Now, THIS is what I should be doing!

I just hung up the telephone after talking with the temp agency that has been giving me work assignments at various local factories. For the past 13 months or so, I’ve been working as a casual laborer at a pharmaceutical factory… packaging products in their “liquids” department. Mouthwash; cough syrup; hand lotion: that sort of thing. A large portion of what is produced there goes to the American market; however, with the rise in value of the Canadian dollar over the past half-year or so, many previously profitable items are now produced at a loss – if at all. Consequently, the drive to increase factory efficiency has been intense; and, for the most part, directed at making the workers do more than was previously expected of them.

It has also meant that work hours have been greatly curtailed: now, contract and regular staff are regularly replacing temp workers because all aspects of the factory have cut back production. As a result, my work hours dropped to the point where my three 12 hour shifts on weekend nights were reduced to 19 or 24 hours per week.

Of course, the shifts I had been working were the least popular in the entire plant; and thus I was one of the last temp workers to actually lose regular shifts. Had the person in charge of that department not been someone I’ve known for almost 30 years, I might not have been so lucky as to end up working when no regular staff usually wants to. Some temp workers who regularly work more the usual weekday shifts have been out of work for close to two months.

Anyway, as I was saying: today at 7:00 AM marked exactly 7 days since I last worked; and that means that I can now ‘request’ my current record of employment… which will be issued due to “Layoff – Lack of work”.

That means I am now eligible to file for unemployment insurance.

Sounds good to me; the past two years that I’ve worked in local factories as a temp laborer has been the longest period in my life that I have been regularly employed. The 13 months I’ve been at the pharmaceutical factory has been the longest period I’ve ever actually worked at one place (and gotten paid – I’ve ‘worked-for-free’ for much longer periods at non-profit places I WANTED to help keep going)!

I’ve got other things that I should be doing – philosophical things!

So now, I will once again be able to direct my productivity into things that I want to do. My taijiquan practice has suffered greatly over the past two years, dropping from peaks of 4-6 hours a day to a meager one or two sets a week. Oddly enough, though, I seem to have been getting more exercise of one sort: during two 2.5 hour work periods on one shift not too long ago, I piled 10,000 liters of mouthwash onto skids for shipping. That’s a bit beyond my most intense tai chi practice, where I usually use only 5 pound hand weights; and as a result, my own weight has stabilized at 160 pounds… a good weight for my 6’4” frame.

Much better than the 135 pounds I ended up starving myself down to – twice – while scraping together enough money to conduct the field work for my research project into the origin of writing. Of course, my taijiquan felt a bit swifter back in that period, from 1991 to 1998; but realistically, I’m not sure that the extra speed I may have had then isn’t outweighed by the increased mass I can now apply. Either way, the end goal is the same: matching the relaxed density of the muscles with the enhanced elasticity of the tendons, and thus enabling the muscle/tendon groups to function as one in producing standing waves and transferring solitons through the body’s structure. I recently noticed that, a karate practitioner of my age (44) who has been involved in that sport as long as I have been practicing the art of taijiquan (21 years) would be ranked as a 6th degree black belt; but tai chi, of course, does not use a belt system.

So, I’m looking forward to once again getting back to my regular practice of taijiquan. It was never so much a matter of available time over the past two years as it was a question of how quickly my muscles heal from the strain of manual labor in a factory context. After seven days of NOT standing for 3X twelve hours on a concrete floor while wearing steel toed and shanked boots, my feet have finally stopped hurting. The tear in a tendon just below my right elbow (from unloading boxes of power tools from transport trailers at another work assignment) finally healed about 4-5 months ago (that took about 8 months); and it is really nice not having to wrap elastic bandages around my knees/legs when I work, in an effort to keep the veins in my legs from collapsing into a varicose state.

But most of all, it will be nice not having to go for three days every week with just 6-7 hours sleep between 12 hour shifts; because it is really difficult to consistently apply oneself to the demands of an ongoing philosophic project when one’s time is regularly broken up by that kind of sleep deprivation coupled with the monotony of packing products on a production line.

At least now I actually have the equipment I need to properly compose and present my research: I ended up funding my initial research by selling all such equipment I had previously assembled – as well as my personal library – back in the early 1990’s. It was definitely the right choice: I managed to pull together some almost impossibly amazing things; and at this point in time, most of my ground work - physical and conceptual - is finished.

All things considered, finishing my research project up should be even more fun than the great time I had after leaving university in the mid 1980’s, when I traveled around Canada working with environmental groups and developing the philosophic ground work (where post-structuralism intersects with visual communications and metalinguistics – I’m also a photographer, after all!) which enabled me to realize, starting with that first artifact which I found in Bute Inlet during a hike in October of 1991, that the First Nations of North America did indeed use a form of writing during pre-Columbian times.

Today, I would even be tempted to say that they (or certainly, their direct ancestors) INVENTED writing!

Well; back to scanning negatives into my computer while I hand code my new web site. I was a good idea to buy a cheap tower for internet access, and hook it up to my existing system’s keyboard, video and mouse using a KVM switch from Radio Shack… my main computer is tied up for 8 hour stretches in scanning, and I can’t use it at all when it’s doing that. That cheap tower was the second last thing I managed to buy before my work hours finally evaporated: the last thing being a comfortable office-type chair to replace the wooden one I had been using.

That was a REALLY good idea.

Anyway: back to my HTML text. Gotta love those cascading style sheets; but I can see that merging frames with dynamic HTML for my site map is going to take a bit of work!

Later…

www.OriginOfWriting.com