… I will have the street cred to say the following sentence:
That is obscene and hilarious RT @scottfish75: I thought you might like a picture of barrowman wanking off a kranky. bit.ly/nOQFJf – @McKelvie
(Warning: Link pretty darn NSFW)

I don’t even need to know what’s in the damn link, I just like the idea of being able to legitimately use the phrase “barrowman wanking off a kranky” in conversation because it just sounds cool.

Because if there’s anything the universe should let me learn, it’s how to make weapons with nothing but nature & a knife.

and yet, there’s the opportunity to do so for a mere $17.
…sometimes, I just love the internet. Don’t you?

It’s like I’m almost a real fake celebrity!

Fake Jonah Hill is following me. I’m kinda tempted to follow him just for this tweet:
In some parts of the world they don’t have clean water, but they also don’t have Kardashians. Sept 13

What up, fake Jonah Hill! Can you send real Brad Pitt to my house for some awesomesauce time?

Keep it up and I’m gonna get out of the car and drop you like 3rd period French.

I have two clients right now where I have the feeling that they’re trying to skeeve me out of being paid. I don’t necessarily know this for sure, yet, but some of the responses I’ve gotten make me think it may be easier to just drop the project(s) than attempt to bother dealing with the problem(s).

One of them currently owes me (a small sum of) money that’s inconsequential in the actual amount, but when I emailed regarding our discussion about using the end of the fiscal quarter to nail down the tracking method so that I’d be able to look & calculate my own commissions, & invoice for the quarter, suddenly emails aren’t being answered.

It’s taken 3 mos just to get to the point where I have the professional freedom to just go ahead & do what needs to be done to create a site that will actually generate revenue, and I’m hesitant to actually move forward with any of that work because they can’t seem to answer that question and/or pay up the piddling $40 from the last quarter that’s my commission because the site was pretty much dormant.

Really, dude? If Amazon can make sure that I get the whopping $1.44 that I was owed before they shut down all their CA affiliates one week into the new fiscal year back in July, I think I’ll be holding off on doing anything for your site until you can show yourself capable of fulfilling quarterly payments, thanks.

The other is just… I don’t know if he’s actually trying to scam me, or just busy & doesn’t realize that he sounds sketchy around the edges because he’s doing a headless chicken impression due to his work’s normal state of being at this time of the year.

If you’re saying someone might be working on what I just proposed already, then tell me that they can’t produce the list of what they’re theoretically working on because they’re out of town, I’m gonna call bullsh*t, because even if you’re not deliberately running it, it sounds really close to that.

Someone in Customer #2′s industry tried a similar thing with me last winter — I made a pitch, they tried to do it without me so they wouldn’t have to pay my fee. Not only did their attempt at a homemade campaign fail, but they ended up writing me a check for the amount I’d have been paid  if the project had made the goal I projected because I sat down with them & had a little chat about a thing we call “Intellectual Property”.

I’m just… I’m freakin’ tired, man.
I’m tired to constantly having to double check to make sure that people aren’t trying to pull a fast one — my business is to make your business profitable. I’m not trying to take money from you, I’m trying to help you make more, so if you just play things straight & pay what I charge to make that happen, you will make back my fee and then quite a bit more.

I’m just annoyed because it’s like, “Dude, if you stand back & let me do my work & everything goes through, you will receive about $125k in materials & cash between now & June, and I’d only be charging commission for $100k of it. Just work with me, let me do my freakin’ job & stop acting like you have to hoard every scrap of info away in a safe deposit box because I’m going to beat you with a stick & then try to sacrifice the kitten you don’t even have — if I frack up & you don’t make money, I don’t make money. It’s just that simple. I want you to look good so you make  money so that I can make money. The end.”

It’s all I can do lately to not just look at people & share the tagline of WilWheaton.net – “Don’t be a dick!”

Everything I need to know about business, I learned from pop music.
No, really.

As I once said to Anisa, “Oh my god, why do people keep acting like this — have we learned nothing from the immortal words of Justin Timberlake?”
and she started laughing, which is why we’re friends.

Mistah JT was totally right, so let’s just start from an important principle that everyone should abide by without each of us having to experience a totally heinous public breakup with Britney — what goes around comes around, biznatches.

If there’s one fact I have seen in practice it’s that karma is effin’ real, dude. Call it ju-ju, call it business philosophy, whatever you want. It might not be now, but oh yeah. If you set about to screw people whenever you can, they’ll make sure you get it right back.

I know a couple of guys in rowing who literally pride themselves on being assholes to other people. They’re totally proud of it.

The problem with that is that while it sounds fun & might work in the short term… nobody actually likes an asshole. They might hang out with you while you’re in charge or have something they want, but when the time comes that you need honest help with something… nobody wants to help an asshole. It’s just that simple.

So while you might think it’s funny & that you have the right to do whatever you want, I can tell you right now I have seen that sh*t come back & bite you in the ass as you watch everybody else get the job you were looking for or the salary you wish you had, and you’ll be left wondering why.

I try really hard to treat people fairly, especially when it comes to money. There have been times here at Museum!Co when I was in on an extra day and the work that I was supposed to take care of either wasn’t ready or just didn’t manifest at all, and I’ve gone to CaptJack and said, “Hey, I don’t have anything to do, do you have anything? Otherwise I’ll just head out so we don’t blow through your contractor budget.”

And you know what? He was okay with that. At one point, he actually thanked me for thinking of it that way. Hey, no lie — I totally could have bullsh*tted some stuff & gotten the extra day’s pay in that invoice for now, but because CaptJack knows that I’ll treat Museum!Co honestly, that’s one of the factors which I know he’ll consider as he extends my contract out further so that in the long term I’ll continue to have a paycheck much much later.

So it bothers me when I have clients that are trying to jigger sh*t so that they can pull my ideas or work for themselves without paying me for it.

