Category: work

Sunday 04/05/20

I’m a janitor. Boy is it hard to say that out loud. I have been a janitor for over five years. I know I’m a janitor because when I got the job cleaning the yoga studio and office space that is what was written in the contract. It took me awhile to accept that being a janitor was what I did not who I was. 

I am still cleaning the yoga studio and office space and even though only two people are working there I have noticed that I get physically ill every Sat night before I have to go clean the next day. I also clean the radio station where I volunteer, I’m sure that place is full of cooties. Most of the volunteers are men and most of them just don’t enjoy a good disinfectant wipe they way a woman would. Statistics are now saying the virus kills more men then woman and that scientist think it has something to do with female hormones or some such nonsense. I don’t think so. Men do not pay attention. Men do not wash their hands like woman do. Men think they can “tough it out.’ Not this time boys.

There are 20 confirmed cases in our town but testing has been limited so we are told maybe more like 200.

Big Joy

I spent many hours planning my hour and a half radio show this week, It was a different kind of planning then the last three months. I was looking at the show in a different way. I worked all week on listening to new music and blending in my favorites. I thought the show was done and then I am changing everything again.  I keep doing this until I go on the air and even while I am doing my show I am changing the rotation. Something has shifted. My ex poetry teacher suggests  that I am creating my radio show like you arrange  poetry and I believe she is right. I didn’t know how to express what I am doing but I think she did. Art. It comes in many forms. Big Joy.

Radio Baby

When I was seventeen years old instead of going to school I went to the radio station. My father was a disc jockey and his name is Tom Donahue. The radio station was KMPX in San Francisco in 1967.  Up until then I hadn’t hung out with my father when he did radio in AM but the family was aware of Top 40, music hops and concerts as Tom  was always was putting on some show. My favorites were the Cow Palace shows he and his partner Bob Mitchell and KYA radio  put on in San Francisco in the early  60’s.

At KMPX I was the receptionist, the music librarian, an engineer and then when we moved to KSAN;  a disc jockey.  And now 50 years later I am a disc jockey once again at my local community radio station  and loving it. I didn’t think I ever wanted to be a dj after I “retired” from radio and moved to Maui in 1973  to “work on my tan.” There were enough disc jockeys in the family; my father, my brother  Sean Donahue and my step mother Raechel. I wanted to find my own path.

 

Tuesday

I am working on getting rid of stuff that belonged to the queen mum today. It always makes me emotional and today angry. I believe what happened at the nursing home has traumatized me, and I still wear my grief like a second skin.  Today I am looking through the stuff that was in her desk. Everything we could never find so we bought another was in that  drawer. Now I have 4 staplers, 3 measuring tapes, 6 pairs of scissors and more pens that I want to count, and push pins and rubber bands and on and on it goes. I have had a couple of people give me suggestions on getting a  job. Like I don’t know to look in the newspaper, I hate it when someones suggests the obvious to me.  In my heart I know these suggestions come from a place of love and yet it makes me mad because neither one of them has worked a low paying job in forty years.  They have no idea what it is like being an itinerant worker these days. I was so surprised how  cruel women can be in the workplace. I still have no idea why they didn’t like me and  decided to make my working life miserable, no sisterhood working there. And don’t get me started about ageism in the workplace. I see another box to go through, it looks like kitchen stuff, oh good just want I need  another potato peeler.