Some updates about my whereabouts

I started a new job this week at the company that makes Flash. Yes, I am back for the third time. This time it’s a three-month contract until the end of April.

As soon as I locked this in, I booked some trips. I am going to Olympia, Washington from Feb. 12 to 15. It’s a long weekend because that Monday is President’s Day. I am visiting Kean and his mom. Kean is helping her move to Olympia and is staying there for the rest of the month. I miss him.

I also booked a trip to Germany for two weeks in May. I am going alone this time and am very excited about spending quality time with family and friends.

The perfect new job

I have been talking to a technology giant for a few months. After a couple of interviews, a language test and lots of phone calls, I am now finally their new part-time back-up German linguist. They already have one full-time German linguist on site in San Jose, but I get to work part-time and remotely. Once in a while I will have to go to San Jose to do work there, which I have already done twice, and both times it was a nice little mini road trip adventure.

Each week they would like to know what my availability is. Based on my availability, they will then assign overflow projects to me which the full-time German linguist doesn’t have enough time for. She is pretty swamped right now, so I can pretty much work as much or as little as I want. The projects are translation projects that need to be reviewed. They are mostly technical documents that have been translated by a translation company. My job is to review the translation and point out any typos, grammatical errors, mistranslations and deviations from the company’s linguistic style. I get to work from the comfort of my own home or my favorite coffee shop.

This is such a perfect arrangement, I can barely believe it’s true. But I believe it.

Reverse naked dreams

I recently started working as a figure model for art classes. The work is very sporadic, and I enjoy it because it’s physical and doesn’t involve staring at a screen.

When I model for drawing classes, I usually do a variety of one minute, five minute, ten minute and twenty minute poses. For painting classes, it’s usually a series of twenty minute sessions all in the same pose with breaks inbetween. For example, last Friday I did a six hour class in the same pose – twelve twenty minute sessions with breaks inbetween them.

During the lunch break, I put all of my clothes back on and went out to get something to eat. When I was undressing and getting ready to pose again, I thought about how embarrassing it would be if I forgot to take off, say, my bra and posed with my bra still on instead of fully nude.

And last night I actually had a dream about that. I dreamt that I was in a dressing room and was expected to come out and do some kind of naked performance. But when I came out, I still had my underwear on. So I had to rush back into the dressing room, tear off my underwear and then rush out again to do my performance. It was mortifying.

My first radio appearance

I was asked to channel Audrey Hepburn and other famous movie stars for last night’s episode of the college radio show Silver Screen Talk. You can listen to the entire episode online. I am on during the last fifteen minutes. Thank you, Robert and Dayna!

An important decision

As I had mentioned before, cab driving has been very miserable for me since the beginning of the year. Business has been slow, and that means that not only have I been making only an average of about $7 an hour, if that, but I have also been fucking bored out of my mind. I have been feeling so bored and miserable that even when I did have passengers, I haven’t felt like talking to them. I have been a total grump. This, of course, only made the situation worse because passenger interaction has been what has made cab driving joyful and interesting. I could tell that I was really falling into an abyss of negativity when I noticed the hatred I was feeling for other cab drivers. Every time I pulled up to an area where other cab drivers were around, such as a hotel or the airport, I immediately started scowling and thinking things like “What are you looking at?” or “Don’t even think about talking to me.” What I really wanted was to talk to my passengers and to smile at other cab drivers, but I just couldn’t bring myself to snap out of the hole. All of last weekend I dreaded the thought of Monday because Monday was when I was going to drive a cab again. This had never happened before.

On Monday during my shift I called my aunt to wish her a belated happy birthday. I told her how much I hated driving a cab right now. She asked me “Why do you keep doing it?” So I listed the reasons I had been telling myself and others for the last few months. And she popped the bubbles of reason one by one.

I said that I wanted to publish my taxi stories and that I didn’t think a publisher would take me on if I wasn’t actually a cab driver anymore.

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Plus, I’m still on the Board at Green Cab. I just don’t feel I can leave right now.”

“You can stay on the Board. You can even still fill in as a driver once in a while. Just don’t have any scheduled shifts for now.”

“But this is the only regular source of income I have.”

“What income? You are wasting your time sitting on your ass for ten hours.”

“It’s true. I could be making the same daily income with just one counseling session.”

Suddenly things were crystal clear to me: It was time to take a break from my two scheduled shifts a week. After saying good-bye to my aunt, I immediately called the manager and told him that I wanted to be on-call for a while. I felt so happy and relieved about the decision that for the rest of my shift, I chatted with all of my passengers and smiled at other cab drivers.

In the future I will know that when I find myself falling into animosity, it is time to get out.