I don’t screw with your ability to make a living, why on earth do you think it’s all right to try to hurt mine?
This isn’t like shopping around to find cheaper DVDs on the internet, buddy — this is me having gone out & sourced information and resources & created materials specific to your business & offering an opportunity that I know you didn’t have available to you before where my fee will literally be returned to your organization nine times over, because I only charge 10% commission, so really? Work with me, motherf*cker, & stop acting like I’m some airhead LA girl who you think doesn’t know when you’re lying. ‘cause at the end of the day, I am actually so very East Coast, & Homie don’t play ‘dat.

Because I was born in one & spent a decade in the other, someone once asked me what the difference is between New York & Boston, & this was my answer:

“In Boston, when you piss people off enough, they’ll take you out back & beat you with a pipe, and that’s how things get done.
That’s actually pretty nice of them, ‘cause a pipe is hollow.

 

In New York, they’d use a brick.”

More and more lately, no matter how nicely I try to treat people, their reactions just make me feel like gettin’ my New York on.

Maybe I should iTunes gift them some Justin Timberlake instead.

Music: Be OK – Ingrid Michaelson

previous adventures

• d-u-n done, geekery bits & bobs.
• owning a boat, patronized by fashion, & cutting teenagers off from making decisions.
• car washes, romantic comedies, & other weekend thoughts

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Anyway, so I found what I was looking for, only to be mildly annoyed at the caption below. Go on, click away:

“Model’s height is 5’9″ & she wears a small”
Really? REALLY?

Little secret — unless the girl is a model or a ballerina, most of us that are 5’9″ & above will NOT be a small, so possibly that’s not the best example to give.
God, that’s almost as bad as when they rolled out vanity sizing – when someone explained it, I was totally annoyed because I felt like the fashion industry was patronizing me. Bastards.

Ugh, I hate bad user interfaces.
One of the National rowers did a post on her blog re: how much she eats. (For those of you just tuning in, Michael Phelps ain’t got nothin’ on an Olympic rower. Hell, I’m a non-Olympic rower, & I can tell you, we talk about food. Alot.)

I went to post a comment, & it appeared to not go through. so I hit it again, thinking work servers were being slow. Then my email starts popping up, “your new USOC password” — it seems that by posting, I created a username & password for myself on the site.

What? Since when? No visible notification, nothin’. It’s most likely somewhere in the “terms & conditions” box that, let’s face it, none of us ever actually read before we check off.
Not only that, but it posted my comment twice, and doesn’t allow for deletion, which is so a pet peeve of mine. Really? I have a username & pswd, but I can’t do anything about that? What’s the point of the username & pswd then?

oh, ineffective user interfaces, thou art the bane of mine professional existence. stoopid, stoopid things.

I own a boat!
…or at least I will soon. Found a boat, have figured out the money part, just need to get everything together & make the money/boat switch & then get it down to LB!Boathouse, since I don’t have a roof rack. (That will be the NEXT purchase. Possibly should have gone the other way around, but eh, whatcha gonna do.)

It’s the same as the one I was originally looking at, a Filippi f-15 model, which looks like this one:

No, that's not me rowing...

The pic above is the slightly larger twin of the boat that I row during the week up at Bear!Boathouse. The one I’m buying however, is the same model, but weight-class’ed (is that a word?) for me. The one in the picture is for openweight men, & we’ve discovered that in terms of my body proportions, I have the rowing settings of your average lightweight man.
(see above re: tunic length)

It needs a little work, which is pretty much par for the course for me — I’m used to restoration. Since I wasn’t their first owners, I guess you could say that technically I even bought my dogs used.

There’s some scraping on the bottom of the hull, but SeniorMcG said he can help me wet-sand the bottom & repaint it Filippi white so it’ll look just fine, & we’ll check the inside to make sure the honeycomb structure is intact & stuff it if need be. Eventually, I’ll have to get it repainted, which will probably happen over the winter, & I know exactly what I’m getting – the same paint job as the Longhorn boats. It’s this great glittery burnt orange that’s just totally awesome. I saw it when I went out for Head of the Charles & my old coach G was teasing me that I was more interested in the cowboys than the boats they were in.
I will admit, I did like that the coxswains wear cowboys hats to race. Not gonna lie.

I also have to buy new shoes that fit, move the harness for the speedcoach & get a new wiring set.
I know, right? Rowing websites make my Baby Jesus want to cry. Eventually, you just kinda sigh & get used to it.

Of course, I really shouldn’t worry about buying anything, since I’ll be attending the post-rapture looting this weekend & can just get it all for free. I just love how many people I know from completely difference circles of acquaintance who have never even met each other are already signed up. Clearly, I attract miscreants no matter where I am.

Congratulations, you are now officially cut off from making decisions.
On Monday, I was visiting another boathouse, & in talking with a bunch of junior rowers, discovered there’d been a high occurrence of intoxication amongst them that weekend, to the point where I was sorely tempted to invoke the Boozie Suzy talk that Salter & I had with some novice girls one year. (When Salter & I rowed together, there was a girl named Suzy, and she was… well yah. You get it. In fact, Jessica‘s reading this & laughing right now, ’cause she knows it’s troooooo!)

As it was, the coach in me couldn’t help saying, “Seriously ladies? You call yourselves athletes, & this is what you’re doing? Really?” and the attempt to defend the behavior ended with me going, “No, seriously people – all joking aside, not okay.”

In the course of the conversation with the girls at this particular boathouse on Monday, one of the rowers N, confessed that she’d not only gotten plastered that Saturday, but she’d also made out with her friend’s boyfriend, which caused every girl there (including me) to turn around & basically go, “Dude! Not okay!”

When their coach returned, & they were making lineups, N asked, “Can I bow today?” and while the actual coach’s answer was that no, she’d be stroking, I told her, “Look, dude, you can’t bow. Bowing involves making decisions, and you have shown that you in particular are making some very bad decisions as of late, so no no, my friend – no bowing for you!”

