Addendum addendum addendum.

One of my pet peeves is how where I'm at professionally comes up, people talk about my skills.

I recently caught up with my one (straight) friend who's into (BDSM), and he was saying, "Oh, you're so enthusiastic, you'd be such a great teacher!"\

(Yes -- now show me a job.)

Like, when I was disentangling from the collapsing eldercare sector, another friend commented that I had skills in that area as a "healer."

(Okay, that's one way of putting it -- now show me a healthy part of that sector that's worth getting involved in, now that I spent years in it to establish myself and work my way up, only to see it fall apart around me.)

Or, on a recent visit to my hometown, a librarian that I'm friendly with there was asking me what I was doing, and when I said waiting tables, she was saying something about how I should be doing something better, and she caught herself and was like, "Oh, I mean I'm sure you're a a great waiter, but you're so talented, it just seems like there's something better out there."

(Okay, fine, but don't talk hypothetically, now, instead go and actually show me.)

It's just the same shit over and over and over again, where people focus on the individual in their discussions and can't grapple with systemic economic degradation.

My one lawyer friend from (Missouri) says that people who give comments like that are trying to be helpful, but it's really just tiring.

For a while, my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) would engage people like that socratically in a kind of dick-ish way -- "Oh, interesting, so there are opportunities there? Oh wait, why did you think there are opportunities there? Oh, so you mean that anyone with that skill could get a job like that, how many people do you think have that skill, and how many jobs are there like that? Oh, so this advice on careers really isn't based on anything?" -- which really is dick-ish, but I think that was his way of dealing with that, too.

As he has said, when engaging your personal employment situation, people never make initial stray comments about the system, like, "Oh, isn't it a shame that they don't pay nurses more!"

Instead, it's all about you, and your skills, and what you could be doing.