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anything goes
May. 20th, 2013 04:24 pmKnowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account.
Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, 1975 (emphasis original). Ok look have this one too (emphasis mine):
Now, when we attempt to describe and to understand developments of this kind in a general way, we are, of course, obliged to appeal to the existing forms of speech which do not take them into account and which must be distorted, misused, beaten into new patterns in order to fit unforeseen situations (without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress).
-passed SEE part 1 on Thursday, with my mental focus so shot that I seriously found it hard to sit still through the exam. I took this as a sign to take a week or so off before starting to study for the last block. Unfortunately this has left me existentially bored and oh my god I need to write.
-have had a couple of shifts at newjob which have been largely 'learn things about Section 8 programs; give uninformed comments on interior design; tickle cat'. Not helping with boredom levels. I remember, years ago, taking issue with Henry Jenkins' theory that slash was fuelled by women having dissatisfying jobs; I still think that this is a weird angle to look at given how obviously dissatisfying our cultures - our myths and our pornographies - are, but recently I am feeling like he has a point; sometimes I write to demonstrate that I'm still here, to count myself when other means evaporate.
-speaking of dissatisfying culture, the only good thing about Star Trek: Into Darkness is Benedict Cumberbatch. nuKirk inspires in me great deals of boredom. C says it is like Pine is playing Shatner only with no Shatner and Shatner was the only thing that ever gave Shatner a personality. I don't know because I don't care. No one has convinced me why I should care.
-I finished Embassytown! At some point in the middle I began to feel guilty toward all the people who I'd told it was a sci-fi book about philosophy of language because it degenerated delightfully into a sci-fi book about zombies and troll romance. I seriously never know if I'm imagining all the brilliantest jokes I read into Mieville's stuff but oh god this:
^this is the point where I did a headtilt and realised that the last few pages had been a joke about kink memes and prompts and fandom exchanges, or at least, it totally let me take it as such. I have no idea how far I'm stretching but it's a delightful stretch. If you read this book I dare you to pick a pairing - any pairing, but it might be funniest if it's RPF - and play out the entire EzRa plotline as an Imagine Yuor Otp. By the end it veered back to philosophy of language; the conclusion was a bit twee and IMO unnecessarily charitable towards the human race, but it is a charming book.
-have had a couple of shifts at newjob which have been largely 'learn things about Section 8 programs; give uninformed comments on interior design; tickle cat'. Not helping with boredom levels. I remember, years ago, taking issue with Henry Jenkins' theory that slash was fuelled by women having dissatisfying jobs; I still think that this is a weird angle to look at given how obviously dissatisfying our cultures - our myths and our pornographies - are, but recently I am feeling like he has a point; sometimes I write to demonstrate that I'm still here, to count myself when other means evaporate.
-speaking of dissatisfying culture, the only good thing about Star Trek: Into Darkness is Benedict Cumberbatch. nuKirk inspires in me great deals of boredom. C says it is like Pine is playing Shatner only with no Shatner and Shatner was the only thing that ever gave Shatner a personality. I don't know because I don't care. No one has convinced me why I should care.
-I finished Embassytown! At some point in the middle I began to feel guilty toward all the people who I'd told it was a sci-fi book about philosophy of language because it degenerated delightfully into a sci-fi book about zombies and troll romance. I seriously never know if I'm imagining all the brilliantest jokes I read into Mieville's stuff but oh god this:
After this exchange I made new sense of EzRa's little speeches to the city. Someone would generally translate. Some nodded to logic. Others were random sentences, or statements of preference or condition. I'm tired, subject-verb-object like children's grammars. What I'd previously thought whims of subject I realised might be gifts for partlicar Ariekene listeners in return for this or that favour. Economies and politics.
^this is the point where I did a headtilt and realised that the last few pages had been a joke about kink memes and prompts and fandom exchanges, or at least, it totally let me take it as such. I have no idea how far I'm stretching but it's a delightful stretch. If you read this book I dare you to pick a pairing - any pairing, but it might be funniest if it's RPF - and play out the entire EzRa plotline as an Imagine Yuor Otp. By the end it veered back to philosophy of language; the conclusion was a bit twee and IMO unnecessarily charitable towards the human race, but it is a charming book.
uncertainty:
May. 15th, 2013 06:43 pmThings I am going to do this year, and when:
-pass the SEE, June/July
-do mentally unchallenging work for the Mob, May/June/possibly beyond, but only if I can squeak over into doing mentally challenging work for them instead.
-enrol as an EA, either ASAP or in November. [The divinely stupid thing is, EAs are all on one of three different 3-year enrolment cycles depending on the last digit of their social security number. Spoiler: my set is the one that's up for renewal this winter. I think if I hold off applying until November then my enrollment will be set for three years, because that is what happens when you apply at the turn of a cycle, whereas if I apply any sooner I'll become enrolled two months later and then have to take CPE credits and renew between November and January in order to stay enrolled past next April. Therefore I'll only apply before November if I land a job that requires me to do so.]
Things I would like to do this year, and when:
-look for a job that wants an EA, either Julyish or I hold off until the end of the year when there's more jobs available, albeit most of them seasonal dead ends.
-take some goddamn accounting classes, preferably in pursuit of a second bachelor's, I guess in the autumn
-accept niceboss's request that I teach evening tax prep classes to her prospective new minions, I think late August-October.