Kids, man – half the time it makes you fear for the future of humanity, & the other half is an odd kind of comedy gold. :facepalm:

Music: What’s My Age Again?

previous adventures

• This making your own way bullsh*t? Yeah, sometimes it sucks.
• Computer tips, geek workouts, & how CPR illustrated that I really am losing my mind

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d-u-n.
Menkare posted this on her facebook the other day, & it just totally reminds me of so many things in my life lately.

How do you forgive? The same way you let go of a rock that you pick up that you realize is hot: you just let it go. Don’t think about it, analyze it, or write yet another story about it… just let it go.
- Janus RedMoon

One of the things that I’ve been doing since the beginning of the year is… getting rid of clients. Closing out accounts on things whose level of inter-personal difficulty is not worth the money it yields, companies that I’ve never been entirely comfortable working with, people that I have to chase to get paid… all that crap.

It’s hard, because the paranoid blue-collar food-stamp kid in me is like, “OMG, no we need work or we shall staaaaaarve. No Precious, no!”

And then the other part of me that’s trying to react in a measured, somewhat grown-up fashion will point to the budget spreadsheet for now until the end of the year & very calmly tell FoodStampGollumMe, “No, we will be okay. New work will come in from better clients who will be better to work with, & things will be fine.”

Thank god SortOfGrownUpMe was right. Less than a day after closing out accounts with Radio!Client, an old client I hadn’t heard from in a while emailed. Civic!Co had just gotten in a slew of new work & needed migrators, so did I have any time over the next six weeks?

Indeed I do, client that pays on time & doesn’t treat me like crap. Indeed I do.

There are other things, too. I went & had one of my periodic talks with Sylvie last week in an attempt to figure out how to work around the complications I was finding in my business dealings with another industry, and came to two conclusions:

1. The shady-ass bullsh*t that I’m running into is why no one is working with this industry.
2. I am really tired of trying to wade through it all, & while on paper it would have been an interesting project, when I factor in dealing with the personalities involved & the muck I’ll have to navigate to make things happen, there are easier ways to make money which will not involve half as much trouble.

I decided to just finish out the projects that I have quoted at the moment, & not take on anything new. It’s not worth the trouble, & if you’re going to make me fight to make a living, I’m pretty sure there are a lot easier ways I can find to make a living, so hey – peace out, bitches.

Yes, I realize that really doesn’t sound like the best attitude to have, but ya know what I say to that?

meh.

I’m just tired. And done. And really, really okay with the fact that I am both of those things. Besides, if there’s anything that LA teaches you, it’s that life moves on without you, so I know that once things are wrapped up & done, neither of the clients that I’ll be ditching will miss me a bit, so there’s no reason to feel bad about any of it.

Instead, I’d rather spend the summer rowing and doing cycle & yoga classes, launching new sites & finishing up client work that pays well with no personal complications, finding drawing workshops to do, and, if I’m feeling very ambitious, maybe starting violin lessons again. Hell, I’m starting spinning again after a decade away, why not violin lessons too…

Bits & bobs

:a-quiver with geek anticipation:
X-Men: First Class Trailer

—————–

From @ZacharyLevi – Best Star Wars Pet EVER.
He’s so leetle & I just wanna squoosh ‘im! Click here for awesome!

—————–

Damn you Martha Stewart!
You & your insidious ideas! I totally want to do this now. :shaky fist!:

—————–

…and in closing, a lil’ sompin’ sompin’ bouncy to round out the day:

Music: Hanginaround – Counting Crows

previous adventures

• romantic geekery
• Hoff’s maximum speed, code vs life, & my continued employment – aka, ALL HAIL THE POWER OF THE LIST!
• This making your own way bullsh*t? Yeah, sometimes it sucks.

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The verdict is that we’ll continue on the present schedule of 16hrs/wk until sometime in Sept, after which I will have at least 8 hrs/wk through the end of the year, possibly still my 16 depending on what kind of work comes through the dept in the fall, which he can’t entirely predict or slate the cash monies for yet. There’s a wordpress project that might fall to me once they get it from the outside agency doing the initial heavy lifting, which would be really great, and we’ll see what there is to see.

What does this mean for me? Two things:
1. Not moving to Long Beach.
2. Need to finish getting my arse in gear.

Moving.
If I knew I had the guaranteed hours from Museum!Co ’til the end of the year, I’d have moved. However, without that guarantee, the large amt of money I put down for Zoey’s cancer surgery, and considering that the majority of my work comes from here in LA, I really can’t justify moving that far south right now. At this point, I think that if I can get a couple things in order, I can look at moving further west so that I’m on the other side of the 405 by the fall.

Arse in gear.
October -> Jan was basically spent paying off everything & putting myself in a stable position after having spent a year on unemployment/freelancing/valeting.

Jan -> May has been about cleaning things up & out, and putting money in the bank. I’ve ditched some clients that were troublesome, consolidated all my sites onto one server, & I’m about this >< close! to finishing a new version of my portfolio site that actually includes some of the work I’ve done over the last two years, as opposed to my old one, which is from before I was laid off from Infomercial!Co.
ZoomZoom! is almost paid off, & I’m actually in a position that I’m waiting to hear back from the bank on buying a 1x for myself — I could probably do it in payments direct with the seller (whom I know) but I’m doing it this way to strategically take out a small loan & then pay it back with a series of small frequent payments & get done with the loan about… 1/3 early — enough that it ups my credit score, but not to much that I get an early payment penalty. My credit isn’t horrible, but I was still 11points short being able to do the loan w/o a co-signer, so this way I can make a payment every mo & it’ll still only be half of what my car payment is, thank the gods.

Jun -> Sept is basically going to be about applying everything that I’ve built up. I’m going to launch ShoppingBlogs 1 & 2, & put the VitaminBlog that KC & I have been working on in motion — I don’t expect that of them would suddenly firebomb into being Phenomenal!Cash!Monies!, but I’m hoping that by the end of the summer, their combined income would equal what I make from Museum!Co, which would allow me to put whatever I make from Museum!Co in the fall into the bank.

