Kyle David Iverson's Blog

Freelancing

I get asked a lot about freelancing.Turns out, a lot of folks are interested in cutting ties with aneight to five, embracing a slice of transience, and gigging their wayto the top. It’s a fuck of a road. One me and a lot of others aretrying to figure out as we go. Having written a few ‘Okay, here’swhat I think you should do and here’s what I think you can expect,’messages to friends, I decided it might be good if I just puteverything down in one place. So here goes. If you’re interested inlearning about my path into freelancing, read on.

First, some background. In September2019, I was living in my mother’s basement waiting for the UK foreignoffice to approve my visa to live and work in the UK. The applicationcost me nearly all the money I had in the world, but it was fine. Iwould stay rent-free in my wife’s studio apartment and I believed I’dbe able to find work in England relatively quickly. But then thecold, motherless fucks rejected the visa, and overnight I transformedlike Cinderella’s pumpkin from a man with a semblance of a plan to ajobless broke dude in my mother’s basement. No bueno.

While waiting for callbacks from theresumes I’d left at every greasy watering hole in town, I polishedoff the old Upwork profile to see if I could get anything kicking. Iknow some remedial WordPress and I’m certainly a Tommy TryHard whenit comes to writing. I thought maybe I could eke out a bit of scratchor at least pay for something 80-proof that might help drown thesorrows. That’s when I learned lesson one.

Lesson 1: Upwork seems to be theticket. Ifucked a bit with freelancer.com and Fiverr (actually paid an Italianteenager on Fiverr to whip up the graffiti text for the cover ofEyesore), but I think the most and best jobs are on Upwork. Might Ibe wrong? Yes. But I’ve spent 99.9% of my time as a freelancer on thesite, and for my money, that’s where the bacon’s at.

ButUpwork is a greedy piggy. Upworkskims 20% off the top for any hours you clock with the site. Thisdrops to 10% after you’ve earned a hot grand or so, but it’s still alot. This is on top of having to pay service fees, as well as pay forConnects (which are basically tokens you need to pay to apply forjobs. No connects, no apply.). Personally, I think it’s steep. Here’smy advice.

Doa couple jobs on Upwork.If you have a one-off or a short term contract, by all means, keep iton Upwork. Completing jobs on Upwork earns you valuable feedbackwhich informs future clients that you’re not a buffoon prone tolicking peanut butter off their own elbow instead of making them afunctional WordPress site.

Take long-term clients off Upwork. Once you develop a rapport with a client, once you’ve got their cell, email address, and you’re sharing Google Docs, you may want to give them a call and ask if you can accompany their business off Upwork. Most will already know that Upwork takes a deep cut and many are expecting to get this kind of call. If they’re not, you might be able to enlighten them. Pulling a long-term client off Upwork earns you a 20% boost in pay in a Hong Kong jiffy, so it’s definitely worth it. I use PayPal to invoice clients. This costs me 3% which is annoying, but not enough that I’m going to find a better way to do it. If you do decide to do this, make sure this conversation doesn’t happen on the Upwork messaging service, or you risk a terms of service violation.

Lesson2: Don’t stock shit that you don’t want to sell. WhenI was first starting, one of the services I offered was monthlysocial media. It just seemed like a market-y thing to do. But here’sthe thing, I hate social media. To me, social media is a bottomlesspit of despair. You write a post for March 3rdand okay, it’s all well and good, but then you have to write one forMarch 4thand 5thand 6thand so on. It’s a fucking nightmare. I don’t even follow myself onTwitter. Why oh why was I offering services to customers that Iliterally hated to do?

It’s true that jobs lead to jobs in freelance, and one of those social media jobs turned into super consistent SEO blogs, which I hate a whole lot less. So take this with a grain of salt. But I think it’s important to offer services you are actually interested in. Don’t try to write blogs if you want to design logos. Don’t design logos if you want to write emails. Do yourself a favor, pick a couple of things you don’t mind doing and stick to those. Sure, they might evolve into something else later, but remember, you’re the boss here, don’t stick yourself with bullshit tasks. If you need to brush up or want to get more confident in your skills, drop $25 on a course over at Udemy. It’s definitely worth it. Confidence = jobs.

Exude professionalism even when your desk is an ironing board.

Lesson 3: You need a portfolio. Let me save you some trouble. I applied for a lot of jobs without a portfolio and I applied for a lot of jobs with one. The response rate you’ll get applying for jobs with a portfolio is NOTICEABLY BETTER. So make one. Even if you have to make it from scratch, right now. Take a week. Hell, take two. Whip up some content using the two or three things you decided to focus on, and stick them in a portfolio. I use the free version of journoportfolio because I’m not desperate for work. If I was, I’d pay the $6.50 a month or whatever it is to add more content because TRUST ME, that shit pays for itself.

ProTip:Making a portfolio from scratch and don’t know where to start? Lookfor some jobs you’re interested in and create a writing sample. Youcan use it in your application andstick it in your portfolio at the same time. Bob’s your uncle. Twobirds stoned at once.

Lesson 4: On rates. Peopleequate price with quality, so don’t sell yourself short. This isespecially true for freelancers because we miss out on payments otheremployees might be used to, like paid downtime, regular taxwithholding, or healthcare contributions. The value of those thingsadd up quick, and when rent is due, the $30 an hour you were almostembarrassed to charge seems like a hard hill of uncooked beans. Afterabout a year and a half, my advertised price on Upwork is $55 anhour, marked up from $35.

Ialso know many freelancers who refuse to charge by the hour, andinstead charge by the job. This can be a great option too as you’lleventually get faster the more you write for the same client. Whytake a pay cut because you’ve gotten better at something?

I’ll tell you this too, in the interest of demystification: Last year I made about $27,000 freelancing. It’s not a lot. It’s even less than a lot when you consider that number is before taxes (including a self-employment tax of an additional 15% that you may or may not be aware of). It’s more than some and less than others. If you’re looking to stack paper, look for something more stable. If a work/life balance is more your thing, you really can’t beat it.

