Y O Y Do Birds Fly?

It Was 100 Degrees

2009-04-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to lie to you blog: I've been depressed. But I'm not really going to go into why, I'm just going to leave it at that as I really don't feel like whining right now about that in particular.

I do want to whine about the minimal amount I get paid for lots and lots of meaningless work that I really don't want to do anymore: I think I'm going to ditch one of my buyers. Specifically, the one who expects tons of articles a week for a buck a pop. One dollar per 450 words. Lame. It adds up, sure, but really I could get paid as much I do a week for less worth with other buyers out there.

It sucks, because she's very nice and understands when I have things going on in life so I'm not going to be right on time, but the amount I get per week isn't even enough to buy my weekly cigarettes with. And imagine if I still drank! The Vietnamese man would just tell me to put all my money towards booze. Though in reality, all I've made so far is going towards an awfully large bill I have to pay, so I haven't gotten to spend any of it on cigarettes anyway.

Here's a hub I wrote a few days ago on how my days generally go if I'm not depressed and playing Starcraft or sleeping my woes away.

Let's Burn!

2009-03-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

The title seems moderately enthusiastic, but really I'm not about anything right now. I'm overworked and stressed out.

I Can't Think

2009-03-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

After yesterday's push, I am feeling extremely drained. I couldn't bring myself to write all day besides type up an article I wrote for Emma last night, which sucks because I just want to get it done. I have about twenty things to finish, not counting the awesome but short deadline-d gig I just got which, if I play my cards right, could turn out to be very profitable, I believe.

I honestly couldn't bring myself to do anything today no matter how hard I tried. I suppose that's what happens when you push yourself too hard for too many days in a row. Back on the saddle tomorrow, tonight is FRENCH FRIES AND PIZZA NIGHT, by yours truly.

Delicious pizza.. mmm..

Smothered by A Wall of Text

2009-03-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

17 articles to do today. I'll have to do one every 30 minutes if I want to finish this today. So why am I making a blog entry? I just sort of feel like it.

Though in reality, I don't have much to say and I'm focused on the things I need to do. Maybe I should do this later, after this push.

No, I Didn't Abandon You.

2009-03-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

I am on a new road for this week! Also known as writing 28 articles on home loan modification and various aspects of the process, as opposed to last week where I was writing on tattoos and workers compensation insurance. How exciting.

Luckily enough there is so much information on this online that it is relatively easy, and I've finally got the laptop running dual monitor so I can just have my references and music player up on the laptop screen (as I do now) and my work up on the main monitor.

Technology sure is glorious. Who needs friends when I can have porn playing on two screens at once?

...

I kid, I kid. I'm not very good at multitasking, I can only have it playing on one.

I intend to test out running Starcraft later and see what it does, I haven't delved into multi-monitoring much in the past. I used to watch movies on one screen and play WoW on the other a few years ago, but I think the closest I'll get to that nowadays is Starcraft and Googledocs at once.

It's amazing what a six year old high end laptop can do.

I just wish my desktop were up, then I could triple monitor. Once I get out of my financial trouble I'm working through right now, that is my main priority. I miss my desktop so much it makes me want to cry sometimes, mostly when I try to watch a video or play a game and this thing lags.

Good thing all my cool files are on my external.

Guess Who's Tired?

2009-03-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy the past two days that I've barely had a chance to feed myself, and it's only going to get worse. What can I do, complain about it? I need the money, really, just it's much harder to do this not on my desktop, which is beyond repairing myself.

My sister's laptop has some sort of graphics card problem, I've discovered, that makes the computer run slowly when black is involved, so I had to switch it out for my old laptop, which is nowhere near as slow but has its fair share of problems and a blown graphics card.

At least it runs fast. Let the old debate I read on a forum from '06 be settled: Radeon Mobility 9600 is a better bet than Radeon Mobility Xpress 200, which is awful. They both are sub par, however.

I wish I could go into the bad spot I'm in here, but I get stressed out just thinking about it. Imagine that.

Well That's That.