General Status
Once I finish the commission for OilGasCo, I’ll be able to complete having 3mos worth of bills in the bank, & I’m about… $200 away from paying off Zoom-Zoom once an errant client’s check arrives in the mail, which will hopefully be today or tomorrow. So it’s not like I’m in any way destitute, just a little fiscally neurotic. One of the things I still need to do is take the IRA that I have at Schwab & move it over to ING so that I can properly distribute it into conservative, long-term sections.

And I know that there are some who would say, you know… Seize the day! Do the thing! but I just so totally can’t.

Last night, I saw an interview that Stephen Colbert did with Ice T. (yes, really) In it, Ice T talked about the fact that with all of his admitted criminal activity in his youth, he doesn’t drink & he never did drugs. When asked why, he basically explained that because he was an orphan, he felt like he couldn’t show weakness or lose control in that way, & I found that comforting, because it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one that thinks that way.

I remember talking to… I think it may have been HelloKittyRowerFriend about the fact that PandaFace wasn’t coming down to row, because he’d been out drinking the night before — with his dad. In the course of that convo, I summed it up as, “To me, going out & getting drunk shows a certain trust in the world that while you are somewhat incapacitated or not fully aware, nothing bad will happen to you. That the universe will take care of you. I just don’t have that faith, man. So basically, I’m sober most of the time because I have trust issues.”

And really, that same philosophy extends to my finances. Coming from what I do growing up, I have absolutely no faith in the system to begin with, but even more so with the way things are right now. For me, I feel better when I have things paid for, even if they’re saved for long before they ever happen. Hell, a good part of the reason my credit score is on the lower range of middle-of-the-road is because generally speaking, I pay for things in cash. :shrug: it’s just the way I am.

It also affects my work approach. I was a corporate drudge at a string of companies for almost ten years, & it was just the same cycle of hire, use into the ground, get rid of you when we’re done — especially when you’re the designer in a marketing dept.

The last time I got laid off, I went freelance, & in that time, I’ve actually come to the realization that honestly, I don’t even really like having clients. I just don’t feel like answering to anyone, because I have so little faith in humanity right now. Don’t get me wrong, I love Museum!Co, & will continue to work here forever if they let me (especially since hey – I ain’t moving!), but I’m finding that who I want to take on as clients is a narrowing field simply because I have so little tolerance for the same bullsh*t over & over again, so I’m getting pickier & pickier about the work that I take on.

More than anything, I have the yen to basically generate my own income on my own schedule, which is why I’m going to start working on the different blogs & charitable development work in the rowing community. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to work from wherever I want whenever I want & still have a decent income.

But before I can get there, I need to finish the work I have now & do the prep work to move forward, which is why right now I’m a bit dismayed that two co-workers just came in to do a teleconference call with my office mate.

Hurry up & get done, people — my portfolio site only has a couple of things left to do, & I’ve got a monkey to finish!

Music: The Man Who Can’t be Moved – The Script

previous adventures

• sometimes it’s an honor just being nominated.
• my friends are better than yours, a plan, and higher learning.

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So by Friday, when I was slated to go down to SD to do a practice for the Crew Classic boat I’m supposed to be in, I was totally just running on auto-pilot. Now, if I’d been running on all cylinders, it probably would have occurred to me that hey, it’s the morning of & we’re still short two rowers & a cox, so I should probably just call it & not drive down, but no no, I wasn’t aware enough for that & just kept on keepin’ on, and was half an hour outside of San Diego when the email came through on my phone that yes indeed, practice was not gonna happen — of course by this time it was 1pm & I’d already dropped the dogs in Long Beach, so I was pretty much screwed.

I did my erg, and I wasted some time & I rode launch with the Juniors practice, but basically it was like, well this is pretty fuckin’ useless. I started to go to Hoff’s house & was stopping to get myself dinner when I just… I cannot even tell you what set it off, but I just sat in a parking lot & reverted to being five years old – I was tired, I wanted to be home in my bed, and because those two things were not instantaneously available, I just started crying.

It was at this point that I decided that hey, I’m just gonna go the hell home. I went back to the boathouse, managed to get there just in time to get my oars back before they closed the place up, and made my way back up the 405 — between finally stopping to get something to eat (a venture far more successful when one does not start crying in the parking lot) and finding a parking spot in my neighborhood, put me back at my apartment around 10pm. (I’d decided to leave the dogs in Long Beach so that I wasn’t showing up at Mia’s Menagerie at 9pm at night.)

Upshot, I got everything in, had something to eat, marveled at the fact that in the time it took me to get home Callaghan got his ass a new car, (“Wait, is that facebook that you got a new car for real? I just left you like, three hours ago!”)… and then I slept for 11 hours.

I am willing to admit that in terms of commentary about my life, this turn of events probably falls into the category of “indicator”.

This making your own way bullsh*t? Yeah, sometimes it sucks.
There have been two prevailing thematics in my life — things that have just always been said to me since my childhood. The first was that I’d be lovely if I just lost a few more pounds, dear – but that’s a blog entry for another day.

The other being that I’m supposed to do things on my own. Large portions of my existence are self-taught, & I cannot tell you how often I heard before I became a full time freelancer that I needed to go into business for myself, that I had the ability to create my own world, etc & so forth.

You know what the problem with that is? You spend a lot of time alone, you’re the one that has to do all the work, and it is really fuckin’ tiring.

I have approximately… a bajillion things that need to be done right now. And yet, all I managed this weekend was to finish moving my urls over to my one GoDaddy server so that everything is centralized. Do you know when I’d originally planned on doing that? December. What is it now? The end of March. That right there should tell you how things are going.

My dog has cancer. It’s treatable, we’re going to the doggie oncologist tomorrow & hopefully one surgery & two weeks of woe-is-me recovery time later, Zoey should be fine. And I do not, for one second, begrudge getting her taken care of, because it’s Zoey, & those of you who know how things are for me & my dog know that she’s worth every penny.

