So I think I need a new job. I'm working at Whataburger and JLRAC and they conflict. I want to cut down Whataburger to just the weekends, which I hope will be ok.
I'm super scared maybe of the blow which will never come. I have a running tab in my mind of all the bad things at each job, which makes it hard to get the clarity to see if I really need to get a new job.
I want to keep them. At least, JLRAC. I'm super scared though. It's a tough job with a lot of responsibility. I'm not sure that I'm up to the task.
I was thinking about freelance writing, but that's similar to starting your own business and I don't know if I have the self-management skills for that. I want to get an at full-time at home job.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Sunday, August 12, 2018
The Problem of Writing to Yourself and Becoming an Expert in Very Little Time
Now I suddenly have two jobs! I work at Whataburger in the mornings, Wed, and Fri and on Sat. and at the Jason Little Road Animal Clinic in the evenings Mon-Fri. I feel I am precariously perched on both jobs and on tenuous ground.
I do bring some value to the jobs, but on the other side of the world, I sometimes feel like I'm practically useless at the people aspect of things.
So I'm going to start writing. This is a start right here. I want to write, but not for myself, but for others. They are going to get the satisfaction that I get writing about myself. Really the truth is, I'm a horrible writer. When I write for other people I tend to copy other people verbatium. Mama Melania would be proud. How do I get from A to B, though. When I research, I really really suck at writing and try to reword exactly what they said with different words and sentence forms. That's what I remember about my brief stint as a copy writer.
They say fake it til you make it, but how do you comfortably move from writing I did, I said, I am, to another topic? Knowing that the topic is one I know little to nothing about, doesn't reassure me in the least. I am very afraid. Most niche writers, don't come from writing school, but from the niche itself. So to say you are purely a writer and don't just have a career and also write about it is a frightening prospect indeed. It's like weighing anchor and then throwing that same anchor overboard.
Similies aside, a lot of people believe in practice. A lot of people believe in spurts of inspiration. There's three types of writers. Practice writers and spurt writers. I know, I know I said that there are three types. Well, there's a middle ground. People can be practice writers, but they lose steam after a couple of pages and have to call it day and come back to write the next day. There are spurt writers whos spurts last years, which is encroaching into practice writing. So that's the middle ground, third group of writers.
Today, I'm talking about the first two, practice writers and spurt writers. Practice writers are those who work everyday and write everyday, regardless of the quality and the interest of the work. Spurt writers, on the other hand, write only when inspiration strikes, and they usually end up with the highest quality or lowest quality work. (I'm thinking lowest quality happens if they writer takes drugs and then uses that as inspiration.) They write in a passion, quickly as if they are about to breathe their last breath.
So what am I? I'm pretty sure the late nights at the keyboard in high school, and the long gaps between my blog postings would label me a spurt writer. Now all of this types of writers is distraction against the real problem of how do you move from a journaler and blogger to a person who writes for and about other people? No matter how you write, this is going to come up, because people write what they know and if they aren't experts why are we reading their work? And most everyone by age thirty is an expert at their adult self. How do we write about things we don't know?
We (and I) have to develop the talent of becoming deeply knowledgeable in a topic we know little about in a small amount of time.
Here's what I learned from a few internet searches.
1. Find the expert and interview them. Things will be more interesting and engaging than reading information on the internet and you will remember the information more. They know everything about the topic. Let them be the guide.
2. Filter. Don't let the unimportant information bog you down in your search for the most important, interesting, and relevant information. Learn to scan. Learn to identify poor resources. How do I do this? Through practice. I thought I was just surfing the internet for fun in the '00's but really I was learning to discern what was click bait and what was real fish. If you want to become an expert quickly, you have to weed out what's unimportant and irrelevant.
3. Where you write matters. Where you learn matters. You recall things better if you are learning them in a similar context. This is one place where I take the middle of the road and we come up against a spurt/practice writer dichotomy. You may like to take your computer to a different side of town to write. However you may like to go to the same coffee shop. It's really just your ability to recreate context in a given place. Practice remembering what you had for breakfast. Recall helps not only Philip K. Dick write a book that is turned into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, it helps you recall your experiences and knowledge base to help you, as an instant expert, to remember the details I learned last week to write the article this week.