2009-03-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

My computer seems to have kicked the bucket for the time being.

I reformatted and it worked all right for a few hours then conked out. It still comes on but it seems to have some sort of electrical problem that's causing problems with both USB hubs, the CD drive, and possibly the motherboard itself. I'm going to take it apart when I get the chance and see if anything is loose and to clean the internal of dust and the like.

It's rather disappointing because I really love my computer. As I see it, I won't need a new one for a long time, all I need to do is upgrade it myself, and I'd much rather stick with XP than any other Windows releases and Linux isn't compatible with enough games for me to consider using it as a main OS.

I'm working on the laptop I borrowed from my sister and am forcing myself to do an all-nighter since my new contractor decided to pile me with a ton of work to get done ASAP. I really just want to weep myself to sleep over the early (temporary) retirement of my desktop.

Hopefully (temporary).

This really couldn't be a worse time for my power house to die out, honestly. Though I did get the sound on this hunk of junk to work, I guess that's a plus.

What the Hell Do I Know About Worker's Comp? Srsly.

2009-03-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

So suddenly I have a lot of work to do, which is great. The problem with this is that one of the jobs is long article intensive for little pay and my trial article is to be on worker's compensation insurance coverage. I know absolutely nothing about this subject and Google is not being my best friend on this one, so I'm more than a little frustrated at the moment.

The (second) guy who wants me to do the WoW articles got in contact with me and gave me an example of what his other employee working on the project did, and I couldn't help but laugh. The other guy he has isn't a fluent English speaker and obvious has not played the game at all, so I am going to blow that even further out of the water than I thought.

Also helps that he has distinct things he wants the guides to written about and gave me a chart and I was like "Hell yeah!" This is gonna be cake, but not so much on this thing right now about workers compensation insurance coverage.

I think my employeer having me ghostwrite is a little too friendly, but he's a great guy. Pays nothing, but he's great to work with and likes me work so I will continue.

Oh yeah, my computer is fucked. I'm lucky it's even working right now, I hate working on my laptop.

Dry Spells Make Me Antsy

2009-03-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Essentially right now all I have that I can work on is the porn movie job, which pays hideously low. I mean, I could work on an article that I'm supposed to be ghostwriting but I'm not really feeling it right now and it's hard to really feel writing squatting on a crappy blue chair and typing on a wobbly keyboard.

I got into Bright Hub as a writer, and I'm not really sure how difficult that is, but I'm appreciative nonetheless. $10 per article on things that I actually like to write about isn't too shabby in my opinion.

I'm also mulling over a few short stories to submit to a few magazines and publishers that are calling for work.

I have to dish out a lot of money at the end of the month and I am worried like nothing else.

Also Starcraft until 4 or 6 in the morning on a daily basis is starting to give me recurring headaches.

Can she pull through!? Will this aspiring and bring young woman reach it to the lower middle level and pull in enough cash to make it through the month!? Stay tuned for out next episode's inevitable whining!

Funky Dealer

2009-03-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

Neglecting my body's need for sleep for the past two weeks has finally caught up to me today and I'm indescribably tired. That's not to say that I haven't slept at all, I've slept for 5 hour durations on various days at different times of the day and I guess after last night's fun my body decided that it wanted so much more sleep.

Two very awesome job-related things have happened:

I got that job for the dirty movies and writing descriptions about them. Pays awful but it's easy work. And hey, getting paid for watching fap material is never bad.
I have an interview with a guy to writing guides on World of Warcraft. This is especially great because it's well-paying and gives me an excuse to keep playing. Too bad the job supposedly only lasts two weeks. I'm hoping he will get in contact with me today.

I've also applied for a quick 2500 word gig that requires me to write ten 250 word articles on Starcraft 2 within the next two days. I jumped on that posting like a rabid dog, so hopefully I will be chosen for this relatively easy money that I know I'm a better pick for than anyone else on the site. If this comes through I'll be able to say that it does pay to play video games. But then again, the WoW gig, once/if he gets in contact with me, basically claims that as well.

