The Wild Winds of Fortune

Good News: I seem to be getting over whatever it was I had.  No fever, only minimal sore throat.  I was out and about today, going to a DOR jobs workshop and to the library.

Bad News: The Rangers beat the Rays to knock them out of the postseason.  And I didn’t even get to see any of it.

I don’t know who to pull for from here on out.  The Rangers, I guess, since the only other option would be the Yankees, which is totally unthinkable.  On the other side, perhaps the Phillies — although they have already won the Series once this decade.  But rooting for the Giants….

Ah, well.  There is college football (Stanford beat USC in an absolutely amazing game on Saturday) and pro football.

It could all be worse, I suppose; I could be a Cubs fan.

I hate job searching.

I suspect — correction, I know — I am not alone in this.

There are a lot of things I hate about it, other than the sense of failure and rejection that keeps hitting me over time.  I hate trying to sell myself — I’m very bad at that.  (The Rocket Scientist gets frustrated because he says I routinely underestimate my abilities. By a lot.)  I hate networking: I am introverted by nature, but more than that, I am really terrible at talking to people about career matters.

Most of all, I hate the recurring question:  just what do you want to do when you grow up?

“Beats the hell out of me” is, frankly speaking, a totally inadequate answer. And more to the point, it is a dishonest answer.  I do know what I want, I just don’t know how to get there.

I want to write.  Every single vocational assessment I have taken over the past oh, so many years has come up with “Writer” at the top of the list.  Followed by the vocational counselor saying “Umm, I don’t really think that that is a viable career path….”

I am a good writer.  I am an interesting writer.  I have been told this again and again, and more to the point (and unlike many of the other things I have been told over time about myself) I happen to believe it to be true.**

The best job I ever had, in terms of the nature of the work, hands down, was a spell when I wrote trivia questions for Pogo.com. (Sorry, guys at the Census Bureau: I love y’all to bits, but the work left a great deal to be desired. You win the “best work environment” award, which is like Miss Congeniality, only better.) I researched odd things.  I wrote – and I had to write clearly and concisely, which made my writing better. My only frustration was the questions that got kicked back:  any world in which “Who was the last of the Stuart monarchs?” is considered too obscure but “Who was Jennifer Aniston’s godfather?” is not is a world with serious educational issues.***

The reason I loved law school is that I had to write a great deal about interesting subject matter. (You get the best cases in law school.) I was able to bring my ability to a new venue (and somehow managed not to be infected with lawyerly writing — although I can do that on occasion if necessary).  One of the reasons I hated practicing is that the subject matter was a great deal less interesting, and the writing I do best was not called for.  (There is also a certain level of moral elasticity needed to be a good lawyer, with which I had a lot of trouble.) While I recognize that this is probably as much an artifact of the field of law I chose to practice as anything else (I really should have become a criminal lawyer), a great deal of it was just the nature of the legal beast.

So, what should I do? I write.  I write here.  I write on my (probably-never-to-be-published) book.  I have to write to be whole.  The long periods I have not written have been stretches where I was most certainly less than all together.

So the question then becomes: what do I do that will challenge me, keep from going crazy, pay me a decent wage, and still leave me time to write?

And that’s the question to which “Beats the hell out of me” is a truthful answer.

*At the time I wrote this post, I was unaware that there is, in fact, a new show called “Fairy Jobmother.”  It looks dreadful.
**A strong tendency towards run-on sentences nothwithstanding.
***In the odd chance you actually care, the answers are Queen Anne and Telly Savalas.

Temp just hit over 100 for the seventh day in a row.  The sore throat is omnipresent.  It is known not to be strep, or Epstein-Barr, and the mumps titer has not come back yet.  Whatever it is, it’s not terribly contagious: nobody else in the house has come down with it. Even Echidna Boy, who gets sick if you look at him wrong.

I am so freaking tired of all of this.

Time to hunt down something soft to eat and go watch Mythbusters and nap.  My brain is fried.

 The Rays have just announced a lottery for single post-season tickets for ALCS and/or World Series tickets at Tropicana Field.  Unfortunately, the way they’ve been playing against the Rangers, it may be a case of too little, too late.

Update:  Well, on the other hand, the Rays beat Texas today to tie the series and send it back to St. Pete. (Note to media: The Rays do not play in Tampa.)

Today is Binary Day: 10.10.10.  Hurrah!  As the guys at ThinkGeek point out, “There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

It gets better, though.

101010, when converted from binary to decimal, is…..


42.

A perfect day.

“[My dog] is like a boyfriend and a child, all wrapped up in a package that won’t talk back to you.”

Fred Clark writes one of my favorite blogs, Slacktivist.  He is interested in the intersection between religion — and faith — and politics, economics, and everything else.  Although he has a number of religious posts, he also has many that deal simply with issues of social justice. A self-proclaimed “liberal evangelical,” he attracts people of all religious persuasions (including agnostics and atheists) to his comment threads, which have some of the highest signal to noise ratios around (probably only exceeded by Making Light).

