New Year, Brand New Content

I just came back from the Portland Parks and Recreation annual Public Budget Discussion. Before you admire my parks journalism diligence, I have to tell you that I was an hour late. I wrote 7pm on the calendar last week, which was unfortunate because it began at six. I made it on time last year and composed a great write up of the event (in inserting that hyperlink I just realized a wrote it was a “great” account of the public budget discussion, which you may take with a grain of salt), in case you’re demanding credentials. This year there was someone with a camera, not sure who, but somebody else had the public’s interest in mind, so don’t worry.

I missed, as I could see from the agenda, the Call to Order, Commissioner Fritz’s Welcome, Budget 101, and Parks Director Mike Abbaté’s account of the 2015-16 fiscal year budget. I did make it in time for the Tabletop Discussions segment, in which each citizen was given 400,000 hypothetical dollars to prioritize funding.

This complex process was confusing, especially since I just walked in, grabbed a clementine from the snack area, and had no context. The General Fund Forecast released last month was way off my radar unfortunately. But apparently Mayor Charlie Hales is calling for a 5% cut in the general fund. But that’s crazy, right? After last year’s 6% increase in parks and recreation funding, and another mind-boggling year of growth we’re going to cut back funding?

The first thing I saw they were going to turn off the fountains. “If funding is eliminated, the community would lose access to 18 fountains, 11 of them interactive and therefore part of summer recreation and cooling opportunities.” What unholy nonsense is this? Salmon Street Springs turned off? Well I guess probably not that one, but all of the colorful water features on the east side of the river turned off, interactive no longer, summer recreation and cooling opportunities defunded out of existence.

The gist of the not particularly exciting general fund forecast is that we can’t count on the $11 million allocated from the surplus that is funding one-off programs, with added expenses from increasing personnel costs associated with inflation and larger employer PERS rates (which apparently you don’t have to define in a budget document. I had to look it up: Public Employees Retirement System).

We were supposed to divide up our $400,000 by multiples of $50,000, so I gave the fountains 50k, another 50 to not cutting seasonal positions (delaying the opening of bathrooms until JUNE), and another 50 here, there–really it all seemed fairly arbitrary. It’s the same thing as last year. The dozen people that use the Buckman Pool are the most emotionally invested and will end up keeping their indoor pool. The Summer Free for All program will remain because it has become iconic and beloved. Needed infrastructure problems might get resolved or passed on down the road of time.

I’m not too worried about it. Portland Parks & Rec’s values are right in line with mine. Right off the bat, number 1 of the Budget Values provided in tonight’s hand outs:

Portland Parks & Recreation is committed to providing equitable services and programs, and welcome all members of our community, including those who are underserved due to ethnicity, income, age or ability.

Their Strategic Plan and 2020 Vision get the important stuff right: preservation of the parks legacy and the city’s natural areas. Access to recreation. Make the parks system an interconnected means of walking the city. Promote community. Can’t argue with any of that. Number 6 is what gets folks anxious and passionate, speaking trembling words of appeal to their right to the pool they’ve used forever, to the present price of a community garden plot, the need for the Sellwood Community Center:

Preserve our ability to provide basic levels of service in our most core program areas by making the difficult decisions to reduce or eliminate less core activities.

What emotional tumult to learn that what is core to you, the individual, is considered a “less core activity” to the department of Parks and Recreation. This is how the rupture between the citizen and the state begins. These meetings are how they are resolved.

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Ultimately, I was satisfied with the meeting. I ate five clementines, received some quality information with great phrasings like “Reduce pass-through allocations by a commensurate 5% that the bureau is reducing.” The idea of strategically allowing food carts to set up in parks for a fee seems like a good idea if done right. Even though I missed essentially all of the content of the presentations, I got my opinion counted, talked to a couple people about parks, and got out of the house. I didn’t shake anyone’s hand, which I guess one day I’ll have to do, either as a parks journalist, advocate, or general grown up.

On the walk back home I thought about the tough choices that need to be made to keep the thing going. I help run a bike non-profit that’s got some budget things. I’m trying to turn this into a book, with little interest and no funding. I don’t even really have a job. I’m on call for a mobile bike mechanic service. I have two bicycles available to rent on an online bike sharing service. I could stop writing this right now and pick up some food for somebody and bike it to their house. I’d be back at my house in an hour and 4-odd dollars “richer.” Essentially, it’s the dead of winter, it’s cold and rainy, and my income is dependent upon bicycling.

