Vocational service is odd to outsiders, until you try it. My mother and her family are sometimes so disabled, that to them (mostly on the surface, when being a true "drama queen" really counts), the idea that I have a business where I can publish to you daily from a public library cannot penetrate the denseness of their disordered consciousness. "But...someone else gives you a job...and you don't have a 'job'!"
None of them have business degrees, or MBA's, or business degrees from famous Ivy League schools with MBA's attached to it, like my brothers do, nor the entrepreneurial experience all of us as a family have, because as proud members of the merchant class, we believe that honest trade is a good measure in any kind of society. Fair trade is defined to us as a "win/win" situation, which is the only type of business I transact. You read me, and we all benefit from it. You see?
I do not have commercial advertisers because I am a not-for-profit, and I come from religious family. Who better to fund me than my own kind, the same people who first showed me the beautiful traditions of our faith? They drove me to all those extra "Religion" classes after our regular public school curriculum days ended—our parents, grandparents, and anyone else who was trustworthy and going to Confession on a Saturday afternoon before a big holiday. They drove us to classes, church services, and all those devotional duties (besides religion class) that are required by canonical law for us to accept the rites conferred upon us through our ancient rituals, beginning at birth through to today. It's an important part of my service.
Yeah. It's a lot of school, study, and thought. Why do all that?! Lazy people have a hard time with honest labor that they can't easily game for a quick buck, and I have family who are much less ethical than me. My mom had the audacity to tell me the other day that I "just go to the library", after I showed her the Claddagh pin that the Director of the Library gave me as I sat here typing to you on St. Patrick's Day, because I'm here Monday through Friday, every single week (barring emergencies and holidays), banging it out on some old PC keyboard, off the top of my head, sitting next to your New York "public", and if you think that isn't hard, try it on your own with my minuscule budget, without any staff to assist you.
Then, I presented my mother with the works of two master children's book illustrators, old books that I found here and bought at a bargain rate (to assess her ongoing decline, and any lessening in her acuity), a soil conservation program shadily sponsored by a pharmaceutical company through a Midwest university that I thought she might be interested in (as a former botanist who had a blessedly quick brush-up with breast cancer), and a coupon from our local carpet guy that we always use, with deep roots in the community. She heard...uh....some of it. Attention spans were never their strong suits, but that's a long list of medical diagnostics for another day other than today.
Suffice to say, I have family so disordered at times that they don't understand (and this is a very short list of their ongoing ignorance): devotional service (unless you're part of a clergy they can pay/control), vocational service (like doing social work, volunteer charity work, and/or teaching with skills that you can't buy at some broke-ass dollar store), and my continually ongoing artistic devotion with hardcore spiritual high notes, as endeavors so outside of their norms that they can't figure out how to infiltrate a presence like mine on the Internet, because computers are to be demonized and feared, lest someone "beats" you in that, too. It's arrogance and insecurity at its worst, and quite of few of them go down hard because of it. False pride is the worst kind of sin to carry. I strongly urge you to free yourself from it, through the Rites of Confession before this Easter Sunday.
Since they can't marginalize my website by attacking its quality, they say it isn't a "real job", like every threatened amateur afraid of artistry before them, and that truly is scary, because those inherited genetics are built from their fears. Because I don't work through a corporate entity someone can attack (like a public holding), then I must not be "in business", and since I can't be railroaded into accepting a high interest bank loan, then my father must not be my venture capitalist, since there are no shareholders to manipulate. There's just me and the obvious strength of my gifts. Ahhh....I see a dawn of recognition in your eyes. Good! You have to be as good as we are in this game called "Life" to know when someone is helping you build an edifice that can't be disseminated in thousands of little ways that gangsters, er, business lawyers can gain off your labor without you even knowing it.
Needless to say, my few brush-ups with court systems, judges, and lawyers (none of my doing, actually, and through no fault of my own) taught me all I needed to know about how those venues are gamed by the players operating them economically, and that is not my joint. This is. What about me? As someone who's been in this little game called "media" since, well, almost all my life, I know that this freedom I have with you, my audience, is a much harder currency to earn than any money you can deposit in someone else's bank for their financial gain, and this New York girl ain't havin' none of that. You've already had more than your fair share, my dear family. Pour la Belgique.