But, mainly, one of the reasons I love Fred is sentences like this:

But this triumphalism also doesn’t seem to offer much of a reward even in the next life. It’s not anticipating the glory of heaven, merely the bitter pleasure of seeing others get their comeuppance. It’s a vision of heaven as a place of eternal schadenfreude.

When you’re forced to describe heaven using untranslatable German words, then something has gone very wrong with your spiritual weltanschauung.

EchidnaBoy (on FB):  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE REALITY, BUT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE IT DOESN’T EXIST THEREFORE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE SURE WE ARE NOT SOME WIERD CREATION OF SOMEBODY’S MIND

Me: First: don’t shout.  Secondly: Read Descartes.

With a few exceptions, I do not believe in human monsters.  I hesitate to use the word evil when referring to a human being.  (A human being’s actions are another thing entirely:  it is quite possible for otherwise decent people to commit atrocities under the right — or wrong — circumstances.)  Although I will occasionally tell someone to “go to hell,” I don’t mean it, nor do I claim to have any knowledge of whom will be allowed to enter heaven in the hereafter.  Eternal punishment and reward are God’s doing, not mine; I am not God, and it is blasphemy to assume otherwise.

Nonetheless, I believe Fred Phelps to be evil.

When they picket funerals of service men, he and his followers at the Westboro Baptist “Church” (the quotation marks are deliberate on my part) inflict grievous emotional harm upon people when they are at their most vulnerable: when they are mourning the loss of loved one.  In their demonstrations at the sights of other tragedies (such as at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, following the suicide of four students), they show a disregard for human suffering that is monstrous in its scope.  Their heretofore successful strategy of provoking people to attack them, and suing for damages, is abhorrent.  They warp and twist beyond all recognition the God of the Old Testament and the New, creating a picture of a hateful, vengeful diety.  They have the unmitigated gall to call themselves Christians when their behavior is an affront to every word Jesus spoke.

They are currently parties in a case presently before the Supreme Court, involving a lawsuit for damages from the family of a dead soldier whose funeral they picketed.  And — deep breath — I cannot tell which side I want the Court to come down on.

The emotional side says this is a no-brainer.  It was a funeral of a soldier, after all, a private event, and the families had a right to bury their kin in peace. Phelps and his followers had no right to be there, perhaps, and allowing the family to sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress is only just.

 The facts in the case were largely undisputed, according to the appeals court:  that the protesters complied with all police instructions about how far they could stand from the funeral.  It was also established at trial that the father did not see the signs until he saw television coverage afterwards.  The attacks on the dead Marine continued on the Westboro Church site.

In its questions to the lawyers at oral arguments, the court seemed far more favorable to lawyers for  the family of the dead Marine than the lawyers for the hate-mongers.

And yet… I am very nervous about creating lines which limit what people may or may not say in public.  I am worried about stifling what may be legitimate free speech. 

For me, it is a case where deeply held beliefs about the inviolability of the First Amendment ran smack into abhorrence at the grief caused by Fred Phelps and Co. and sorrow that families of servicemen who gave their lives in service to their  country have to experience this additional pain.

There have been many times in this country when those who spoke the truth were vilified and subjected to legislation which curtailed what they could say and to whom.  The women’s suffrage and the civil rights movements of the 1960s immediately come to mind.  Which is not in any way to compare those righteous causes with the excrement that the Westboro Baptists produce, simply to observe that we need to be extemely careful what precedents are set here.

I will be following this case with a great deal of interest.  I have an odd feeling that, whatever way the Court decides, I will be both satisfied and displeased at the result.

 My doctor is 95% certain I have strep throat. (Still waiting for culture results.) Damn.  I should only be contagious for another 24 hours, and the fever has abated, but I still feel awful. I have not had strep in years, I have no idea where I got it, and I just hope I didn’t give it to anyone in the past week.  Note to self:  next time you might not want to wait a day to contact your doctor when your temp does not go below 102.5 in 12 hours, in spite of pumping yourself with Tylenol and/or Nyquil. And hitting an impervious to drugs 103 with a very sore neck is definitely a bad sign.

The small bright side in all of this is I can eat as much Ben and Jerry’s as I want (which is not really all that much — I lose my appetite when I run a fever) and not feel guilty about it, and the Rocket Scientist brought me red beans and rice from a local Cajun restaurant last night.  He also reported that a) the food is relatively cheap, b) they have a bar where I could possibly just sit and drink cokes and c) they have a big screen television where they will be showing the baseball playoffs.

Speaking of baseball, the latest attempt by teams to extort money infuriates me.  The Braves, Rays, and Giants — the only three teams in the playoffs that anyone in this house cares about (the Giants only because they are playing the Braves) — have all pulled their tickets from their websites.  The way to purchase playoff tickets is to pay a nonrefundable deposit on season tickets for next season.  Right.  Like the Braves’ fan in the house is going to pay a deposit on season tickets for a team he actively despises.  We had been planning to splurge and get one ticket for a game during the division series — that’s not going to happen.  Likewise, were the Rays to end up in the World Series against the Giants, we were going to buy one WS ticket for the Rays’ fan in the house.  Likewise, she has no intention of ever even considering buying season tickets for the Giants — she probably dislikes them even more than he does.