Of course, almost two years after taking the job, I can still log in to yet another online symptom of the sharing economy and take a writing order to complete. But alas right now, “There are no current orders.” I thought about the email the company started sending of “FAQs, tips, and more,” and issue No. 2 of the Writing Team Newsletter that I had received just the night before. Now that the organization had established itself solidly enough they have enough writers to grab orders within seconds of them appearing. Those that were there at the beginning have sufficiently colonized enough dreams that an army of unemployed writers, PhDs, and other frustrated scholars are waiting for 10 dollars a page to come there way like a drumstick stripped clean and tossed from the castle. The thanks to those who established the functionality of the service is not profit sharing or greater opportunities–it’s five more people waiting behind you who are willing to do it for less. Thus is the reality of the so-called “sharing economy”: the greater concentration of wealth accompanied by the shirking of work by those receiving all that money, which is really just capitalism on speedballs.

The email was titled “New Year, Brand New Content.”

Hello and welcome to the second issue of the Writing Team Newsletter. The entire ____ staff is pleased to see how well each of our writers has done as we have closed out the best year yet in terms of order volume and overall client and writer satisfaction. This is a new year which means new opportunities for personal growth through professional freelance writing.

In this issue, we include a contribution from Editor T., ‘What is the Deal with the Editors?’ The article explains the role of the ____ editors and offers some acute insight into what happens on the other side of the messaging system.

As we continue the journey this year as the best place to be a freelance writer, we aspire to embrace all the new challenges that will present themselves. May the content flow freely as you embark upon your first projects of the year. As always, if you are interested in responding with feedback or questions regarding this newsletter or any writing matter, you may email _____@____.

If you need inspiration before undertaking new projects, just remember the words of T.S. Eliot: “Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past into different lives… you are not the same people who left that station” (‘The Dry Salvages’ III).

There’s a lot to unpack here. Indeed we are no longer those who we were leaving the station, but let’s continue with the ensuing think piece “What is the deal with the Editors?” A question I have often asked myself. “May the content flow freely”:

Many of you, fresh faced and senior alike, have wondered why the editors at ____, Inc. behave the way they do. An editor may respond to your essay-length message board queries with as little as a word, often not responding to your comments with less. Editors expect the best from writers and may be inclined to send corrections without much explanation. And yet, we are conscious of the frustration and, less frequent, rage-quitting that occurs on the writer’s end of the communication. Having been on both sides of the equation myself, as writer and editor, I get it. Why, then, do my fellow editors and I behave this way? A lot of it comes down to time management and our high standards. Hopefully, this brief explanation that follows will speak to your concerns, answer a few of your questions and lay some of your doubts to rest.

Why oh why do the editors behave this way? Like bonafide assholes, really. Welcome to the following scenario:

Editor XY sits at her desk at Ultius headquarters or at his café booth next to the ball pit at the at-capacity McDonald’s, the screams of ecstatic children gently massaging his eardrums. They clock in for their shift and open the nine or ten separate Chrome windows necessary for basic Editorial work. These windows include the editor’s inbox, the administrative end of ____.com, our plagiarism checker, an invoicing system, and our highly organized and monitored Google spreadsheets which track adjusted writer payouts and orders ready to review, based upon final deadline of course. How was that for a refreshing to-do list? All of these pages load as the Editor gyrates the wheel of his mouse, anticipating the portion of orders due in just one hour to end but knowing full well that the new drafts will keep coming in. The Editor is always against the clock. And they have learned to work with it. They squint at the unclaimed order queue and wonder how by the beard of ____ they will find writers who can meet these urgent deadlines, sometimes five hours or less. For my part at least, my motivation and strategy are always the same: team work and shift priority, respectively.

This really humanized what before were a Kafkaesque amalgam of what I assumed to be humans. But now I understood why they were so terse and unfriendly: they were next to the ballpit teeming with unattended children in an “at-capacity McDonald’s” with 8 hours to do 10 hours of work.

I would be an editor, but they can’t hire people in Oregon. Also, I would like to spend my time doing meaningful work that matters to me.

As I continued home I considered a challenge to my community–family, friends, local consumers of culture–buy an advanced copy of my book and I will write it and not other people’s essays.

Everybody: “Stopping doing other people’s homework, Andrew.”

Me: “Make me.”

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I did the math and it’s pretty simple: 100 people commit 20 bucks to getting the Parks of Portland concluded and cohesive and I get $2,000 to devote myself for two months full-time to the decolonization of my mind. Stay posted and enjoy these kind words from the editors:

Most if not all of us, editors and writers alike, have densely packed lives, and our time is extremely valuable. So let us spend our time working in the most efficient way possible, both for the team and for our individual selves. Mastering the arts of autonomy, team work, and fluid communication go a long way toward this end, and will also serve you profoundly as a life-long learner. To our dear writers, we wish you a compassionate heart, an organized mind, productive habits and a happy new year.