#dirty jobs

[facialhairy]

Mike Rowe (has a magnificent smile)

[edenfenixblogs]

hey i saw the post about your cousin's bar mitzvah, and well first of all congrats to her. but also uh one thing you mentioned made me curious- what *am* i supposed to do should i find a dead body on the side of the road, if it's no problem for me to ask? not to worry you or anything like that but i guess it'd be useful to know if i pass a car crash on a road trip again.

Ah! What a good ask!!!! I see you committing to the act of learning more about Judaism as an act of allyship, and I appreciate you! Thanks so much for taking an interest.

Obligatory disclaimer: I’m not a biblical scholar or a Talmudic expert. I’m just a Jew who likes being a Jew.

So my Torah portion was in Leviticus. For those who don’t know, Leviticus and Numbers are often considered the doldrums of Torah books. It’s not where a lot of the well-known exciting parts happen. Those books generally contain a lot of lists of rules and mitzvot.

But this is actually why I like the way Judaism reads the whole Torah in order. It forces us to confront the “boring” stuff. And in so doing, we have to think harder about why that stuff is included in our books.

So that’s why my assigned portion was interesting to me.

The actual text basically says “don’t touch dead bodies.” But I remember reading the Talmudic scholarship which was especially interesting because its focus was to elaborate on all the exceptions and then talked about the importance of doing good deeds without a reward and not punishing those who need to do things like touch dead bodies.

The point of the text isn’t to condemn people who are doing the “forbidden” thing without any cause. The text outlines a lot of rules (many of which are not relevant anymore) and, frankly excessive punishments for breaking the rules.

But Judaism doesn’t end at the literal text. Talmud (rabbinical interpretation) is equally important.

My take on the material was this:

There are some things that, on the whole, we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t touch dead bodies. We shouldn’t come to synagogue when we are sick. We shouldn’t cheat on our spouses. Etc.

But sometimes, you do need to break the rules. And for some things, someone must always break the rules. There must be someone in any community whose job it is to touch dead bodies. Someone must bury the dead. At the very least.

For people in that position, it is so vitally important that we do not throw the literal text in their face. It is important that we do not condemn them or shun them or otherwise exclude them from our community. Judaism is about community. And you cannot have a community that is based upon excluding people who do essential jobs. Rather, thank them. Because they are doing a good thing with no inherent reward. Quite the opposite. Those people should be celebrated. They take on the hard work knowing it carries risk of exclusion and judgment, but they do it anyway. Because it’s right.

Back in the day, if you saw a dead body on the side of the road and no one seemed available to bury it? Bury it. Give that fallen soul dignity. Then pray about it. Physically and emotionally wash the sin* away. (*sin in Judaism is not the same as the Christian idea of sin. Sin is more akin to an “oops” or “missing the mark.”) And take pleasure in doing something good for humanity and knowing that nobody else had to take on that sin for you.

So, nowadays, if you see a dead body on the side of the road? Call the person whose job it is to deal with that. And thank them for doing this very emotionally difficult work. Welcome that person into your community. Be kind to them. It matters. Because there is no community at all without them and people like them.

And in general? The more broad lesson to this is to of course be kind to people who do unglamorous but necessary work. And to take on that unglamorous work ourselves when necessary. That’s how we keep our community functional and healthy. Do good deeds without expecting a reward. Do what’s right even when you expect a bad outcome. Do good and right things for their own sake, because that’s what we exist to do. Create goodness in the world. The reward is the better world we create.

Thanks for asking @clawdia-houyhnhnm

[invisibleicewands]

[vertigoartgore]

The Jennings family portrait (around the early 80's in universe) from FX's The Americans (2013-2018). Can you tell which ones are Russians spies and which one are real Americans ?

[guardwyrm]

i ❤️ vultures i’m such a huge fan of The continued cycle of life and death and rebirth and the sun and pestilence and doing the work that must be done for the cycle to continue despite others’ disgust and living hand in hand with death and how interesting of a relationship that is

[reality-detective]

* * * News Interruption * * *

Installing spacers on a 765,000 volt line.

[haggishlyhagging]

“Mining women, of course, had no time or occasion to worry about their appearance. The work was so cruelly hard that it was not unknown for a girl to fall into a dead faint from exhaustion as soon as she climbed into the basket to be drawn up to the surface at the end of her shift; when this happened, she usually pitched out of the shallow wicker container and down the shaft to her death. Other fatalities were caused by the weight of the trucks the women had to pull — at twelve and a half hundredweight, a runaway wagon easily crushed or mangled its "drawer." Even normal conditions of working were horrifyingly severe: the youngest girls had to crawl through passages as low as 16 to 18 inches, while grown women were expected to navigate tunnels no higher than 30 inches. In a 14-hour day, they would crawl for anything between 10 and 20 miles, with no opportunity at any point to stand up or straighten their limbs. In the winter, said Fanny Drake, a Yorkshire pit-woman, she worked for six months up to her calves in water; this took the skin off her feet "just as if they were scalded." Betty Harris of Little Bolton in the neighboring county of Lancashire found that her troubles came more from the girdle and chain by which she pulled her truck along, for it cut and blistered her sides "till I have had the skin off me"; but the only time it really bothered her was ‘when I was in the family way.’”

-Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?

[stellarpurplecollar]

Journal: Cheese Louise and Butter Fingers...