Unfortunately, the only reason I have the pennies to get her taken care of is because I’d saved up money to go to Europe this summer on the first vacation of my entire life, and now that is not going to happen.

Instead, I will work. Because that is what I do. And there is no break on the horizon, just… more work. And there’s no way around it, or anything to be done for it other than to simply apply myself & get the work done, because I really need to move out of my apartment, and once Zoey’s taken care of I’ll start saving up to go on vacation all over again, and if there’s anything this has taught me it’s the value of pet insurance so I should get some for Ernie too, not to mention that the 2011-2012 tax cycle should probably also include getting health insurance for myself as well.

Now, I certainly don’t begrudge the work — after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I was valeting for three different companies & sleeping in my car in parking lots on the weekends so that I could eliminate the time it took to drive home & get a full three hours of sleep before practice. I just… it would be nice to not always feel like I have to do everything alone. Sometimes it would be really nice to crawl into bed & have someone else there to snuggle with. I mean, I love my dogs and I know they love me, but at the end of the day they are dogs and I am alone. And while for the most part I learned to accept being alone pretty much since early childhood & have had enough crappy forays into attempting a life that I know work is the best focus for me to have, every so often there’s that day where you just want to sit the universe down & ask why it is that everyone else gets to have a life & I just seem to get more work.

But for now, it’s four hours before I have to drive to LB to do my workout for the day then take Zoey to her new vet for 11:15am, and I still have to sit & get caught up on the emails & work that I didn’t get done this weekend because my body decided it would be great to shut down two weekends in a row. Tuesday, we’ll talk about things like group meditation, making tomato soup, & my incredibly geeky iPhone keyboard case, so tune in next time kids – same bat-time, same bat channel.

previous adventures

• parking cars, building walls, and creating structure: oh yeah, I’m livin’ the dream.
• my friends are better than yours, a plan, and higher learning.

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Try putting low tack, double-sided tape on all the areas the cat likes to scratch. It like setting a booby trap, the tape catches on its paws and freaks it out. After a few times, the kitty associates the couch with bad memories and learns to stay away.
- needtherapy

Nice. Well, at least they know.

ex deux:
Now, I like ING. I use them for a lot of my banking, & will be using them for more in the coming future. However, this footnote at the end of an email made me blink:

Hey ladies: Looking for another place to unite with fellow female Savers? Check out DailyWorth for some money talk meets girl talk.

I just… I don’t know if that’s what they were going for, but I feel patronized and… odd about that remark. Possibly their copywriter had just finished a Mad Men marathon & thus needed to re-tool their viewpoint of women back to modern realities? dunno, but yah. Not so much, dude. Not. So. Much.

Note: nothing against DailyWorth.com, it actually looks like a good site & I’ll probably check it out further at another time. just… bad writing. So few words, to have such bad, bad writing.

well, they say things come in threes…
From DailyWorth.com itself, look at this winner of a comment near the bottom:
You never know when your ife is going to end, due to accident or terminal medicalcondition. Everyone should have life insurance. I had signed up for 75,000 about a year before I was stabbed by my husband & died twice once in the helicopter & once in the or. Don’t ever take for granted that you will live to see another day. I have term life because the whole life that you can borrow on, can leave you with a hefty loan payment that will eat up your insurance policy.Everyone have a great day!

I just… I can’t even pick a response to that. You just go on ahead, make up a snarky comment all your own, pretend I told it to you.

—————————–

Oh internet… who you got runnin’ ’round inside you baby? You poor, poor thing. :pet:pet:

Music: Bach: Cello Suite #4 in E Flat BWW 1010 – Courante – Yo-Yo Ma

previous adventures

• Shut it, internet.

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“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit.
“No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it along the way.”

… which is the only explanation I can give for Monday. I’ve been limping my tower along on Vista (yes, really) until I could replace my printer with one that has Win7 drivers and ya know, pay for another lisence for Win 7. I’d been looking to wait until I was done prepping my taxes (which requires a good amount of printing things), and Monday, my tower decided it was tired of waiting.

Bastard machine. :sigh: Doesn’t it know that we haven’t gotten all of our invoices paid up for the first of the month yet? :shaky fist:

While I’ve managed to get things into some semblance of working order for now, it does mean that I need to finish getting things together for taxes so that I can shut the tower down, wipe it, install Win 7 as my new OS, & acquire a new printer. Considering that I also need to redo that entire corner of my apartment so it’s more like an office and less like a hovel of work-related detritus, I sense this may be a Weekend Job of Work. gah!

ZOMG it’s a baby rhino! How can you not love the baby rhino?
RT from electriclandlady
It seems the St. Louis zoo got a new addition:

To be surpassed only by the adorableness of this little girl:
RT@ adrililith

I wish I could have found the original on the AP since having worked amongst the celebrity set ruined any desire I ever had to read sites like… jezebel.com, but hey – beggars choosers & all that, and dude, HOW FREAKIN’ CUTE IS THAT KID?