[-bonus complication; if I've enrolled as an EA I'll need to take a small amount of CPE credits. The two above items may or may not count towards this (I know you can get EA creds for instructing others, just not sure if this qualifies); if not, I will probably do what I did last year for required RTRP credits, ie. get them online as quickly and dirtily as legally possible because it is seemingly almost impossible in any 'profession' to find CPE that isn't just a complete waste of time and money. NVM new email from niceboss says that the teaching job counts for EA CPE, so the most I'd need elsewhere is the 2hr Ethics requirement which I am sure I could knock out at home in about 20 minutes. This makes it way more likely that I'll enrol sooner rather than later as it eliminates almost all the downside.]
-I may try to cling to my two easy mornings per week with the Dingbat because the agency I work through offers tuition reimbursements for professional classes, though I am not positive if I've clocked enough hours to qualify for it. (I call them the Useless People for a reason.)
...The logical thing to do would be to cling on to my dribs-and-drabs of employment while continuing to study things, and then look for a real job at the end of the year; however, looking for a real job sooner might make my household actually solvent. If I commit to studying, I'll need to do as much as I possibly can during autumns and summers as I am always going to be unable to do any of it during tax season. but. please, if you catch me trying to work three jobs while studying later this year? kill me immediately.
Oh and it would be nice if I'd finished more than one shortfic all year. :/
-pass the SEE, June/July
-do mentally unchallenging work for the Mob, May/June/possibly beyond, but only if I can squeak over into doing mentally challenging work for them instead.
-enrol as an EA, either ASAP or in November. [The divinely stupid thing is, EAs are all on one of three different 3-year enrolment cycles depending on the last digit of their social security number. Spoiler: my set is the one that's up for renewal this winter. I think if I hold off applying until November then my enrollment will be set for three years, because that is what happens when you apply at the turn of a cycle, whereas if I apply any sooner I'll become enrolled two months later and then have to take CPE credits and renew between November and January in order to stay enrolled past next April. Therefore I'll only apply before November if I land a job that requires me to do so.]
Things I would like to do this year, and when:
-look for a job that wants an EA, either Julyish or I hold off until the end of the year when there's more jobs available, albeit most of them seasonal dead ends.
-take some goddamn accounting classes, preferably in pursuit of a second bachelor's, I guess in the autumn
-accept niceboss's request that I teach evening tax prep classes to her prospective new minions, I think late August-October.
[-
-I may try to cling to my two easy mornings per week with the Dingbat because the agency I work through offers tuition reimbursements for professional classes, though I am not positive if I've clocked enough hours to qualify for it. (I call them the Useless People for a reason.)
...The logical thing to do would be to cling on to my dribs-and-drabs of employment while continuing to study things, and then look for a real job at the end of the year; however, looking for a real job sooner might make my household actually solvent. If I commit to studying, I'll need to do as much as I possibly can during autumns and summers as I am always going to be unable to do any of it during tax season. but. please, if you catch me trying to work three jobs while studying later this year? kill me immediately.
Oh and it would be nice if I'd finished more than one shortfic all year. :/
I have a new job - the one I kindof didn't really want. I don't even know what it pays yet because the boss is a hyperactively busy eccentric who talks exactly like a cliche Boston-Italian mobster villain (fyi this part of the description is irrelevant to the point but I had to put it in somewhere) and he vanished halfway through the afternoon to go buy some smaller toilets. no, really.
Why am I doing this?
a) certainty beats wrangling with staffing agencies and I would really like more income right now,
b) I straight-up talked to them about the fact that I am about to get a shiny new qualification and may well fuck off in July but that is fine because it is their enormous June project they really want me around for,
c) the same things that always made me interested in this industry (housing; specifically, a private property management trust that is administering a public housing program) in the first place; the variety of work and the fact that it's everywhere and it matters. It's also likely to be helpful in the future to say that I've worked in property management, especially if I can get anywhere near their accounting team,
d) CAT. in fact, there are three cats. I haven't worked in a place with an office cat since 2010! The people are also quite nice albeit inevitably over twice my age, and they advocate wearing only sensible, comfortable clothes/shoes on account of having to be anywhere within a mile's radius at a moment's notice. (The Mobster is the only snappy dresser in evidence; I like snappy work-clothes so I am probably going to stick with them but oh fuck, I have needed a new pair of comfy dress flats for about the last two years. The Mobster's wife is tiny, shrill and wears a cat cameo pendant.) The workplace is interesting; underground, cosy, and full of mirrored walls and grandfather clocks and dehumidifiers fighting against the smell of the air. Given the expected shortness of duration I will willingly take a whiff of batshit funtiems over a sterile corporate environment. The thing about residential real estate is, people have to want to live there.
e) I seriously would have been thrilled with this as recently as six months ago.
The above makes it sound like much more of a proactive decision than it was. Really it just kind of happened and I am now sat here rationalising why I went along with it like a good girl even though it is likely to be a mixture of tedium and absurdity and I spent much of today thinking about how easy it would be to computerise a good deal of the shit they want me to do. And I've spent most of the last two weeks being an anxious wreck about how grey-out frustrated I am with working for the Dingbat and how unqualified I am for everything else, so feeling vaguely good about doing something will suffice, I hope. (I am going to continue to work for the Dingbat, just, going back to having a second job as well will help my brain a lot).
If you were wondering, the Shiny Job Of My Dreams emailed tonight to say it had ceased to exist - I was warned over the phone that they might split it into two different jobs, one of which I possibly can't do and the other of which I probably don't want, but I told them I'll keep a look out for when they re-list things. I did send a 'wtf' email to that person who wants to interview me on Monday, but now I really need to just cancel the damn interview, and tell the Useless People not to call me until July, but however inept all these staffing people are I hate the thought of even slightly damaging bridges.
Wait, no.
