I've taken a second job transcribing interviews for a TV show. I am working at being speedy so that the pay isn't so bad. Note: it takes a god-awful long time to transcribe things, much longer than you anticipate. $30 per half hour transcribed sounds pretty good until you realise that that's TOPS $20/hour. That's if you're lucky (lots of stumbling sentences where you don't have to transcribe all the mistakes) and super speedy. We'll see how long I decide to keep this up. My first transcribed half hour of tape took me 2.5 hours. Boo-urns. But I am getting speedier, as I shed my linguistic transcription past and stop caring about accuracy and start transcribing what people MEANT to say, instead of what they really said.

i.e. Well, the thing that I- what I meant to say was, was that I really, well, I like you. = Well the thing I meant to say was that I really like you.

I'm sitting alone on a Friday night drinking foreign alcohol. There are two kitties here with me, kitties who greeted me this morning by batting around a cellphone, a cellphone which was loose on the floor only because they had CHOMPED the cord connecting it to the charger into THREE PIECES. They're lucky there isn't much of a charge on that cord. Them kitties don't know that electricity plays ROUGH.

I'm making friends with a coworker. We are bonding over agnosticism and our shared indigation with Dictator Bush (THE SELF-PROCLAIMED DECIDER). He who reunites church and state, he who talks about people using religion to start wars without any sense of irony, he who uses an awfully redneck accent for someone who grew up the son of an oil baron and went to Yale.

So, I still want to write a book. But the things is, I don't think that writing books is any way to make money. So I still have to think about what I want to do for a job. If I became a receptionist or something, I would have plenty of free time to think about book things. If I became an editor, it would be more challenging but wouldn't necessarily leave time for thinking about books.

I was talking to Cat today at lunch about how we're brilliant girls, so we should have Career Goals. But we don't. We just like school and ideas and reading interesting papers. And sometimes we shy away from PhDs because we find the idea of such isolation daunting. But we are smart! So we feel a responsibility to go forth and do something amazing, until we realise that we have no idea what the hell to do with our lives. Can't we stay in school where people tell us we're great all the time? No? Well, shit.