(no subject)
Dec. 12th, 2020 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[fairly mild cw: venting]
tomorrow I have to find a news article about a business-related accident and write 1,200 words analysing the accident in terms of what we learned last chapter
(or at least I have to *start* doing that: I'm not saying I'm going to do it all in one day, especially given that I have work that late-afternoon)
I haven't had to do a writing assignment beyond short-answer questions in...years? I think it's been literal years
I'm not, like, objectively *bad* at them, but I find them *stressful* in a way numbery assignments aren't. they're more unpredictable, they have too many degrees of freedom.
(school has been a breeze in comparison ever since I switched majors (the one mandatory writing course for this diploma was something I'd already finished beforehand); there were way more writing assignments thrown into CS courses than into accounting courses. I knew this course was the exception, which is why I did it last in hopes that the end being in sight would help with motivation.)
the thing about schoolwork, perhaps especially flexible-scheduling schoolwork (though fixed-schedule would dump extra problems on top of it), is that...it's not like recovering from an injury, where you merely have to wait it out. it requires me to *actively surmount* it in order for it to go away. this semester is over when I *make* it over: no sooner, no later.
I've grown very tired of living in the liminal space on the threshold of adulthood. it's been eight years and I want *out*. I want a nice little cubicle and some spreadsheets to make and maybe go and help with the inventory counting sometimes. (I like counting the money in the cash registers at work to make sure it matches up with the theoretical figure, it's soothing) I want a bank account that has *more* money after [[putting a paycheque in] + [paying off bills]] than it did before.
---
also I'm scared of the even more acutely liminal period *after* this semester, where I've graduated but don't have a career job yet
it seems like the primary interview skills, the foundation upon which everything else rests, are "ability to think on your feet" and "ability to speak fluently and accurately", both of which I am very very bad at
(if anything you would expect fluent speech and accountancy to be *negatively* correlated abilities, since not-X and Y can both be caused by Z. hey, maybe I'll get a hiring manager who thinks it through and realises it's a *good* sign that I come off a bit aspie. maybe I can give off a vibe of "hello, yes! I am the *ideal* level of autistic for this job! hire me to sit in a little room and line up numbers!!"
(like, I have definitely at least once gotten so excited about tax-efficient investment strategies that I forgot to make eye contact, that is definitely a type of thing that has been known to happen))
---
plus, you know...in my social bubble the 2008 recession never really ended, and I *was* looking forward to breaking into a bubble where that wasn't true. but I'm never going to see what the prosperous version of the 2010's looked like. I'm graduating into a recession after all, not the perpetual one I see when I look around me but one so pervasive that approximately every sphere is feeling it.
---
I look at Indeed every so often to get a feel for how things are going. today I saw that a pretty large percentage of current entry-level listings are hiring for 3 days/week.
I started wondering: would that be...acceptable, for me, given my values and my situation? the one that [gave its wage explicitly] said it was $20/hour: 24 hours/week at $20/hour is essentially a perpetual CERB in terms of the amount of money it gives, so I guess it *is* quite a bit really. I could do continuing-ed with 2 - 3 of the other days, or keep doing fast-food on the side. and then a year in I can start telling the other hiring managers that I have a year's experience. it'd still be uncomfortably liminal, but it'd be a step up.
I don't know, maybe I'm just borrowing trouble, maybe I don't need to think through what compromises I should be willing to make when I'm not actually being faced with them yet. maybe when it comes time to actually look I'll find a full-time job with a nice short commute, where the workload isn't overwhelming and you know what's expected of you and the employees aren't constantly scheming against each other. (I used to have a workplace where the employees weren't constantly scheming against each other! it was nice!!)
tomorrow I have to find a news article about a business-related accident and write 1,200 words analysing the accident in terms of what we learned last chapter
(or at least I have to *start* doing that: I'm not saying I'm going to do it all in one day, especially given that I have work that late-afternoon)
I haven't had to do a writing assignment beyond short-answer questions in...years? I think it's been literal years
I'm not, like, objectively *bad* at them, but I find them *stressful* in a way numbery assignments aren't. they're more unpredictable, they have too many degrees of freedom.