Wife at the office.

Lesson 5: On interviews. Theinterview is as important as the job it will get you. If a clientneeds a 1,500 word article and they want a phone call first, measurethat as a use of your time. It’s a numbers game. Don’t spend threehours writing a sonnet for a cover letter. Keep it short and snappy,and note that clients that are needy during the interview processwill likely be needy as they give you work. Do everything in yourpower to avoid working for free.

Lesson 6: Clients. When it comes to freelancing, we are Mormon cousins, Midwest lesbians. We CRAVE long-term relationships. Nibbles can be nice, especially for generating reviews, but one-off jobs won’t pay the bills. Long-term clients are critical for long-term success. Pay attention during the application and interview process. Find the right client and you’ll set yourself up so they’ll do the legwork for you. That shit’s key. Agency clients plop work in your lap, through no effort on your part. The benefit is obvious, but it also means you have no control over vetting that client, and you might find yourself owing 2,000 words per week about the latest in automotive windshield technology. But hey, it can’t all be roses, can it? A freelancer with three or four agency clients will find themselves working full-time hours lickety split.

Lesson7: Expect your clients to overanticipate how busy they will be. Ican’t tell you how many clients I’ve had who told me they need 20hours per week. Actually, I can. It’s three. Want to know how manyhours per week those clients need? It varies, but I’d say between 5and 8. People overestimate their workload. It makes sense. Theywouldn’t be looking for freelancers if they weren’t alreadyoverstretched. They’re stressed. They’re busy. But once they bringyou aboard and you’ve sorted out the logjam (usually 2-3 weeks), thetap tends to slow. Expect and prepare for a first wave, then expectthings to slow down, often by a lot.

Lesson8: Set boundaries. Look,I get that we can’t always control the flow of our work. Deadlinescreep up, things shift around, and we’ve all got to put in extra timeto get the deliverable out the door. Shit happens when you partynaked. While the occasional working weekend should be expected, it isimportant to set clear boundaries with clients. Tell them yourworking hours. Tell them your days off. Give them clear turnaroundtimes for your work so they don’t hang on to unrealisticexpectations. You are, after all, a human fucking being and not acontent fucking factory. Don’t feel like you need to respond to thatslack at 8PM. When you’re working from home it’s easy for lines toget blurred. Set up regular hours and work as regularly as you canwithin those hours, and know when to call it quits. Trust me, you’llthank me.

Iwrite this list not because I’ve got it figured out. Trust me, I’mlearning how to do this all the time and I’m sure in a year, I’llwrite another article that contradicts everything I said in this one,aside from the thing about partying naked. For some people,freelancing is too risky of an option and I completely understand.For others though, this seems like the way forward with traditionalwork environments shifting and freedom becoming a higher-valuedcommodity. Hopefully you found this helpful, and whatever you do,don’t forget that there’s a lot of us out there dicking around withthis freelancing thing and remember you aren’t in it alone.

The post Freelancing appeared first on Kyle David Iverson.

A Cold Week in Cactus Country

It’s 54 degrees in my apartment. That’s12 for those of you in Places Centigrade, where a drop in a degreemakes an actual difference. The water’s been shut off. It was on mostof the day Monday, then it was off, on, off, and on again. For now atleast, the taps have spoken, and the other side beat us out.

I’ll address it now because I know you’re wondering. We filled our camping jug when the taps were on so we’re okay with water to drink, and we’ve got a garbage bin filled with melted snow in the bathroom that we thought would help us flush, but which in practice only slightly obfuscates our bathroom business. Really, the worst part of the whole poo poo pee pee thing is that our bum gun is offline.

We haven’t lost power, though I can’tsay why. I don’t think we’re on the same power grid as a hospital ornursing home. The car dealerships along 35 are lit up like it’sfucking Christmas. Despite that, the heating hasn’t been able tomuscle past 54 degrees today, same as yesterday.

A Basically Empty Nest

We’re lucky. All around Austin, it’snearing a point where some people might actually consider killing toget themselves into our situation. Scheduled rolling blackouts (’20minutes, tops’) went into effect in the wee hours of Monday morning,and for huge swaths of the city, the power never came back. Today isThursday. Four days now of people in a major American city no power,heating, or access to water in 25 degree temps outside.

Even when power comes back, myprediction is that the water won’t. Pipes here aren’t insulated andall across the city they have been bursting in their thousands. Apipe burst on the first floor of the building I live in. A guy I workwith lives in a nice condominium group, apartment number nine. Pipesburst in eight and ten.

The massive amount of water sheddingfrom the system has kamikazed water pressure everywhere hence theshutting off the grid hence my empty taps. But again, it’s not sobad. The same thing happened at some of the hospitals in Austin.That’s much worse.

Trapped Bug

And I had warning. Before it went out,the water sputtered and fought the good fight. I knew it was goingand could act accordingly. For other people in Austin, the city-wideboil notice is about as helpful as a winning lotto ticket to a deadguy. A little too goddamn late, wouldn’t you say?

I’m sure you’ve read about this.

Growing up in Minnesota, you hearstories about people in the south. We passed chittery gossip back andforth, telling tall tales of schools closed after half an inch ofnothing much. How we laughed, the snowbanks brushing our shoulders!Those southern weaklings couldn’t manage the tough stuff like wecould. How soft they must be.

I’ll tell you something, you get realsoft real quick when there’s no salt on the road. No sand on yourapartment steps. No snowplow or shovel or window scraper for miles inany direction. The infrastructure here just isn’t set up to handlethis.

Death Trap on the Back Stairs

Texas exceptionalism is a phrase youhear sometimes. We’ve seen the shirt, ‘most likely to secede.’ Weknow Texas is a Republic, evenif we don’t know what that means exactly or how it’s any differentfrom say, Maine or Hawaii. Isn’t Hawaii a kingdom? Or is it aqueendom?