Why am I doing this?
a) certainty beats wrangling with staffing agencies and I would really like more income right now,
b) I straight-up talked to them about the fact that I am about to get a shiny new qualification and may well fuck off in July but that is fine because it is their enormous June project they really want me around for,
c) the same things that always made me interested in this industry (housing; specifically, a private property management trust that is administering a public housing program) in the first place; the variety of work and the fact that it's everywhere and it matters. It's also likely to be helpful in the future to say that I've worked in property management, especially if I can get anywhere near their accounting team,
d) CAT. in fact, there are three cats. I haven't worked in a place with an office cat since 2010! The people are also quite nice albeit inevitably over twice my age, and they advocate wearing only sensible, comfortable clothes/shoes on account of having to be anywhere within a mile's radius at a moment's notice. (The Mobster is the only snappy dresser in evidence; I like snappy work-clothes so I am probably going to stick with them but oh fuck, I have needed a new pair of comfy dress flats for about the last two years. The Mobster's wife is tiny, shrill and wears a cat cameo pendant.) The workplace is interesting; underground, cosy, and full of mirrored walls and grandfather clocks and dehumidifiers fighting against the smell of the air. Given the expected shortness of duration I will willingly take a whiff of batshit funtiems over a sterile corporate environment. The thing about residential real estate is, people have to want to live there.
e) I seriously would have been thrilled with this as recently as six months ago.
The above makes it sound like much more of a proactive decision than it was. Really it just kind of happened and I am now sat here rationalising why I went along with it like a good girl even though it is likely to be a mixture of tedium and absurdity and I spent much of today thinking about how easy it would be to computerise a good deal of the shit they want me to do. And I've spent most of the last two weeks being an anxious wreck about how grey-out frustrated I am with working for the Dingbat and how unqualified I am for everything else, so feeling vaguely good about doing something will suffice, I hope. (I am going to continue to work for the Dingbat, just, going back to having a second job as well will help my brain a lot).
If you were wondering, the Shiny Job Of My Dreams emailed tonight to say it had ceased to exist - I was warned over the phone that they might split it into two different jobs, one of which I possibly can't do and the other of which I probably don't want, but I told them I'll keep a look out for when they re-list things. I did send a 'wtf' email to that person who wants to interview me on Monday, but now I really need to just cancel the damn interview, and tell the Useless People not to call me until July, but however inept all these staffing people are I hate the thought of even slightly damaging bridges.
Wait, no.
cut and turn
May. 10th, 2013 10:10 pm[written yesterday, then not posted on account of me becoming too drunk]
-I'm still enjoying Embassytown's weirdness and querying its definition of truth, and the language is doing warm, familiar things from my brain; there's things it touches that I forgot I stashed there years back. Mieville is absolutely one of my all-time major targets for stylistic theft, so when he writes about things I care about it feels like the words and I are conversing in a totally one-sided fashion (in, as the story literalises, two voices, but who's counting?)
-had first exam (which is really part 3 of exam); it was harder than I expected, full of things I hadn't really studied, and I passed. The one kind thing about it is the time; it's three and a half hours and lets you flag things you're not sure of, so I answered all the questions in about 90 minutes and then went over things in multiple different ways and then made a handwritten table of confidence intervals on the scratch paper they gave me and computed my own estimates of whether I'd fucking passed or not and went over the lower probability range again looking for clues to certain answers in other questions, etc etc etc, and hit the 'end' button with 19 minutes spare and with my last estimate telling me I might fail by .25 of a question, but by then terror had overtaken focus and there was no point waiting any longer. And I passed.
-still wondering about how hard I fluffed up my Sunday interview. It really didn't help that I was talking to a third-party recruiter who did not know certain things about the job, or the industry, so I was having to stammer out nervous & long-winded explanations of things that shouldn't have required elaboration, eg. what the fuck an EA is. :/ I haven't heard anything back yet, but I have a feeling it's a slow-process place so that may not yet be fatal news.
-meanwhile, tomorrow I am doing something with the other place I interviewed with; I don't know if it's a second interview or a training session or whateverthefuck. I'm not depressed about it so much any more, just hoping I can talk them into a temp arrangement that ends in July so I can get my EA card and then fuck off without anyone hating me. (Assuming having an EA card makes anyone love me, at all, ever.)
-I have another interview scheduled monday, but; I got a bit perplexed on the phone when the lady at the staffing agency (one I interviewed for in January but haven't worked for before) thought it was like what I've been doing, when it is actually totally not, but I assumed she just had no idea what my job entails because being clueless about actual work is what staffing agencies do...only then she sent the appointment email and it made familiar mention of people I have never heard of. So I now have the super-conspiracy strand of impostor syndrome where I'm genuinely pretty sure she called the wrong person for an interview! I'll have to send her the most awkward email ever tonight and see if she cancels the interview. I'd love to try the job (much more than I would love to try the job I have seemingly been offered already) although I'd probably be awful at it on account of being an impostor.
-next exam is next Thursday. I know the material way better but still need to study into its depths. Basis step-up, oh my fuck. And gift splitting. At least I've memorised the definition of legal blindness, which might be the weirdest thing on this entire exam.
-I'm still enjoying Embassytown's weirdness and querying its definition of truth, and the language is doing warm, familiar things from my brain; there's things it touches that I forgot I stashed there years back. Mieville is absolutely one of my all-time major targets for stylistic theft, so when he writes about things I care about it feels like the words and I are conversing in a totally one-sided fashion (in, as the story literalises, two voices, but who's counting?)