(school has been a breeze in comparison ever since I switched majors (the one mandatory writing course for this diploma was something I'd already finished beforehand); there were way more writing assignments thrown into CS courses than into accounting courses. I knew this course was the exception, which is why I did it last in hopes that the end being in sight would help with motivation.)
the thing about schoolwork, perhaps especially flexible-scheduling schoolwork (though fixed-schedule would dump extra problems on top of it), is that...it's not like recovering from an injury, where you merely have to wait it out. it requires me to *actively surmount* it in order for it to go away. this semester is over when I *make* it over: no sooner, no later.
I've grown very tired of living in the liminal space on the threshold of adulthood. it's been eight years and I want *out*. I want a nice little cubicle and some spreadsheets to make and maybe go and help with the inventory counting sometimes. (I like counting the money in the cash registers at work to make sure it matches up with the theoretical figure, it's soothing) I want a bank account that has *more* money after [[putting a paycheque in] + [paying off bills]] than it did before.
---
also I'm scared of the even more acutely liminal period *after* this semester, where I've graduated but don't have a career job yet
it seems like the primary interview skills, the foundation upon which everything else rests, are "ability to think on your feet" and "ability to speak fluently and accurately", both of which I am very very bad at
(if anything you would expect fluent speech and accountancy to be *negatively* correlated abilities, since not-X and Y can both be caused by Z. hey, maybe I'll get a hiring manager who thinks it through and realises it's a *good* sign that I come off a bit aspie. maybe I can give off a vibe of "hello, yes! I am the *ideal* level of autistic for this job! hire me to sit in a little room and line up numbers!!"
(like, I have definitely at least once gotten so excited about tax-efficient investment strategies that I forgot to make eye contact, that is definitely a type of thing that has been known to happen))
---
plus, you know...in my social bubble the 2008 recession never really ended, and I *was* looking forward to breaking into a bubble where that wasn't true. but I'm never going to see what the prosperous version of the 2010's looked like. I'm graduating into a recession after all, not the perpetual one I see when I look around me but one so pervasive that approximately every sphere is feeling it.
---
I look at Indeed every so often to get a feel for how things are going. today I saw that a pretty large percentage of current entry-level listings are hiring for 3 days/week.
I started wondering: would that be...acceptable, for me, given my values and my situation? the one that [gave its wage explicitly] said it was $20/hour: 24 hours/week at $20/hour is essentially a perpetual CERB in terms of the amount of money it gives, so I guess it *is* quite a bit really. I could do continuing-ed with 2 - 3 of the other days, or keep doing fast-food on the side. and then a year in I can start telling the other hiring managers that I have a year's experience. it'd still be uncomfortably liminal, but it'd be a step up.
I don't know, maybe I'm just borrowing trouble, maybe I don't need to think through what compromises I should be willing to make when I'm not actually being faced with them yet. maybe when it comes time to actually look I'll find a full-time job with a nice short commute, where the workload isn't overwhelming and you know what's expected of you and the employees aren't constantly scheming against each other. (I used to have a workplace where the employees weren't constantly scheming against each other! it was nice!!)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 03:04 pm (UTC)It occurred to me in bed last night that this post would make an even better context-link for this.
(There is a certain bitter amusement in noting that it *was*, in fact, written right before a crash, albeit an exogenous one. There is a different bitter amusement in noting that, financially, the pandemic was actually *great* for us. We fell through the cracks on the 2008 recovery, but we did the *opposite* of falling through the cracks on the 2020 recession.
...admittedly, the two are very much linked: the reason my dad and I made out so well on stimulus payments is because we were accustomed to making so little money that $2k/person/month was actually a huge *improvement*. Now that CERB is over I'm bleeding about $200 per fortnightly pay-cycle (expenses of ~$500 on income of ~$300), but I still have all that old CERB money to *fund* the bleed with.)