Jobs as Leisure

 Well, that's enough for one afternoon. The difference between having a job and doing a 'job' as leisure is that you can finish whenever you like. For some people writing poems, or about poetry, is their job and that must be hard. For most of them, though, it's not the job that pays the bills, it's the one that sustains their reputation. They have other roles that pay money they can live on.

A lot of us do other people's jobs for pleasure, though. For me, writing about poems takes a lot longer than writing poems. Some of a Sunday afternoon spent counting punctuation marks in poems in order to make some esoteric point was enjoyable in its way. It turns out I'm going to have to modify the point I was hoping to make in the light of my findings. Then, knowing a quotation I want to cite but having to find exactly where it occurs for the sake of the footnote is sometimes more painstaking than it ought to be (see footnote) but I feel as if I'm having a go at being a university academic working on an erudite treatise in much the same way as in 1970 I was having a go at being George Best, in the 1980's-2000's, Alex Higgins, and in the 1990's a long-distance bike rider, amongst other such things.

For those that really do perform sport, or creative art, for a living- and are mostly well rewarded for doing so- there must be some pressure involved unless they are sublimely brilliant at it but I suffer less if my poem or my review of a local piano recital isn't very good. But I still have to be satisfied it was worth the effort or else I'm aware I've wasted my time.

But there's much to be said for being amateur, doing it for the love of it. 'Professional' can be a mis-interpreted word, taken to mean 'expert' when it only means 'doing it for money'. Since giving up the day job, which was a job that asked for no outrageous talent (although you'd be surprised), horse racing has provided more income than writing but that is the plan. I don't even want any money for writing. That's not the point of it.

I'll get back to adding footnotes, amending words, phrases and probably even paragraphs, another time. There's no rush. Whether or not this latest effort sees print remains to be seen. If I didn't have to try, in the hope that it might, there would be a bit less point to it.

Footnote - Painstaking, that's the taking of pains and not the staking of pain, do you think?