-had first exam (which is really part 3 of exam); it was harder than I expected, full of things I hadn't really studied, and I passed. The one kind thing about it is the time; it's three and a half hours and lets you flag things you're not sure of, so I answered all the questions in about 90 minutes and then went over things in multiple different ways and then made a handwritten table of confidence intervals on the scratch paper they gave me and computed my own estimates of whether I'd fucking passed or not and went over the lower probability range again looking for clues to certain answers in other questions, etc etc etc, and hit the 'end' button with 19 minutes spare and with my last estimate telling me I might fail by .25 of a question, but by then terror had overtaken focus and there was no point waiting any longer. And I passed.
-still wondering about how hard I fluffed up my Sunday interview. It really didn't help that I was talking to a third-party recruiter who did not know certain things about the job, or the industry, so I was having to stammer out nervous & long-winded explanations of things that shouldn't have required elaboration, eg. what the fuck an EA is. :/ I haven't heard anything back yet, but I have a feeling it's a slow-process place so that may not yet be fatal news.
-meanwhile, tomorrow I am doing something with the other place I interviewed with; I don't know if it's a second interview or a training session or whateverthefuck. I'm not depressed about it so much any more, just hoping I can talk them into a temp arrangement that ends in July so I can get my EA card and then fuck off without anyone hating me. (Assuming having an EA card makes anyone love me, at all, ever.)
-I have another interview scheduled monday, but; I got a bit perplexed on the phone when the lady at the staffing agency (one I interviewed for in January but haven't worked for before) thought it was like what I've been doing, when it is actually totally not, but I assumed she just had no idea what my job entails because being clueless about actual work is what staffing agencies do...only then she sent the appointment email and it made familiar mention of people I have never heard of. So I now have the super-conspiracy strand of impostor syndrome where I'm genuinely pretty sure she called the wrong person for an interview! I'll have to send her the most awkward email ever tonight and see if she cancels the interview. I'd love to try the job (much more than I would love to try the job I have seemingly been offered already) although I'd probably be awful at it on account of being an impostor.
-next exam is next Thursday. I know the material way better but still need to study into its depths. Basis step-up, oh my fuck. And gift splitting. At least I've memorised the definition of legal blindness, which might be the weirdest thing on this entire exam.
maybe i do
May. 2nd, 2013 08:22 pmToday was both delightful and inexplicably depressing, although obviously that is untrue as I am blogging it in the hope of explicating its depressingness.
I bitch about staffing agencies being variously useless and vampiric but the person I went to see this morning might be the best interviewer I've ever had. Professional recruiters tend to remind me a little of professional photographers - their job is, in part, to bring out the best in people, and that gives them a veneer of smarm that's hard to get through and which becomes a cause for frustration after the billionth time. This one was totally straight-up, realistic and full of good advice about what I should & shouldn't do academically and what I can and can't do professionally, and she swore the recession was still ongoing, and said she knew how to get people with my 'profile' hired. I took up all of twenty minutes of her time but it felt like more got done, more got covered, than at all the other interviews I've ever had.
I took that grain of hope home with me, because nothing is as hopeful or inspiring as seeing competent people working, then I studied for a while and made lunch and went out to interview #2. Which lasted for an hour and a half, primarily because the dude really liked the sound of his own voice. We established that I understood what the job involved and had done vaguely related things in the past, and I eventually managed to ask the most important question - is this gig temporary or permanent? - and didn't get a straightforward response. I gather June is their super-heavy-workload month and they need another pair of hands but have no idea how long for. He said he'd call later to talk about 'money and stuff'.
What really gets me is, I would have totally gone for this as recently as a year ago. I was applying for similar things. It's local. I don't know what it pays but it'll be a damn sight more than I was earning in GA. It's flexible enough to study around. It's even in an industry that interests me. And my brain is whining in pain at the thought of doing unchallenging & unstimulating pink-collar monkeywork that has nothing to do with the career I want and will allow me to learn roughly nothing of relevance to said career, and which will dump me in a social trap between two self-important local businessmen. I mean, suppose I pass the fucking SEE - it would not, as far as I know, confer upon me superpowers but being one of America's ~35000 admitted tax practitioners would make me highly fucking unsuitable for your pink-collar generica of form-filling and client contact for $12 an hour. idk I should not be this terrified of wasting my time; god knows it's what I've been good at over the years.
A few best-case scenarios; this dude does hire me and is okay with me hightailing it at the end of June, ish, if anyone else wants me by then. Or, one of the agencies pulls something more meaningful out of their ass (the Useless People emailed today saying they might have come up with something) and I can politely hightail it now before anything ever happens. Or, I am being overentitled and what I actually need is a meaningless place to work while I keep on studying things for another couple of years. idk idk idk, i just want each choice to be another step up and this is distinctly not looking like one of them.
Later, we went to Boston for no real reason; I wanted to wander and see how the streets fit together, and we passed the shrine of running shoes and cuddled for a while by the hare-and-tortoise statues. And I tried to recognise something, feel something, as we walked, and couldn't. I haven't known Boston long enough to be friends with it but I have known it more than long enough to know I'm not in love with it; there's no romance, just the odd flash of attraction on Memorial Drive; I like them taller, darker, not so fussy about age but I like them to look as smart and bad as they can be. I like the ones I can't afford to be with. I was feeling impermanent again, but I've never had cause to feel otherwise. I don't know where I'm going; I know where I am.
I bitch about staffing agencies being variously useless and vampiric but the person I went to see this morning might be the best interviewer I've ever had. Professional recruiters tend to remind me a little of professional photographers - their job is, in part, to bring out the best in people, and that gives them a veneer of smarm that's hard to get through and which becomes a cause for frustration after the billionth time. This one was totally straight-up, realistic and full of good advice about what I should & shouldn't do academically and what I can and can't do professionally, and she swore the recession was still ongoing, and said she knew how to get people with my 'profile' hired. I took up all of twenty minutes of her time but it felt like more got done, more got covered, than at all the other interviews I've ever had.
