Have I talked about this already/ If so, I apologize, but I am way too messed up from sleep to look it up right now.

I realized recently that the best job in the world for me would be one where there was always another job to be done. Where once I completed one task, I could just grab another, and fo forth and so on until I was satisfied.

Evidence : back when I worked for my Uncle Sonny, the only times I hated the job was when there were no customers and there was nothing to do.

My boss, Blaine Skerry, told me “just watch TV’, which made sense because I was surrounded by TVs. But I couldn’t. TV was way too slow and passive for me. I was at WORK, god damn it, and I needed something to DO.

I am at my happiest when I am at my busiest.

Now if only I was better at busying myself.

Video games don’t count because they are not productive. They give the illusion of productivity, granted, but like all things virtual, it is nowhere near as good as the real thing. And that little shot of dopamine when I complete a tasks (or in video game terms, a quest) is nowhere near as strong.

“Achievements” don’t mean shit compared to accomplishments.

This is hitting me hard right now because as far as I know, I am sans tasks right now. I am awaiting responses from the two writing gigs and the text companion gig does not start until (hopefully) this Thursday now.

And I am actually tempted to log in to UpWork and look for yet MORE work to do in order to fill the time.

I need to work, god dammit. Working is so much better than video games and Facebook. When I am working, I am actually in a good mood for once, not just too distracted and/or absorbed in something to worry about stuff.

It feels so good to have a load to pull. The ox needs the plow. To have something productive and therefore worth doing for a change is a joy. Bliss.

And I got to visit that joyful, blissful land for all too brief a time recently, and I want more. I want to go back. I want to go there to stay.

I have seen my Narnia and it’s full of joyful productivity.

Plus, inherent in these tasks is the feeling of being useful. Of contributing. I have been an unwilling but helpless nonparticipant in the work of life for way too long a time and that can’t possibly end too soon for me.

If you can’t work, you can’t grow up. Going off to work for a living is the modern equivalent of being allowed to hunt with the hunters or gather with the gatherers. It means you have taken on adult responsibilities, and it is through them you will continue the process of maturing that you have been part of for your whole life.

That, and money is an awesome thing to have. Or so I have heard.

Come to think of it, it’s the money that confirms that you have “done good”. It’s society’s way of saying “your contribution to the collective is being rewarded with the ability to reap rewards from said society”.

And in a broad sense, the size of your paycheck is the degree of society’s appreciation. In the smaller increments and especially at the low end, that is measured in direct rewards like being able to afford small pleasures like indulging in your hobbies or being able to buy fun things with it.

But in larger doses, it buys something far more important to humans : status. That’s rwhat the fancy new car or the new swank address are really about. It getgs confusing because with said advancements in rank also come upgrades in lifestyle, including access to luxuries, so it can seem like it’s the material pleasures alone that are the reward for your contributions.

But those material pleasures would lose a lot of their joy if you didn’t associate them with successful, high status people. That’s what confirms to you that society considers you a superior kind of person.

WIth all the status baggage that entails.

That’s something we never really talk about in society. We all intuitively grasp that a rise in status, especially if accompanied by wealth, can turn a good person bad and bring out a really ugly side of previously wonderful people, but we almost never sit down and ask ourselves why that it.

I think a big piece of the reason why is that society in no way prepares us for advanced status living. Our belief in equality and the fact that we are (sort of kind of not really) a classless society leaves us entirely unprepared for what happens when we are enjoying a substantial inequality of status in our favour.

So we fall back on our instincts and our instincts are harsh. They tell us all kinds of things that are not compatible with a modern egalitarian democracy. Things like “everyone lower in status than you must show deference and respect to you at all times and you are free to punish them if they do not do it to your satisfaction. “, or even further down the rabbit hole, “if people of lower status do not do what you say or behave the way you think they should, this is a direct challenge to your authority and you must quash it immediately and harshly or you will lose status to them”.

I think we would be better off if we had some widely popular tales of regular people gaining status and dealing with the emotions that suddenly arise in them that point them down a dark and twisted path, and how they overcome that in order to both retain their friends and retain their sanity.

Is that what Entourage was all about? I never watched.

And it’s easy to say that you would never be lke that, but until you are actually dealing with the issues, you don’t really know.

I, of course, would only become more awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today has not been great.

