New things, new gigs... and school's out!

 What a month.

New job- not a restaurant, at least not yet. I reloaded my first aid certs and got picked up as a lifeguard at the city pool, so that's a good bit of usefulness (and I didn't have to pay for the certifications, so double bonus). More work to come, I'm sure, but for now that stops the bleeding of my savings.

Catering has gone quite well too. After the last big one (which was apparently an offsite meetup for a bunch of Vtubers in the area for a convention) I'm hip deep in preparing for another big event in a couple of weeks. Summertime can mean a lot of outdoor events (Lots of summer birthday parties too! Hard to celebrate on a school night.), and not everyone wants to run a grill all afternoon or make the common backyard barbecue sides. A knack for the classics can potentially carry one quite a ways as long as they taste sufficiently better than the ones at the supermarket.

Short update- been busy!

Short version: Multiple interviews over the last week or so, things look good. I may have found a suitable position offered by staff that actually recognize what makes a perfect candidate. Shock!

Also booked a catering job near the end of the month, so that's been rather occupying as well. I realized that I hadn't updated my catering menu offerings (Or prices! Yikes!) since before the plague, so that's taken a fair bit of research and effort as well. I may do a writeup on that this week if I can squeeze it in.

Why You Must Lead With "Yes"

"No." is one of the most aggressively abused words and concepts in any language.

Refusing something is a nebulously acceptable notion, but it's one that has requirements.

"Yes" is the only acceptable default. "No" requires valid justification. You can't say no to something just because you want to, nor can you say it because your beliefs don't align with something provable.

It's tiring to see the meteoric rise in preventable disease because "people" who are uppity about vaccines think they deserve the luxury of refusing them. I have to qualify the word usage simply because that designation is, to my mind, forfeit. Upon making the choice to actively sabotage a cooperative sociocultural environment and endanger the lives of their betters, they're worse than people, even than animals.

"Oh, this prevents the spread of a disease? No, I don't care about that." Well, off to the proverbial leper colony with you. No access to any public services ever again, because you've proven that you'd poison the well if you wanted to badly enough.

Shunning the willfully ignorant, the contrarian, the reckless, the ego-driven... it's all simply good practice. Lots of actual people with knowledge, experience, and skill do incredible amounts of actual research, experimentation, and verification to make the lives of others visibly better. 

Not every person can follow the minutiae behind most of it, and that's okay- that's why expertise as a concept exists. But thinking it's acceptable to dismiss those experts' efforts due to an inability to understand them?

No, that's definitely not. The aggressively politically motivated countercultural movement towards blatant distrust of the scientific method and disregard of validated expertise in the name of profiteering and personal preference is easily the greatest danger the U.S. (are they really though?) has faced in at least the last hundred years.

And it's spreading.

Brief Update on Myself

 

    My struggle to find a suitable, steady job throughout the course of the pandemic has been exhausting. If it's not being led on and then ghosted by headhunters, restaurants, or facilities, it's finding out the potential operations are some mix of unsafe, unethical, or simply unwilling to pay. 

    Jobhunting is never pleasant- I've sent out more variations on my resume than I can recall, and cover letters are a special sort of poisonous I thoroughly despise. The notion of 'selling oneself' has ever been an issue for me. Preferring to let my expertise and understanding speak for themselves is difficult when the loudest voices are most often those that need never be heard. Such methods are thoroughly foreign to me.

    Those cultural difficulties lie atop many physical and environmental ones. In early 2020, my car was stolen, and never recovered. A few months later, I was attacked by an escaped neighborhood dog and was injured. Though not life-threatening, I was bedridden for several weeks, and now have a visible dent of missing muscle in my right shin. While still healing, I had to pack up and move to a new city. Imagine carrying boxes hopping on one leg, bleeding down the other. A lot. So all of that, plus my many duties handling shopping, cooking, some cleaning, and miscellaneous management duties for the household I had to move into, and you have quite the robust mess. 

    But as of today, the lion's share of change has come. I found a new place to live, and am nearing the end of the moving process. It's so quiet. So peaceful. So still. There's still hauling to be done and plenty of outfitting yet to do of course, but everything that required a moving truck is here. That day's titanic effort reminded me how aggressively out of condition I am. This past year has been riddled with stress-induced starvation, to the point where I'm down about ten kilos of muscle mass. For someone my size, that leaves me a bit skeletal. But now I can eat, exercise, and exist in some manner of calm, in a way I have not known for far too many years.

    The hunt for work now starts up more aggressively, as does proper eating and physical training. I need all that muscle back, and more besides- my industries are not kind to those possessed of poor fitness. While I hunt for work, I'll have time to start streaming again, and hopefully in the doing endear myself to the new neighbors/neighborhood.