This Game is Gigged @gigtastic - Tumblr Blog

I don’t update this much at the moment! Sorry!

But I thought newcomers might appreciate a synopsis of what on earth they’re looking at. Long story short, this Tumblr is a collection of posts about all of the marvelous and inspiring ways that people pay the rent. I’ve had a lot of these jobs myself! Plus a lot more I hope to have.

A lot of these gigs - housekeeping! forensic science! upholstery! - you’ve probably heard about already, but they deserve to have their praises sung again anyway. Other gigs, however, you may be hearing about for the first time. Either way, each little post will include as much information as I have about how to get one of these gigs for yourself, by hook or by crook. Got a voice for radio? I know a station in Alaska that will take you on. Or maybe marine science? Did you know you can work at the Scottish Dolphin Centre? That is a place that exists.

I wrote up a Table of Contents, with hyperlinks, but it’s so damn big that Tumblr won’t post it. So feel free to follow this link to a Google Docs: goo.gl/5zM7Oc. Take a look around, knock yourself out, and good luck on your professional adventure! Send me a fruit basket or something.

Keep on being fabulous, internet!

So many people don't give a crap about their jobs. For most people, working to pay the bills is no more fulfilling as all the other daily tasks required for survival - like chewing, or getting someone to look at that rash. And what the hell is arbejdsglæde? Danish witchcraft, that's what.

I once knew a sweetheart of a man (who also happened to be a buff, bisexual, motorcycle-riding cardiac nurse raised by a single mother in the American South, because sometimes dreams do come true). By the time I'd met him, he was finishing up his 30s and considering going back to school for geology to kick off his 40s. He'd already spent his 20s as a priest (see?!? he was basically the cover of a pulp romance novel).

And that's how it's supposed to work, right? "Do what you love," I think is the spiel of enlightened college graduation speeches everywhere.

But it's not exactly an apolitical mantra, is it? Not only can it shore up the academic salt mine (get that education! fulfill your passions! for poverty-level wages and instability!), but it also subtly undercuts a class of people who don't have the privilege of choosing their daily grind.

Before my father crushed the civil service exam and got abducted into the well-paid union life of air traffic control, she'd slogged through years in sewer cable repair. But even if she'd never made it out of the sewers - like some kind of blue-collar Ninja Turtle - she still would have been owed her due respect, for doing good work and being a fabulous human. She exists, independent of the glamourless grime of her 9-5.

(All that said? Totally did ask her to interview at a local ice cream shop, just as a cute gig in her twilight years. Discount ice cream for life!)

"A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a crescent wrench five times, and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fencepost. So if you don't buy a trailer from me, it ain’t gonna hurt my feelings. So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home.

Or don’t. I don’t care."

Marine biologists will be the first ones to tell you that there's a big difference between studying microphytobenthos, and playing with dolphins. The former requires years of hard science while also somehow enduring some of the most terrible smells imaginable; the latter demands countless hours of chaffing your privates in wetsuits and possibly selling your soul to SeaWorld. You lied to me, Flipper. You lied.

As someone who goes to bed every night in lime-green penguin jammies, it should come as no surprise that marine conservation is kind of my jam. I've applied for internships that would've had me chasing elephant seals off the coast of San Francisco, or watching penguins bone in Antarctica. I obtained a PADI certificate on the off-chance that I might get into science diving, and I'd happily forego my lifelong disinterest in beaches if it meant I could rescue turtles in Greece, or Uruguay, or Costa Rica. Wise Oceans is your job board of choice, sea-hippies.

If you only want to thread the needle between science nerd and SeaQuest fanfic - well, there's enough dolphin-loving snowflakes in the world that most places can charge an arm and a leg for the mere pleasure of "interning" - and sadly, you'll need that arm for wiping your tears. So really, the only reasonable option you have left is spending eight months at the Scottish Dolphin Centre, because such a place exists.

