In the late-1980s, Chris and I settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a house on 4th Avenue. I worked at a tiny Montessori school near the food co-op, and Chris worked as a runner for a lawyer in Ypsilanti. The lawyer wanted between 5 and 40 hours of his time per week, on a fixed weekly salary, no law training required.

The job turned out to be roughly 25 hours per week—perfect for a budding artist. At work Chris ran errands, filed papers, checked points of law, wrote letters, made copies, confirmed an alibi for a man accused of murder, served papers, and drove the lawyer to and from court appearances. The lawyer and Chris got on well; we even babysat his young children a couple of times.

Chris gave the lawyer his full attention during work hours but then switched it off, totally, the rest of the week. It was a classic day job in that way, and he used his free time to develop a pen and ink illustration style.

The Urban Dictionary defines “day job” as: The talentless job you’re currently working for just to make money, while in the process of following the career path you are working on and that you actually really want.

Technically, then, my work as a writer/reporter is not a day job because it’s not “talentless” and it’s almost indistinguishable from the path I “actually really want," which is to be... a writer.

You might say, “But you are a writer,” to which I would say I want to branch out and write in different genres; to publish profiles about unsung educators I come across, to write about our urban walks, and to finish my book about a homeless man living in Central Park.

I wonder if working as a writer makes it harder for me to write on my own time, because it works the same muscles; like Chris, maybe I should be a runner, drive a bus or work as a barista at my beloved O Café.

It was certainly difficult to juggle both when my day job was new and I undertook big, all-consuming projects such as co-authoring a policy paper on Math Anxiety in Teachers and a Parents’ Guide to Math and Science. But I don’t think it’s true now.

My school visits and profiles do not take every ounce of me, yet I learn from them like a pianist practicing scales. Despite weeks like this last one--when I was so backed up with work I didn’t get this blog post out--my day job is pretty perfect for me.

Anything done well—even “typical” day jobs like my first job as an ice cream scooper, or a job cleaning hotel rooms—is not talentless, anyway, as anyone knows who has been on the receiving end of untalented ice cream scooping or hotel cleaning.

I suspect Chris is in the minority in the way he so cleanly demarcated his day job from his non-day job, like the way my grandfather extricated bones from a fish. Chris says, “It was a relief to have work to go to and not think about the career path for awhile.”

What's really lovely, I find, is when one job feeds the other in unexpected ways. It was my education experience, for example, that helped me land my first steady writing job (and now that job provides stability, colleagues and much-needed structure to my week—the “relief” Chris mentions).

And it was at his day job in the 1980s that Chris happened upon the Michigan Bar Journal and noticed it was published in Ypsilanti. One day he toted his pen and ink drawings to the Journal’s offices to see if they could use an illustrator, mentioning he worked part-time for a lawyer. It was a winning combination for them, and that’s how he picked up his first regular illustration job.

What’s in a day job for you? This week I’m adding a new “comments” feature. I’d love to hear from you.

The day job may inform the career path in unexpected ways