I took that grain of hope home with me, because nothing is as hopeful or inspiring as seeing competent people working, then I studied for a while and made lunch and went out to interview #2. Which lasted for an hour and a half, primarily because the dude really liked the sound of his own voice. We established that I understood what the job involved and had done vaguely related things in the past, and I eventually managed to ask the most important question - is this gig temporary or permanent? - and didn't get a straightforward response. I gather June is their super-heavy-workload month and they need another pair of hands but have no idea how long for. He said he'd call later to talk about 'money and stuff'.
What really gets me is, I would have totally gone for this as recently as a year ago. I was applying for similar things. It's local. I don't know what it pays but it'll be a damn sight more than I was earning in GA. It's flexible enough to study around. It's even in an industry that interests me. And my brain is whining in pain at the thought of doing unchallenging & unstimulating pink-collar monkeywork that has nothing to do with the career I want and will allow me to learn roughly nothing of relevance to said career, and which will dump me in a social trap between two self-important local businessmen. I mean, suppose I pass the fucking SEE - it would not, as far as I know, confer upon me superpowers but being one of America's ~35000 admitted tax practitioners would make me highly fucking unsuitable for your pink-collar generica of form-filling and client contact for $12 an hour. idk I should not be this terrified of wasting my time; god knows it's what I've been good at over the years.
A few best-case scenarios; this dude does hire me and is okay with me hightailing it at the end of June, ish, if anyone else wants me by then. Or, one of the agencies pulls something more meaningful out of their ass (the Useless People emailed today saying they might have come up with something) and I can politely hightail it now before anything ever happens. Or, I am being overentitled and what I actually need is a meaningless place to work while I keep on studying things for another couple of years. idk idk idk, i just want each choice to be another step up and this is distinctly not looking like one of them.
Later, we went to Boston for no real reason; I wanted to wander and see how the streets fit together, and we passed the shrine of running shoes and cuddled for a while by the hare-and-tortoise statues. And I tried to recognise something, feel something, as we walked, and couldn't. I haven't known Boston long enough to be friends with it but I have known it more than long enough to know I'm not in love with it; there's no romance, just the odd flash of attraction on Memorial Drive; I like them taller, darker, not so fussy about age but I like them to look as smart and bad as they can be. I like the ones I can't afford to be with. I was feeling impermanent again, but I've never had cause to feel otherwise. I don't know where I'm going; I know where I am.
i am so overdue for a linklist
May. 2nd, 2013 02:18 amIn which Z explains how to edit fiction. This is really interesting and I'm sure will be useful to many of you, and to me it's also loaded with comparison and nostalgia; the fancy prose style is most of what I care about and I hate all the literary fiction I've ever tried to read, but hey, in a very real sense, that is what fandom's for; doing what matters, where it matters, to hell with industry. I'm reading China Mieville's Embassytown right now; it's a sci-fi story about philosophy of language, complete with aliens and FTL and Kant, and all the words are smooth and perfect. I still remember Mieville's defence of adjective chains (superbe, sanglant, charmant?); they can defer our access to nouns, steer us down weird and radical paths to reach them. What he said was, "Who are you to say you know what a cat is?"
and also, cat
May. 2nd, 2013 01:51 amThere he was, on top of my kitchen cabinets. He oversaw us with disdain, secure in the knowledge that he was by far the most internet famous person present, and also the most accomplished boxer; once again, Grendel lost a fight with a small mammal in such a way as to be left bleeding from the nose, and he was duly embarrassed. TOTALLY his fault; Cooper sat patiently under a chair while Grendel tried to intimidate him, and Grendel got what was coming to him as soon as he came within arm's reach. Animal compatibility fail :( So we are going to have to visit Cooper in his current abode to catsit him while his kittehmommeh is in Canada, rather than entertaining him here, because our dogs fail and are awful, but on the plus side, CAT.
i told you these people were amazing
May. 2nd, 2013 01:19 amPrometric both sent an email and left a VM telling me that my exam had been moved to a different location, without seeing fit to specify which exam. I am just going to assume it's both of them because that's easier than getting a straight answer out of Prometric.
Studying for these goddamn things has become a weird addiction, which is fortunate as it wasn't until the month rolled over that I realised how tight I had scheduled this shit /face.palm. It is made more interesting by my refusal to spend any money on, oh come on now, self-study of publicly available information that I mostly already know. The plethora of certification in our professional lives primarily serves to enrich private education companies (but hey, the tax code itself now exists to enrich the owners of TurboTax so who even cares any more). Besides, on the most popular/most marketed EA study website it costs $40 each for a practice exam; it's $105 to sit each module for reals and you actually get a thing if you pass so why pay to study anything ever.
minor irritation #1: I found out that the most recent public-access SEE exam on IRS.gov is from 2005, immediately assumed they'd sold everything more recent & that this was another example of public policy existing in order to enrich the private education industry, then I read this ancient fucking question list and discovered that all the free samples from study materials that I've been using are based on it. I mean, they are the same questions with a few words switched. Suppose you'd paid for the private Special Enrollment ed and then noticed that? Oh wait, if you'd paid for things you would never have looked at the actualfuck source code would you.
minor irritation #2: I can't automatically add irs.gov to my Firefox search dropdown and am too lazy to figure out how.
minor irritation #3: this is making me tangibly more boring, which is all the more reason to get it out of the way ASAP and go back to having my life derailed by bad porn ideas instead.
