I nearly ended up at UVic once upon a time as a student; I’m glad I dodged that bullet.

I read “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun, when I was a kid, and I remember the starving writer who refused to pawn his friend’s blanket to buy food.

John Dolan is that character — alive still.

get food/money, find jerbs:

- go to money mart and get a loan. I used to make up paystubs in windows paint and print them out. I even edited my bank account information easily by saving the web page to online banking and adjusting everything. Receive $300-1,000 instantly (pay it back whenever, who cares they’re loan shark scum)

- getafreelancer.com has a ton of writing jobs that pay immediately for blog work.

- scour craigslist for one day jobs, like being somebody’s personal assistant, being paid $50 to wait in line at the passport office, editing something, ect.

- walk into an employment head hunting company and show them your freaking PHD. Walk out with job teaching english to Koreans on student visas for $40k/yr plus benefits. Mon-Fri 10am – 3pm easy work, your hot wife could do it too and you’d both pull in near 80k. Then you can spend time finding a position you want to do instead of being desperate and taking anything (like this ESL job)

- The Vancouver Olympics need anybody who can speak a second language. I assume you speak Russian, and probably French. This guarantees you a job right now.

- Sikh temples have free food for anybody. No mandatory preaching first, just walk in and eat. There’s also the food bank, countless shelters serving actual food and you can receive food credit slips from any of them to buy your own food.

- Dozens of homeless advocacy job placement, residences and lawyers exist. Use them for $0.00 (also if you were supposedly fired, you can sue in Canada and get at least a 3yr settlement. Talk to an employment lawyer).

- The farther north you go, the more desperate they are for teachers. John Ralston Saul sometimes teaches in Iqaluit while writing his books. He always writes them up north for some reason.

I just spent all of 3mins searching for faculty jobs in British Columbia and found over 300 of them. UNBC is hiring P/T instructors right now for the English dept, History, everything. Yeah Prince George sucks, but cost of living is nothing and you can rant endlessly from your fortress of solitude on this site and in print in your spare time. Ignore all this if you already found a job and no longer live in a van down by the river.

I bet any of the private english schools around Seymour St in Vancouver with all asian students would’ve hired you in a flash to teach english. Not exactly huge money, but enough to cover the bills while you write a book, or apply to other universities.

Craigslist and the canada job bank are also full of building manager jobs. they are always looking for older responsible couples just to take rent and perform very light maintenance. this is a shitty job, but you do maybe 3hrs work a day and get a huge discount on rent in exchange to a salary. Then use your spare time to write/whatever. Idk

If you a have a driver’s license, you can work as a cab driver.

I know it sounds outrageously downmarket for a college professor. But hear me out. In every city in the world they are ALWAYS hiring cab drivers.

It is job that is open everywhere no matter what your immigration status.

The reason is the way the cab companies set up the job. They lease the cabs for 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. You pay the lease in advance.

This works out to having to pay to take a day off, so drivers don’t. They quickly become burnt out and quit.

Huge turnover, that’s why they are always hiring.

But for me it is a blessing, because I can gut out 40 or 50 days in a row, then cruise, and when my $$ runs down I just buy back into a cab lease and gut out another run.

You don’t even have to know the city you drive in. 95% of your customers know where they are going and are happy to direct you. After a while you get it down and end up knowing the city better than the locals.

Just a tip.

really, tho, I’m surprised it took you this long to find out how most people are. maybe that’s what happens when you are forced outta the pseudo-Berkley hole that is BC. people with money and needs met, can afford to pretend.

The problem is that people have far too many choices. Unless you have some ability to handle them more choices won’t make you happy, they just give more ways to be miserable. Everyone wants only the good parts of anything, no one is prepared to accept things in their entirety. Today you are here you like this but you don’t like that. So naturally it must be better there, so you go there where you again like this but dont like that and so on and so forth.