4. Active learning. Write as you learn. Write notes. Write funny and insightful notes. Write notes that are detailed and inspiring. Write notes that interest you. If there's anyway to experience the topic other than reading about it, do so. You'll not only become a better writer, you'll become a better person.
5. There's this thing called grit that people have been trying to popularize lately. To me, grit is the number of times people have said no to you and you have recognized it. You have to be careful, because if you personalize grit, you will end up personalizing your writing. I definitely know this mistake. Impersonalizing your writing, is the other end of the stick, with none of your grit being personal, just about other people in a castle in the sky, not about anyone or anything in particular just a bunch of random prepositions and pronouns that don't mean anything to anyone. You see what I mean? So instead of completely internalizing or externalizing something that strikes us the wrong way in our research, we need to analyze it. You know that thing your English teacher in high school made you do to poetry?
6. Spend 1/3 of your time researching, then 1/3 organizing your notes and then 1/3 writing. You simply can't memorize large amounts of information about a topic. So use your filtering skills to research, your organizational skills to arrange and your writing skills to write. Don't try to memorize everything on the subject. Just take what you have and arrange it in a different way. In a way that you know your reader will understand.
7. Don't forget to reward yourself. Take a nap. Writing is hard work.
I got most all of this information from a TIME article titled "How to Become an Expert at Anything, According to the Experts."
Becoming an expert at a topic you know little about will help you write to others and for others.
Next week, To write to your reader or your client?
I do bring some value to the jobs, but on the other side of the world, I sometimes feel like I'm practically useless at the people aspect of things.
So I'm going to start writing. This is a start right here. I want to write, but not for myself, but for others. They are going to get the satisfaction that I get writing about myself. Really the truth is, I'm a horrible writer. When I write for other people I tend to copy other people verbatium. Mama Melania would be proud. How do I get from A to B, though. When I research, I really really suck at writing and try to reword exactly what they said with different words and sentence forms. That's what I remember about my brief stint as a copy writer.
They say fake it til you make it, but how do you comfortably move from writing I did, I said, I am, to another topic? Knowing that the topic is one I know little to nothing about, doesn't reassure me in the least. I am very afraid. Most niche writers, don't come from writing school, but from the niche itself. So to say you are purely a writer and don't just have a career and also write about it is a frightening prospect indeed. It's like weighing anchor and then throwing that same anchor overboard.
Similies aside, a lot of people believe in practice. A lot of people believe in spurts of inspiration. There's three types of writers. Practice writers and spurt writers. I know, I know I said that there are three types. Well, there's a middle ground. People can be practice writers, but they lose steam after a couple of pages and have to call it day and come back to write the next day. There are spurt writers whos spurts last years, which is encroaching into practice writing. So that's the middle ground, third group of writers.
Today, I'm talking about the first two, practice writers and spurt writers. Practice writers are those who work everyday and write everyday, regardless of the quality and the interest of the work. Spurt writers, on the other hand, write only when inspiration strikes, and they usually end up with the highest quality or lowest quality work. (I'm thinking lowest quality happens if they writer takes drugs and then uses that as inspiration.) They write in a passion, quickly as if they are about to breathe their last breath.
So what am I? I'm pretty sure the late nights at the keyboard in high school, and the long gaps between my blog postings would label me a spurt writer. Now all of this types of writers is distraction against the real problem of how do you move from a journaler and blogger to a person who writes for and about other people? No matter how you write, this is going to come up, because people write what they know and if they aren't experts why are we reading their work? And most everyone by age thirty is an expert at their adult self. How do we write about things we don't know?
We (and I) have to develop the talent of becoming deeply knowledgeable in a topic we know little about in a small amount of time.
Here's what I learned from a few internet searches.