Wellhere’s what I’ve learned from the crash course I’ve been living sinceSunday: Texas’s grid is an example of exceptionalism in action. Texasdoesn’t share electricity so we can’t exactly ask for it when we needit. The grid was developed at a time before the world had emphysemaand people had a choirboy’s chance in church of actually predictingthe weather accurately. The folks in charge of setting the thing upset it up for the weather they grew up with. They didn’t count onextreme fluctuation because they didn’t think they needed to andbecause weatherizing shit costs money, goddamnit, good money thatthey earned fair and square.

Thelast time the grid collapsed, in 2011, they waited for the thaw andthen went their merry way because weatherizing shit costs money,goddamnit, and all the rest and they’ll probably do the same thingagain after this. Why? Because the Texas energy sector is deregulatedall to hell and half the Electric Reliability Council of Texas(ERCOT) (the people in charge of the grid) live in fucking Michiganor Idaho or something. Not here anyway.

Speakingof which Ted Cruz just flew to Cancun. Unbefuckinglievable. Forgiveme if I misspelled that, I’m working my keyboard with gloves.

Sothat’s the situation as I understand it. I’m lucky. We got groceriesover the weekend before things went Arctic, so we’re okay on food.The heater stalled out on 54 which is better than the 30 degrees itis outside. I’ve got blankets and a wife and a cat I can cuddle, andthe temperature drop isn’t, for the moment, for us anyway, dangerous.We’ve still got power. Again, no clue how, but I’m certainly notcomplaining. We’ll have to wait and see about the water. We’re goodfor the night and tomorrow and there’s snow outside if that runs out.Maybe the grocery stores aren’t as bad as they say.

Working and Being Cold

Really,the thing that surprises me isn’t the weather. Watch DavidAttenborough’s Witness Statement and you’ll understand thatunpredictable weather is the new normal. It isn’t the mismanagementof the grid. Watch any Texas politician flap their cowhide gums inWashington and you’ll see that’s a foregone conclusion. The thingthat surprises me is how close it all feels to falling apart. Leninsaid every society is three meals away from chaos. I think I’mstarting to agree.

Look, the ‘facts’ I stated above are my best understanding of the situation. These I pulled from newspaper articles and screen scrolls in the gym (which is heated which is funnily enough incredibly motivating) and an episode of the Daily. Really, I don’t know much about how a grid works, or how my heater makes heat or how my water taps stay wet. And when something like this happens and leadership disappears, you become real aware real quick of how little you know.

Thetruth is, rumors flying like grackles. People are cold and hungry andthirsty and pissed off and they’re directing their anger at anyoneand everyone they think might be to blame. For now, most of the angerseems to be directed at politicians.

Forgood reason.

I feel gutted when I think about the amount of people with flooded, freezing apartments. When I think of people sleeping in their cars or the homeless population, waiting this out fuck-knows-where. And I’m pissed too. Hotels down here, not even the nice ones, shitty ones, were charging $700 per night. The skyline was lit up after we were all told to conserve. Clearly, the folks in charge didn’t make appropriate preparations.

Common Room at my Apartment, Locked, Empty, with a Fireplace Roaring

Everyoneseems to expect things to go back to normal on Saturday when theweather thaws. I hope they’re right. The last time I was in asituation like this, after a cyclone in Airlie Beach, cleanup was amonths-long process. Will a thaw fix the broken machinery on thegrid? Will it repair all the busted water pipes? Pretty sure that’snot how warm weather works.

Allowme a quick rant. The future we’re barreling into isn’t a future wecreated. It was built by robber barons who stole everything theycould of value from the environment, and brinkmanship on the part ofpoliticians determined to protect profits and keep rich dickheadssweet because the rich dickheads keep them elected. So this kind ofthing is going to happen again. Probably, it’s going to happen a lot.Corporations will keep skullfucking the planet and politicians aregoing to continue to let them and preventable things like a city-wideblackout and water shortage and people freezing to death and gettingcarbon monoxide poisoning from heating their house with their gasstove will happen in more places too.

I’mnot saying society is going to collapse. Not yet anyway.

But ifI were a betting man in charge of a major American city, I would sureas shit be stockpiling food. Because it seems to me that people arestarting to feel like they’re missing their meal.

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Borders: Part One

I
was lying on a couch in my mother’s basement in the house where I
grew up. I knew every whorl in the wood paneling and every textured
pastel in the wallpaper. It was cold, but then, my mother’s basement
was always cold. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it on some kind of
registry of arctic places at risk due to rising global temperatures.
There was a ping on my phone and I checked my email and it was
exactly the one I’d been waiting for. That I’d been thinking about
for nearly a year. It was from a UK government agency called the
Sheffield Visa Section. A decision had been made about my visa.

The
email came weeks later than I expected, though it’s possible this had
more to do with my expectation than the folks at the visa centre in
Sheffield. I’d been waiting nearly five weeks. I paid £600 extra to
have it expedited. Expedition, apparently, is a relative concept.

I
slid my trembling fingers tightly through the pop socket I’d recently
glued to the back of my phone and thumbed open the email.

The
body was as cold as the basement. ‘A decision has been made on your
UK Visa application. Please see attached text.’ After that, a
disclaimer stating that no one would try to contact me about my
application further, and if they did, that I should suspect fraud.

Shards
of something in my stomach. Metal in my mouth. I opened the
attachment. My phone asked several questions regarding my preferred
method of viewing PDF’s and it’s likely I spoke my answer.

‘Does
anyone, I mean ever, have a preference how they view their PDF’s?’

It
loaded. I read and held my breath.

Dear
KYLE DAVID IVERSON, your human rights claim in an application for
entry clearance made on 6 September 2019 has been refused.

Refused.
Your claim has been refused. A frozen mixture of disbelief and rage
crystallized within me, calved off into a dark, churning sea.
Refused.