If you ever get tired of wrangling dolphins - aka, "the raging blowholes of the sea" - you could try hugging seals instead, who will almost certainly not try to molest you (as much). Rehabilitate sick pups on the Dutch coast! Return them to the Irish Sea from whence they came!

Just so long as you understand that, on some level, every animal you'll ever love is kind of a jerk.

We seemingly live in an animation renaissance so thick that I'm afraid to namedrop any one series over another, for fear of unleashing fandom wrath (although, I hear, Book of Life is amazing). It's enough to make you think we may've finally made progress since the so-called Golden Age when hundreds of women worked double shifts in the Disney ink mines, but a mere handful got to paintsling on the front lines.

Nah: animation has its own ceiling made of celluloid. That's not to say there isn't a glorious history of female animators, or that there aren't genres of animation with wicked female characters. And still, Cartoon Network only got their first solo female creator in 2013, and executives still appear to be under the impression that ladies and girls aren't a worthwhile market because they don't buy enough toys.

But hell, this is Tumblr - otherwise known as The Thunderdome School for Media Analysis, Criticism and Feels. So far be it from me to yalp about the inequities of an industry about which I know almost nothing - except that the Russian version of Winnie the Pooh is adorable, the history of animator' unions is kind of amazing, and the animation industry in Senegal is trying to kickstart studios across the continent.

So I'll leave you instead with the story of Brenda Banks, who was one of the first black women - if not the first black woman, although accounts vary - to ever work in the Hollywood animation industry. As Ralph Bakshi tells it, she just walked in off the street. From Georgia:

This young girl, her name is Brenda Banks, okay...She comes in off the street...Comes in and she says, “I. Want. To animate.” Just like that.

“Why’d you come here?” “I like your movies." “Did you ever animate?” “No.” “Did anyone ever let you animate?” “No.” “Why do you think you can animate?” “I want to animate.” “Where're you from?” “Georgia," or somewhere. “How’d you get here?” “Walked. Train.”

I sat her down at the desk, figuring she was going to fail miserably. One of the most hysterical, funniest animators that ever walked in...She is such a naturally gifted girl that anything she anything she did on the goons was the gooniest thing you ever saw in your whole life.

By comparison, an animators job board is child's play. Now please enjoy this video of a Power Glove being given its moment in the sun.

A few years ago, I spent a summer in Northern Uganda. We came there at the invitation of the local university's peace studies program, in the wake of the Gordian nightmare of their decades-long internal war (as well as that godawful viral video whose only major success was to drive a white man insane). This gig started off with my transcribing their massive backlog of oral history interviews with Acholi elders while partaking of far too many delicious rolexes; it ended with my cohorts befriending a crew of local youth who'd grown up in 'internally displaced people' camps, and who now credited breakdancing as the misunderstood art form that helped keep them on the straight and narrow.

The march towards peace can get really damn weird, is what I'm saying.

I'm blessed to have not have grown up in a society so wartorn that it necessitated a nationwide sex strike in order to win peace; that kind of spiritual jiu-jitsu is way above my emotional paygrade. But there's often a lot less daylight than we'd care to admit between the bloody fever dreams of the past and the blasé diplomacy of the present; an Irish car bomb was once an act of mass murder, not a regrettable 1am cocktail.

But in the wake of the genocidal maelstrom that was the first half of the twentieth century, we might have actually learned a few things about how to come to terms with the ghosts of our lesser angels. Nowadays, you can fight for peace as long-term volunteers at reconciliation villages in Belfast, or apply for language scholarships to better study the history of colonization or listen to refugees. Or you can start early, and enroll at one of the United World Colleges - a series of universities from Armenia to Costa Rica, founded in the wake of WWII and on the cusp of the Cold War, and whose primary objective is the pursuit of peace and justice. I honestly think UWC might be the closest we've come to Starfleet.

Or you could always try playing football on Christmas in no-man's-land. Might not last, but it'll be a hell of a story.

