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Hallelujah, no more skipping threads full of mammal nonsense

0 (0%)

Oh well, time to block Wombat's IP, she never had anything else interesting to post about

1 (5.3%)

I am overwhelmed by this rodent tragedy of capybara-like proportions

15 (78.9%)

What mole rat stories?

3 (15.8%)

Total Members Voted: 18

Voting closed: March 23, 2004, 12:09:14 pm

[CortJstr]

Many condolences, Wombat.

Hope you fill your pockets with mole rats on the way out.

But not the bitingest ones. Yee-ouch!

[AlohaDawg]

That sucks seven kinds of ass. I thought it was really hard to get rid of Federal Employees. Are you a contractor? I hope everyone involved in the mismanagement of our National  Zoo gets chronic explosive diarrhea like that guy that kep writing to Ray.

I'm sad 'cause I wanted a tour, too. Don't cash in your last favors with your coworkers too soon. If you are bored with not working, come on out here. We'll get you up on a surfboard, you can swim with dolphins or sea turtles not too far from where I live.

J

[wombat]

I'm not a permanent employee, I'm temporary. No benefits and they can let me go any time.  They use a lot of temps because it takes months to hire someone permanent, and animals can't go months without being taken care of.

Yeah, it is very hard to fire the permanent federal employees. Unfortunate, because I am pretty sure my boss would be happy to trade one or two of them for me.  But he has no choice.  He has so little control over what he can do to hire, reward or punish his employees that I almost feel sorrier for him than for myself.  It is a little frightening, frankly,  to have seen my federal government at work up close like this.

In one sense I can't complain.  I could never have gotten hired permanently at the time they took me on as a temp.  Now I've had nine months of what is basically paid job training and if I can just get a little more, might be able to get a real job at some point.  And if it did nothing other than get me to quit my old career it will have been worth it.  But it would have been awfully nice to be able to stay.  

I am pretty sure I will still be able to call in favors for tours for years.  It would be slightly less fun than if I could do them myself, but probably not so's you'd notice.

[Choop]

Do what you love, and the rest will take care of itself.

Happiness is remarkably easy to come by; you just have to be open to it. This probably sounds like rhetoric bullshit, but trust me, it's true. You want to write? Write. Work nights in a dishroom if you need to pay the bills - it may give you some subject matter. Who cares? As long as you do what you love.

Best of luck and lots of love to you. You'll be just fine.

[Nabubrush]

Do what you love, and the rest will take care of itself.

You know, you always hear people say this, or variations on this theme, but the fact is that the World demands too many cheeseburgers, and automobiles, and portable toilets for everyone to do what they love. My advice is try not to get stuck doing something you hate, and do what you love (or who you love) in your off-time.

[slink]

Screw that! Life's too short and screwy to not just do what you love all the time.
Perseverence and hard work it may take, but it's easier to work hard doing what you love than something else. And there's enough idiots out there who think they have to do some menial shit they don't want to, that you really don't have to!

[Nabubrush]

I just mean that it's nice to have that philosophy in your own life, but it's short-sighted to think that everyone on Earth can just do what they love. Do you think everyone in Haiti, or Iraq, or Chad can go out and find a job doing what they love?

[AugustWest]

Career plan C was these murder mysteries I have been writing, but an author friend of mine just emailed me a horribly depressing story from salon.com about how no one can make it as a midlist author. Very badly timed email.  But maybe I just need to make the books more trashy...

You should read the letters they got on this story here.  They made me feel better.

[wombat]

Oh, great letters - thanks.

On the subject of loving your work or not - I have tried various permutations of loving your work, doing your work just to be able to do what you love in your spare time, trying if you can't do the work you love to love the work you do...  It's better to love your job but as my current (and some previous) experience shows, it's risky to love something like a job or an institution, that can't love you back.

But hey, it's better to have loved and lost.  And in the meantime I am sending emails to all the bosses around here that I have schmoozed with...

[AlohaDawg]

Nabu is kind of right in a way; not too many people can spend their whole career outside of the grind chuckling at the racing rats. If you can Pay that Piper at some point and get out to do what you want to do and still make your ends meet, do it - and then tell the rest of us how you did it.

Obviously it's also a function of your comfort level and your needs. I've talked to some pretty content homeless people, some of whom had no other reason to be homeless but because they wanted to be. They just detached and left a lot of the societally imposed responsibilities and expectations behind them.

Somewhere between 'wage slave' and 'homeless guy' is where you want to be, (me too) and I hope we get there before we get old or something...

[Limmo]

Somewhere between 'wage slave' and 'homeless guy' is where you want to be, (me too) and I hope we get there before we get old or something...

I'd hope to be somewhere above either of those descriptions by that point...

[Bozack]

I want to have a room filled with gold coins, and I want to jump into it sometimes and swim around, a la Scrooge McDuck.

Seriously, where I am right now, I'm not sure if I even want to go to college, just because I'm feeling so totally content just waiting tables.
But of course I'm going to.

[wombat]

Somewhere between 'wage slave' and 'homeless guy' is where you want to be, (me too) and I hope we get there before we get old or something...

I'd hope to be somewhere above either of those descriptions by that point...

No, I think that's a great description of the scale.  Exactly what I've done is try to move closer to the 'homeless guy' end of it - giving up a whole lot of stuff that everyone else thought was important, and that made me Respectable and all that, but that was interfering with actual happiness.

I don't want to go all the way to that end of the scale, of course.  But yeah,  find the point in between that feels right.

[AlohaDawg]

Wombat and me are gonna quit workin' and spend the summer riding the rails like hobos, eatin' dinty moore out of the can and having nothing to do but learn to pick guitar and figure out what to do next.  It'll be awesome. Who's a-comin'?

[slink]

Who's a-comin'?

Sorry. I mean, I probably will end up riding' the rails, but for now, I'm desperately trying (with much procrastination) to remain unemployed and edging towards receiving great and fantastical riches from the creative things I love doing, mainly music.
Fortunately I am getting 6 months or so studio time in a month or so, which will help so much. But, while I shun 'stuff', and would love a world of simplicity and spiritual happiness, I like stuff too much. I want to own the new top of the range computer parts, and sell my soul (well, ok, I work) to pay for it every time. I'm not capitalist scum, I just like stuff.
But, I'm not going to work a real job. I just want to get comfortably rich doing what I like. If not... I'll be a hobo.