Under
an all caps header called REASONS FOR REFUSAL, Sheffield first listed
the category under which I had applied for the visa in the first
place: seeking entry clearance on the basis of family life with my
spouse Bethany.

Then,
beneath bold subheadings, they listed the following:

Suitability

Your
application does not fail on grounds of suitability under section
S-EC on Appendix FM.

Relationship
Requirement

You
meet the eligibility relationship requirement of paragraphs
E-ECP.2.1. To 2.10.

Financial
Requirement

You
do not meet the eligibility financial requirement of paragraphs
E-ECP.3.1. to 3.4. You have stated in your Visa Application Form that
you meet the financial requirement through CAT A. I am not able to
take into account any potential employment you have available to you
in the UK or any offers of financial support from third parties. In
order to meet the financial requirements of Appendix FM your sponsor
needs a gross income of at least £18,600 per annum.

Translation:
You seem cool, your relationship looks legit, but your wife is only
slightly too poor. Toodleoo!

We
knew it was going to be a problem. Beth made £18,000 as a trainee
journalist for a major regional news organization. That’s $21,700 if
you’re keeping score at home. For full time work. 40-50 hours per
week plus extensive train travel.

See,
the UK government does this clever thing where they allow employers
to pay disgustingly low wages under the guise of work experience.
People looking to break into competitive fields like journalism are
required to engage in a drawn out series of exams and training
conducted by the NCTJ, a self-appointed body that has no affiliation
with the government, a trade union, or anything else.

To
go through the process takes about 18 months provided you can afford
the expensive study material, hire a private tutor to teach you
shorthand, and put in long hours after your workday.

Anyway.

We
were £600 short. We knew that going in. My income in the US? Didn’t
matter. Her parents’ income? Didn’t matter. Hers was the only income
Sheffield cared about. She asked her company for a modest raise which
would put us over the threshold, and they refused, flat out, fuck you
very much.

During
the months preceding our application, Beth worked a second job for
her same company. She sat beneath a tent at various public events
(remember those?) and sold goodie bags with newspapers, wine gums,
and bottles of water for £1, for which they paid her slightly below
minimum wage.

By
August, the last month of paychecks which would be included in our
application, she’d earned nearly £800 additional income, putting us
above the threshold.

But
unbeknownst to us, her company enrolled her in an automatic pension
scheme which placed some of her pretax earnings into a pension
account.

According
to our application, contributing to her pension dropped Beth’s income
to £18,302. Which meant we were short £298.

Want
to know what you can buy for £298?

A
decent set of cookware from M&S or an Xbox One with a second
wireless remote or a Squier Telecaster electric guitar with dual
humbuckers or- you get the idea.

Back
in the basement, I read the email again and again. It became almost
sadistic. The cold words developed a kind of sneer as they slammed
shut the gates to an entire country. To the life and future my wife
and I had been planning. Closed the gates not just to me, but to her
too. The application cost nearly £2,600 and led to a decision that
shut us out for the cost of cookware.

I
called Beth. She was at work. In her way, she knew what happened
before I could speak. Through sobs, she asked the question I had been
too discombobulated to ask myself. She asked: ‘What do we do now?’

The post Borders: Part One appeared first on Kyle David Iverson.

The Case for Dry Cereal

Look, I’m the first to admit I’ve held some pretty unpopular beliefs in my time. I don’t want to reproduce, for example, and I very seriously believe that both Brand New and Saves the Day are legitimately good bands with varied and interesting back catalogs. But by far the opinion I harbor which generates the most controversy is the fact that I prefer to eat my cereal dry.

You heard me.

No milk, no water, no I just add a
little bit of milk to each bite so then it doesn’t get soggy.

Fuck that.
Hypocrites. Half measures.

I like
it dry, baby, dry as a bone. The Sahara desert at noon. Death Valley.
The oceans on Mars. An adult woman’s vagina during an episode of
Entourage. D-R-Y DRY.

I’ve always eaten it that way, since I was a kid. I put a bit about it in my first book. I might put a bit about it in my next book too, fuck it, yolo.

To most of you, the
prospect of eating your cereal dry is akin to sliding down a
waterslide dry. It is, quite simply, not done, because A) It isn’t
nearly as fun and B) ouch.

But a case must be
made by those among us, those Titans of Taste and Colossi of Crunch,
who down the dry like there’s no tomorrow, because by eating our
cereal dry, we’ve chosen the road less traveled, and that has made
all the difference.

Dry Cereal is
Crunchy, Every Bite

You hear that? You
in the other room? Yeah. That’s me, crunching away, ten minutes into
my Golden Grahams. While the rest of you engage in a harrowing,
heart-pumping race against time as soon as you pour on that
disgusting udder juice you probably smell tested, I’m sitting here
cool as a cucumber, knowing my next bite will be as crunchtastic as
the last. Speaking of which…

Dry Cereal Ages
Gracefully

Maybe you’re eating
your cereal in the morning and remember ‘Oh shit, I’m late for work!’
No worries, Bill Murrays, just pop another bite into your mouth and
set the ol’ bowl wherever. No need to refrigerate. Don’t bother
tracking down a pyrex. Simply leave it on the counter, then polish
‘er off when you get home. Nom, nom motherfucker, crunchy as ever. Go
on, you deserve it.

Purity of Taste

You’re no dummy.
You’ve tried the lot and chosen your favorite cereal carefully. To
then slosh it over with milk is like choosing an expensive whiskey
and mixing it with coke. The flavor barely comes through. It’s all
the same indistinguishable sugar gloop. Those of us with taste, we’ll
take our cereal neat, thank you much.

Uncompromising

A Cruncher (that’s what we’re called, Crunchers) isn’t one to buy into the milkspiracy. We don’t follow the trends the dairy industry’s sold the rest of you sheeple so blindly, so easily. We’re a different breed. We live by our own rules. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a Milker (that’s what you’re called, Milkers).

In Conclusion

Look, I’m not here to tell you one way of eating cereal is better
than any other.

Wait, yes I am.