1. Find the expert and interview them. Things will be more interesting and engaging than reading information on the internet and you will remember the information more. They know everything about the topic. Let them be the guide.
2. Filter. Don't let the unimportant information bog you down in your search for the most important, interesting, and relevant information. Learn to scan. Learn to identify poor resources. How do I do this? Through practice. I thought I was just surfing the internet for fun in the '00's but really I was learning to discern what was click bait and what was real fish. If you want to become an expert quickly, you have to weed out what's unimportant and irrelevant.
3. Where you write matters. Where you learn matters. You recall things better if you are learning them in a similar context. This is one place where I take the middle of the road and we come up against a spurt/practice writer dichotomy. You may like to take your computer to a different side of town to write. However you may like to go to the same coffee shop. It's really just your ability to recreate context in a given place. Practice remembering what you had for breakfast. Recall helps not only Philip K. Dick write a book that is turned into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, it helps you recall your experiences and knowledge base to help you, as an instant expert, to remember the details I learned last week to write the article this week.
4. Active learning. Write as you learn. Write notes. Write funny and insightful notes. Write notes that are detailed and inspiring. Write notes that interest you. If there's anyway to experience the topic other than reading about it, do so. You'll not only become a better writer, you'll become a better person.
5. There's this thing called grit that people have been trying to popularize lately. To me, grit is the number of times people have said no to you and you have recognized it. You have to be careful, because if you personalize grit, you will end up personalizing your writing. I definitely know this mistake. Impersonalizing your writing, is the other end of the stick, with none of your grit being personal, just about other people in a castle in the sky, not about anyone or anything in particular just a bunch of random prepositions and pronouns that don't mean anything to anyone. You see what I mean? So instead of completely internalizing or externalizing something that strikes us the wrong way in our research, we need to analyze it. You know that thing your English teacher in high school made you do to poetry?
6. Spend 1/3 of your time researching, then 1/3 organizing your notes and then 1/3 writing. You simply can't memorize large amounts of information about a topic. So use your filtering skills to research, your organizational skills to arrange and your writing skills to write. Don't try to memorize everything on the subject. Just take what you have and arrange it in a different way. In a way that you know your reader will understand.
7. Don't forget to reward yourself. Take a nap. Writing is hard work.
I got most all of this information from a TIME article titled "How to Become an Expert at Anything, According to the Experts."
Becoming an expert at a topic you know little about will help you write to others and for others.
Next week, To write to your reader or your client?
Saturday, April 14, 2018
my post before the end.
I may have found my forever home with Whataburger.
I know it's crazy, but I love that place.
I kinda wish I could do more stuff, but what I do right now is ok.
I don't always love Whataburger, sometimes I hate it. So that's how I know.
I really need to start talking more, but with that comes being really low, and with being really low comes nonfunctioning. Talking about sucking, I had to go home from work because I had the worst headache and felt nauseous. It was really bad. All the pain. I came home and slept the sleep of the ages. The whitest, I'm-sleeping-during-a-rainstorm sleep you could get.
Then came back with renewed vigor, the next day. For now, I'm staying here.
I know it's crazy, but I love that place.
I kinda wish I could do more stuff, but what I do right now is ok.
I don't always love Whataburger, sometimes I hate it. So that's how I know.
I really need to start talking more, but with that comes being really low, and with being really low comes nonfunctioning. Talking about sucking, I had to go home from work because I had the worst headache and felt nauseous. It was really bad. All the pain. I came home and slept the sleep of the ages. The whitest, I'm-sleeping-during-a-rainstorm sleep you could get.
Then came back with renewed vigor, the next day. For now, I'm staying here.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Like Vezzini said, "Back to the Beginning"
So I'm here again. At the point where I need to get another job.
I love my job at Whataburger, but I'm not perfect for the job by any means and I feel like I should be looking, just in case.
I also feel like I'm a lesser person than I was when I was looking for the Whataburger job. I can't seem to focus on anything except my writing. When I write, I can focus, but looking for a job and my eyes feel like they are going in opposite directions and I can't seem to filter any of the jobs, or let go of the fear that I have. Maybe it's because I'm just starting to look and I need practice, but it's difficult for me not to compare myself to previous job searches.