While taking an unlikely detour through the spud-filled expanse of Idaho, an old lady picked me up from the bus station at midnight and took me home. This darling grandma ran literally the only hostel in the entire state, which consisted of her second ranch house outfitted with bunk beds. She was so concerned that I hadn't eaten that she'd prepared me a late-night snack of peanut butter sandwiches and hardboiled eggs.

I've been welcomed into so many homes and beds (the latter mostly by accident...and/or exasperated directness) that I'd have to outfit my front door with a neon vacancy sign just to make a dent in my karmic debt. Beyond the undeniable allure of petty motel soap and moist towelette theft, there's still something immensely gratifying about the spirit of hospitality - a word which, if my Googling of Ancient Greek etymology is anything to go by, actually translates as “one who loves strangers and immigrants like you would your own brother."

I once read a daft little memoir called The Lunatic Express, in which a nutbar vagabond opted to circumnavigate the world via the most dangerous means of transit possible. And after a year of janky buses on Peruvian mountains and rusty ferries across the Strait of Malacca, it turns out that the worst trip of all was the Greyhound from Los Angeles to New York City - because nobody welcomed or trusted him.

So as commonplace as it might seem, I don't want to downplay the holy roots of welcoming strangers in from the cold. I couldn't have lived my life with a fraction of the success it's had without the blessing of bunk beds in Korean hostels or tent space overlooking waterfalls in Maine or couches of near-strangers all over the place. And if you ever feel like being on the giving end, one email could have you folding laundry at gorgeous hostels in Wales, running the front desk at B&Bs in the Rocky Mountains or the Caribbean, managing an ecolodge in Ecuador or Costa Rica. Hell, open up your own tiny house village. Or a dinosaur hotel! The world will never have enough dinosaur hotels, you guys.

But I would really, really appreciate it if someone could revitalize the bankrupt hotel in Minnesota that provided a free cat for every guest.

I once got to live with a Japanese farmdog named Daichi. He was amazing, because that's just how shiba inus roll. (Even though he did manage to get into the henhouse one night, and had himself a fine ol' chicken-killing party. But we forgave him, because look at that face.)

Humanity has been chilling with canines for longer than we've been brewing beer - which is to say, pretty much the entirety of what we now call "civilization." Making friends with wolves was probably the first skill we learned after "killing mammoths" and "pooping berries," and they've saved our hairless hides more times that we can ever count: packs of huskies shepherding diphtheria serum through the Arctic; WWI vets getting warned of poison gas attacks by their courageous comrade, "Sergeant Stubby"; dammit, they led the way into space for us.

If cutting raw meat and scooping poop sounds like a slice of furry heaven, you can scutwork your way up the pack hierarchy as a volunteer dog handler at the annual Iditarod; if you want something a little bit less rushed, you're more than welcome to try your hand at a sled dog internship in the Yukon, or training K9 units outside of Little Rock, or leading husky safaris in Lappland. But if peeing icicles or donning a ratty chewsuit isn't your bag, you could always ride the furry pooptrain straight into social work by training service dogs, because bless you.

Dogs: restoring our humanity since 100,000 B.C.

I've known a professional singer or two. And they get the same treatment as a lot of artists get: "offers" to sing for free as "exposure." Seems like a fair exchange, after their years of training in which they learned to turn their voicebox into a sonic weapon of resonant beauty.

But while I've some adventurous friends, I can't say I've known any who've made a living as a singing telegram - which, with seemingly no caveat, is absolutely still a viable gig. You'd have thought the market for vocal assault would have folded around the same time live musician's unions lost out to "canned music" at "talkies", but I guess that's like worrying that concerts would go the way of the dodo because we invented mp3s. Meanwhile, a Chinese video gaming platform has accidentally transformed into a nation of crowdfunded karaoke stars.

In other news, please don't ask opera singers about when they're going on [Nation] Idol.

