essay

Writing Prompt: “What’s Your Dream Job?”

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What’s your dream job?

I don’t dream of jobs. That being said, I do dream of positions in terms of direction and how I contribute to society. I’ve always felt fulfilled in roles that allow me to solve problems and be helpful. I seek those kind of jobs that have enough structure and clear systems to make sense, but offer room for creative thinking. I need the job that allows me space and refills my cup so that I can create on my own terms outside of work.

I dream of jobs that do not take without giving, and that can stop at the end of the workday. I like to work hard but I want energy to still play hard at the end of the day, so that I have a life outside of the hours I’ve sold to my employer. I had dreams when I was younger to work under my own terms, write and paint at home, with only my adventures to new places while traveling to drag me away from the artist’s single-minded devotion to craft.

As an adult, I definitely need stability for contribution outside my own worlds, many of which were born out of trauma and bad events. I get mental sunshine with every problem I solve, or the person I help. I craft moon shine (or moonshine) out of my thoughts put to paper or canvas. There has to be balance. I don’t think I’d be satisfied with a full-time writer or artist position, however, there’s a part of me that still would like the chance to try. I think I would need to know that what I was doing offered something essential for society. I’d be volunteering more if I felt that wasn’t the case.

The day job that funds my life and my creative investments without taking everything else is the dream job these days. Retirement one day might be nice, but I know that’s asking for a lot. I dream of not dying at work, for an employer, who gives perhaps two shits about me, and that’s only if they’re a halfway decent company. I dream of not leaving with regrets. But I am no longer in my twenties, even if I can’t quantify the two decades that passed between 21 and 41. Wisdom I can pass on, however, is that we work to live; we do not live to work. Don’t lose sight of that, even if the years fly by faster than you’re anticipating.

Arthritis

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Not entirely unexpected, but developing arthritis in a joint in my left hand has forced me to slow down a bit sooner than I expected with my usual tasks. I work on computers, I create on computers. I’m learning the art of slower, more gentle, typing (and gaming!) while finding new ways to function / interact.

I’m still pressing on with planning for my yearly novel project in November, although I am looking into different methods for writing while dealing with this. I may get back to some writing by hand and have it transcribed to limit the intense hours of typing after full days of typing with the day job. While braces for the joint in question help, they can’t stop what’s already happened.

For me, this all sounds less like a setback and more novel approach this way, at least to my finicky brain. If anyone has recommendations for speech-to-type software, I’m all ears and grateful for the recommendations.

Leadership Goals

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I obviously don’t know what company Tim Bray is going to go to next, but I think I might like to work there and learn from him. At the very least, I think I might try my best to support them if he’s got any leeway with the company’s operations given his own ethics. Moral ethics in business are, I promise you, supposed to be the norm and not the exception.

Even so, I greatly appreciate that he referred to evil (perhaps idiocy is more likely but… it still sounds pretty evil to just fire protesting workers at this time) from Amazon’s upper leadership during this pandemic as ‘chickenshit.’ He used other, more eloquent, phrases, but honestly – they don’t deserve them. These horrible individuals deserve to be shrunk down as small as possible in the public eye. Why should we ever reward these people with our money? We might not be able to do much for controlling our taxes going toward these bloated and greedy MNCs but we definitely can vote with where we spend our own money and time.

2020 has brought with it some awful events, but we can start to move toward more mindfulness and purpose with our next steps. That’s where I find myself, at least. I don’t have answers yet, but I’m learning to be at peace with taking each day as a new experience. I hope you’re all being as safe as you can and enjoying each breath with some measure of ease. If not, I hope you’re at least being able to be gentle with yourself when the fear or the isolation is too much.

Eight Months Later

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I realize I’ve not been the best with keeping up with this blog after I started it to be a writing portfolio (of sorts). I’m still not sure where I’m going with Dead Cat Bounce ultimately, but here’s the run down of how the bulk of my first year in Seattle has gone:

I had three weeks of panic upon my first arrival here, because my spouse had lost the job that had gotten us through the move and into an apartment on my first day in the city. I took the first job that I was offered, grateful, albeit a little daunted, but it turned out to be the best decision I’ve made in a long time. I was promoted to an assistant manager position after six months.

My mental and physical health had taken a dive back in Kansas and it had worsened since I wound up in a position of shouldering the bulk of the household expenses in a city notorious for its high cost of living. Enter company health insurance and actually taking care of my own health for the first time in probably twenty years. For the first time in a long time, I’m living with a thought on the future, instead of bare-bones survival running on nothing but adrenaline, caffeine, top-notch fiction, and cheap whiskey. At the end of this journey, I hope to ease the nightmares and start to appreciate myself as a person, as well as hopefully survive my next decade without wearing down my organs anymore than is necessary.

In short, I stopped writing and creating for a while. I no longer had a taste for it, so this is a move back toward making art (or something in that general direction) and growing as a person. I’m not sticking to a regular writing schedule yet, but it is happening again. I’ve been working on my programming skills and I have a game concept that I’ve been poking at when inspiration strikes. Baby steps, as they say.