That’s exactly what I’m doing.

Fuck it. Milkers are scrubs. You’re disgusting sog socks who probably voted for Gary Johnson. Crunchers 4 lyfe.

The post The Case for Dry Cereal appeared first on Kyle David Iverson.

January Questions

Let me start this post by saying that I’m aware how much I’ve been slacking on blog posts. The six months between this post and the last one have been fraught to say the least, and while I promise I’m going to write a post that unpacks a bit of that, this isn’t it.

I want to give you something.

One day in January 2018, I was sitting at a cheap, slanted table in a dining room with three refrigerators along the wall and a dead mouse smell coming from somewhere. I lived in a ramshackle house with asbestos floors with eleven other people on Rottnest Island in Western Australia. I was reflecting the choices I made to end up there, and began to write out some questions designed to help me make sense of it.

I think I wrote 50. There might have been less.

I waited a day and then answered the questions and lost the doc, buried it somewhere on my laptop. I didn’t think about it again until I dug it out next January, when I answered the same questions sitting on my couch in Denver.

This January I answered them again, this time sitting at a folding table in my mother’s basement, and it formed, at least to me, a really interesting snapshot into the evolution of me and my situation.

Some things stayed the same. (Do you
want to have your same job next year? 2018: God no. 2019: Fuck no.
2020: Hell no) (Do you think you’re pretentious? 2018: yes. 2019: Oh
yeah. 2020: Yep.)

Some things changed. (Who do you live with? 2018: 11 people from half as many countries, only one of whom I knew. 2019: Kate. 2020: My mother)

Traditionally, I only open these questions once a year. I choose a day in January and answer them anew, then compare them to previous years’ answers. Then I forget about them until next January.

It’s not much, but I think it’s interesting. It’s cool, and yeah maybe a bit self-indulgent to watch yourself go through life like that, to be given an excuse to step back from the avalanche, the barrage of shit flying at us, every minute of every day, and allow yourself some space to stop and reflect. I’ve never been good at meditating, but maybe it’s a bit like that.

So that’s it. January questions. My gift to you. I’m going to drop my list here and I encourage and invite you to fill them out. My questions are pretty specific to me and to writing, but there are a lot that can apply to everyone. Take some out, add your own. Tell me what you’ve added so I can add them too. I think it was Socrates who said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ So I say to you, examine.

January Questions

How much money is in your bank account?

Where do you work?

Do you want next year’s answer to be
the same?

Who do you spend most of your time
with?

Where do you live?

Do you like your city?

Does your space feel like your own?

What is your relationship status?

What time do you usually wake up?

Are you in good shape?

Have you written something in the last
year that you’re proud of?

What are you listening to?

What’s the last song you wrote?

Do you speak better Spanish than you
did at this time last year?

Do you have a dirty mouth?

Describe your humor.

Would you say that you eat healthy?

What’s your dream job?

Do you think things happen for a
reason?

Describe your spirituality.

Where are you, as you’re answering
these questions, specifically. Describe the room.

What’s something you feel like you’ve
learned in the last year?

Do you think before you speak?

What do you want to improve about
yourself?

Where do you expect to be, next
January, answering these questions?

Are you happy?

What would make you happier?

Are you doing things that make you
excited?

What tattoo are you thinking about?

What’s your favorite pair of shoes?

What would you name a dog?

What’s something thoughtful you’ve
done?

Are you thinking about someone? Longing
for them?

Is anyone longing for you?

Where would you apparate, right now?

Food appears in front of you. Anything,
from anywhere. What is it?

When’s the last time you spoke with
your mother? Your father? Your brother?

Who do you live with?

What’s your go-to joke?

What’s the best dish you can cook?

Is there someone you wish you were
keeping in touch with?

What’s your movie theater snack?

Who is the last person you
videochatted?

What’s a piece of clothing you want but
don’t have?

Would you consider yourself cynical?

Are you in love?

Who would you want to spend a day with?

What mood are you in as you fill out
these questions?

What did you have for lunch?

What is your favorite kind of scenery?

Do you think you’re pretentious?

Is there a project you think you’ll see
through this year?

Have you exercised today?

What countries did you visit last year?

What dates stick out?

Where did most of your money go?

What’s your primary mode of transport?

What can you see out the nearest
window?

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The Drunk Guys on the Train

When it comes to public displays of happiness, public transportation is a zero-sum game. If you’re a passenger aboard a train and you express a certain amount of good cheer, however small, an equal amount is drained from the other passengers. This is an unfortunate fact. If a couple three rows back spends twelve stops talking in giggly falsetto, I can guarantee the people across the aisle, forced to overhear it for twelve stops, are going to leave the train defeated and drained and dragging their feet.

The opposite is
true too. If you spend the ride sobbing into your iPhone, trying to
convince an ex to please, please just give you another chance,
and I happen to be close enough to listen, my ride just got that much
better.

What can I say?
Public transit is boring.

The other night,
Beth and I were on the train. It had been a long day. We woke up near
Lake Orta in the north of Italy, drove to Milan, returned our rental
car, had a fight and caught a bus to the airport. We made up on the
long wait and had a couple Aperol Spritzes, then flew RyanAir to
London, and we were still two hours by train to Norwich. When we
boarded, it was late in the evening and a handful of people were
spread around the train, most with a row to themselves. Every stop, a
few people would exit and a few would board, but the train stayed
quiet until we called at Cambridge.

At Cambridge, half
a dozen men in their fifties boarded, redfaced and reeking. They
jelly-legged down the aisle, arguing good-naturedly about something
or other. The argument continued as they fell into their seats and
uncapped bottle of vodka, which I’m pretty sure they were mixing with
coffee. Happy Tuesday.

The men appeared
like rainclouds over a map of England. Nowhere was safe. They missed
Beth and I by half a train car, but landed directly on top of someone
else. The victim was a woman in her late-thirties with thick glasses
and a bob. Before they got on, she’d been reading a book. Now forced
to share a seatback with a man his friends called ‘Fuckface,’ she
stared into space and crinkled her nose like she could smell
something we couldn’t.