One of my dearest friends recently reupholstered a chair for her girlfriend, and her family freaked out a little bit. "We should hire you!," they said. "Don't," she replied. "You have no idea what I had to put myself through for that goddamn chair. I'm the greatest f-ing girlfriend."

Happy Schmaltz, Chocolate and Orgasms Day, you mighty dragons.

I once got kicked out of a buffet restaurant for overeating. Along with breaking a shoe while dancing, it was one of my proudest moments.

Eating tasty meals is one of the closest things I have to religion, and anyone who knows me has heard me refer to cooking as 'food magic.' It doesn't have to be fancy: I remember reading an article about what Americans from the Deep South considered to be the best meal they ever had; they responded almost universally with something like, "Grandma's cornbread, just this morning." Our stomachs may be soulmates.

Even hapless snackhacks like me can learn to whip up a few heaping mouthfuls of deliciousness, whether it's through viral hit cookbooks for the paycheck-challenged or kitchen internships in friggin' downtown Rome. We wouldn't have made it this far as a species otherwise, because grandma's jambalaya (amazing) or your partner's ginger beer curry (also amazing) is just love by another name: we live in a world where hunger charities host year-long food system internships, soup kitchens in Boston hire live-in staff, and food banks are born on a whim.

(And remember: we live in a world where famine isn't just a tragedy, but a crime; bellies can also be emptied or filled at the ballot box.)

Food is a gift, but any work towards community gardens or locavorism won't get far if the people you aim to feed only know their way around a microwave. That's why you have crews like the Civilian Cooking Corps running amok in the name of culanthropy service trips, a "League of Kitchens" cooking school taught entirely by immigrants, restaurants in Amish country staffed entirely by refugees, and a whole job board dedicated to good food. The UK has actually started having annual regional cookouts; how better to change the world than curry potlucks?

And it's not like okra and black beans drop fully-formed out of the ether - they come from a finite, empowering resource called land, and that resource crunch has prompted some wicked inspirational radical farmers who are working to reconnect peoples' mouths with their hearts. There's also amazing work being done by food wizards working to resuscitate their lost or neglected culinary traditions, in what has been called "culinary justice" (which sounds far more righteous than "kitchen necromancy"): you've got black Jewish men extolling West African roots of southern cuisine while making a mean kosher jumbo, "decolonized diet" university programs, and precolonial restaurant menus.

Because, seriously: I once snacked on fermented shark in Iceland, and you'll never convince that a taste like that wasn't witchcraft.

I'm a child of the modern world; in a fight between me and Encino Man, the caveman is undoubtedly the superior cook, artist and lion-slayer. I know more about double-slit experiments and obscure Scrabble words than I do about which wild mushrooms won't make me puke my guts out my eyeballs. The only time I remember handling clay as a child, I made my mother a tiny brontosaurus (and that jerk never even existed).

And I'm the bigger idiot for it, because clay is one of the most magical materials in the history of the world, without which we'd still be a few thousand years shy of things like written language and houses not made of palm fronds. So I've nothing but respect for the wheel-throwing wizards who can earthbend the ground beneath their feet into a lifetime's supply of dope wine goblets and homebrewed kimchi.

It must also be neat to live in apprenticeship heaven. In it for the art? Done. Cookware? Set. Water filters? Golden. Cars? Wait, cars?

As an overly excitable nerd, I've done my fair share of teaching: I've strapped teenagers into flight simulators, yapped about the biological exuberance of sex and gender, and shoved eels into the hands of school children aboard a wandering science schooner.

But teaching is more than that. If teaching only required the enthusiastic transmission of data, we could eventually just airdrop holosuites of Vi Hart and Neil deGrasse Tyson the world over and call it a day (not that you totally shouldn't tune into Star Talk, you guys). Teaching isn't just about nerding out, it's about promoting educational health. It's about caring about peoples' hearts so hard that they also grow a brain.

