December Daily: fantasy professions

[resonant]

mific - Top five fantasy professions/jobs

About work: In Samuel Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, one of the settings is a world where everyone spends maybe twenty hours a week at a Job₁, which is the kind of work that requires education and training and sometimes faces you with problems that you have to take home with you, and then ten or so at a Job₂, which is work that's necessary and important but can be hung up with your apron at the end of the day. I think a system like that would be fantastic. There are lots of things I could enjoy doing if I didn't have to do them all day, every day.

5. I like to imagine cooking for people. But I don't imagine it the way any cooking-related work looks in the real world -- more like being a hobbit, or a little mouse in an apron from a Beatrix Potter book, or a personal chef from one of those wacky movies where you're hired by a family of perfectly awful people and you cook them the food they need rather than the food they think they want and then all is miraculously fixed.

4. This week I saw a video on Reddit from someone who worked in a cat cafe. Wasn't clear to me what they did in a cat cafe, but imagine if part of your job was to pet cats all day.

3. My father was in city planning for a while. You never could get him to talk about his work, but sometimes he'd slip and tell me something fascinating. "There's a formula to rate how successful a set of street solutions is," he said in about 1980, "and it boils down to how many miles per hour a car can average going through it, which is why this city is such a mess." I think it would be really interesting to do urban planning hypothetically, but if you had to work with real people, real competing government agencies, real budgets, etc., it would be frustrating.

2. Project management sounds like a lot of fun to me. I wouldn't want to do it at a megacorporation like the one I work for now, because your bit of the process is too small and it's too hard to get to know the full context of it, but the same kind of work in a smaller context (working for a remodeling firm, maybe) sounds really fun and interesting.

1. Sometimes I've imagined living in a little housing development founded and built for the purpose of sharing resources -- like you've got twelve small houses built around a common building, and the individual houses are just big enough for privacy because if you want to do large-scale cooking or crafts or gardening or whatever, there are spaces you can use in the common house. And not everyone has to have a car, because twelve households could probably do fine sharing five cars and one van. And of course if you were going to make such a thing, someone would have to coordinate the use of all those shared resources, coordinate the people who kept them maintained and cleaned and repaired, connect residents to services they needed, etc. -- now that would be a really interesting job.



Leave me a comment to add a prompt to the calendar. The current list is below the cut.





4 runpunkrun - Top five things you like to have at/on hand
5 mergatrude - Top five things you have overheard
6 storiesforsorries - Top five due South fanfics
7 norah - Top five things you would tell your 25-year-old self
8 kitewithfish - Top five lines from movies or TV that have just made it into your day to day speech
9 libitina - top five beverages you wouldn't make for yourself
10 lunabee - Top five colors to wear
11 minutia_r - top five pieces of fandom history
12 celli - Top five TV episodes of all time
13
14 minoanmiss - Top five poets? top five titles?
15
16
17 dine - Top five ice cream flavors
18
19 china_shop - Top five devices/appliances/bluetooth thingies/whatever :-)
20
21
22
23 fox - Top five Advent carols, maybe
24 fox - Top five Christmas carols
25 break for Christmas
26
27
28
29
30
31

Comments

[clevermanka]

Oh to be a hobbit-esque Hunca Munca, preparing food for people in an intentional community. 🧡

[duffy]

Dec. 13: Top 5 OTPs in television or movies. Could be romantic or friendship. (Canon is NOT a requirement!)

[the_future_modernes]

Because I have had interesting times with roommates, shared kitchens give me the heebie jeebies. But if folks actually clean up after themselves, fab! I do like Samuel Delaney's job ideas though. How about what the the top five things you look forward to as you grow older?

[dorinda]

Dec. 20: Top 5 comfort movies? Or comfort reads, if you'd rather.

[sara]

I think it would be really interesting to do urban planning hypothetically, but if you had to work with real people, real competing government agencies, real budgets, etc., it would be frustrating.

Land management is All A Bit Much many days. Some days I look forward to retirement and other days I remind myself that I would probably last about two years before I waded back in to something.

[minoanmiss]

I really love your answers. I've had a couple of friends who've lived in housing developments like that (more townhouses than separated houses, but with larger shared spaces for entertaining, including kitchens and gardens). They do look really nifty to me.

[mific]

The Samuel Delaney idea is very much a fantasy I had some time ago when working at an especially complex and taxing job. I used to imagine being a librarian, but not the complex role of real librarians, just reshelving books. I liked the calm organisation and simplicity of it.
And I saw an article about one of those shared housing developments like in 5. just the other day. They look great!

[nnozomi]

This is great. Especially 3, 2, and 1--I have a thing about "administration saves the world" in fic or fiction in general, and I would adore a novel set entirely in any of these three settings in a fantasy or SF context.

[copracat]

I'm going to create your perfect job: part-time facilities manager for a string of cat cafes. On Thursdays you cook in one of the cafes.

[lunabee34]

Your answers are so fascinating. Love them.

[norah]

I am loving these! The Delaney sounds great. In my experience most jobs, even great jobs, are about 20% actual engaging work that requires expertise and problem-solving and then about 80% email, meetings, paperwork, reporting, spreadsheets, and anxiety; the 80% is the part I bring home and that keeps me up at night.