Other items of note:
• HelloKittyRowerFriend nicely conscience-ed me into doing the SD Indoor Classic Saturday since I have a business mtg in San Diego on Friday and thus will be in town anyway. This moves the timeline for trying my next 2k from six weeks from now to… 2 days from now. Here goes nothin’.
• Why Jason Mraz used to be annoyed at Ray Lamontagne for stealing the girl that ended up being Jason’s fianceé. I read this right after I posted regarding not rowing in anger, and now I kinda want to hang out with Jason even more than I did before. Jason, call me – I know you’ve got a girl, it’s not a sex thing, I swear.
• I know everyone else has put it up, but I really do just love the VW Darth Vader commercial.
  Not just for the kid, but because the dad screwing with him via keyfob? Anyone that knows me will not be surprised when I admit that yes – that is totally the kind of parent I will be.
• The guy from my class in high school who gave our graduation speech & stood up at the podium yelling to “be the old black man by the side of the road singin’ your blues! Feel the funk in your life! Live the noise!” — ya know how most of the time that guy ends up being an accountant? I found out this week that our version got his masters in Mathematics, then chucked it all & become a retro swing musician. He plays the banjo. As someone who lives in LA surrounded by people who will spend their days telling you what their agent thinks they should be doing, I am extraordinarily proud of him for that, and may have to do a post on it sometime soon.
• It took four trips to three different Targets in order for me to acquire the drill I need to put up my new shelves.
  This was due to
  a) Target not having the drill
  b) me forgetting to bring my Target gift card
  c) both a&b occurring at the same time
  Good news! Now I have the drill
  Bad news! Now I have no excuse not to finally suck it up & redo my art corner & re-org my office. See paragraph above re: Job of Work.
• Got my new security badge today, am now officially employed at Museum!Co until the end of June. Working 4 days next week instead of normal 2, so double the paycheck, double the fun!
• Have been here since 10am, in which time I have caught up on my admin work for the job I’m being paid to be here for, sorted all of my email, cleaned out my facebook msgs from approximately forever ago, & now am off to go get lunch from the cafe before coming back to create back content for PersonalWebProject#1… ah, my life the whirlygig, how do I manage the excitement of it all…

Back later kids – don’t blow anything up while I’m gone!

Music: Be OK – Ingrid Michaelson

previous adventures

• Hoff’s maximum speed, code vs life, & my continued employment – aka, ALL HAIL THE POWER OF THE LIST!
• parking cars, building walls, and creating structure: oh yeah, I’m livin’ the dream.
• Google always knows, sucking at adulthood, & don’t forget to Keep Calm & Carry On.

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As a consequence of this, I find that when I am around people or even just emailing with others, I tend to ramble even more than usual. After all, there’s so much to do and tell and share, and I only have this small concentrated timeframe in which to do it before I once again am relegated to my Hidey Hole and there is naught to be exchanged but further tippitey-tapping.

In an effort to lessen my inadvertent tendency to overshare and frighten others, I have, as of late, had to keep reminding myself to take deep breaths and just chill. I don’t know if I actually am scaring the general public with my enthusiasm for Things Outside Of the Internet, but I fear becoming That Scary Person, and thus keep reminding myself to tuck that sh*t back lest I be asked to please do everyone a favor and return to my parents’ basement to work on my replica of an authentic Klingon warrior uniform so that all the normal people can have normal lives without worrying about what I’ll do next.
Note: I neither live with my parents nor have a Klingon uniform, but I will cop to having just sent a message to a vendor on etsy.com looking to see if I could order a Battlestar Gallactica patch they’d just sold out of so I can decorate my new backpack. Not gonna lie.

Did I mention my current economic stability? Because b*tches, I got that goin’ ON!
Last week, a wondrous, fantastic thing happened – Museum!Co extended my contract through the end of the fiscal year. (That’s June 30th, 2011 for those of you not livin’ my contractor vida loca.)

You know what that means? It means this:

Bills are paid, boys & girls. Working two days a week at Museum!Co covers everything, and then what I pull in from other client work can go in the bank & towards items on the list. I have everything mapped out in a spreadsheet for now until the end of June, and just doing the 16 hrs a week at Museum!Co, without even counting a) any of my other regular clients b) the fact that as we get further into a migration, my hours at Museum!Co tend to get up to 32 or even a full 40 hour week … I’m doin’ pretty good, my friends. Pretty damn good. And it’s…weird. Here’s the thing – this is so completely different from where I come from. Where I grew up, there were foodstamps, & house foreclosures, and cars being repo’d, and what Everclear refers to as “the joy of a welfare Christmas”. For god’s sake, my mom works at Wal-Mart. My dad got laid off from Wal-Mart. They live in a trailer. Granted, at least now their trailer is now paid for, but still, I can honestly say that I have parents in a trailer park in backwoods NH. And yet here I sit, three thousand miles away from that at a job where I make more in an hour of work than my mother does in four. I am the first woman on my mother’s side of the family to get a college degree. Somewhere along the way I garnered the experience & acumen to be able to discuss brokering deals worth more than my parents make in a year’s worth of work. Within three months, the brand new car I bought four years ago will be paid off, and the only debt on my name will be my student loans. Granted, it took a lot of work to be in the place I’m at now, and having grown up piss poor filled me with an abhorrence of debt which kept me far, far away from the bane of many of my generation – credit card companies. Based on what I’ve seen some of my peers go through, the decision to almost completely eschew that aspect of my 20′s seems to have held me in excellent financial stead. While it’s possible my admittance that I have only one credit card with a scant $500 balance may have caused more than one acquaintance to literally choke on the comestible of the moment, it also means that I really don’t have anything to pay off. Of course, the trade off for that is that my credit score is crappy because I don’t carry any debt — which, seriously, wtf is up with THAT, universe? You won’t give me credit because I don’t buy lots of stuff, so you’re going to make it harder for me to get a loan? That seems kind of messed, and is why I will continue to pay for as much as I can in cash up front, thanks ever so much.

Random tangent raging against the machine aside, it makes me nervous, things being fiscally okay. I keep waiting for the floor to drop out, and having to remind myself that no no, it’s all okay.

The thing is, when you’re raised in a situation where there’s never enough money, and you get to the point where that’s not a problem anymore, you have a hard time accepting that it’s not a problem anymore. You’re used to being in crisis all the time, & you expect it.

I had a thought this morning about what to do at the end of June, which is when my contract is up for renewal again. It went like this:

Oh my god, what if they don’t renew me? What am I going to do? I’m a freelancer, I don’t have unemployment anymore, how will I pay my bills? What about valeting? I can always go back to valeting, especially since my car will be paid off by then. Should I move? I don’t know that I should move if I don’t know that I’m going to have income. Maybe moving is a bad idea. How am I going to pay my bills? oh holy jesus…

See that? Right there? :points up: Totally unreasonable. It’s not even February yet, and I’m already freaking out about something that might happen around July 1st. Literally six months off and instead of taking a moment to stop, and just be in the being, my brain is already calculating the next possible disaster which might occur six months from now.

