i told you these people were amazing

Prometric 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.

and also, cat

There 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 am so overdue for a linklist

In 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?"

maybe i do

Today 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.