When I was going to community college, I had a professor who highly recommend I not go straight through to my highest degree and then start teaching. "Go see the world," he said. "Do stuff. Have adventures. Get your hands dirty. Don't be one of those people who never experiences the reality of the average person" ...because, to him, school was definitely the polar opposite of "the real world."
The problem? He never actually defined what he meant by the real world. I suspect he meant "compile lots of experiences," but I couldn't help but think of "the real world" as having some relation to the traditional signifiers of masculinity. If Academic was not real world, did this mean I had to take up Trade work? Become a mechanic? Build something tangible with my scarred, bleeding hands? If pressed, I know that I could not explain why I bought into this blue collar fetishization. Still, the image held sway.
This was another problem, because, in spite of a weird obsession with home improvement television shows (was this a signifier of my yet-undiagnosed Autism?), I was never what you would consider "handy." Tools were not my friend. Fixing stuff was not my jam. I didn't have the coordination to be mechanically capable. All I could be, I felt, was a blue collar tourist, maybe blue collar-adjacent.
I'm not saying these were explicit thoughts, but the attitude did seem to hold some sway in my various jobs to date. As a teen, I had done some lawn care and construction work in addition to my near-decade of Little Caesars. During community college, I broadened my experience by slaving away in warehouses for a few months. I went broader in terms of job types during my post-community college break by doing sales, but that job was still blue collar-esque at least in terms of the level of security and dignity it provided.
I returned to university life for many reasons, but one of them was definitely "an attempt to better myself." I had done enough of the menial, of the blue collar, and now, it was time to move on. This justification was, I now realize, code language for some mixture of "I deserve more dignity than this temp work/labor life provides" and "I'm simply not suited for a blue collar existence." At the time, I was not aware enough as a person, though, to really grok how much this mindset was riddled with both prejudice and contradiction.
All I could see was a future possibility of working in a book-lined study in a house with interesting brick architecture, reading tome after tome while wearing some equivalent of a tweed jacket with corduroy elbow patches. People who live such a life don't need to be good with a hammer. They don't need to be able to rebuild large household appliances. Theirs was the dignity of a life of the mind. The rest? People can be hired for the rest. That's what I wanted for myself.
This was not, though, what I got. Yes, I eventually ended up with a University teaching job, but it is very much of the worker bee variety. I don't have a life of abstract ideas. I don't live in a cool multistory brick gothic revival. I don't have a tweed jacket. And when something around here breaks? Rather than call someone, I generally have to default to grabbing my toolbox.
Painting the wood underneath the thresholds of both my front and rear house doors, though, was shockingly zen. I don't know how good I am at it...probably not very...but the act of house painting was soothing. It was calming. I could put forth a good effort, and the quality of the final project was almost entirely due to those efforts. I liked that.
Have I achieved that mythical balance between school in the real world? No idea...but I've got the scars on my hands to prove I'm at least working at it.
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