I'm not sure I buy this. I think you may be making some excuses for yourself here. It sounds like you've got a good thing going on with this translation and that you enjoy it - how much are you making for that? Are the jobs you're applying to involved in that? Are you making any money off the translations?
You've published a book! That's great. How many of the jobs you're implying to are based around that? If you've published a book, you look a lot more attractive than most of the other candidates after all. Are you making money off the book? How important is it you need a job right now?
You say that you want to spend more time learning how to program - how are you doing that? Are you contributing to an open source project on github yet? If not, why not - you don't need a whole lot of skill to get started, and you only need a few months of experience to get a decent job with a good starting pay, and the best way to learn is to do, as I'm sure you're aware.
How much money do you actually need? Because if you're good for the time being, instead of worrying about getting a crappy job or not getting good jobs, you're best bet is to simply start working (which you seem to be doing!) and turn that into your job, one way or another.
1. I'm not making anything right now. I get 20% of all profits, but that's not transmitted to me regularly, and we don't get much in the way of profits because we're two mathematicians who self-published a book of Russian poetry translations from a woman who is
famously impossible to work with. Basically, the market is extremely narrow, we have no idea what we're doing, and this could be quite large or very small. We're working on it. People
are buying the book, though. We also got published in
Notices of the AMS and had a notice in the ArXiV, which is not where we'd need to be in order to be Successful, but is a hell of a lot better than most people do. And kind of classy, because the first one is the US's biggest math journal, and the second is a repository of physics papers.
I am applying to one job which involves machine translation so far, and until recently I was looking into freelancing, until I found out that the market was ridiculously, painfully bad. Also looked into a job doing specialist mathematical typesetting for a journal, and so on and so forth. So I'm reconfiguring.
2. I need a job because my father needs to retire, and he won't retire until I have some sort of stable source of income that isn't a minimum wage service job.
3. Github is a good idea. I will try that--I was mostly lacking in projects I wanted to do with the skills that I actually have, and github looks like a great place to work on that.
4. The problem is that I really need a track record of employment, because I don't have one (because Reasons, but whatever). I have great credentials, but I don't have work experience. You know, just in case the dreams don't work out.
So much of this is... I thought I went crazy because of abuse, but I realized recently that I was abused by three separate people and, though I had responses to it, I didn't have the serious problems I experienced from all three. And I thought I went crazy because I was working too hard, but that doesn't make sense, either, logically speaking. My problem--the problem I have been really suffering with, is that I suddenly realized that I am a square peg that has been trying to fit in the round holes society has been passing me since ever.
And that doesn't work, and I am not going to be able to do that. And that scares the crap out of me, because there is no available narrative for my situation, and my relationship with life is so secret as to be absolutely, completely unique, wholly unrelatable to the available schemas.
So yeah. I'll figure something out. Just reconfiguring.
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9699874 times)