The train rumbled
away from the station and the men held aloft their cardboard cups and
tapped them together. One bumbled through a short speech with another
played a song through his cell phone speakers. Halfway through, he
started singing along and this continued for the rest of the journey.
A drunk Englishman loves a song.

Meanwhile the woman
looked increasingly frustrated. The fun the drunk men were having
seemed to be strip-mined from the very depths of her soul. And yet
she didn’t move. She didn’t even shift her weight. She stayed exactly
where she was like a dropped marionette, looking like she was going
to cry, for the entire long ride to Norwich. I know this because,
when we pulled into Norwich, I looked back from the seats where Beth
and I moved, one car down, and saw the pain written on her face.

And I wondered to
myself, why the hell didn’t she move?

She was obviously
annoyed. We were too, that’s why we moved. This woman stayed through
two rounds of drinks. She stayed through the shouting and the banter
and a half an album of drunken Oasis singalongs. Why? Maybe she saw
it as righteous. She was there first, after all. She had been
minding her business, keeping to herself, it was the men that were
the problem. And she wasn’t exactly wrong. But what a thing to go
through. The men probably didn’t even notice her.

This piece isn’t an
allegory. There are big philosophical arguments that could be made
about standing one’s ground and about the patriarchy and probably
maybe something about nationalism. This isn’t that piece. What I
wanted to know was why the hell didn’t she move when there was an
empty train car twenty steps away?
Thinking about it since, I
realized of course that I’m guilty of it too. I’ve thrown shade like
Chinese stars across patios when people sit too close and I can smell
their cigarettes and sweaty ballsacks from my table. And I don’t know
why I sigh and stay where I am when I could just do myself a favor
and pack my shit and move.

Maybe I’m lazy.
Maybe I think by sighing I’m fighting back.

A baby boomer will probably tell you to stand your ground. As a millennial with no health insurance, my advice is this: Avoid the fight. Move to the other side of the train. Lord knows if I’d gotten an invite it would be me drinking vodka coffees and singing Don’t Look Back in Anger. It’s a hell of a tune. Let the people have their fun and move the fuck on. You’ll be happier for it.

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On Being Broke

Let me say this, just to get it out of the way: there is a difference between being poor and being broke. Being poor is closer to having a disease than it is a reflection of social status. More often than not, it is something you’re born into and have little means of affecting. That’s because people born into poverty come from marginalized groups that are crammed into places governments ignore, doesn’t invest in, actively scapegoat, and worse. With few exceptions, being born poor leads to dying poor, because it’s hard to focus on getting ahead when you’re focused so hard on getting by.

Let me say this too, for the record: we could end this disease if we wanted. We could prioritize it, over say, cutting taxes for the megarich or killing people with death robots from the sky or fighting endless regime-change wars (Note: This isn’t me being partisan, this is every president in recent memory minus Jimmy Carter unless I’ve got my facts wrong). If we invested money in the communities affected by poverty, real money that extended beyond an election cycle and was tied to concrete goals for better education, better public transport, better family planning, we could cure the shit out of it. We won’t, of course. There’s no short-term benefit to providing a floor below which none of our citizens can fall, and who gives a shit about what happens a decade from now?

Still with me?

Great.

I’m broke.

Being broke can mean a lot of things. To me, it means I’ve got qualifications and a network, enough that I could build up a fairly decent financial situation for myself if I wanted. I could move, for example, to a country where I’m legally allowed to work. I could apply for jobs where I’ve got relevant experience and with some luck and persistence and a spit-shine on the old LinkedIn I could probably even get one of those jobs. But I don’t. I don’t for a lot of reasons. Primarily because I don’t like a lot of those jobs as much as I like traveling and falling in love and writing clumsy blog posts filled with adverbs and swearing. Look, chances are pretty good I’ll be working until I’m 70 anyway, and fuck knows if I’ve even got that long. Why not spend a bit of my retirement now, when I’m relatively healthy, at an age where a lengthy staircase isn’t a worthy adversary?

A lot of the time, I don’t mind being broke. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I cook a lot and enjoy libraries. I own almost nothing. I bought my computer used. I bought my phone refurbished, which is a fancy way of saying used. I stream movies on websites that end in .dx and .uz. I straight up found my sunglasses.

Here’s some tips from a person who thinks $5,000 is a fortune.

You don’t need meat for every meal.

Used clothes are just as good.

Library books are free and so is chilling in the park.

Walking can be nice.

Look, I don’t think money is a bad thing. I know a lot of people with money and almost none of them are assholes. Shit, I’d love a bit of money. If I’m ever walking through a recently threshed wheat field and find a suitcase lined with unmarked, non-sequential 50’s you can bet it’s going straight under the mattress. Direct flights and macadamia nuts and apartments with balconies are all wonderful, wonderful things. The problem for me is the trade-off. The time and effort it takes to make big money generally leaves you with little time and energy for much else. In the same way that poverty leads to poverty, high-paying jobs lead to plush couches and subscriptions to premium cable.

So how does all this end? Maybe I’ll look up from a mop bucket when I’m 70 at a sea of retired people with bodies rebuilt by science, enjoying their twilight years with perfect skin and a spring in their shlongs. Or maybe I’ll get blasted by a bus tomorrow and bleed out in a storm drain. Who knows? Certainly not me.

And look, I’m not saying I’ve got it right. A lot of the reason I’ve been able to live like this is through sheer, blind luck. I won’t deny it. And I know family logistics change things. Having a sick parent or kids or shit you need to do, so if you feel like I’m judging you, I’m not. I’m just saying that life can take different paths. And while some of those paths don’t lead to much money, they can still be pretty cool.

The post On Being Broke appeared first on Kyle David Iverson.

Leavers, Stayers, & Strong Things

I do this thing sometimes, where I think I know what to expect. I am almost always wrong.

