Tag Archives for self-employment

Know someone who wants my day job?

Happy 2014!

Well, since I last posted (literally a few days after my last post), I got engaged to an incredible guy from back home — the Chicago area, specifically northwest Indiana, one town over from where I grew up. This is someone I have known (and been various degrees of madly in love with) for almost 20 years, which is actually a fantastic story for which this is not altogether the place. :-)

The point is, in early April I’ll be moving back to the Chicago area into his house there. This means that my current employer needs to replace me and is trying to find a moderately experienced Webmaster/Social Media Associate to start in March.

Anyone in the NYC area interested in a full-time position that combines technical skills (HTML), graphic design chops (Adobe Creative Suite), and general social media savvy, please check out the following listings and apply as directed:

http://www.ramaz.org/public/jobs.cfm#webmaster
https://jewishjobs.com/jobs/view/27019

(Some knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish culture is EXTREMELY helpful, but not strictly required.)

Feel free to share this with any likely candidates of your acquaintance!

As for myself, I expect to be looking for a graphics-related job in the NWI region, as well as bumping up my freelance work and joining the family consulting business. But not until April (or possibly July). In the meantime, I will have a few, er, wedding-related design posts to make, so stay tuned. (Space ketubahs!)

On burnout

Some friends of Tiger Boy’s have a regular games night. I went with him one night several weeks ago, and what we played when I got there was Frank’s Zoo.

I’d never heard of it. “It’s fun,” they said. “It’s a trick-taking game.” Crap, I thought. Well, I ought to at least be a good sport and try it.

What I knew from before was that I cannot play trick-taking games. Not just “suck at,” although I do, but literally “cannot play” — because they stress me out enough that it simply is no longer playing.

What was interesting to notice on this particular occasion was that it stressed me out in essentially the same ways that my job had been stressing me out. Strategizing. Prioritizing. Being supposed to keep track of a dozen factors, their relative weights, and — oh yeah — when not to play the thing that looks obvious because it might be better used down the road, if I could think far enough ahead (and understand enough of the relevant factors) to predict what that would be. Or then again, not. Duh.

Add this to the cold I was acutely fighting off, and the general run-down exhausted feeling I’d had for a couple of weeks, and… it really pushed my buttons. It was totally fascinating to observe (in a third-party kind of way) myself approaching the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had to get up from the table for a few minutes to escape to the bathroom and try to collect myself.

I just now took the “Are You Burned Out?” quiz du jour, putting in the answers from the past several weeks, and I got 68%. “You are very burned out. You need a huge break from your responsibilities, starting as soon as possible. And you need this time to reevaluate what you really want out of your life. Because you’re working hard and going no where… and that would burn anyone out!”

Luckily, I figured that out in the interim — and have taken the appropriate steps.

Yesterday was my first official day of full-time self-employment. Today, I had a massage in the morning (yay!) and a really energizing screening interview with PSG in the afternoon.

Tonight, there’s another games night.
I think I’m ready. :-D