Like Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride, I need to go back to the beginning.
I could apply at all the places I used to work and I was going to try that, but I got distracted and didn't.
On the list is:
Subway
Kroger
Chuck E. Cheese
Babies R' Us
6 Flags
I want to hit up all these places for jobs this week, and also, Mr. B's, cause it's so close to Subway.
I just don't know how to "be" anymore. I keep trying to find a future and some force keeps destroying it, where-ever I find it.
I'm afraid but I'm going to try it. I'm scared of Subway, Kroger, Chuck E. Cheese, Babies R' Us and 6 Flags, all for different reasons, but it's worth a try. I've worked at these positions before so I know what they are like.
I don't want a new job. I'm perfectly happy continuing with the job I have. However, I get the impression that maybe I would be better suited to another job. I feel like I had a few opportunities to do something different and I didn't take them. I'll end up like the guy who's been here 14 years and still just does cleaning.
I'm worried that I'll wait until the scared feeling goes away before vigorously applying myself to myself.
This is just all the bad stuff. Good stuff happens too, but we don't talk about it as much because we want to keep it close to us, savoring the good. So if you think that I'm awful, and that awful stuff happens to me all the time you'd be wrong, there is some great stuff, too. I'm just not a promoter of myself as much as I probably should be. For example, I walked to the coffee shop last night. I never do that. I got exercise and I got to be around great like-minded people and maybe learn something. I do great things and work hard at my job. I'm always trying new things, and making sure I keep up with the pace of the workers around me. I know there's ways I'm benefiting the restaurant.
Monday, March 19, 2018
Latest
Looking for jobs, especially at home jobs is extremely discouraging. I'm looking online and there's nothing on indeed, monster, simplyhired, ziprecruiter, or snagajob.
I'd have an easier time looking on indeed for just a general "job" search. All the "home" jobs are job listings with "home" in them, like home health care or home dish installer. Very discouraging.
I'd have an easier time looking on indeed for just a general "job" search. All the "home" jobs are job listings with "home" in them, like home health care or home dish installer. Very discouraging.
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Some notes
I want to work at home, but I feel like my serious attentions are met with ridicule. This is just a feeling, but a palpable one. All these work at home jobs are either scams, they need you to be super human typist such as captioning, or a super fun person like online tutoring, or a super something that I don't have. It's like none of the jobs are entry level. They all require some education or skill or hustling.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Musings of a Troubled Mind
I want a job. I need a job. I have a job. I have panic attacks when I get on the computer to look for a job. I have a part time job at a fast food restaurant and not much experience, mostly entry level.
No one believes in me.
I keep having panic attacks. Just today. I am looking for work at home jobs and they are either too technical and advanced or fake jobs.
I feel like I'm trying to write about the future, what happens to me in the future and I don't know anything about what happens to me in the future. I keep trying to bring myself back to myself, but I'm lost.
How to find a job in the midst of an existential crisis? I don't have anyone to trust.
I trust my mom to an extent, but I don't trust that she would appreciate or support me.
I don't really have anyone else in my life other than Elizabeth L., (recently, Billie), and Marie. And those three keep trying to dump me in the river. I'm a boring body.
So much for networking and marketing. I've been thinking about starting a series on networking and marketing, but I don't know that I'd be able to do all the upkeep, and fulfill the growth promised.
The idea is to go to as many of the meetups as I could in a month. Just go. And talk to people and network. I'm thinking about it. But March is coming up...Beware the IDES. Kinda just want to keep on keeping on.
Maybe I'm stressed about getting a new job because I'm not happy with my current job. I don't like the way my coworkers treat me. It's not that they are rude, in fact I don't think I've ever heard so many thank you's and pleases, and I'm sorry's. I think it's their attitude. Maybe it's my bad attitude? I will continue to try and do a good job and have the right attitude. I'm pretty positive.
