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it never ends.
I have presents sat around not getting mailed; there are no blog entries to not write. Not decorated because everything is a mess. I should, because I like it and it would feel like accomplishing something and Christmas is the only season Boston looks good in. We've had some thin snow to set the mood.
Life is better? I feel less overwhelmed, and am definitely running into fewer of those social nightmare moments, or more likely am ceasing to find them as nightmareish because much like any other thing people can do the best way to learn social skills is to do them for a living; and yesterday, my boss looked me up and down and asked "who are you today?" He meant, he said, that he saw the layers of things I wear in winter as costumes, and last week he'd got at me about the dowdy browns and greys; but yesterday it was a good question as I was wearing a dress of my mother's and the reason I was in his office was to talk about the ghostwriting. best lines from Sound Mind: You will never be one person. This will never be one world.
Tomorrow I am going to the Latino Tax Professionals Boston Regional CPE seminar day with my old boss. Neither of us are Latina and I don't even need CPE credits, I just want to and she got us in for free. On thursday night I will fail an exam (ngl I actually feel pretty confident about it but at the same time I wouldn't feel down about it if I did have to take it again).
In January something I line-edited/rescued from complete structural disaster after the two credited writers (neither of whom can write) started arguing about what the hell the point was is going to be in a magazine that I guess is mistakenly still thought to be reputable. Allegedly millions of people are going to look at the unspeakably shit, I did not do nearly enough to it, first few paragraphs and then skip the rest because it is terrible. My name is on it, in tiny letters at the bottom. I'm unsurprised at how easy it is to ghostwrite after a decade in fandom; I'm a little more surprised that I get enough recognition for being good at it to keep on getting told to do it. i mean, who even cares about good writing and since when did being good at something mean you got to do it <--this has never been more apparent, really. I've gone from being underpaid for things I am great at to being overpaid for things I am shit at.
overwhat? C reminds me of that sometimes; there's nothing normal about no one earning anything. I remember the recruiter I spoke to (who never did squit for me aside from giving me this) who said that she knew the recession wasn't really over. In a very real sense, I did get out of the recession in 2013; I (accidentally) found the full-time, permanent job I'd been looking for since I finished university in 2006. I recently read something that points out that the recession began in 1974 and is not yet over - the real recession in terms of people continually earning less and less money. You do get older, you turn experience and happenstance into ways to make an inch or two more elbow room for you to get by, and it's all done by scrambling over the people coming after you. For a lot of people there's still a recession on. For a lot of other people it never really happened, other than as a vague dream that temporarily dropped the stock market and threatened their possible, maybe, future unearned income, and now the Dow is back up it may as well never have happened. this will never be one world. I cannot get over the disconnect here; I don't get not being a temporary worker at the same company for 4 years, not pulling 50 or 60 or 70-hour workweeks 'part-time' any more. I may even bother to get health insurance some time in the next year.
In MA I now earn over twice what I did in GA; M's pay has jumped by 50%. We make more than the US median household income now. I still remember being 16 and thinking, having worked for nothing for years because that's what women have to do (God says so), that it would be alright once I was out of the asscrack of Lancs and could have a job because even if I got very little, say £12000 a year, it would be enough that I could make a few choices. It seemed so realistic. This is the first year I have actually made that much and most of it was frominvestment income gambling, although that won't be the case next year. My pay is a bit over $30k a year now and this feels alarmingly much and is only open to further escalation due to this very odd bit of sideways luck that let me slink into the finance industry via a young company with big ideas. I am still finding it p hard to accept that I am getting paid so much more for doing things that, well, anyone could do if I can.
The people in the office across the hallway from us are a socialist group who are backing the $15 minimum wage campaign. I sponsored a Walmart striker over Thanksgiving. Once I'm done with this fucking exam I need to finish reading Taxing Women, which is a look at the structures America chose to implement to keep women working for nothing.
Life is better? I feel less overwhelmed, and am definitely running into fewer of those social nightmare moments, or more likely am ceasing to find them as nightmareish because much like any other thing people can do the best way to learn social skills is to do them for a living; and yesterday, my boss looked me up and down and asked "who are you today?" He meant, he said, that he saw the layers of things I wear in winter as costumes, and last week he'd got at me about the dowdy browns and greys; but yesterday it was a good question as I was wearing a dress of my mother's and the reason I was in his office was to talk about the ghostwriting. best lines from Sound Mind: You will never be one person. This will never be one world.
Tomorrow I am going to the Latino Tax Professionals Boston Regional CPE seminar day with my old boss. Neither of us are Latina and I don't even need CPE credits, I just want to and she got us in for free. On thursday night I will fail an exam (ngl I actually feel pretty confident about it but at the same time I wouldn't feel down about it if I did have to take it again).