Though I've spent more on games than I'm sure I will ever make on them.

I drank last night and have a headache that could knock out a large animal. Good thing I don't drink much anymore.

Korean pop? What am I, 15 again?

2009-03-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

I decided to download some albums by the K-pop group Shinhwa out of some sort of morbid curiosity about my adolescence. I'd bought an album of theirs for a friend when I was 15 and liked it quite a bit back then, but I can't seem to find the album online anywhere now. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, or maybe I'm getting senile in my old age, who can be sure?

I got another assignment yesterday, which is great. The guy who gave it to me is pretty chill and is very open about what he wants and expects, and luckily enough I seem to be providing that, so I'm pretty pleased.

I'm just disappointed I didn't get the gig I wanted, which was to watch dirty movie clips and write two sentence descriptions of them. That would have been the most awesome job ever. It would be like I was getting paid to do what I do on my free time anyway, with the added bonus of witty and explicit quips and money.

I am at ends with my significant other, mostly because he's an idiot and I am quite frankly not an idiot. I'm not all that sure what he expects from me but it seems to be for me to lose a ton of weight all at once, drop my gaming habit, grow eight arms to clean with, get the biggest ass the world has ever seen, speak Vietnamese, and learn the quality of getting high at every chance possible.

No thank you, I'm not going to change just because you want a normal girl with a vacuum mouth and octo-arms. I'm so close to being content while being a malcontent I can almost smell the peaches and cream.

Out of Cigs, Out of Love

2009-03-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

I don't like it when my pack of cigarettes, the only thing keeping me sane and headache free in this world, suddenly is empty simply because I've been smoking all day. I'd like to say this phenomenon is due to cigarette gnomes but I know the truth is that I've just been inhaling that delicious tar smoke at an alarming rate. 23 so far today.

I'm done with both of my assignments and I'm left with nothing to do but look for more work while searching out non-lucrative ways to waste my time until someone knocks on my email telling me to type up some more meaningless dribble. I can't wait.

It dawns on me that I am most certainly not going to have the money to pay all of my bills and debts in the coming days and I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a hit and cancel my car insurance because I simply have as much money as some kid in a third world country making shoes.

At least shoes are useful.

Maybe I'm bitter. Life has dealt me the most depressing and enraging hand it possibly could in the past year and a half and it seems there is no way for me to jump over the table and knock out the card dealer, no matter how hard I try. Just let me get three of a kind and stop sneaking jokers into the deck, damnit, I'm only human.

Really I would get a real job if I could, but apparently in the United States today there is some sort of recession and companies just don't want to hire somebody who has a big red X on their work record saying they stole a lot of money, which that somebody did not do. That somebody isn't stupid enough to take money blatantly in front of a camera and expect to get away scotch-free.

Who cares, real jobs are for chumps anyway. I wouldn't have gone to college for two years then foolishly moved in with a man that I was in love with, only to have him decide two years later that having a fiancee just wasn't for him and to toss me to the dogs. I would have just gone about my spectacularly mundane life if not for that whole enraging and embarrassing fiasco. (LOOKING BACK, THIS PARAGRAPH MAKES NO SENSE AND WOULDN'T EVEN IF IT WERE ALL IN CAPS LIKE THIS.)

I think I'm just bitter tonight because the reality of my financial situation is finally sinking in and there's nothing I can really do about it. Then again, it might just be because I'm all out of cigarettes and I want some dinner.

Don't Stop Believin'!

2009-03-05T07:20:00.000-08:00

So I finished the easier of my two assignments, and I need to retype up more words than days my mother has been alive to day to complete the more daunting and irritating assignment that I got lucky enough to get an extension on.

If there is one thing to be learned from this whole experience, it's to not cut myself short deadline-wise and to price my work to match up with the effort I actually have to put forth. I don't like to put forth effort for less money than its worth and while I'd like to price my time at $1 million an hour I know that no one would pay for that from anyone, much less a slacker like me.