I keep praying and I know that I'm going to be pushed off the ice cliff and into the waiting tiger seal's mouth. I keep feeling them pushing me over the edge of my mind. These people who are pushing me, are the church people. I do feel like a penguin. Also Antarctica is the only safe place left.
How to find a job. I feel incomplete so much of the time. Don't you have to feel wonderful to get a job?
Are we going through a recession? What is the most practical use of my time and money towards education to get a great paying and stable job?
I feel like I've done all this before and didn't get anywhere. So depressing.
So now I'm doing it all over again to get another dead end job?
I feel like education and job searches are a betting game. Do I bet on graphic design? Do I bet on insurance? What do I bet on to be a viable career? Who and what will be needed in four years?
Where is God in all of this? Adding Him provides another killing element to my soul. I have to live life by His (read churches') rules, too. And the churches' rules are the worst. They aren't even for you. They are personal things for others. At least that is how it has been for me. Aren't I supposed to put God first? How could I put Him first? Would He be my mother's God? Or some other person's appraisal of God? Would I have to work at 6 Flags? I get that spiritual message, a lot. I almost was a manager there, but I think most of 6 Flags has been worked out of me, through Whataburger. I don't see me going back.
So depressed and getting even more depressed.
I throught writing was supposed to help me. Cartharsis, and all that.
Question of the day:
How did you get the job you currently work at?
No one believes in me.
I keep having panic attacks. Just today. I am looking for work at home jobs and they are either too technical and advanced or fake jobs.
I feel like I'm trying to write about the future, what happens to me in the future and I don't know anything about what happens to me in the future. I keep trying to bring myself back to myself, but I'm lost.
How to find a job in the midst of an existential crisis? I don't have anyone to trust.
I trust my mom to an extent, but I don't trust that she would appreciate or support me.
I don't really have anyone else in my life other than Elizabeth L., (recently, Billie), and Marie. And those three keep trying to dump me in the river. I'm a boring body.
So much for networking and marketing. I've been thinking about starting a series on networking and marketing, but I don't know that I'd be able to do all the upkeep, and fulfill the growth promised.
The idea is to go to as many of the meetups as I could in a month. Just go. And talk to people and network. I'm thinking about it. But March is coming up...Beware the IDES. Kinda just want to keep on keeping on.
Maybe I'm stressed about getting a new job because I'm not happy with my current job. I don't like the way my coworkers treat me. It's not that they are rude, in fact I don't think I've ever heard so many thank you's and pleases, and I'm sorry's. I think it's their attitude. Maybe it's my bad attitude? I will continue to try and do a good job and have the right attitude. I'm pretty positive.
I keep praying and I know that I'm going to be pushed off the ice cliff and into the waiting tiger seal's mouth. I keep feeling them pushing me over the edge of my mind. These people who are pushing me, are the church people. I do feel like a penguin. Also Antarctica is the only safe place left.
How to find a job. I feel incomplete so much of the time. Don't you have to feel wonderful to get a job?
Are we going through a recession? What is the most practical use of my time and money towards education to get a great paying and stable job?
I feel like I've done all this before and didn't get anywhere. So depressing.
So now I'm doing it all over again to get another dead end job?
I feel like education and job searches are a betting game. Do I bet on graphic design? Do I bet on insurance? What do I bet on to be a viable career? Who and what will be needed in four years?
Where is God in all of this? Adding Him provides another killing element to my soul. I have to live life by His (read churches') rules, too. And the churches' rules are the worst. They aren't even for you. They are personal things for others. At least that is how it has been for me. Aren't I supposed to put God first? How could I put Him first? Would He be my mother's God? Or some other person's appraisal of God? Would I have to work at 6 Flags? I get that spiritual message, a lot. I almost was a manager there, but I think most of 6 Flags has been worked out of me, through Whataburger. I don't see me going back.
So depressed and getting even more depressed.
I throught writing was supposed to help me. Cartharsis, and all that.
Question of the day:
How did you get the job you currently work at?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)