When you are on a bipolar manic, making grilled cheese sandwiches is a sort of forced meditation. You have to keep the heat to get the cook just right, you can't leave or really do anything else withou risking distraction and buring dinner. So you have to wait --sweat it out at the stove top-- at least in my case because we have one working air conditioner and it isn't in the front rooms. Nope, we have to tuck ourselves away in the bedroom during the day. Sans air conditioning means the near total shut down of the house; no television, barely any lights, and only the cats dumb enough to hang out in the heat as my only conversational companions. And this heat? I am from the San Antonio, Texas area. Today (7/12/2023) we hit 104 degrees, feeling like 112 degrees.

Stillness. So as not to lose focus on the food. Sweat--to keep my pores clean. Butter--to clog my pores again. Too hot to leave the house. Too dark this late at night to leave the house in case I run into trouble on the road... and with nowhere to go since nearly everything closes at nine or ten.

I am left with only an oven door and my imagination; pretending to hold on to the cheap seat bar of a roller coaster car. And I am terrified of roller coasters. Yet, I am believable enough to convinve myself my seat rattles and my ears are deaf with the hollaring winds of motion and the shrieks of the poor sap in front of me. Until the door creaks and someone walks in, breaking the sad excuse of a spell.

I tried using the dishwasher door handle, but opening it up on an incline was a bitch. The oven opens up much easier, especially on the jerky turns.

A whole lot of love and a whole loaf of bread; I get stuck with an odd number of sandwiches. How upsetting. One lightbulb and the ventilator hood light over the stove top... Looking around in this hazy-lit mess of a kitchen, I involuntarily assign myself up for kitchen duty tomorrow morning. In this sad lighting, my gc's look awesome. Let's see what comes to light.

Enjoy your dinner, Tumblr.

With a cheezy grin,

She Who Is Collared

[littlevictorfrankenstein]

there’s an episode of dirty jobs about this and the man who gets the mud is shown, also the mud

Who wants to come with me to New Jersey to go on an exciting adventure to find the magical mystery baseball mud

[thehippiejediblog]

You know the older I get the more I realize that jobs people think are “beneath them” normally pay a lot more than people think. In my adult life I’ve had 3 jobs. The first was the most prestigious and best looking on a resume. I ran a data department for a real estate investment company. I made $17 an hour. Then I was security at a basket cleaning warehouse. That paid $19 an hour. I now clean toilets. I am working the least hours I’ve ever worked in my life and with the new stops I’m about I get I will be making around 55-60k. Well above what I earned at either previous job. It’s not even a bad job. I just listen to audiobooks all day and everyone leaves me the fuck alone. It’s honestly probably my favorite job I’ve had and not just because of the money.

[artofmyart]

Sketchaday #mike

Mike Rowe, host of “Dirty Jobs”

#100facechallenge

[redtwin]

Dirty Jobs.

[thetreestumptherapist]

Pretty sure my future is f*cked

I'm gonna start with my question:

How does one make a living off of being a volunteer?

Even as a child I never really thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Now that I am an adult, it kind of feels like "tick tock, figure it out or it will be too late" and one of my college classes is requiring me to look at a bunch of different careers I would consider going into and I'm sitting here thinking "This would be really cool, but I don't want to do it for the rest of my life. I don't want to do any one thing for the rest of my life. I want to try a bunch of things. As many things as I can."

I grew up watching Dirty Jobs and Mythbuster's and was always impressed with how many things they got to try and experience. And now that I am an adult looking for a job, I am frustrated by being pressured to choose a whole career to go into, while also wanting to do and be a whole bunch of different things. I have so many things I am passionate about and want to actually work with instead of just dabbling, but I don't want to be stuck with one job for even a majority of my life.

I was watching Northwoods Law recently and I was absolutely in love with how everyone just cared about what they were doing and enjoyed taking care of animals. I have always loved animals and am ,myself, passionate about how they are treated. But I don't want to go into law enforcement so I thought maybe I could be a wild life rehabber. Did some digging and turns out that is also too demanding for me. But, I do really want to help care for wild animals. So I did some more digging trying to find what the people to care for permanent residents of a care facility are called because I remembered that last year at renfaire there was a falconer and I know they have those types of jobs for other animals as well. And then after some searching for odd animal jobs, I was reminded of my trip to the New England aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts and loving all the animals there, and how people just loved caring for them.

While writing this I remembered that I love videogames and how they can be used to help people. Specifically thinking of GoodtimeswithScar and his charity streams. I want to do something like that too.

So, I guess I'm just passionate about having a passion for something? I want to do so much because I care so much about a lot of different things and I'm losing my mind trying to figure out what to do with my life. I've been winging the whole thing up to this point, just seeing where it takes me and where I end up. Maybe I was avoiding having to choose, maybe a leaf in the breeze is what I want to be. I don't know. I do know I am hating this class and the pressure (from all kinds of sources) to get my life straightened out, right now, all of it, from the career I want, to where I want to live, to how many kids I want. I've been fudging my way through this class (and let's be honest, my life) and I guess that's what I'll continue to do.

Thank you for listening (reading?) my rant. I have to go finish a 500 word essay on two jobs that I don't know that I want.

I wish you all better luck in your lives and jobs/careers than I am having in mine.

[drafty-castle]

There was a whole Dirty Jobs episode about this and the guy insisted that teeth was the most humane was to do things. Mike Rowe had to do a whole pause show to check with insurance and animal rights people thing which was not something he had ever had to do before. They showed how fast teeth was compared how slow banding was.

Now, do I know what the proper thing to do is? Fuck no. I ain’t no shepherd. I just remember that episode. It stuck with me, watching Rowe lean over and get teabagged by a ram.

Don’t give CPR to wild animals: a thing you wouldn’t think you’d have to tell people but apparently you do. 💀

[muddyoveralls90]