I have two job interviews tomorrow; one for another goddamn staffing agency, then one that the Dingbat set up for me with a property manager he knows, because the Dingbat is genuinely kind when he's not being bugfuck paranoid and I think he's at least aware of how hard he might theoretically be fucking my life up by simultaneously extending my contract and cutting my hours (I told you he was a terrible employer); that I am both using the time and under no hardship is a shocking and decadent coincidence. He honestly wants me to get a better job anyway, bless his heart, and I strongly suspect that this is not it, but a) I don't care so long as it's work, and b) if I pass all my exams and magifuckily find a real job then I will bail with zero fucks and fewer regrets.
Studying for these goddamn things has become a weird addiction, which is fortunate as it wasn't until the month rolled over that I realised how tight I had scheduled this shit /face.palm. It is made more interesting by my refusal to spend any money on, oh come on now, self-study of publicly available information that I mostly already know. The plethora of certification in our professional lives primarily serves to enrich private education companies (but hey, the tax code itself now exists to enrich the owners of TurboTax so who even cares any more). Besides, on the most popular/most marketed EA study website it costs $40 each for a practice exam; it's $105 to sit each module for reals and you actually get a thing if you pass so why pay to study anything ever.
minor irritation #1: I found out that the most recent public-access SEE exam on IRS.gov is from 2005, immediately assumed they'd sold everything more recent & that this was another example of public policy existing in order to enrich the private education industry, then I read this ancient fucking question list and discovered that all the free samples from study materials that I've been using are based on it. I mean, they are the same questions with a few words switched. Suppose you'd paid for the private Special Enrollment ed and then noticed that? Oh wait, if you'd paid for things you would never have looked at the actualfuck source code would you.
minor irritation #2: I can't automatically add irs.gov to my Firefox search dropdown and am too lazy to figure out how.
minor irritation #3: this is making me tangibly more boring, which is all the more reason to get it out of the way ASAP and go back to having my life derailed by bad porn ideas instead.
I have two job interviews tomorrow; one for another goddamn staffing agency, then one that the Dingbat set up for me with a property manager he knows, because the Dingbat is genuinely kind when he's not being bugfuck paranoid and I think he's at least aware of how hard he might theoretically be fucking my life up by simultaneously extending my contract and cutting my hours (I told you he was a terrible employer); that I am both using the time and under no hardship is a shocking and decadent coincidence. He honestly wants me to get a better job anyway, bless his heart, and I strongly suspect that this is not it, but a) I don't care so long as it's work, and b) if I pass all my exams and magifuckily find a real job then I will bail with zero fucks and fewer regrets.
I'd already signed up to sit part 1 (the one I already know) of the Special Enrollment exam on May 16th, and then assessed that studying for it would be a total waste of my effort and time, and therefore I started studying for part 3 (hazily familiar legal shit) a few days ago in order to get some kind of handle on what it was like and what kind of timeframe I should figure on for it. I had the usual experience one has with unfamiliar things one can actually do, namely shifting rapidly from 'wtf is this shit' to 'HAHAAH I GOT THIS'. So, okay, figured I should get it out of the way as soon after May 16th as reasonably possible.
And then I got pleasantly full of scotch and saw that a spot had opened up on May 9th! honestly though, I would rather spam attempts and get this shit over with than hold off until I have all this new stuff down ~perfect~, so esp. with part 3, I am not even going to take it hard if I don't pass first time. But I think I will.
There is, however a totally legit reason I was using the Prometric website at 3am; because it is honestly the worst website I have ever used, and 3am is the only time it is even reasonably accessible. This is what happens when government simultaneously monopolises a function and privatises it; you get shitty provision, delivered by the lowest bidder, who evidently hasn't upgraded their site since 2004 and who know less about scaling even than I do. That the registration process is spread over way way way unnecessarily many pages (each of which takes about an hour to load during the daytime, no joke) evidently doesn't help with their load problems. I spent eight hours trying to register for part 1 in the middle of the day before giving up and vowing to never try to use Prometric.com before midnight ever again.
I am paying $315 to these people for this dogshit, horribly designed process, and I haven't even picked a time to do part 2 yet. This afternoon I spent almost an hour sat on their help webtalk trying to get a basic question answered, and their customer service agents were too busy to assist me :) The webchat is only available for a few hours on weekends. The phone help is only available in the daytimes midweek. The website is only available in the small hours of the night. It's completely amazing.
And then I got pleasantly full of scotch and saw that a spot had opened up on May 9th! honestly though, I would rather spam attempts and get this shit over with than hold off until I have all this new stuff down ~perfect~, so esp. with part 3, I am not even going to take it hard if I don't pass first time. But I think I will.
There is, however a totally legit reason I was using the Prometric website at 3am; because it is honestly the worst website I have ever used, and 3am is the only time it is even reasonably accessible. This is what happens when government simultaneously monopolises a function and privatises it; you get shitty provision, delivered by the lowest bidder, who evidently hasn't upgraded their site since 2004 and who know less about scaling even than I do. That the registration process is spread over way way way unnecessarily many pages (each of which takes about an hour to load during the daytime, no joke) evidently doesn't help with their load problems. I spent eight hours trying to register for part 1 in the middle of the day before giving up and vowing to never try to use Prometric.com before midnight ever again.
I am paying $315 to these people for this dogshit, horribly designed process, and I haven't even picked a time to do part 2 yet. This afternoon I spent almost an hour sat on their help webtalk trying to get a basic question answered, and their customer service agents were too busy to assist me :) The webchat is only available for a few hours on weekends. The phone help is only available in the daytimes midweek. The website is only available in the small hours of the night. It's completely amazing.
$330 million
Apr. 24th, 2013 04:56 pmThat is the amount of money I am told was lost when Boston shut down for the day on Friday April 19th.