I smoked around 37 cigarettes yesterday and I feel like a bad person to be putting my body through that type of trauma. My bad. On top of that I was actually so wiped out last night that I couldn't stay up like I wanted to in order to just finish this crap and move on, so now I have for force myself to work like a monkey on a keyboard hopped up on speed.

Not that I'm hopped up on speed, that's just what it's going to be like once I finish typing this and smoking this cigarette.

I should just rename this blog to "Ashley Plays With Long Sentences" because that's basically what I'm doing as a form of self-glorifying procrastination tool.

When I'm done with this whole runaround I need to do today I'm going to write a series of articles on Starcraft that I feel will be or have all of the following:

Completely awesome
Ignorant
Full of screenshots of me doing asshole tactics in noob fashion
Me telling the reader why everything they know about the game is wrong

I'm not actually that much of a noob, I've been playing for long enough to know my way in and out of the game, but there are simply some things I just do not utilize or care about because I want to play my way and my way has gotten me quite a few victories.

Well whatever, this smoke is over and so is this blog post.

Seriously, why?

2009-03-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

I pushed for another all-nighter last night to complete the 100 small articles. At 12pm I had 96 completed, over 11,000 words and more characters in the whole document than I, or my word processor, could count. At absurd situation number 96, my word processor decided that it was time to die and coughed up its organs in error form all over my desktop.

This assignment almost seems like it doesn't like me, and I know for sure that I don't like it.

On the flip-side, I'm so good at the game Starcraft that I have been called a cheater. Let it be known that this is not true.

I have been given the gift of sight, site!

2009-03-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

I passed out in the upstairs bedroom not long after making the last post and dreamt that I had a brand new pair of glasses and the world was new and full of sharp edges again. I woke up in quite the opposite situation.

After toiling away two hours I decided it was time to find my glasses and we took a stick and a rake and started shuffling the snow around in the vicinity we figured they'd be and 45 minutes later I am sitting here with my less-than-perfect-but-at-least-I-can-read vision again.

I am now filled with confidence that I can meet my deadlines, even if my specs are now an amputee and missing an arm. I'm foolishing playing with the idea of drinking a lot of coffee again to pump it up, though I feel that if I do that I may have some sort of overload and go into cardiac arrest. Nothing like fear to motivate the lazy, though, right?

Why Oh Why

2009-03-01T21:35:00.000-08:00

Let me start this off by saying two things:

My glasses are MIA.
I've only had 5 hours of sleep in the past 40 hours.

This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have so much to do, but unfortunately I have 6 more short stories to write, 16 short articles I need to type back up thanks to a power loss, and 75 more short articles I need to pump out in a very short period of time -- all for a rather small amount of money that I desperately need due to personal circumstances.

I had to change my screen resolution to 800x600 and I still couldn't see anything so the monitor is now literally 4 inches away from my squinty eyes and scowling face, and I'm sure it's not having any more fun that I am having to deal with words, paragraphs, and sites that were complete and happy not even 6 hours ago.

Everything has been working against my completion of my projects today, from my body resisting sleep thanks to too much caffeine, through a sudden an unexpected snow storm, and to my subsequent loss of my vision correctional lenses, which I need to do something as simple as getting a glass of water. I would just lie in bed and wish it all away if I were not absolutely dependent on finishing my work, which my significant other seems to be bent on keeping me from completing because he will not leave me alone.

Two good things came of today:

I got to watch a live competitive match of my favorite online game at 5 in the morning while I tried to fight off the shakes.
The largest amount of snow to hit Virginia in a few years has come down and I got the privilege of getting to lie down in it and stare into the gray sky.

I could go into an entire monologue on both subjects but I'll try to resist the temptation and just tell you that if it were not for those two events, I would have sworn off life altogether today and jumped in front of a passing truck.

I realize that most of these are rather long sentences, especially the one above, but I can't help reading them back to myself in a silly British accent and feeling like a real professional despite not being a professional at anything besides being a jerk. Here's a picture of the whiny and irritating Vietnamese man I live with.