I'm pretty happy with cycling to strawberry picking. While I
don't have anything like a community or culture outside of
new cyberia, I found seasonal work is a way to hang out with
people from cultures whose fashioning could be described as
old.
It's not all a cake walk. High density farming of sweet
things means you are constantly breathing the in the black
and grey particulate mist of mould which explode as you
"clean them" while picking (throw them onto the ground, to
the extent they are a well behaved rigid object). This leads
to constant sneezing that is not at all cute or apologetic.
Today particularly there has been a massive sandfly boom.
Vietnamese pickers will not go amoung the rows with anything
less than a full hazmat suit; and the feeling is they've got
the right of it. Different big communities might dislike
each other on principle in some way.
Let's codename one of my friends Lilly. She seems to be the
most important person at the farm, though maybe Lilly is
just the head seasonal-worker-facing person. Lilly is
putting their daughter through an NZ college at full
international student rates. I think that's about 10k NZD /
course, 8 courses a year; ballpark at least. I was
interrogating them while we were picking next to each other
about what she does on days off, and this idea just doesn't
register with her. When she finishes for the day, she gets
to spend time at home with her family; she works seven days
a week, all the time (I don't have any knowledge of the
non/seasonal nature of this). I feel like she was trying to
give me advice, or make a pointed observation about how I
take Wednesdays off for my show, and so she has scheduled
herself to pick rather than QC on Wednesdays.
I'm very interested in this non-working-week vision of the
world and SE DEBROUILLER nature of Orwell's PLONGEURS.
(Obviously I don't agree with the existence of modern
economic work).
This is also the sort of place and person I want to have
personal-scope deep learning harnessed by all the time, and
it is my dream to have personal device deep learning that
people here will gain from using themselves day-to-day.