What would you do with $330 million? Is 'catching one dude who killed a number of people commensurate to a bad car wreck' top of your list? This is even without thinking about how purposeless it was to even close anything outside of Watertown; even if it had accomplished anything, it is not worth this city's money and especially not worth sending the signal out that we will fearfully screw ourselves over that hard the moment any two-bit jihadi does anything newsworthy. $330 million is a lot of power to be handing to those two-bit jihadis, and I am sure they will take account of the sum accordingly.
What would you do with $330 million? Is 'catching one dude who killed a number of people commensurate to a bad car wreck' top of your list? This is even without thinking about how purposeless it was to even close anything outside of Watertown; even if it had accomplished anything, it is not worth this city's money and especially not worth sending the signal out that we will fearfully screw ourselves over that hard the moment any two-bit jihadi does anything newsworthy. $330 million is a lot of power to be handing to those two-bit jihadis, and I am sure they will take account of the sum accordingly.
and when I walked from one job to the other, after the power was back on, long after I'd quit even vaguely pretending to do any actual work for the Dingbat, the streets seemed much the same as ever but with less road rage, and all the people who were out and about were happy and relaxed and glad to see each other. I had already decided that Boston was doing it wrong, because I can be a haughty Londoner when I have to be. I always go back to what that one high court judge in the UK said a few years ago, while ruling that yes, people accused of terrorism do still have legal rights; these people 'do not threaten the life of this nation.' They are not worth our abandoning the city, not even for one day. I am looking forward to seeing an estimate of the economic cost, no joke. I want someone to stand up and explain why they think it was worth every wasted cent.
I DO have today off, and tomorrow, and I have no idea what other days, both jobs being in this weird transition state. I am going to a different drinking party and am taking cake, and I already cleaned the kitchen, and I need to iron everything ever, and get studying - I feel so very industrious.
I DO have today off, and tomorrow, and I have no idea what other days, both jobs being in this weird transition state. I am going to a different drinking party and am taking cake, and I already cleaned the kitchen, and I need to iron everything ever, and get studying - I feel so very industrious.
my lack of lack of job:
Apr. 19th, 2013 12:24 amMy jobs have both failed to dematerialise. Niceboss is referring to this as The Tax Season That Never Ends, Ha Freaking Ha; it is April 18th and we are still getting appointments from new clients; we have no idea wtf is going on or even what our opening hours for next week are. Part of me is grrrrf because I don't get to immediately gallivant off to something more lucrative; another part is okay with hunkering down to ~30 hours a week while I study for the Enrolled Agent exam (yes this is actually happening); most of the parts are full of weird achiness and yearnings on account of not having had a day off work since April 2nd and not being sure when I'm going to get one (maaaaaybe saturday). Also, the agency tells me the Dingbat has been trying to extend my contract 'indefinitely', an overfond gesture given how much my workload is likely to drop off. I told the agency I could happily fit a full-time job in around his request for my time and had indeed been doing so for three months, but they are being useless on account of me having no real qualifications to do anything. (Back in January, I saved their number in my phone as 'Useless People'.)
I don't even know that I want to be an EA other than in the sense of having meaningful letters after my name and thereby alleviating the sin of having a gloriously useless major, but I suspect that sitting the EA exam is the easiest way to make myself look like someone who deserves a real job. The next testing period seems to start in two and a half weeks, and I am inclined to put my name down to sit the part I mostly already know asap because why not.
I don't even know that I want to be an EA other than in the sense of having meaningful letters after my name and thereby alleviating the sin of having a gloriously useless major, but I suspect that sitting the EA exam is the easiest way to make myself look like someone who deserves a real job. The next testing period seems to start in two and a half weeks, and I am inclined to put my name down to sit the part I mostly already know asap because why not.
The only good thing I could say about yesterday is that the cop let me and my favourite coworker go in time for me to catch the last Orange Line train back home.
I am so chill right now, though; the Dingbat is running way late to work, I cooked some amazing breakfast, I firmly expect my bosses to be sending us dinner tonight, and the last-minuters in South Boston have been at least 30% totally amazing individuals. One of them (another goddamn lesbians, which is the main reason we were there so late) proudly showed me her ShinRa business card case and I was, like, two inches from giving her the address of this blog but then went no thene no.
I am so chill right now, though; the Dingbat is running way late to work, I cooked some amazing breakfast, I firmly expect my bosses to be sending us dinner tonight, and the last-minuters in South Boston have been at least 30% totally amazing individuals. One of them (another goddamn lesbians, which is the main reason we were there so late) proudly showed me her ShinRa business card case and I was, like, two inches from giving her the address of this blog but then went no thene no.
THIS REALLY HAPPENED:
Apr. 14th, 2013 01:08 pmYesterday I worked for a very long time while my friendpeoples were being all SOCIABLE and possibly having a PARTY, and though I was too tired to think, I really needed to talk to E so after M picked me up from work I got him to take me round to see people.
There were about ten of us crammed into T&C's living room not watching a movie.![[twitter.com profile]](http://twitter.com/favicon.ico)
ipgd was sat there in a Godtier Space hoodie drawing SB&HJ fanart; I realised I had forgotten the implication of it being April 13th, and we squealed at each other while other people mocked us. And then a newcomer to our many-tentacled social circle said, "Okay, I keep hearing people talk about it, so could someone tell me what the hell 'Homestuck' is?"
I lay back on the hardwood floor and laughed my tits off.
There were about ten of us crammed into T&C's living room not watching a movie.
I lay back on the hardwood floor and laughed my tits off.