So I might find it upsetting when politicians look at underprivileged schools and think to themselves, "You know what these kids need? Bootstraps." As if my friends' students (like, say, in Chicago) only had to muster their can-do spirit up the ladder of social mobility, up and over its crumbling rungs of food deserts and gang violence and lead poisoning. And as if someone like me - whose own educational background is just one orbiting popcorn laser shy of Real Genius - didn't feel like this budgetary triage wasn't, maybe, completely backward.

Here's what I mean: I got pegged, at an early age, as one of those "gifted" youngsters that states love to fête with trophies and resources and talk of "the future." But, awkward baby monastic that I was, I didn't feel any more clever than my best friend - who could kill at merengue, tell stories for days, and care for his little brother like a champ - but whose teachers hated him for being a brown punk with a smart mouth.

Can you guess which one of us is now getting their PhD in clinical nutrition? That guy. It just took him years until he could stop hating school.

I wasn't gifted - I was just respected and not poor. I was what a kid, given a loving community and full belly, is naturally predisposed to be: curious and ambitious to the point of being insufferable. Once I'd come that far, mentorships or fancy lab equipment are just icing on the cake; I could have crafted together my own education out of chewing gum and bailing wire, like an X-Man with a library card.

We need all the teachers and resources we can get. But until we can grow them in vats, I suggest we give 'em to the kids who need it the most.

A couple years ago, a vast conspiracy of sugarburglars snuck into Canada's Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, and made off with eighteen million dollars of delicious tree blood. It may have been hilarious across the border, but every Canadian I know had a friggin' panic attack.

If you haven't had the pleasure of sugaring off, then I can't recommend it enough. Although if you don't know any better, I suppose that term must sound like a classy euphemism for the world's most adorable cocaine and cupcakes party; it is, by contrast, simple adorably Canadian.

If you can't get out of the city, you can scratch your sucrose itch at the inevitable pop-up taffy stands, at which friendly sweetness purveyors (aka, food saints) pour boiling syrup onto freshly-laid snow, and wrap the cooling crystals around a stick for instant, DIY sap popsicles.

But if you can manage a jaunt into the Quebec woods, and find one of the legions of sugar shacks, you can and indulging in a bottomless maple syrup buffet. Maple-smoked ham. Maple-cooked eggs. Maple syrup on baked beans. Maple syrup on oreilles de crisse - or "Christ's ears," otherwise known as deep-fried pork jowls. Pancakes for days. I put maple syrup in my milk, because only God can judge me.

And lest they make the same mistake twice, Canada has since built la forteresse du sirop d’érable: the Maple Syrup Fortress.

I have a friend who went to school for oncology massage - which, honestly, is one of the most humbling medical fields I've ever heard of.

A lot of people fighting cancer have been touched more by chemo than by human hands, because sometimes humanity sucks at priorities. And yet, when my friend found herself doing rounds in hospice, she actually caught some flack from her medical mentors; they felt that hospice work wouldn't do justice to her intelligence. This is terrible for two reasons: one, because it suggests that being clever is somehow antithetical to basic human kindness; and two, because it does nothing to provide hospice workers with the lifelong ice cream supply they all deserve.

This kindness can also take the form of letting people die when they choose, and letting them do so with dignity. It shouldn't require tattooing "Do Not Resuscitate" across a person's chest to give them control over the last days of their life, which was as successful as it's now fleeting,

But if you fancy the idea of playing travel agent for twilight gondola guides across the River Styx, than you can stake your claim with year-long volunteer programs to accompany the dying. Because until we somehow manage to abuse our telomeres into releasing their inner Highlander, I think it behooves us to treat our dying like we would our astronauts: with a sense of wonder and gratitude that they've gone before us.

Welp! Back to talking about the 99.9% of gigs out there that don't involve asteroids, video games, or cyborgs. Yet.

Man, I'm totally going to miss neon.

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