Today was the day I was going to dedicate my whole afternoon to getting my text story into the proper format, which happens to be an Excel spreadsheet.

Once I looked at the sample spreadsheet the company provided,. I got what the deal with the format was. It’s dead simple, two colums, one for who is speaking and one for what they are saying. Anyone could figure that out in two seconds.

But why a spreadsheet and not just a text file? My guess is that an app has a way easier time reading and interpeting a spreadsheet than a text document.

So that was my Saturday Afternoon Challenge. Making the spreadsheet was no big deal. I have LibreOffice, it does various Excel formats. I learned spreadsheets when I was in high school.

I find them quite beautiful,. to be honest. The ability to so swiftly and easily set up dynamic mathematical relationships between values rocks my freaking world.

For us system times, it’s practically porn.

So there I was plugging away at the thing when I suddenly realized three horrible things at the same time :

1. It was not nearly long enough. It was supposed to be at least 100 lines and it was 52. There goes my concision again. I have to learn to be more prolix.
2. My future at this gig was riding on this
3. It sucked.

It’s really not very good. It starts off very strong but then it veers off into stupidity fairly quickly and I just plain hate the ending.

For quick reference, we are talking about the story I wrote in this blog entry. 

And right at this moment, I haaaaaate it.

But that’s how the artistic process goes. You make it the first time, you love it, then you hate it, then you fix it, lather rinse repeat as many times as it takes, and if you are lucky, you emerge at the end with something you can stand.

Or so I am told. I am still Mister One Draft Only over here. But I feel like I am getting ready to finally evolve into being a real writer who is capable of working on something for a much longer time any day now.

Or so I hope.

For the moment, it’s still write, release, and forget. I am lucky that I have enough talent that I can get away with that kind of thing. My writing hums with life and is alternately hilarious, heartbreaking, or just plain dark.

It’s a mood thing.

I suppose my whole life has been like that, in a way. I have been coasting on raw talent and intelligence since the first day of grade 1. My life has been split between the things I do easily that others can’t do at all and the things others do easily that I can’t do at all.

Call me “differently abled”.

Or a hothouse flower. That certainly fits. In the right environment, I could bloom like crazy and light up the whole greenhouse with my dazzling display of color and form.

But those conditions are so rare as to be currently unknown to science and wisdom, and as to how to get there, well, that’s…. complicated.

What I really need is to be transplanted someplace where I can thrive by the Great Green Gardener in the Sky.

Shown here scaring the crap out of people.

Full of country goodness and green peaness.

All I can do on my own is very slowly creepy in the direction of the sun. I have no idea when I will actually get there, but the light gets brighter as I go and that is good enough for me for now.

I am not, of course, surprised that my re-entry to the world of working has been quite rough so far.

That’s to be expected. I am not used to the world and I have always had a little more optimism than forethought so I am not surprised that I am stumbling out of the gate.

But soon I will hit my stride and then, zoom!

And I mean, worst case scenario, I lose the gigs I have now. That would suck, but there is plenty of more work out there.

I mean, look at all I got with a little less than a week of trying!

And I think that the people I have been writing for will be impressed with my talent enough to be willing to work with me to get the rest of the equation up to par.

I definitely have a talent for writing good stuff. But I need help turning my rich ore into gold bricks. I need someone else being in the equation giving me feedback.

Preferably someone harsh but fair. Like my fave professor, Aaronovsky, fromk VFS. He was the only one who cared enough to be tough with us and say “Not good enough! Do it again! ” till we got it right.

To say that stood out like a rose in a bed of daisies in the don’t give a shit, do whatever is easiest for YOU atmosphere of the VFS writing department would be the understatement of the year, three years running.

As patient readers know, I have had remarkably little challenge in my life. School was always super easy and all that. So when someone gives me the feedback I need and want so bad, I don’t care if it comes via the tip of their boot.

In fact, to be honest, I would prefer that to having it come in the form of vague, hazy statements made by people who are too afraid of hurting my feelings (or of me, for that matter) to push back at all and so, to me, it’s like they are barely there.

It’s hard to convey the deep frustration of being a naturally combative person in a world where nobody is willing to spar with you.

I need opposition! Pushback! Friction! Or any other thing that would make the world feel more real to me.

I am tired of living in this crazy hazy world of dreams.

I want to wake up and get to work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.