LESBIAN PAPERWORK
Apr. 12th, 2013 01:44 ami promise that none of you hate DOMA as much as i do right now. my work computer crashed at 11.30pm. and then i stared at all the bits of paper and realised i had no idea where to put any of them and suffered a terminal no fucks error and went home.
notes to self
Apr. 6th, 2013 02:00 pmso it is April 6th and I'm posting by email from bouncyjob, which is wearing down its bounce, though I still have to occasionally put out fires set by the former office manager (my boss's response to my most recent email on this topic was "did [he] do anything right in the four years he worked there?" Esq replied in allcaps, "NO") I am caught in a reflective lull; one client just left, the next one is late, someone else isn't picking up the phone (because hi, I also have to fix things fucked up by Esq, who is deadly intent on winning the office bonus prize for racking up ill amounts on her invoices and much less keen on doing her job properly. I am not even trying that hard to rack up commission and I am still my manager's favourite employee, because I like doing the interesting, non-money-generating stuff.) And I woke up late this morning and part of me has evidently stayed in bed, dozing and trying to keep the sun out of my eyes. The sky evidently feels the same way - bright, but there's a bitter wind - as does my job; I am just harassing slowass clients over the phone, because the last-minuters haven't showed up yet and everyone else is already done.
I hads a fly and it went away again :( That aside, I am kinda way behind on sleep and personal pootling, neither of which I am likely to catch up on in the next two weeks. Guess I didn't get the dreamjob, need to call agencies, rah rah, just wanna write terrible porn and play videogames, my life. I have a minor reprieve jobwise; being Favourite Employee is going to get me staying on part-time at bouncyjob, if I'm available; given that I'm not desperate for money (although a liveable steady income sure would be nice), I will be glad of the intangible benefits of being on someone's payroll until I can find a real job.
I keep wavering between feeling like all things are possible and realising that actuallyno, even if getting interviews for full-time permanent jobs is a step up from life in GA, it is not the same thing as getting one, which will probably never happen so I will be working 50+hrs/week "part-time" through agencies for forever just like everyone else. I'm still glad to have better work, hope to see more of it, though I'm genuinely worried about what the useless agency will even be able to find for me to do out of season, because I have shit-all qualifications and have only ever had two employers - The Dingbat and, years ago, Dani K - who ever wanted me to learn anything. The Dingbat, bless his heart, is even wanting to pay me to do three extra training days at the end of my contract so I can lay further claim to being an accountant. I need more education but would rather spend the time working, not least because I'd probably learn more that way.
This isn't a blog interface; it's an email to myself, so reads more like a to-do list, and it evidently has nothing non-immediate to say. I finished Chasm City, did I say? It seemed a bit strange to be reading something by Alastair Reynolds that was markedly more about men than about women, but then it all ended in an identity clusterfuck where everyone is the same person. It was longer and slower than it had to be, and the plot felt far too incidental to its innards, but it rewarded me with deliciously unreliable narration, transsexual cyborgs and an epilogue cameo from Ana Khouri (she of canon noncon fempreg fame - god I love Alastair Reynolds), so I was happy.
now i get to hit send and then fuss about editing this post later, or not, because I gathered thoughts and killed time and polish isn't everything.
I hads a fly and it went away again :( That aside, I am kinda way behind on sleep and personal pootling, neither of which I am likely to catch up on in the next two weeks. Guess I didn't get the dreamjob, need to call agencies, rah rah, just wanna write terrible porn and play videogames, my life. I have a minor reprieve jobwise; being Favourite Employee is going to get me staying on part-time at bouncyjob, if I'm available; given that I'm not desperate for money (although a liveable steady income sure would be nice), I will be glad of the intangible benefits of being on someone's payroll until I can find a real job.
I keep wavering between feeling like all things are possible and realising that actuallyno, even if getting interviews for full-time permanent jobs is a step up from life in GA, it is not the same thing as getting one, which will probably never happen so I will be working 50+hrs/week "part-time" through agencies for forever just like everyone else. I'm still glad to have better work, hope to see more of it, though I'm genuinely worried about what the useless agency will even be able to find for me to do out of season, because I have shit-all qualifications and have only ever had two employers - The Dingbat and, years ago, Dani K - who ever wanted me to learn anything. The Dingbat, bless his heart, is even wanting to pay me to do three extra training days at the end of my contract so I can lay further claim to being an accountant. I need more education but would rather spend the time working, not least because I'd probably learn more that way.
This isn't a blog interface; it's an email to myself, so reads more like a to-do list, and it evidently has nothing non-immediate to say. I finished Chasm City, did I say? It seemed a bit strange to be reading something by Alastair Reynolds that was markedly more about men than about women, but then it all ended in an identity clusterfuck where everyone is the same person. It was longer and slower than it had to be, and the plot felt far too incidental to its innards, but it rewarded me with deliciously unreliable narration, transsexual cyborgs and an epilogue cameo from Ana Khouri (she of canon noncon fempreg fame - god I love Alastair Reynolds), so I was happy.
now i get to hit send and then fuss about editing this post later, or not, because I gathered thoughts and killed time and polish isn't everything.
At the time, we noticed a void in rock and roll. A hole that could only really be filled with grown men and women painting up like robots and playing some fierce and furious rock music based on a 1980's video game. We were fairly certain no one else was going to fill that hole. But, by god, it's filled now. You can thank us later.
-in which Raul Panther explains Rule 35 to JoystickDivision. God I love Rule 35.
(Posting from back at home; bus wifi was 2 broke 2 post. Some strange malady has overcome my dogsitter; not only did she fail to drain my liquor stash, she also cleaned my kitchen. I have no idea what is wrong with her.)
( we are not lost in the mortal city )
( we are not lost in the mortal city )
