my goodness!!! got myself all stressed out over a late start today. that's one of the big ones: preempting stress never does any good! whatever happens, isn't it better to leave that for when it comes?
because yeah, i slept in a little, but tonight really wasn't stressful at all! i mean, i still have pb work, but i'm done with the shop way earlier than i was anticipating, and that's about it. weee.... planning on sending thru chapter 7 to the server sometime this week. the vriar interactions are so so so fun to write every time and i really do adore them so much wah!!
i'm feeling so much better after getting that movement put together, too. it really feels right to be doing that. like, i always get a little tense when i have to be watching my dad over his shoulder--and i'm going to be doing that for a long time, because that's just what an apprenticeship is!--but when i get to come home and go to the shop by myself and listen to music while working out whatever little issues a movement has, i just get this feeling, like, "this is what i'm supposed to be doing." i can't help thinking about the stories my mom tells about my grandpa, coming home from work and doing the exact same thing. it's a really reassuring reminder that this isn't some abstract thing i'm working towards. it's exactly where i should be.
and it's profitable! we've already made a hundred off the first clock we delivered this month, and we should get 75 for this cleaning, plus--well, something like three hundred for the clocks we got from bruce, but i'm charging her fifty percent for the time being. i've got another stranger who will probably be bringing a clock by sometime this week, and that's almost certainly another hundred by the end of the month. when i did the math about reducing my hours, that's about how much i was going to be losing to the arrangement: three or four hundred dollars a month. given the fact that we're just getting started, i feel really good about that.
i decided not to ask for the reduction, though. we had a big meeting today about how we're basically going to be understaffed the entire year, so, yeah, i figured it's Not The Time. it's a little frustrating, just because it seems like everywhere i work is always experiencing some major world shattering event that means everyone who works there suddenly has to work harder all the time. like, are things ever normal anywhere?
but they're still way better to me than they ought to be, and today was a really good day! even though i yelled at tyler a little bit--that was actually a good thing in its own way, too. we had a mixup with information Again on our first pickup and when we got back i said, "this shouldn't be happening as often as it does," and tyler said, "well, mistakes happen," and i said, "yeah, but not every single day." and of course he just like, Whatever'd his way out of there. so you can imagine the vindication i felt when we had a SECOND pickup where the information was just completely incorrect that afternoon. i didn't even need to say anything. Well, Mistakes Happen!
i really don't hate my job at all--there aren't many bad things about it, other than being understaffed, and that's no one's fault. i just don't like how much i work, and anyway, it's not what i wanna do for the rest of my life. in his newest podcast episode, caleb hearon talks about how he job-hopped pretty badly when he was living in chicago in his twenties, because he was still on his mom's insurance--like, that's the time to be job-hopping!
it was a pretty nice reminder, because whenever i talk about this to someone, they say something about how lucky i am to work where i do with the people i do when they're so incredibly understanding, et cetera, and how i shouldn't give up a nice and stable thing for no reason, et cetera, but like,,,, man, there's no better time to do it than Now, when the stakes could not be lower. eizouken "we've got youth on our side" moment. and also, you just shouldn't let losing a nice thing stop you from trying to get a great thing. duh!
but anyway, i still plan on volunteering there when i quit. realistically, i'm going to spend a few months not working a "real job" and then end up finding somewhere i can pick up a few shifts on weekends--but i'm wholly confident that i can get to a point where i only need to supplement clock income with like, ten or fifteen hours a week, and what a dream that'll be! anyway...i guess this is just me fantasizing about being unemployed for several hundred words. what i need to do now is Shower and Eat and Pactbound. drafting tonight ...!