I’d love to tell you that I landed a gig on UpWork today, but I can’t.

Because I landed two! Insert slot machine win sound effect clip here.

I got both the writing texting-based stories gig (told you my story was scary) and the gig being some lonely person’s online companion.

The companion gig pays $11\hour and that is,honestly, too little. i am pretty sure the clients will be paying a hell of a lot more than that. But it’s a startup working an entirely new business model which may well belly flop into the pit of Startups That Become Stopdowns, so I am willing to go with it.

At least until. like I said before, I build up a loyal clientele and become the most popular and beloved companion, and then it will be time to renegotiate.

It’s such a great gig for me because I feel like I have inadvertentky been training for it by being fluffy lovable Fruvous online for oh, more than 20 years.

So I am quite confident that I can rock that job if I can just make it through the awkward initial stage when I am still learning the ropes.

Then again, seeing as this is, as far as I know, a totally new business model, absolutely nobody will know what they are doing at first. It’s not like there are old veterans who cna teach me how to do it. We will all be winging it.

I can live with that. That kind of makes it more fun. I get to sort of invent the job as I go and I don’t have to worry that I am not doing it the way I am ‘supposed” to be doing it.

I like having that kind of freedom. I would rather be governed by my own sensitivity and personality than some goddamned book of rules any day.

:Like a lot of creative types,. I am not big on rules. I mean. I’m no anarchist – I believe in the necessity of rules and methods for enforcing them – but on a personal level, I am only comfortable in environments where the rules and my natural sense of manners and ethics are more or less the same.

I remember the first time I read through the list of rules for some message board and realized they all covered shit I would never do any way and therefore I did not need to think about them at all.

To me, they pretty much all boiled down to, “don’t be an asshole”. No problem.

It’s like when I first read Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, and realized it all boiled down to listening to people, seeing things from their point of view, and in generel being polite, sincere, and respectful.

By those terms, I am already a social genius. Or at least, I have the potential to be one if I can get rid of enough of my excess baggage from all my social damage.

The other gig, the writing in texting form gig, should not be too hard for me. Amy, the lady in charge of it, has given me till next Monday to finish it.

Which is hilarious, because I could have had it for her today if she’d wanted. As is, I am probably going to write it tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow evening at the latest. And won’t she be surprised at how fast I can work.

In fact, originally, I was going to make the job tonight’s blog entry, but my inner writer’s sense told me the ideas for it were not quite ready yet, so I punted it to tomorrow so I have more time to develop it in my mind.

But tomorrow for sure. I have a lot to prove and I intend on proving it as fast as I can, and one of the prime things I aim to prove is that I am amazingly talented and anyone who hires me should count themselves lucky to have found such a goddamned gem.

Plus, I have a lot of personality that needs to be expressed. I think in my natural state I would be one of those big guys with the big personality to match. The kind of guy everybody loves. even if he can be a little hard to take sometimes.

But like…. the arts world version of him. Hmmm.

I definitely think I would be way better at job interviews now than I was 20 years ago. I am fully aware of the power of my personality and how to use it now, and I am pretty sure I can overwhelm people with my charm and charisma if given the chance.

One of the best things about applying for things on UpWork is that it activates this other side of myself that has always been there but didnt usually see the light of day except when dealing with purely academic and/or intellectual things.

That side of me has total confidence. No self doubt at all. It’s the side of me that has caused me some trouble in my past because I state my opinions with such firmness of conviction that it tends to stifle debate.

I’ve got that under control now, more or less.

But the self-confidence it springs from is a highly valuable asset. Throw charm and charisma over it to blunt the rough edges, and you have the makings of someone who can really make a splash in the world of entertainment.

Lemme at’m, I’ll knock’em dead!

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

All I have to do is turn on the sweetness and charm and I bet I could make a lot of friends real fast because I am fun to be around. \

Funny how that works. People like to be around people who are fun to be around. Seems obvious but there’s a lot of people who do not see the connection, and go right on being unpleasant to be around while loudly complaining about how unfair it is that nobody wants to be around them.

Me, I figured it out at an early age. If anything,. I err in the opposite direction and act like I have to be super entertaining or people will leave me.

Remember, folks, that for every insanity, there is an equal and opposite insanity. And that the the opposite of insanity isn’t the opposite insanity, as tempting as it is to think so. The opposite of insanity is sanity, and that is much harder to achieve.

Because sabnity requires not only that we restrain ourselves, but that we look beyond the neurochemical landscape of conflict to see the middle road that leads away from the madness and into cool calm waters.

It’s not an easy route and it’s not a popular route, but it’s the right route.

And I do my best to follow it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.