Tag Archives: Unemployment

The freelance life

Fortune cookie

Week one of unemployment. Or, depending on your point of view, week one of free-lancing. I’m a little confused on the point. In theory, I ought to be throwing myself into my job hunt right now. But (although I’ve cast a few lines into the water), I’ve been too busy… working.

The Norwegian media company I translate for (may they prosper like the North Sea oil fields) sent me a fairly hefty chunk of prose to process – another densely worded script outline. And the deadline was tomorrow, which it almost is now in their time zone. So I jumped on it and turned it in a couple hours ago. Since this will eke out my finances, however briefly, I think it merits priority over mailing resumes.

The idea of just being a freelancer is extremely beguiling. But I need more income sources than this one company. So I guess I’ll be fishing for freelance gigs at the same time I’m looking for a regular job. Sometimes I think the freelance dream is a worthy goal. Sometimes I think it’s moonshine – get a real job. After all, unemployment is way down. Unfortunately, the market for librarians is saturated, and there’s never been a big market for writers.

But we’ll see. I haven’t even gotten my bearings yet.

When I ate at a Chinese restaurant tonight, my fortune cookie said, “You will be wildly successful in the entertainment field.”

I think the Almighty’s just messing with me.

A man of leisure

I’m taking a week off from work. Having lost my job, effective the end of the month, I have vacation time left I’ll never use. So I’m using some. This is also the week of the Sons of Norway convention, here in town (starts tomorrow). Although I’m president of my lodge, I successfully avoided becoming a delegate. I did agree, however, to help in greeting people (who wouldn’t want to be greeted by an avoidant curmudgeon?), and to make some chocolate chip cookies for the hospitality suite.

Yesterday I made the cookies. I’m pretty good at this; used to make them all the time. But it’s been a while now. I forgot one basic element of the procedure – you mix up the wet stuff in the big bowl, and then stir in the dry stuff from the smaller bowl. I got that backwards, with the result that I poured the wet stuff into the flour mixture and had to mix that up. It came out OK, but I judge these cookies a tad mealy.

But hey, I’m giving them away for free. And Norwegians are too polite to complain.

Also, I got a little boost yesterday. Heard from the movie translation company in Norway after months of radio silence. They threw me enough work to fill up the rest of the day.

Occasional freelance translation jobs won’t replace my library position. But it was an encouragement, and the timing couldn’t have been better, from the morale point of view.