So, let’s see, it’s been a few months. Not a whole lot has changed. Still jobless. Sister spent a month here, at the parents’ house, for sabbatical from work, and I was at the parents’ house for most of that time, and all that was fun. Being back at my own apartment has been… pretty uneventful and boring, really. I’ve once again run out of old candles/wax/to use in the candlemaker I found for 2 bucks at at second hand shop (it’s literally exactly the same one my sister like paid 40 bucks for, years ago, and it works wonderfully. I’ve once again gotten out my collection of several old magazines, and random chunks of color cut out of magazines, and I’ve finished the collage koi fish I had sitting around partially finished for months, have to put the finishing touches on that particular piece, and then I’m going to try to sell it, I think. I’m thinking at pricing it around 35-40 bucks or so. When you consider that I spent hours upon hours going through magazines looking for bits of color, cutting out hundreds (not an exaggeration) of little circles and strips out of said magazines, and strategically gluing them onto a cardboard shape I first had to plan out and draw… I don’t feel like that’s an unrealistic price to ask. I think the lowest I’d be willing to go is probably 30 bucks, because that’s a lot of work. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy doing it, but artists deserve to be paid a decent amount for putting in work. It’s like that at any other job. I wouldn’t spend hours and hours working on a like, report, I don’t know, in an office job, and then presenting said project and getting told it didn’t look like 50 bucks worth of work or whatever. A lot of time people just look at the product and want to pay for just that, but not the time and resources it took to produce it.
But I’m not in the mood to get into a diatribe on that, because then it’ll remind me of something else that pisses me off, and pretty soon I’ll be bitching about the president or some shit.
In reference to the title of this, it turns out that trying to get online transcription jobs is a lot harder than one would expect. At least in my experience, you expect it to be like “OH, GET PAID TO TYPE OUT AUDIO SHIT ONLINE, EASY PEASY. It’s actually difficult difficult lemon difficult, for future reference. I tried one website, failed their test, and have to wait 45 days to try again (and I failed on the 24th of July so I’m only about halfway through that wait period. Then I tried a different website, and that one actually pissed me off. It gives you two tries for one particular test. And it was this banal clip about some richass white dude talking about starting a business that I listened to a million times on like 50 percent audio speed. Failed the first time. The next time, I made damn sure I was accurate, spell checked the thing, was very careful about formatting and everything, and it still said I failed with only 33 percent. It took me over an hour to transcribe a fucking 6 minute clip, and it said I failed with 33 percent. I still don’t think that was accurate, but that website was way worse than the first one. They had ridiculous formatting you had to follow, like time stamping each speaker every time they started speaking, and that takes ages, and they had super strict rules as to putting in false starts, etc, and I made sure I went over the guidelines and everything and truth be told I’m still a bit pissed off about that one. But I think it’s because I had pretty much staked all my financial hopes on getting an easy transcription job and then BOOM, having money. I was trying out some positivity crap, telling myself I was for sure going to pass, but the only thing that was positive was the fact that I that was positively pissed off that I failed. I was like UGH, WHAT THE FUCK WAS ALL THAT POSITIVITY SHIT EVEN FOR I DIDN’T EVEN PASS. I was venting to my sister about it and she was all ‘You know, positivity doesn’t guarantee results’ which sounds like a really obvious thing but it was like OH. I guess you’re right.
I’ve been going to group therapy about dealing with emotional intensity (once a week), and this is my second time through the course (which I think ends next week) and I think it’s finally starting to knock something into this stupid brain, I’m finally starting to think about these things. And I mean, I was in a great mood yesterday, and I’m in a decent mood today so take that for what it is. Still I think my financial and employment situation causes me the most stress and the most emotional self flagellation over it. And even in the instances where I think I don’t deserve better stuff, don’t deserve good stuff, deserve to be emotionally beat up about it, it took this long to really start thinking… “Even if you think you deserve to be punished, what’s this shit really accomplishing? Who is really benefiting from this?” Because it’s hard to get to that point where you realize that emotionally beating myself up over something makes it that much harder to accomplish the thing I was trying to get at, which just snowballs out of control and you end up having the exact opposite effect that you were shooting for. It’s weird, y’all. And the tense in that sentence was all over the damn place. Oops.
Before I went off on a tangent about jobs, when I was still on about the collage crap, I’m working on a collage of a planet, it’s gonna be all spacey and shit because I finally got over rage quitting the first mass effect game and actually finished it, and holy shit y’all, the feels are all over the place. I’m currently on my fourth playthrough of the second mass effect, but it’s the first one where I’ve been able to import my Shepard from the first game and like I miss my stupid space boyfriend with the raspy voice and the good eyebrows and I refuse to put his actual name here because I don’t want this shit showing up when I google his stupid ass. Speaking of which, the game really should just be called ass effect because every elevator ride, the camera mysteriously switches round to view his ass.
It’s pretty funny because I literally just finished my 3rd playthrough of ME2 like….last week, so I’m almost getting to dragon age/skyrim levels of knowing where everything is, but my stupid ass still gets lost on Omega, and I’m sure my upstairs neighbor is really tired of me literally yelling “DAMMIT SHEPARD GET DOWN”, especially when I brainfart and revert to the controls of the other game, like mashing the stupid left stick and then going OH SHIT this is the second one, duh, hit A. Okay brain, thanks. So, that’s why I’m doing an artsy fartsy collage that’s all SPACE-y.
Anyhoo I’m bored.
♫ friction and harmony ♫ 