Man in Motion

Apropos of nothing, I made a chart that shows, for any given year since I graduated from college, the number of W-2s I filed, and the number of addresses I called “home.” Of course, these are incomplete metrics of how often I hop jobs or shift house. The job metric omits freelance jobs that don’t provide W-2s, but over-represents temp agency jobs that no one would consider terribly permanent. And how I define “home” is notoriously vague. Do I count places at which I’ve received mail? This would include, for example, several “c/o General Delivery” addresses I had while doing fieldwork. For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to define “home” as any address at which I received a bank statement. So most of my abodes while performing fieldwork are not represented. On the other hand, this metric over-represents my parents’ addresses, where I had my bank statements forwarded during periods of high mobility (e.g. while living out of my backpack or moving to China).

Plotting a trend — even an exercise as simple as this — reveals patterns. Overall, I average about 2.4 jobs and 2.3 addresses per year. The inverse of the mean (1/µ) suggests a periodicity of about 0.4 for both metrics — in other words, I change jobs or addresses every 0.4 years (or 5 months). The logarithmic trend lines reveal a clear pattern to hold jobs longer as I age, and a less-clear pattern to shift addresses less frequently. In other words, my early job-hopping skews the job-hopping metric, but I can reliably be counted upon to shift addresses every five months.

The archaeologist in me sees three discontinuities. In particular, I notice two “stable years” (1996 and 2004) in which I had only one job and lived in only one address. I also have one “ultra-unstable” year (1999) where I top out both metrics. If this chart were a seriation of pottery shards from an archaeological site, I would expect that those three sample units are providing especially unusual information. So what happened in 1996, 1999, and 2004?

In 1996, I was in the second year of grad school. I had a fellowship that I carried for both years of school, and which grew out of and back into my job as a Collections Assistant at the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. It was a great job and I was good at it. I also had an affordable, nice-enough apartment close to campus. So 1996 actually represents two years of stability: from the time I moved to Oregon (August, 1995) to start school, until I left school and moved to Montana for my first field directorship (August, 1997). The stability here was real: my life was mostly unchanged during the period beginning in 1995 and ending in 1997.

In 1999, I left my last archaeology job in Southern California and changed careers into web design. This was also the height of the DotCom boom. The job-hopping represents my gaining traction in my new career: two of my W-2 were for temp agencies that year. The address-shifting represents both the move from SoCal (back) to Oregon, as well as an abortive move to Seattle. There were also intra-city moves in Redlands and Portland.

2004 was the first year after I met Jenny (my favorite person). We were living in a rented house in Multnomah Village (my favorite home of my adult life), and I was working as an Art Director at Curiosity (my favorite job ever). We lived in that house for two years (July, 2003 to June, 2005). I had the Curiosity job for almost three (July, 2002 to April, 2005).

All this seems like a lot of change. But the apparent job-hopping, and to a lesser extent the house-shifting, are artifacts of my chosen careers. Both archaeology and web design are project-based work. Moreover archaeology is seasonal and site-dependent. When the project ends, everyone gets laid off, and you move (geographically) to the next available project. This happened to me with five archaeology jobs (one in 1993, three in 1994, and one in 1999). I kind of developed a nose for impending layoffs, and managed to duck out of some of my design jobs just before the company declared bankruptcy (which happened once in 1999, and three times in 2001).

After 1999, however, my profession doesn’t explain my address changes, because I pretty much lived entirely in Oregon. From 1999 to 2002, however, I was living through my unhappy first marriage, which produced a lot of moving-in and moving-out. I can attribute three address changes in that period to two separations and a divorce.

2007 looks to be an on-trend year. Jenny and I will be back in Oregon soon and I’ll be looking to add another job to my resumé. Frankly, though, I’m getting sorely tired of these shenanigans. My life has suffered from a surfeit of adventure, professional and personal. Despite which, as I’ve come to realize this past year, I am not a particularly adventurous person. If pressed, I’d say my favorite years (in the past fourteen) were, unsurprisingly, 1996 and 2004. (Although 1994 might rate as well, for very different reasons.) My least favorite would certainly be 2002, which was kind of the karmic hangover for 1999–2000.

I sometimes liken myself to a hobbit. I really long for the comforts of familiarity and the dignity of labor. I don’t care much for fancy trinkets or fast living. In another age I’d have made a pretty good farmer. But every so often I get an itch, and I tear my life apart scratching it. Today I’m hoping our adventure in China proves to be the last.