Wow. He is not nearly as butch looking as I thought he would be.
Anyhow, 44 isn’t much different than 43. Except that my 43rd birthday wasn’t, ya know, hell.
I was supposed to be at a Secret Informant meeting this afternoon, but I was too sick to go. By sick I mean depressed, of course. That’s my illness, both chronic and constant. I have still not fully recovered from last Friday night. Right now, I feel beat up inside. Bruised. And really goddamned tired in a way that goes beyond the physical I can tell I am on the mend but it’s taking longer than I thought I would.
I am struggling with feeling self-loathing guilt about not going to the meeting. Part of me feels like a total loser for having taken the loser choice instead of forcing myself out there where the odds were good that once I got moving, I would feel a whole lot better.
The other side of the internal argument says that I have to take care of myself and not push myself too far and end up totally collapsing. Part of managing illness is knowing when to push and when to accept your limitations – and forgive yourself for them.
It’s that last bit that’s hard for me.
I hope that some day, I figure out how to turn off this ruthless, relentless self-judgment. Accomplishment will help. I completed that insane assignment and the payment for it has been put through. The funds will be available in a week, if I’m lucky.
Because that’s how modern banking goes. Everything is instant except the things that mysteriously take days to happen. It will be three days for my method of payment (PayPal) to be approved. And then Upwork only does payouts once a week. And only if there is more than $100 to pay.
The usual bullshit. I supposed that if it is a pay per transaction situation with Upwork, then doing fewer transactions overall would save them money. And also bandwidth.
But it is frustrating to us poor schlubs waiting for our money.
Oh well, it will show up in my Paypal account eventually. PayPal was not my first choice for the receipt of payments. My first choice was direct bank transfer – that way the money goes directly into my Vancity account, and it would be simple to transfer it onto my reloadable VISA from there and then use it wherever.
But I ran into one of those situations that drive us poor idiots stuck insisting the world make sense crazy, because in order to set up the direct transfer, I needed my account number, and there is literally no way for me to find out what my account number is. No way I could find, anyhow. I did every Google site search I could think of, and the closest thing I could find was a page that told me how to find my account number… on a check.
Who the fuck uses checks any more? Might as well be banking using marks scratched on clay tablets with reeds, or notes tied to carrier pigeons.
So that was super frustrating. I can see that PayPal is almost as good because it it set up to draw from my credit card anyhow, and most importantly tons of places accept PayPal as a form of payment for stuff now, so I can use it for online shopping no prob.
But, well, I am one stubborn dude who hates to stop anything before he finishes it, and so I will probably call the bank tomorrow and get my account number from them, and set the fucking thing up like I wanted it set up in the first place.
But hey, that’s the stubbornness that earned me that money in the first place. Only someone like me would have worked so fucking hard for a whole week for $100. It’s that semi-insane persistence that sustained me.
And the stubborn pride of never giving up no matter what the challenge is…. in other words, never letting a challenge defeat me. Fuck you, challenge. I am going to defeat you whatever the cost.
Again, not exactly one hundred percent sane, but potent when harnessed properly.
When I was feeling overwhelmed by the task next week, all I had to do was imagine failing my first ever freelance assignment and that would goad me back into action. I worked rally hard on that insane thing, but I got it done.
Just between you and me, and don’t tell the client, but it was not a very well thought out assignment. For me at least…. I am dying to know how the others hired (if there were any) fared on the job.
I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there was an easier and faster way to do it and it was only my very high standards that made it take me so long to rephrase four paragraphs. Maybe if I had truly accepted that I could trash most of the content from the original and done my rephrasings by taking like two facts from each paragraph and completely ignoring the rest.
But I care too much about information,. I can’t just casually destroy it like that. Even with permission. I made a few concessions to the idea, like only including three from any list of more than three items, but for the most part it all stayed.
And while that slowed things down and made way more work for me, I will say this : My reworked paragraphs were well written!
Oh, and the agreement for the job was to do it for USD $72, and I was paid USD $86 instead. So they threw in a tip, at least.
That means that, at the current exchange rate, I got paid CDN $116 for the job. Which is nice. Nowhere near minimum wage, but still. Nice.
Aaaand I have a completed job on Upwork so I am not a total nonentity any more. Plus I have the animation thing I am going to be doing 5 days a way.
So things are looking up for me. I just have to pull myself together and get on top of it.
And I am totally going to do that…. TOMORROW.
Today, I am going to freaking relax.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.