At this point, I can’t honestly promise I’ll keep up with the site like I originally intended, or that it won’t take on a new direction in the future, but thanks for popping in on occasion to read! I hope to have more to share in the coming weeks. Let me know in the comments if you have any places in Seattle you want me to review, photograph, and/or mention. Or anything that strikes your mind on what you’d like see next on readcatbounce.

Some Like It Hot

/ francesmihulec

A Seattle summer may not hold a light to the humid, triple-digit, nightmare that was Kansas but for a city that doesn’t have air conditioning as a norm, it’s been too hot the past few days for this cat.

Our lovely high-speed fan died last night – a casualty to several years of heavy usage – so it was a sweaty evening filled with strange dreams and a yearning for ice cream around my humble abode. At least the sun doesn’t burn as cruelly here. I can tolerate a hot day here and I have endured worse. Make no mistake – I am much happier to be here in summer instead.

Perhaps some really do like it hot, but I reserve that feeling for spicy food rather than the daily temps. I intend to burn my tongue to cool my skin as I used to as a kid, growing up first just shy of southern Appalachia and then in the Midwest – both of which offered oppressive weather and rhetoric thinly veiled in hospitality and friendliness that occasionally slashed like a dual-edged paper blade.

I find the genuine attitudes refreshing, perhaps enough to blot out any unexpected discomfort here. Even so, I find myself clinging to old traditions and expectations even if I choose to employ them in new ways.

I’m hardly going to be managing a spicy seafood boil on the apartment complex’s rooftop for hours drinking cheap beer and shooting the shit with folks until night fall when everyone shows up to eat. But there are always better options – at least better suited for this city and my current circumstances.

Speaking in Tones

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A coworker called me over today to give my two-cents on the intended tone of an e-mail. For a good three minutes, we pored over syntax, punctuation, and the possible formality present in a two-sentence missive. Our goal? To determine the intended tone. Was it a friendly explanation? Was it a passive-aggressive slight to belittle the initial question? In the end, we decided to go with past knowledge of the person in question and chose the kinder meaning.

I have been communicating online for more years than maybe I would like to admit. Elder millennial here, ha! (Thanks to Iliza Shlesinger for that wonderfully coined phrase, by the way). This challenge of eliminating ambiguity is so pervasive to writing of any kind online because the language you choose has to somehow circumvent a myriad of communication barriers outside of what you might normally consider. Because we cannot hear spoken tone in this scenario, we are left to imagine what the author intended.

Emojis or emoticons exist in casual texting and messaging for a reason, folks. 🙂 A straightforward sentence might otherwise come across as too harsh without that smiley. They’ve expanded to include GIFs to more strongly encode a visual explanation for the words we choose. Memes have become essential in bolstering all kinds of messages from marketing to improving relationships. Those still may not create the correct impression in a professional communique, however.

As I said before, I have been on the internet for some time, and I consider tone to be my strongest focus in professional writing. No one wants to be seen as unlikable or unfriendly because it truly makes the rest of your message fall to the wayside. Body language and inflection, which are often more important than words in communication, cannot be seen and our minds try to fill in those gaps, looking for any missing meaning. In the end, a seemingly short-and-sweet email could spark off some serious social problems.

Psychology Today tackled this subject back in 2013 and I still find their articles to offer good advice and tips on how to improve your online relationship management. (That’s really what you’re doing when you send an email, text, or instant message.) Getting a second pair of eyes on a piece of writing is probably something everyone should do. No matter how skilled the writer’s editing chops might be, we’re all fallible and subject to brains that often act like Photoshop filters when it comes to our own errors.

I have a few guidelines I stick to with most of my correspondence that aren’t exactly included and stem from my experiences working with individuals who do not speak English as their first language. My particular dialect of American English – yes, we all have dialects and accents – is also wholly foreign to a great number of people in the world. Being kind as well as effective in communication demands that we understand our experiences are not indicative of anyone else’s life. To that end:

  1. Know Your Audience. While this is a good marketing mantra, it is not applicable only for marketing. Much like when you’re trying to be a good listener, you have to step away from how you would normally say something and consider how another person is going to read it.
  2. Remove Ambiguity Whenever Possible. A clear, neutral, statement is going to get a message across so much more effectively than something complicated or that could be interpreted in another way.
  3. Cut Colloquialisms. This essay is peppered with such sayings as part of my point. My intention is a relaxed conversation that would work well with most native American English speakers. Confusion with a different audience might cause the entire message to be lost.
  4. Online Correspondence is not Simple. It all serves a purpose, the main one being speed. The consequences of a bad message sent in haste can cause more trouble than tackling the conversation in person or over-the-phone where the message is far less likely to be misconstrued. TL;DR: Fast, yes. Simple, no. Take your time and be thoughtful.

I consider online writing in all its form to require more from my skill set than those literary analysis papers that I definitely did not write the night before during my undergraduate years. Written tone should be a primary focus for anyone, because we are all communicating electronically these days. It is definitely top of my list.