aka “Things I’ve Seen” since 2004
Jake, Marie and daughters Isabelle and Nicolette are visiting from California for the holidays. Nicolette had her blessing in Lansing (Marie’s home town) earlier in the week. We’ll get to meet her at a family gathering at my sister’s home on Saturday.
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Here are some photos from Christmas day. Somehow I didn’t take very many, and these aren’t all that good. Still, in the interest of documentation, here they are. Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season!
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I now have a full-time job.
This probably surprises many of you, and it surprised me no less, believe me. My last update in July was so very glowing about the promise of freelancing, and how I felt I was making headway into a pretty permanent way of making a living. I recounted a revelation I’d had about how if you’re good, people will keep hiring you, word will spread and you’ll get work forever and ever, amen.
Or something like that.
But then the totally unexpected happened.
In late July (not long after I wrote that last update on a writer’s life, in fact), I received an email from a client of mine at a local university where I was just wrapping up a big project. He said he’d received the latest copy I’d sent in and it looked good. Then he asked me:
"Are you looking for a job, or are you going to freelance?"
I was intrigued. So I wrote back and told him that while I’d been doing very well freelancing, I’d certainly take a look at a job if the right one came along.
Now I should mention that this client had been a coworker of mine at my last job. We’re both writers and we know each other fairly well, in fact, it was that relationship that had got me the job I was working on for him. The writing was almost exactly the type I’d done when we worked together, he knew my style was what he was looking for, and he knew I could deliver, so he hired me on a contract basis.
And now, as I found in subsequent emails and phone conversations, he wanted to know if I was interested in being hired permanently.
An easy decision
In spite of everything I’ve written here about enjoying the freelance life, the decision to pursue permanent employment was not a difficult one. My first thought was hey, if you’ve been "out of work" for 10 months and suddenly a job offer drops out of the sky when you haven’t even been looking (especially in Michigan’s tight job market), well, that’s a sign you shouldn’t ignore.
Also very high on my list of considerations was the fact that after my health insurance expired, our family’s coverage had become 1) less comprehensive and 2) waaay more expensive since we’d had to take on the coverage offered by Clay’s employer. Another fact I had to face was that while I’d been very busy over the summer, all of my jobs were wrapping up at the same time and prospects for the future seemed to be dimming a bit. I was looking at finally having to do some self promotion, I think, and possibly facing some time with a little less cash flow.
Finally, one benefit this job offered was "tuition remission" for myself, spouse and dependents. With Meg and Suze both looking to start college next fall, I’d have been a fool not to take this opportunity seriously
So I set the ball rolling. And on September 11, after two interviews and a little salary negotiation, I started at Davenport University as communications manager.
… more later
Kathy Sierra (I love this woman!), writing for Creating Passionate Users, nails the reason that I:
In her post, The Twitter Curve, she articulates it for me. But I can sum it up with one acronym: TMI (or "too much information," for my less-attuned-to-pop-phraseology readers). In a nutshell:
… we’re all feeling the enormous weight of not being able to keep up.
We can’t keep up with work. We can’t keep up with our social life. We
can’t keep up with the industry, our hobbies, our families. We can’t keep up with current events. We’ll never read a fraction of those books on our list. And we are hurting.Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow.
Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all
that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our
knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we
can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a
certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain
RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely
we are to ever get there.And not only are we stopping ourselves from ever getting in flow, we’re stopping ourselves from ever getting really good at something. From becoming experts. The brain scientists now tell us that becoming an expert is not a matter of being a prodigy, it’s a matter of being able to focus.
So correct is she about the effects of being unable to focus on anything for any length of time so as to think effectively, much less complete anything well, so aptly has she described my own particular reason for malaise, that I won’t — no, I can’t — even elaborate. Her comments will substitute here for my own analysis and my own thoughts. I’ll be content to drag a quote from her post over here and let it do the explaining for me.
And in doing so I’ll save myself, on this mid-December-lazy Saturday (where all I’ve done all day is nap, empty the dishwasher and update my desktop photos from summer to winter) from thinking, reading, analyzing and writing. Not because I don’t want to do these things. Because I just can’t.