What is Dr Dolan doing still looking for positions in academia? Has he not written of the appalling squalor that is the academic world? But is he not also looking to sneak in himself? What does he expect? A profession where everyone sneaks in and gets jobs for life and yet one where there is firesome honest debate, integrity, brilliant work and grand recognition for everyone? How is this possible? And when you get your sneaky academic job you insist on wrecking it in order to prove you are ‘right’? This is destructiveness at its worst. Your employers hired you to do a particular job, why should they be interested in what you think is ‘right’, that you think Monbiot is a sanctimonious twit? To bite the hand that feeds you is just dumb.

Night must follow day: everything has its positives and negatives. Yet there are things that fit our natural temperament better than others. Has not Dr Dolan written about being an anglophone? Then what is he doing in British Columbia of all places, the most anglo of anglo lands? Is he a masochist? You want warmer people, go somewhere where there are some. Even there you will have to work, do some job, and there will be things you dont like. You hate anglo lands and academia, yet you want a position in academia in an anglo land? Where are you lost?

This too is the human experience. We make patterns of behavior and repeat them even if they cause us misery. But what one sees here seems to be a strong sense of privilege: why didn’t life go exactly as I want it, why are my words not the center of everyone’s attention and why isn’t everyone completely preoccupied with my problems? Some of this comes out of people going to schools like Berkeley and the ivy league. People who graduate from these places simply cannot countenance that they are in the end just like everyone else and will suffer all the problems that others suffer too. They can’t countenance that others may be as ‘right’ as they are; everyone must have the same opinion they do, and everyone must know they are right. This is lame.

Only meditation can save you. You will become aware of the patterns you are engaging in and learn how not to repeat them, to make new ones. You will understand that the grand opinions you have, what you think is ‘right’, is really just the noise of your silly ego. And you will learn acceptance and the sense of wholeness that comes with that; taking the good and the bad without reservation. Ordinarily for anything we do we get used to what is good and only notice what is bad. But this is not hard and fast, we can learn how to accept the bad and be aware of the good.

This of course depends on whether you want to heal. If you have no desire to heal, if you have a death wish then no one can help you. Look carefully and you will see that entitlement and death wish are two extremes of the same thing. Entitlement turns into death wish when the title does not come or does not fulfill. It does appear that this sad sack has something of a death wish, some bad destructive streak. He doesn’t want to do well, he doesn’t want to he happy. After all if he is happy what will he have to complain about? How will he live if he is not hating something or the other? Or perhaps he is happy hating.

The death wish is a strange thing. We tend to see the world through our childhood patterns and this destructiveness often manifests itself unconsciously then: for children with unhappy family lives or the adolescent who is not on the top of the social totem pole and experiences the great let down that sex love and relationships initially are, who knows that his fantasies will have to be adjusted, that they may never be fulfilled.

Please go find that meditation center.

Private teachers in Siberia make $100/hr. In Slovakia I made $35/hr to talk about movies and traveling with already fluent students. In Bangkok they hire any a-hole that speaks English, even as a second language.

You can probably get a paid plane ticket to Korea or Japan and an apartment if you do a one year contract.

Then again, I got the feeling that this was fictional writing anyways. If thats true then I take all my advice back and say good job in creating a believable story.

First sentence
> I should have done some kind of crime. But what kind? That’s what I couldn’t figure out. What kind of crime can you actually do, if you aren’t a lawyer and don’t understand computers?

As a typical Exiled reader I reserve the right not to read beyond the first sentence before rushing to assist my hero. Short attention span? Who? Moi?

Scary thing is…I think I know some of the people…or more than likely they repeat drearily harbour to harbour.

But..I know a Johnny and Jimmy…and a Chris who’s boat was always sinking,whos now in his van.you wern’t in brentwood bay were you?
Thing is with boats…if you don’t like your neighbour moving ain’t a big deal.

Not sure what’s going to happen to those 100k suburban cops. They are probably going to die to some tea party lynch mob.