Of course, given the Rays 4-0 loss to the Rangers yesterday, that latter scenario may well be moot.

Although I still feel awful, my head has cleared enough today that I did an online skills evaluation provided by the NOVA Connect Center.  I still cannot get the MS Word and Excel evaluations to run, in spite of the nice young man at the job center insisting that they should run on my Mac.  They won’t run, dude. Unfortunately, I cannot go tell you this in person, yet.

So, last week I did an InDesign CS3 assessment, and a Legal Assistant Assessment, and today I did a Paralegal Skills assessment. I got 50% on the InDesign assessment, which sounds awful, until you realize that I used the program for all of about four months eighteen months ago, and the global average on the test was 51%.  I am pretty certain I could pick it up quite easily.

As far as the Legal Assistant Skills, I got an 80% (global average was 70%).  In the Paralegal Skills, I got 88% (the global average was 70%) which put me in the 90th percentile.  It’s been twenty years since I looked at this stuff, and I still did well.  So, if I had to, legal-related jobs are a possibility. (I would have to renew my bar membership — including paying back bar dues — in order to actually practice law, which I am pretty sure I am no longer competent to do.  I wouldn’t hire me to represent me, that’s for sure.)

I am waiting until my head clears a little more to do the “Persuasive Writing” evaluation. 

I wish there were some way to forward these results to perspective employers and say see?  See how smart I am?

While sick I have been spending time on Facebook (along with watching old movies), and have run across a number of links I just love:  Indiana Jones loses his bid for tenure,  John Scalzi (the science fiction writer) takes down Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and, finally, an important scientific paper.  The Scalzi piece has me thinking about writing something about what literature informed my political views, but I haven’t crystallized my thoughts yet.

Today, I will do job-search related work, and nap a lot. 

So, what’s up in your world?

October 4, 2010

Allan H. (Bud) Selig, Commissioner
Address: 245 Park Avenue, 31st Floor
New York, NY  10167

Dear Commissioner Selig:

For decades before I was born, baseball has been “America’s Pastime.” I have been a baseball fan for many of my forty-nine years.  I have been a Tampa Bay Rays fan since before the franchise actually started playing baseball.

I was delighted that my beloved Rays won the AL East.  I was looking forward to watching them beat the Rangers.  Imagine my dismay when I discovered that all the postseason games were to be held on TBS, a channel that my cable provider  (Comcast) refuses to provide in their digital economy service. 

We are in the middle of a recession.  I am myself out of work.  The only reason that we have any cable at all is because it is the only way to get broadcast channels such as ABC and CBS, etc. with any real sort of clarity.  We have had to cut back and economize, with the result that we now need to purchase the most basic package Comcast has to offer.  As a result, we are frozen out of watching all of the postseason play before the World Series. 

So many of us struggle with finances these days.  Eighty dollars a month (which is what the lowest cable package ComCast offers which has TBS on it) is a problem.  And my family is weathering this economic storm better than many – we are not in danger of losing our home, and we have food to eat.

Across the country, average everyday people support baseball in a whole myriad of ways.  And now they are being rewarded by being deprived of seeing the most important month of games in the baseball year.  So much for baseball being “America’s Pastime.”

It is too late for this year.  Please make changes next year and thereafter so postseason games can be available to everyone, and not place fans at the mercy of cable providers. 

Please put the good of the game – and loyalty to its fans – above mercenary considerations.  Thank you.

Sincerely,

[Me]

I’ve been meaning to write something every day.  Unfortunately, I tend to have a habit of not posting in a week, then posting six items in one day.  Sorry.

Today, I am trying to figure out what to write about.  Of course, since I have been writing a lot this week, I could just take a break, but that would lack discipline (a particular failing of mine). 

Any suggestions?

Rays win the AL East! Rays win the AL East!  Damn Yankees go down. 

This is not to say that the Rays won’t tank in the first round of the playoffs, but it’s still nice.

Ellen Degeneres has come out with an important video about a tragedy affecting our society, specifically our youth, especially youth who identify (or who are believed by their peers) to be gay.

This is an important issue.  Bullying of all kinds goes on, and to a great deal is excused as being just a part of teenage life, but that aimed towards gay youth tends to be the nastiest.

It occurred to me this morning that my post on Terry Pratchett and identity was incomplete: I didn’t even touch on Angua (rejection of identity by nature), Cheery (rejection of other people’s demands for how you self-identity), William de Worde* (the flip side of Jeremy and Lobsang — rejection of identity by family), Sam Vimes later on in the series (the clash between public identity and personal identity) and most of all Vetinari (whose identity is the most intriguing. Who is he?).

Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict a detailed explanation on all of you. : )

*I always assumed that “William de Worde” was a completely made up name, ironically reflecting his position as a publisher. I was delighted to find out that there was a Wynkyn de Worde who was an important figure in the history of printing. Among other things he introduced the use of italics into English printing, for which I am very grateful.  Terry Pratchett is simply brilliant.