A difficulty, considered...

I am going to India.
The money is paid, the tickets are bought.
One of my best friends is getting married Hindu-style to one of the best men I know, and my parents made sure that I can be there.

So, that's awesome, right?

I just got a job - it pays minimum wage, it involves standing and stuffing inserts into papers for 3 hours one night a week and not more than 12 hours another night.
It is work. It is a paycheck. It is a start.

Last night was the first shift I'd worked since I learned I'm going to India this winter, so I took a moment and told my boss that I will be gone from work for probably 3 weeks over Christmas.

Her response was "Well, I guess I'll have to let you go," which I interpreted as she'd have to fire me and hire someone else for the season (a thing which I kind of feel is not entirely unreasonable) and then, "I usually like to only have one person gone at a time, and I think someone else is going to be gone, but since you're going to India, I guess I'll have to let you."

A) I will quit if it comes down to that.
B) "Let" me go? Are you sure about that?

and then this happened in my brain:

Minimum wage work tends to be the most physically demanding, both in terms of the kind of work that is done and the lack of flexibility there is in doing it. The people who do what I think of as necessary grunt work are treated as replaceable and yet are reminded of their responsibility to show up and work hard and to not expect any of kind respect or meaningful acknowledgment. I have worked many of these jobs, and am forever astonished at the callous ways in which my co-workers and myself have been treated, especially as the timeliness and correctness of the work we did was always somehow crucial to the future lives of other people. They needed us and yet we were inferior and dismissed.

I recognize that a degree in higher education and/or specialized training and skill development get rewarded. I intend to go to graduate school and to develop specialized skills so that I can be rewarded. It is not unfamiliar to me, nor is it to me unfair. I do not intend to ever be at a job where I am not working. I do not intend to pursue a career in something that allows me to ignore it for hours a day or days a month or months a year while still insuring me an unbalanced allotment of power. I intend to work with people whose skills are not necessarily the same as mine, but are respected by me and by each other.

So here is the observation: The people who are not paid enough to provide themselves with adequate (much less desirable) medical treatment are the ones who are also not offered benefits as opposed to the people who can afford to pay for private doctors and full-coverage insurance without having to go through an employer. The people who cannot afford to not work for a few days (much less to travel (more on that later)) are not even offered vacation days. This is an imbalance that seems more than unfair, it seems unspoken. There is nothing that makes me less of a human being than someone who makes 4 times what I do in one day. And yet there is this expectation of disregard and distrust and its resultant anger and despair.

My experience of people is that while we speak words that seem to express our general sentiment that we are all created equal, we all do live lives that continue to reinforce the idea that some of us are more equal than others, and that there is somehow a moral component attached to a paycheck. Better people deserve more nice things to themselves. Those of us who have accepted generous gifts offered by people in our lives are not as good as the people who have provided these things for themselves. (Having said that: it is humbling to accept such gifts, and my gratitude knows no bounds. Travel is the thing that I do when I am the most myself, and nothing can express how happy I am whenever I get to pursue it.)

I would be self-sustaining. I would thrive and in some ways profit. I do not doubt that I've gotten my life into a position where it has to become creative and active and all the things that it needs to be in order to be more than it was 5 months ago. That was sort of the point.

None of this makes me a better person. I would not give up the physical act of work just because it seems that the society in which I live ascribes a certain level of negativity to it.

Much of the frustration in my life over the last several years has been an inability to express discontent in any way that does not seem irrational or self-indulgent or illogical. I am in no way free from my own politics, but that does not mean that I am shackled to a position or perspective. I have no idea what I will do with this slightly less shrieky approach to inhumanity in the world, but I like the idea that I can listen more easily.