Thursday, July 24, 2014

People making stuff

Or, "It seems like when there's something I really want to watch on TV, it's when I don't have time, and then when I do have time, there's nothing."

This morning, taking a few minutes' break before dressing, packing my lunch, and practicing piano, I flipped on the PBS channel. There was a show on "natural beekeeping" on. What first caught my attention was how it was filmed - fairly long pauses just showing the bees doing their thing, with snippets of music in the background. This was then interspersed with segments of the man the show was featuring talking a little about how he did his beekeeping - how he harvested the honey, how he maintained the supers, stuff like that.

I like programs like that. I enjoy watching people make stuff or work on stuff. And things like beekeeping (or alpaca-raising, or having a small herb farm, or making traditional instruments the traditional way) are just inherently interesting to me. I also eagerly read "Mary Jane's Farm" (I have a subscription) and when I visit my parents, I read my mom's copy of "Grit." (I should probably take out a subscription to that one. It has some good recipes and even if I never do own a hobby-farm, it's still interesting to me to learn about the heirloom breeds and stuff like how you keep ponies on small acreage.) And I like shows like the beekeeping show. Not just because it's about "making stuff" but it's also calm and slow-paced and no one is screaming at anyone else. (I suppose to be a good beekeeper, it helps to be a calm and slow-paced person.)

(We have hundreds of channels out there. Why can we not have a "people making stuff" channel that just has slow-paced, documentary-like (or PBS-show-like) programs on these different processes? That's a kind of "reality tv" I'd actually enjoy)


I also tweeted about this article on sheep-shearing yesterday, with the comment that I can tell I've hit end-of-semester burnout because I find myself looking at all these other careers and feeling a "the grass is greener over there" sense about it. (Of course, another article on raising animals starts off with "There will be poop..." so that helps bring me back to reality a bit. Then again, would dealing with ungulate poop be so very bad?)

Part of it, I think, is that all of those things - beekeeping, breadmaking, cabinetmaking, raising fiber animals - it feels to me like there's an immediacy there, you can see the results of what you do every day and that must be tremendously satisfying. With teaching, you never know who's going to succeed in their career and how much you actually helped them. (And perhaps we aren't helping them all that much; today a fellow pony-fan linked an article discussing innumeracy rates. And at least some of those innumerates had to have attended college...) And it's easy to get frustrated with that seeming lack of results; I regularly find myself looking around and going "Surely there's some job where you don't have to take it on faith that you're doing some good in the world?"

Oh, I know: beekeeping has its problems. Especially in this part of the world, where the so-called killer bees could come and take over your hive. (One semester I had a student who was a hobbyist beekeeper, and he spoke of how he had to "eliminate" one hive after they showed suspicious swarming behavior and were acting like the Africanized bees. I guess later inspection of the queen showed that in fact the hive had been taken over...) And with raising animals for fiber, there are the vet bills and the creatures that mysteriously die out in the field and the getting up at 2 am to assist in a difficult lambing. And with being a baker, there are all the inspections and the constant cleaning of the kitchen and the having to worry about labeling everything with potential allergens...

But still, when I'm frustrated with my "real" job, I fantasize about the ones I don't actually have and think about how nice, and how wholesome, and how fulfilling it would be to start my day by, I don't know, going out and looking at the hives or going out and harvesting eggs from the henhouse or whatever other thing.

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