working

i'm self-employed. this means lots of things. it means i have to pay the part of social security and medicare tax that my employer would were i employed by a company, twice what a wage-earner pays. it means that i can do what i want most of the time. it means that some days i sit around doing nothing, usually feeling guilty. sometimes i feel overwhelmed by possibility. lately i've been experimenting with a regimen picked up from the routines of the homesteaders i've been reading about. i work three or four hours a day doing labor directly related to my "bread", in my case it's working on my two buildings--and i mean labor, like scraping paint, lifting things, carpentry, masonry, plumbing. then i spend another four hours doing whatever i feel feeds me, lately reading. i don't feed myself nearly enough and this practice alone has affected me deeply. the rest of the day i spend working on a project or projects that relate to community, in my case, it's a camp project in southern vermont for the radical faeries or helping friends with their projects. i've often thought about how much happened in school and wondered how i could bring that level of accomplishment into my adult life. in school i was scheduled, fed (intellectually and gastronomically) and housed. i really had no choice in the matter. classes happened, information flowed, and opportunities to socialize abounded. so, perhaps, this schedule i'm trying out is an attempt to bring some of that richness into my adult life. so far it's very satisfying, but it's still new and the novelty is attractive. stay tuned for the long term review.