In the summer of 2018 I moved to Denver. I signed a lease, folded my clothes into drawers, and stowed my battered backpack in a recessed corner of my closet. I set my guitars in stands and hung art on the walls. I amassed a respectable amount of Dollar Tree plates and spoons. I had transitioned, I thought, from the Leaver I’d been to the Stayer I wanted to become. I was somewhere specific, somewhere I’d chosen. My new life would begin in Denver.

My first task was to make friends. Long-term people who lived in my zip code and planned to stay longer than a fiscal quarter. It was something I’d missed during my life on the road, and I thought it was going to be easy. I had a fire under my ass to play open mics, go to shows, utilize the resources of our digitally connected world to integrate myself into a like-minded crew.

But that’s not what happened.

It’s hard to imagine two things at once. In the time I spent moving from someplace new to somewhere else new, I forgot what it was like to stay in one place. How deep and tangled are roots and routines. When everyone around you is transient, friendships become as light as the breeze itself. You’re with a hundred strangers, living together and sharing communal rooms with the same budget in a new city with no plans. Everyone is open because everyone is passing through, and the disposable nature of it makes us all the same starry-eyed kind of lonely. With some exceptions, I find that most long-term travelers give up pretty quickly on the idea of hanging with the locals, and we all end up settling for each other. Whether we’re in Colombia or Cambodia, Yangon or Chiang Mai, the people we meet are English, German, Australian. We meet at our hostels, play cards and make fun of each other’s accents and go out together and drink a lot of cheap beer. I wouldn’t exactly say we soak up the culture, but it’s not a bad way to spend a couple months. Everyone’s reason for leaving is different, but we don’t get into that much. Instead, we share a carefree, temporary mentality. We’re on holiday. A break from responsibility, from work, from school.

Staying is more complicated. People stay for a million reasons. They stay for the same reasons Leavers take breaks: school and jobs and family and friends. But they stay for other reasons too. Millions of them. While some stay but want to leave and many actually prefer to stay, my guess is that most fall somewhere in the middle. But the thing that links them, the thing that nearly all Stayers have in common is this: Those motherfuckers have shit to do.

Stayers have dogs and dentist appointments. Dinner with Grandma. They’re babysitting nephews and changing their oil and they still haven’t seen the new Avengers. And look, I get it. In Denver, I was working 40 hours too. I was working nights and weekends. I was free on Monday evening. Barring that, I was free on Tuesday. I hope I’m not the first to tell you, to much of the world, the American work/life balance is a literal joke.

Look, I admit, my hashtag squadgoals took a nosedive when I decided I was going to take a chance and get myself to England to settle a score with the ol’ dream girl, so take this with a grain of that good Trader Joe’s Himalayan Pink, but breaking in with Stayers was a fuck of a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I guess you could say I came on strong. I went in with a Leaver’s mentality. Slapping a stranger’s shoulder and sidling up to their table, ‘Mind if I grab a seat?’ It was… a lot. Even if we hung out that night, they obviously didn’t answer when I texted. Of course they didn’t! Who texts back when some random dude, probably saved in their phone as Kyle Close-Talker, invites them to the goddamn park?

People are busy enough with the friends they have.

If I sound bitter, I don’t mean to. It wasn’t the Stayers who were the problem, it was me. See, I thought I could waltz into people’s lives the way I got used to waltzing the past two years. But that kind of fast, disposable friendship doesn’t work with Stayers. With Stayers you need to move slow. You need to earn their time because their time is precious.

I understand that now.

Just in time too, because once again, I find myself in a community of Stayers, this time in England, and I want to find my people (in addition to my person). I have the same fire under my ass, but it’s less burny, if that makes sense. It’s a fire built to smolder, rather than flare up all at once. Because people have shit to do, and strong things take time to build.

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Chances

The problem with chances is that chances come rarely. When they come, they come in disguise, so they barely look like chances at all. Instead, they look like moments. Seconds in a minute. Snippets of conversation that burn bright like fireflies you don’t think to grab until they’re a mile past gone. But sometimes, you do. Sometimes, you grab them. I saw a chance recently, and almost without knowing what I was doing, I grabbed it.

I don’t believe in fate. Ask anyone, I’m the Marie Kondo of spirituality. I believe in luck and timing and that’s about it. One night, last September, I had a dream. In it, a girl I knew got a job as a hand model. That was my chance. See what I mean? It didn’t look like a chance, it looked like a stupid dream. But I thought she’d find it funny, so I sent her a message over social media. ‘I had a dream where you were a hand model,’ I said, ‘and you seemed pretty happy. So if you’re looking for a career change…’ That’s it. That’s what I wrote. And she responded. And we talked. She told me she was a journalist. That she worked long hours for not enough money, but she was really, genuinely happy. I told her I’d just moved to Denver. I was working as a bartender and I was genuinely happy too. Then she told me she had vacation time coming up and would I, by chance, care to meet her somewhere, and I said I’d meet her literally anywhere in the world. Name the place. I told her I’d meet her in a muddy hole in the ground and I meant it. Her name is Bethany.

Bethany and I made a list. On that list was Morocco and Romania and Croatia and Cuba and after a week of deliberation and google image searches we chose Cuba. We were in different time zones when we bought our flights and I think, even as I clicked the purchase button, part of me doubted she was going to show. The whole thing seemed too surreal. I pictured myself wandering the streets of Havana alone, but I figured there were worse ways to spend a fortnight. And besides, if there was even a glimmer of a chance of her going, it was worth it.

I sent her my flight details and she bought her ticket the next day. That gave me a whole different set of nerves. See, Bethany and I had history. We’d tried this before, this or something like it. Before I went to Australia we’d traveled a bit of Southeast Asia, and we lit up like a Chinese lantern. Beautiful and delicate and too fiery for our own good. But this seemed different. Like we’d each settled into something. In the two years we spent apart, we learned how to stand alone. I published the novel that was gnawing at my insides and she found her path and become a journalist.