That? That’s just crazy-headed. Even for me, that’s a whole new level of paranoia & contingency planning. Crazy-headed, completely unwarranted, freakish worrying.

Because it’s not like I don’t have a plan. Within a day of confirming my contract, I’d already gone to the One Fiscal Spreadsheet to Control them All, One Excel Sheet to Bind Them and mapped everything out. I’ve already talked to Anisa, my biz dev guru that I worked with at Evyl!Law!Co., and she’s going to help me set up an actual plan for myself and we’re going to co-dependently force one another to go out into the world & network to bring in more business for ourselves. I’m clearing out all my back projects so that I can sit and start to work on trying to establish affiliate marketing income to add to another source of revenue that’s not dependent upon a client or contract.

So logically, I know that things will be fine. I’ve survived far worse uncertainty, far less money, far smaller timeframes, and in the end it all sorted out.

More than anything, I think that right now the reason that my brain keeps getting dizzy from chasing its own tail is because I do spend so much time alone at the moment. There’s no balance for things, no one to walk up to me & be like, “Hey, shut up, Stupid Claris Brain. You’re being stupid and not-helpful.” While I realize that this isn’t horribly Independent Woman of me, sometimes I can’t help but think it would be nice to have a boyfriend just so that I could get a hug & the reassurance to calm down because everything will be all right.

However, it is just me (and Zoey!), so instead I have to remind myself to take a deep breath, chill the hell out, make a new list of what needs to be done next, turn on the Curious George soundtrack, and attempt to repress the urge to get a cookie.

mmm…. cookies…

Music: Upside Down – Jack Johnson (Curious George soundtrack)

previous adventures

• Make way – fuck up comin’ through.

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Accomplished!
Car stuff:
- new tires for Zoom-Zoom
- back bumper fixed

Zoey stuff:
- pet insurance for Zoey
- annual shots up to date (for Zoey!)

Rowing stuff:
- my own set of C2 oars

Work stuff
- began a lynda.com membership for edjimicachun
- anatomical drawing class at LAAFA fall ’10

Life stuff
- my very own vacuum

Work in Progress:
- now ranked in new order of priority!

• paying off Zoom Zoom
  - this will most likely be done around June April! 2011. Yay!
  95.24%

• Three Months of Bills in the Bank
  56.9%

• Zoey Heath Stuff
  2%

  - teeth cleaning
  - operation to get rid of non-cancerous lumps
  - chipping of ear

• Move out of West Hollywood
  This one has changed. Where before, it was with the goal of moving to West LA/Santa Monica-esque, over the course of December I realized that honestly? That’s not where my life is or even where I want it to be. So things are in progress to move elsewhere, but the need for first & last still remains.
  1.3%

• spend a month in Europe this summer
  The original plan had been to go for three months, but depending on moving and what happens with employment here at Museum!Co, the idea of putting myself in a regimented program for the course of summer has become a far more fluid idea. As I talked about last week, I need to roll with the idea of making my own curriculum, so we’ll see how that one pans out.
  42%

• save up to buy my own single
  I’m at the point where as a rower it’s just time for me to save up & make the investment of buying my own 1x. Plus, I seem to be oddly proportioned compared to other female rowers, so it’s best that I have a boat whose settings are custom’ed to my body. Right now, the Fillipi brand is in the lead, but I’d like to try a Midweight Fluid before I take the plunge and write a check.
  10%

It might seem silly to keep the page, but having the list & being able to see what I’ve actually managed to get done over the last few months is really nice. Sometimes you get the feeling like there’s just no end to it all, ya know? If nothing else, after four years, being this><close to paying off Zoom-Zoom is just so phenomenal, I can’t even tell you — I’ll get the equivalent of almost half a month’s rent back into my budget, it’s that freakin’ rawk.

Don’t worry – the next post will be life revelations, how the heavens opened up & gave me the insight of how to fix the mess of my office and studio in one fell purchase, and the fact that I’m pondering using 2011 to remember how to properly knit, gods help you all.

previous adventures

• Hoff’s maximum speed, code vs life, & my continued employment – aka, ALL HAIL THE POWER OF THE LIST!
• Google always knows, sucking at adulthood, & don’t forget to Keep Calm & Carry On.
• sometimes it’s an honor just being nominated.

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I don’t feel pressured to do anything except keep them all alive and, if we go out, make sure everyone is wearing clothes.

Considering that she’s up in New Hampshire, I gotta say those are good goals.

Example 2:
from Closet Buffyholic – what do you do when you’re cross-certified to practice law in six states (let’s not even talk about those bar exams, they were three very dark times) and the guy on the East Coast is trying to give you sh*t about the fact that he had to work through the holidays b/c he doesn’t know you did too?

So, what I ended up saying was “is this a measuring contest? I’ll put my job up against yours I’ll win every day of the week and twice on Sunday.” I think he was kinda taken aback and later he called to apologize for being such a dickweed.

I think she’s right – it’s definitely time for us to plan her vacation(s) this year.

One day, I will be caught up. And on that day, I totally won’t know what to do after that.
I didn’t get nearly as much done over Christmas/New Year’s as I wanted. Part of it was that things came up, & part of it was that after the last year of work and life!stress, I think my body just kind of went, “eff you, we need a break”. I’m not gonna lie, I totally spent about four days slowly plonking through some mindless photo editing and watching season 6 of Grey’s Anatomy on the Roku box that my housesitting location had.

Which now means that I have Normal Time Work to do as well as All The Other Things that I kept putting off because I was going to do them those last two weeks of the year.

