yours, tiramisu

falling down the stairs

On Saturday night I fell down an entire flight of stairs (fortunately carpet), and on Sunday a swinging arm bruised my nose at soccer, so now I am feeling battered both inside and outside. I've been trying to drown the unsavory feelings by shopping for fountain pen inks, but I have to remind myself that being able to write in a new color won't make me feel better.

I was looking forward to playing soccer again on Sunday after almost two weeks off, but the way I played reminded me of this old Nike advert called "The Switch", in which Cristiano Ronaldo collides into a fan during a game. When the two wake up the next day, they discover that they've swapped bodies. Yesterday I felt just like that, as if I'd been switched into a body double that couldn't play soccer. Of course, the real reason for my awful showing probably stems from the two weeks I spent away from the ball, but it feels cruel experiencing how quickly skills can deteriorate without practice.

My writing lesson on Sunday went okay. The part of lessons that stresses me out the most is the check-in activity at the beginning of class, Rose-Bud-Thorn. It brings me back to panicking during standup on Mondays trying to rack my brain for something interesting to say about what I did over the weekend. Turns out my student dislikes sharing highlights from her week as much as I do; for the Bud portion she said, "I'm not looking forward to anything." Me too buddy, me too.

My well of inspiration has been coming up dry lately, so today I'll write about something I wanted to save till the end of the month: the status of my job applications.

I keep track of every job I apply to on a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Not so much because it's useful to do so, but more so that I can set goals for the amount of applications I send out and keep myself honest. I originally set out to apply to 10 jobs a day, but I quickly realized that was unrealistic. I'm at around 60 now, which averages out to 5 or so a day. Here's a list of the data I keep track of for each application/listing.

Looking back at the data here are some of my observations.

The more time goes on, the more lax my standards get.
This one makes sense. The more desperate I get, the more I'm willing to consider. When I first started applying I was pretty much only looking for technical writing roles. Now I feed the LinkedIn omnibox random keywords I'm remotely interested in and apply to any suitable jobs that pop up.

I need to be more creative about how & where I apply.
Plenty of jobs don't get posted on LinkedIn. I'm trying to branch out and scour other job boards. I look up organizations I'm interested in and see if they're hiring.

I need to think bigger. In all my desperation to get a job I haven't really thought big. What about going abroad? Medical concerns always dog me when I do, but it can't hurt to apply, right?

Most of my applications score a 1 or a 2 on both desire and chance.
I don't know what kinds of jobs I would like, and for the rare ones I might I usually don't meet the minimum requirements. I need to change this, because oodles of applications for jobs I'm uninterested in and unqualified for are not worth even close to a single solid application for a job I actually want. Problem is I don't know how.

I'm probably in this for the long haul.
I've been musing the idea of getting (another) part-time job. I could try to take on more at my tutoring company, but there's only so much work I can get, and it might do me some good to get out of the house and make some pocket change. On the flipside, I don't feel like I have that much free time to spare between lesson planning and job applications, and I'm worried working retail (even if for only a few hours a day/week) will sap away at my limited energy.

P.S. Random tip: I saw somewhere on the Internet to include '-delete' in the name of all files you don't intend to keep. I've been using it and it makes cleaning up unneeded files so much easier.

#english #life #wordvomit #work