After three days in Cuba I knew I was in love, and I told her that same night, on a balcony, as the sun sunk over crumbling Trinidad and the colonial city started coming to life. Old men played live salsa on the street below and a turkey gobbled from its pen, somewhere in someone’s backyard. She said it to me too, by the way, which shit me sideways was that a relief.

You learn a lot about a person when you travel with them, and what Bethany and I learned, we liked. It was as if we’d taken the history we already had and managed to smooth out the parts where before, we’d stuck. We’d become stronger as individuals, and we decided to see if we could become a stronger team.

When our time in Cuba was over, we had a teary goodbye in a foreign airport, far from our first, and then my darling and I spent 11 weeks apart. I saw her in England and felt like I could breathe again, then we spent another 14. And even though it was hard, we never wavered. Our team was stronger than we guessed.

We got married in Colorado, in a park in the city. We ate cheeseburgers after and the restaurant gave us free champagne. I’d never before found the smell of sweet potato fries so perfectly romantic. I waited out my lease. Paid my bills and saved a bit of money. By the time I publish this, I’ll already be in England for the summer.

This chance at happiness, of a feeling so full I’m gonna burst, came disguised as a dream. As a message on social media. A couple of seconds in a minute. Look, I’m no expert; the future is long and impossible to predict. But if you ask me, when you catch a chance like that you grab it as hard as possible. It’s worth the weeks apart and the moving boxes and the uncertain visa position, because one day, when we sort out the financials and the logistics and everything else, I’ll be here, standing beside the literal girl of my dreams. And that’s pretty fucking cool.

Her hands, by the way, are all they’re cracked up to be.

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An Obligatory Post About Leaving Australia

When can you say you’ve lived somewhere? Surely it takes longer than a week, but can you say it after a month? Three months? If you update the address where they ship your lost bank cards, does that become the place you live? What if you’re not going to stay?

Before I arrived in Australia, the only travel I knew was short-term. Cities and whole countries consumed one after the other, two days here, three there. Hit the spots, do the things, bam, bam, bam, then grab a night bus to the next. That kind of travel is fun, man. It’s breakneck and yeah maybe a little surface, but it’s constant action and dopamine dumps. Hot weather and polar aircon. A battered wallet spilling six currencies on a 7-11 glass countertop. Strangers in the morning becoming friends for the evening and sometimes even long-distance travel companions. But that’s rare. Usually, the people you meet become another in a line of a hundred blurry faces in a hundred blurry photos you look back on once a year when the wifi signal drops and you scroll through your gallery thinking ‘oh shit, I remember them.’

That’s not the kind of travel I experienced in Australia. Barring the road trip (which was something different entirely), in Australia I didn’t move quickly. In fact, I hardly moved at all. Everywhere I went, I stayed. Three months here, six there. I actually got to know some places. Got to peel back a bit of the surface and get a look at the shiny, veiny bits beneath.

See, in Australia, there was a variable. Something I haven’t experienced in the other places I’ve gone. In Australia, I had a visa. I could work, in six month stints, anywhere I wanted. And the wages were good.

In the almost two years I stayed, I handled this new variable in a couple of ways. The first I embraced out of necessity since I stretched my trip to Asia and basically crash landed in the country thinking I was going to have to ask directions to the nearest homeless shelter. The second was an attempt at a normal life. A righteous ignorance to the axe that hung above my head and constantly reminded me that eventually, I had to leave.

If there was a mantra for the first of these options, it would be this: Go somewhere impressively uninteresting and save as much as you possibly can.

This was my strategy for Dingo, when I first got to Australia. And it was my strategy for Rottnest Island, which I’ve only just left. In most ways, it was the same for Airlie Beach, though Airlie carried its own variable since it held the extension of my visa.

The goal for each of those places was to leave with more money (or visas) than I had when I arrived. And in that sense I accomplished my goals. It can’t be argued that Australia is a great place to go if you’re looking to save money quickly. Full-time work is easily accessible and if you choose a company with generous penalties, you’re looking at a Sunday cleaning toilets for $40 an hour. And it’s fine, sometimes, if you’ve got something you’re working on. I wrote a lot in all those places. Made a record with Kate and planned world domination with Liz.

But I gotta say, as a motivator, for me, money is fucking depressing.

As I allowed those places to drag me into the boonies, I learned what a city person I am. How I crave the accessibility and the options. The energy and the people and endless opportunities to connect and spark something in your brain. I’m an Islander, yes, but Islanders, more often than not, live in cities, and away from them I felt myself beginning to spiral. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the people I met in those places, but people without a place isn’t enough, same as a place without people isn’t enough.

But even when I embraced option two and lived in cities, Cairns and later Melbourne, things weren’t exactly hunky dory. My writing/life balance was skewed to shit in Cairns. Communal living will do that to you. You’ve got no space to work and even if you did, who wants to make a twelfth pass at a blog post when people are drinking goon by the pool? And Melbourne, the place I was probably balanced best, was marred by the fact that I knew I had to leave. I settled for things that were good enough instead of looking to improve on them. I could have found a better place to live, but why? I was leaving. I could have found a job where I didn’t work late nights, but why? I was leaving.

Can you live somewhere and simultaneously be leaving? That was the question I had to ask myself, over and over in Australia. And it’s the reason I’m so looking forward to the States. Because no matter the answer, in the land of the free, I’m not going to have to worry about it.

I know that wherever I end up, I likely won’t stay forever. I was born with itchy feet and honestly, what’s the point without a bum gun? But this time, there won’t be a deadline. I won’t be forced to leave a place by such and such time, and if I leave, it will be because I’ve chosen to leave, not because I’ve reached some arbitrary date hanging above my head.

There are a lot of places I haven’t been. There is a lot I still want to see. Despite what you might think, I am young and the world is wide. But for now, I’m not looking for somewhere to go. I’m looking for somewhere to stay. And I will be there soon.

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