessment of George III, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Anne Applebaum’s bracing Autocracy, Inc. (along with Brene Brown’s comforting The Gifts of Imperfection), a gen-pop study of modern supply-chain miracles, American Psycho (re-added recently with some trepidation), and a couple of novels from the charming Louis Bayard. (He has a new one out, centered on Oscar Wilde’s family, and why not catch up with what I’ve missed while I wait for it?)
I know this because Libby helpfully tracks everything reading-ish: holds and wait estimates, current check-outs, related suggestions, new-book picks, even a wish list for books my librar(ies, see below) haven’t acquired yet.
And yes, that was “libraries.” In addition to working fairly seamlessly with Kindle1 to serve up the ebooks and audiobooks I borrow, Libby also functions as a kind of library-card wallet. Mine holds cards from Broward County, FL, Arlington, VA, Horry County, SC, Wake County, NC, and of course my beloved D.C.; search one library, and Libby alerts you that the book you want is available sooner from one of the others.
Libby is a genius, frankly — and a stern mistress, serving up warnings for two or three days before my holds and loans expire. “Read the book, Trey,” she says, “or I’ll send it back.”
At which point I stay up for hours reading the book before it evaporates. More than usually useless, like I said — but pretty cozily happy, too.
I meant to go to that Kennedy Center thingy with Naveen and Peter, if only to heckle good-naturedly. But I didn’t, and I suspect some of my D.C. theaterpeople likewise missed it. Herewith, the tale of the tape:
I’ve had my eye on actor-director Seamus Miller for a while (stop it, you there in the gutter), not least because when I met him he was (unless I misremember) singing karaoke while wearing a protective helmet. He’s got a couple of projects going on that I’ve been wanting to learn more about and maybe even write about. One recent exploit — a run of As You Like It staged at a marbly-temply thingy tucked away in a wooded grove near some stables on the National Mall — I missed entirely, though I heard the cast had to compete with incoming National Airport traffic half the night.
Wouldn’t mind getting to this next project, though. From Seamus, via Facebook:
Now, I love this for a number of reasons:
Shakespeare in the islands!
Free theater for teens!
The image of Charlton Heston’s pants on fire!
Honestly that last bit just seems like God pointing out that playin’ holy ain’t always stayin’ holy.
Aaaaaaanyway if you’re heading to Bermuda, I suspect there are other reasons to check out the fort. Go with God.
One thing leads to another, in some cases quite literally. I opened my music player a while ago to pull up some Telemann — what, you don’t listen to tafelmusik when you write? — and this album cover (it’s animated in the app) snagged me:
Then the blurb made it a must-listen:
“Glasper, who’s only ever had to focus his efforts on [jazz or hiphop] in the interest of time, made an album that splits the difference between the two, emphasizing their shared genetics.”
Reader, I was hooked. Get it/stream it on Apple Music if it sounds like your groove too.
Like all the hardworking crew at NPR, the good people at Pop Culture Happy Hour find themselves in need of a g****n break from time to time.
And sometimes when they take one, they’ll queue up an archival episode, and then I’ll hear my own voice coming out of my HomePod while I’m in the shower, which is (a) something that hasn’t happened regularly in a while and (b) an acutely unnerving thing when you’re not expecting it.
In this case, it was my voice cussing. Or almost cussing, because it’s NPR, and even on a nonregulated platform like a podcast we had some m*****f******g standards.
The topic was profanity in pop culture, and bleeps and all it’s one of my favorite-ever segments from my years on the show. I offer it here, that you might enjoy it too (or enjoy it anew):
Now f**k off.2
Ugh, I know, and when I buy books I buy them elsewhere. If you really, really want to avoid the Bezosverse, the good people at Libby do supply a built-in reader, but it’s on the basic end.
Hang on, wait, don’t f**k off entirely quite yet. If you have a moment, please consider checking out this gofundme appeal from a digital-universe friend. John was a fan of NPR and PCHH from way back, and we’ve become better acquainted in the years since. He seems a good fellow, and he’s had a rough time lately. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you supported me when I needed cash to make that flight-attendant move happen in a hurry back in 2020. If you can manage, I know John would be grateful for your support now. Thanks for listening.