Normally, this would be totally daunting for me, and I’d be all crazy-headed about Everything That Needs to Get Done. However, I made a decision last week regarding where I wanted to be living by the summer, and part of being able to do that includes getting myself fully independent financially. Right now, Museum!Co makes up the bulk of my income, with my other clients adding in the part that’s allowing me to stash money into savings and put my life in order. But I am on contract, and the blue-collar pragmatist in me always feels better with a contingency plan.

First thing for me is to get caught up on all my “now” work — everything I have in the pipe needs to be taken care of so it’s either current or done. I put away a good amount of work on it over the weekend and a little more yesterday, but over the next week there may be a night or two like Saturday night, where I just stay up the full 24 hours to push things through. (Sadly, I fear this week that my be tonight, which sucks – I have an erg workout in the morning, and since things are actually going well, I’d like to be able to turn in solid numbers. May try to push it to Wed night.)

Once that’s done, we get to Part the Second, which is the Great Portfolio Update. I haven’t had a chance to fix my own website since I got laid off from Infomercial!Co, which will be two years ago this March. Considering that I’ve put several sites live since then, there’s still a part of me amazed that people offer me work based off what’s online presently. It’s all very, very sad, that site.

After that is Section Trois – namely, working on building out an affiliate network. I’ve been d*cking around with it on & off for the entire two years since getting out of the Infomercial industry, but the truth of the matter is that if you put in the time & are willing to do the SEO & CPA math, all of the smaller parts actually will combine to create a solid little side income. Problem is that after two years out of the industry, I’ll need to go re-up on what’s current knowledge, which is why I think a lynda.com membership may be in order, and the designation of one morning a week to just sit & do tutorials. Good times, good times.

Speaking of learning – what about school, anyway?
After trying to hustle every Friday morning to make it to school on time, I decided to take a different tact to this semester. Thankfully, my last professor was brilliant in that crazy way that most really good artists & teachers are, and I really did learn a lot about figure drawing, as well as have a couple moments where things actually worked, & I was like, “Okay, I do remember how to do this. Okay then. It’s not all gone.” Honestly, one of the nicest moments for me was talking to an older gentleman in the class who’s a professional sculptor by trade & was taking it to basically brush up on his own drawing skills. (Note: nowadays, a sculptor is not an easy thing to be full time, so it’s a fair bet that he’s pretty good at what he does.)

We had just finished a 15 minute session with the model, and he complimented me on my sketch. At the time, I’d chuckled & said something about not being as fast as some of the other people in the class who’d managed to lay down a full figure sketch in the time it had taken me to do from the waist up. He leaned in & said, “Yes, but theirs are all academic, and you have a style. You don’t have to sign it, and someone can tell its yours. It’s lovely. Speed comes with time.”

And it was in that moment that I realized what had been bothering me all quarter about the class. At the time, I’d thought it was that I was behind, and that not having been one of the people who’d immersed themselves in nothing but drawing all the time was hurting me, because I knew that what I was producing was different from everyone else.
It wasn’t until I had that conversation with Sculptor that I realized that what bothered me wasn’t that I was missing something, but that they were. I’m not 17. I’m not going to sit there and gasp in amazement when the professor shows us something new, or clap when he finishes lecturing. (Honestly, I think it may have wigged him out too when they did that, but whatever.) A lot of the program that I would have been on had I gone full time is basics – it’s stuff I now instinctually know, because I learned it…. literally a decade ago, & thus don’t need to stop & take the time to apply it – it’s ingrained at this point. A good amount of those classes are simply like bootcamp – they’re gonna break you down to weed the bad habits out before they build you back up so that everyone starts with the same base skill set, and then send you off into the world to find your personal style.

Problem being, it’s too late – my brain’s been mapped. I’ve already grown up. I’m a person, I have my own opinions, & my own preference to how I like things to be done, so rather than taking everything an authority figure tells me as The Absolute Truth, I tend to pull out what’s useful and apply it as I see fit. The result being that as Sculptor pointed out, rather than trying to start again, I need to simply set about filling in the areas where I’m finding I need to gain knowledge in order to accomplish my own vision as an artist, and in the end, I’ll set up my own cirriculum and accept that there most likely won’t be a piece of paper to prove what I know — my work will be my degree.

With that (and my wacky schedule) in mind, I decided not to take a set class this semester. Instead, I’m signing up for the unlimited workshop pass that they have available, which will allow me to go in & just draw at any of the model sessions that they have, and there’s at least one every day of the week, so I’m going to aim for two to three a week where I go and simply… go. Just draw. Don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, just work on laying something down on paper to increase speed & get more & more practice in. I talked to Professor!Rey, & since he does private lessons as well as teaching with us & at Art Center, I can make an appt to sit down & do a mini-review once every six weeks or so to get feedback & refinement. It’ll probably cost me about the same as if I’d done a structured course, and I really think I’ll just get a hell of a lot more out of it in terms of work progress. So I’ll give that a whirl this spring, and we’ll see.

—————

In an odd way, both of the above sections really are a reflection of my life. Every time I try to get a “proper” education, or structured degree, it pretty much just never works out. Oh, I’ve got my BFA, which gives me the base credentials to walk in the door, but in terms of what I get paid to do – psh, dude. I work on such a different space now than what my degree is actually for that whenever I’ve looked at a higher degree program, there’s always been a part where I ask, “So, can I test out of that part? I’ve already done it.”

Overall, I think that’s what the last year really has been about for me – accepting that my path is simply going to be different than everyone else. It just is. And that’s okay. The truth is, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll probably never have a “regular” job again – it doesn’t even occur to me to go look for one at this point. Museum!Co is probably as close as I’ll get, or a set-up similar to it. It’s just not how I’m built, or how the universe seems to want me to work. :shrug:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go work on First Thing as outlined above, since none of today’s programming would be possible without the generous financial support of our sponsors…

Music: Crazy for you – Adele (Live from SoHo)

previous adventures

• Why being friends with scientists = awesome
• sometimes it’s an honor just being nominated.
• Then we watch and wait and do nothing but sigh and hope everything is gonna turn out right…

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