Usually, I save the best for last. It’s something I have done all my life. It’s because I seem to have born with an acute sense of how things are trending. Maybe it’s a primitive form of forethought. I don’t know. I just know I really want things to get better as they go, and then end on a high note.

I mean, if you eat dessert first, the rest of the meal will be a huge letdown.

But today I will start with the most exciting\impactful thing going on in my life and then do the less exciting journaling second because something very good (and kinda bad) has happened to me and I can express it in three words :

I got hired!

Someone on Upwork hired me to rephrase a bunch of information to summarize a whole whack of information, and to do it withing four paragraphs.

So yay! The seal is broken! If I can pull this off, I will be an EXPERIENCED freelancer and I will seem far more attractive to future clients.

That would totally level up my career!

The problem is…. I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.

I thought I was just going to be rephrasing a lot of paragraphs. No problem. I could do that in my sleep. So I talked myself up to the client, saying that I could do that so well that I might even be able to do a second batch of 100.

But what I didn’t know was that it would be WAY harder than that. Because what I missed was that I would be summarizing enormous amounts of information in those four little paragraphs. That’s a much, much higher level mental operation, and I really wish I hadn’t talked big on it because this is way way harder,.

I mean, the first one of these (which I have yet to complete), asks me to summarize 21 paragraphs of  historical in four paragraphs.

And once I do that, I got 99 more of the things before late Friday night.

The Friday night that is also my birthday and on which I have a date. ^[1]

And that is going to be a lot of work. All for 90 cents each (of which I get 72^[2]). Oh well, I guess it’s time to pay my dues!

Obviously, I will be working super hard for the next five days. I am sure that it is not as hard as it seems to me right now, and that once I have a bunch of them under my belt I will get into the rhythm of it. That’s just how things go.

But right now, I feel like I just confidently jumped into the deep end of the pool without having any idea how deep it was.

Oh, and I can’t swim.

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Now for the Burnaby part of the blog entry. First off, I am not talking about this guy :

That is totally the clip they would play on a late night talk show to humiliate me.

No, I am talking about his namesake, the suburb of Vancouver. I was there yesterday for a meeting but my trip to said meeting became quite the adventure.

Like most of my adventures, it begins with me fucking up. I did all that I was supposed to do (so I thought) to get to the meeting. I let the Translink website do the transit part of my planning and wrote that down, then figured out the walking part of the trip and wrote that down.

Well, almost. I missed one little thing.

So I went out with my notes, full of hope and confidence, on a quite lovely day. And I did the transit part of the journey without much of a problem, and let me tell you, it was quite the journey. And not just because it was the Skytrain and two buses.

It was also because that part of Burnaby is freaking gorgeous. There’s pine trees (and softwood trees) everywhere, and as we know, we monkeys love to be surrounded by trees. And there was this lovely Sunday afternoon vibe going on, at least for me. The trees, the sunshine, the smell of pine, and the time of the week all combined to both make me feel relaxed and make me feel like I was on a pleasant summer trip on the way to do something fun and family oriented^[3].

Which is probably why I took the looming disaster so well.

It began as I stepped off the second bus. I suddenly had a terrible thought. As the bus (with a very nice driver) drove away, I confirmed it.

I had forgotten Step 1 of a 3 step plan. I knew where to turn on Prenter Street, and where to turn on THAT street to get to Hawthorn Crescent.

But I had forgotten to ascertain how to get from the bus stop to Prenter Street.

So I was totally lost. I walked a ways down the street I was on, and I came upon a very nice public park and rec center. You know, the standard park, soccer field, baseball diamond, pool, and tennis court arrangement. And I saw people down there, so I decided I would ask them for directions. First challenge to my social anxiety accepted.

But I talked to a couple walking their lovely mutt of a dog and to a bunch of teen and tween boys practicing swearing at each other, and nobody had the slightest idea. I don’t blame them. That part of Burnaby is a labyrinth of charming subdivisions, and the sheer amount of information involved is too much for any one person.

So then I walked through one of those charming subdivisions for lack of a superior solution, and when you have no idea where you are, it doesn’t matter which way you go, so you might as well go in the direction that is downhill.

And it was a very nice walk past very nice houses and lots of lovely trees and enjoyed the sunshine and mild temperature. My thinking was that if I went downhill long enough, I would reach the water and therefore some civilization.

After a while, I came out onto a main road. As I was going downhill on it, I spotted someone standing in their yard and having a smoke while using their smartphone. That meant it was time for Social Anxiety Challenge 2 : Plan Hack From Outer Space.

In other words, I asked the dude to call me a cab. And he did. It’s a good thing that, despite my fears, I have a harmless, affable kind of charm.

The cab was totally my Gordian Knot solution. Fuck trying to find the place myself. At this point, I was more than willing to pay someone to do that for me. The cabbie was a great guy, and it turned out I was only six or seven blocks from where I should be, so the cab ride only cost me six bucks (eight with tip).

I arrived at the meeting (an hour late, oy) and Part 1 of my adventure was over. Part 2 is short but this entry is already way too long, so I will punt it to the next entry.

The great thing is that, whether because of my improved mental health or the wonderful surroundings or both, I never freaked out. There was a bad moment when I thought I had reached the gravitational bottom of the subdivision and would now have to climb up the very steep streets, but I realized I was wrong after I talked to a nice lady who was working on her yard.

So all in all, it was an adventure. I am no worse for wear, it only cost me eight bucks, I had a nice walk, and it ended well.

All my fuckups should go so well!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.