In January something I line-edited/rescued from complete structural disaster after the two credited writers (neither of whom can write) started arguing about what the hell the point was is going to be in a magazine that I guess is mistakenly still thought to be reputable. Allegedly millions of people are going to look at the unspeakably shit, I did not do nearly enough to it, first few paragraphs and then skip the rest because it is terrible. My name is on it, in tiny letters at the bottom. I'm unsurprised at how easy it is to ghostwrite after a decade in fandom; I'm a little more surprised that I get enough recognition for being good at it to keep on getting told to do it. i mean, who even cares about good writing and since when did being good at something mean you got to do it <--this has never been more apparent, really. I've gone from being underpaid for things I am great at to being overpaid for things I am shit at.
overwhat? C reminds me of that sometimes; there's nothing normal about no one earning anything. I remember the recruiter I spoke to (who never did squit for me aside from giving me this) who said that she knew the recession wasn't really over. In a very real sense, I did get out of the recession in 2013; I (accidentally) found the full-time, permanent job I'd been looking for since I finished university in 2006. I recently read something that points out that the recession began in 1974 and is not yet over - the real recession in terms of people continually earning less and less money. You do get older, you turn experience and happenstance into ways to make an inch or two more elbow room for you to get by, and it's all done by scrambling over the people coming after you. For a lot of people there's still a recession on. For a lot of other people it never really happened, other than as a vague dream that temporarily dropped the stock market and threatened their possible, maybe, future unearned income, and now the Dow is back up it may as well never have happened. this will never be one world. I cannot get over the disconnect here; I don't get not being a temporary worker at the same company for 4 years, not pulling 50 or 60 or 70-hour workweeks 'part-time' any more. I may even bother to get health insurance some time in the next year.
In MA I now earn over twice what I did in GA; M's pay has jumped by 50%. We make more than the US median household income now. I still remember being 16 and thinking, having worked for nothing for years because that's what women have to do (God says so), that it would be alright once I was out of the asscrack of Lancs and could have a job because even if I got very little, say £12000 a year, it would be enough that I could make a few choices. It seemed so realistic. This is the first year I have actually made that much and most of it was from
The people in the office across the hallway from us are a socialist group who are backing the $15 minimum wage campaign. I sponsored a Walmart striker over Thanksgiving. Once I'm done with this fucking exam I need to finish reading Taxing Women, which is a look at the structures America chose to implement to keep women working for nothing.
no subject
In my experience, God never "says" anything; it's the Bible that does all the talking. Biblical Literalists, in particular, view anybody who professes to "hear" God as a dangerous "theist". I don't know if it would've helped you, but the world would be a better place if "believers" put down the book and listened - even, or especially, if they only heard silence. ;) (Hearing hidden cadences is going to be a theme for this post.)
And on identity, after reading Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained, I gave up on the concept of a unified self. As I understand it, the brain is something like a parliament: full of factions forming alliances and fighting for control. So we all have occasional out-of-characters moments and some of us are plain erratic.
The other thing I'm beginning to understand is that we are not boats on a sea, but sponges in an ocean. Situations and ideas flow through us; intellectual currents erode old structures and build new reefs. (Notice most thinkers shut themselves off from the world in order to think.) If you don't know, some decisions over motor control are "preconscious" so that signals to move a limb originate in the lower brain, long before you consciously chose to move it; that part of freewill is retrocausal. And I'd be prepared to accept that that's generally true; self-consciousness is a revising chamber or a feedback loop that corrects erroneous decisions. I've made my peace with that and given up worrying about unified self: I let my actions bubble up and decide whether or not I like that person. So I don't have to be anybody except that which I am. Who are you? Borrow from God, I am that which I am (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am).
However, you probably do need to perform long-term goal setting. So rather than getting more tax work, maybe you should be walking across the hallway and offering to help. Or if not them, somewhere else.
As to writing: most people can't run under 100m in under 10 seconds, even though most of us can run; the same is true of writing. The margins are smaller, so it's less obvious, but it's a skill you've honed by churning out words. And count yourself lucky that people recognise how good you are. I used to have a boss who was awful; the sentences concerning a topic would occur at random points in the document, rather than being grouped into paragraphs; to this day I don't know he didn't contradict himself. And his style was the very definition of prolix: formal; full of redundant phrases; lacking in imagery. I can still remember how physically painful it was to read. But he never accepted how bad he was, and we'd argue about it constantly. At the time, we were making grant applications so I just hoped the bureaucrats on the other end were as dull as him. A few were. ;)
And 90% of writing happens in the ear - not in the fingers; it's being able to judge good from bad. Most people don't have good taste or can't judge their own work objectively enough to exercise that taste. I suspect a lack of self confidence makes you more willing to question your own work than is the case for a normally-confident person. I write more than you see, and at times, I am genuinely amazed that people like some what I write; but it's taste and knowing your audience. At other times I feign indifference to protect my inner core from being corrupted by praise...
As to the labour stuff. Did you read this in El Graun (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire). Broadly similar. And the German miracle is due to the Euro; Germany has a current account surplus that would have been wiped out if it had used the Deutschmark. Obviously I love quite a lot about their approach, and it's widely touted in the UK, but I'm not sure it would bring economic booms.