Rat race.

I wish I'd done a lot less homework when I was a kid. I'm glad I went to school--knowledge is both practical and wonderful and I wouldn't have just learned it all on my own--and I know that some homework was necessary to drill the knowledge in. But there's also huge amounts of work that I did just to get a grade. Either I already knew the material cold, or I did the homework without genuinely learning--often not out of apathy but out of a fear that if I challenged myself I would miss a deadline or get wrong answers, so doing problems by rote or writing papers on topics I already knew was safer for my grade. I wish that I'd used school to learn things I wanted or needed to know, instead of letting it push me into an arrangement of trading gruntwork for grades.

This is my roundabout way of saying that I hate my job and want to quit. I won't, because I don't have another income source lined up right now, but I want to. Ever since I was sick myself, I can't stop seeing the fact that I'm not working for the patients--I'm working for a monstrously ugly and dim-witted system that treats patients as cogs at best and obstacles at worst. We end up more concerned with shutting people up than with comforting them, better at filling out forms than at relieving pain, more motivated to clear beds than to fix problems. It's not something I want to be a part of any more. Especially since I'm a cogstacle myself--I don't fit into the workplace culture at all and the requirement to constantly work harder not smarter showcases my worst qualities and makes me look mediocre among people who read Twilight unironically. I'm bright and responsible, dammit, I'm just not motivated to spend my downtime washing things that are already clean so the boss doesn't see me sitting down.

Saying you're so super smart doesn't mean much if you are nothing more than a mediocre night tech, though. Going on about "brain the size of a planet, and here I am emptying bedpans" is just entitlement and arrogance if I don't find my own way to stop emptying bedpans. So my next project is to find a way to make money without being a cogstacle. (This doesn't mean I wouldn't be an employee, only that I wouldn't be an employee somewhere that's only hiring me because robots are expensive.) I don't particularly care how much money as long as I can pay my basic bills; I do care that my answer isn't "be a cogstacle somewhere marginally nicer."

The problem is that I don't have a lot of prerequisites for a "brain the size of a planet" job--no advanced or specialized education, decidedly unslick people skills, no business or financial expertise, a messy and unimpressive resume, and the only thing I'm worse at than looking "sexy" is looking "professional." (I have a sneaking suspicion that if I could fit into a suit without looking like a kid in Mom's clothes and say phrases like "proactive teamwork on the development taskforce" with total sincerity, I could make $50K without trying. But alas, I am peasanty of face and sardonic of manner.)

What have I got? A bachelor's degree in film (and rhetoric! ask me about Quintillian's canons of oratory, kids!), above-average writing skills, computer competence but not expertise, specialized knowledge in the fields of human biology, filmmaking, and sexuality, a tremendous amount of creative enthusiasm, the ability to pick up new skills really fast, tons of connections in the kink and sex-positive worlds, and a not completely broken work ethic.

Wow does that all lead up to one thing when I lay it out like that.

I should get me one of them home businesses with the cosmetics and hosting the little cosmetics parties.




I know it sounds like I spelled out "porn," and maybe I kinda did, but I was actually thinking more like "sex toy business." The idea is far less than half-formed, and the competition is certainly fierce and well-established, but I feel like I could actually do something new with the "sell things for people to touch their genitals with" concept. I'm most interested in showcasing unique and unusual toys, with providing a lot of information on the products, with making things previously only available from obscure kink artisans more available, and with trying to appeal to people's sex-nerd "oh I gotta try that" enthusiasm rather than their crotches.

It's a "also I'll have a pony" dream at this point, and I've had a lot of those that didn't pan out. Also a lot that did. It's worth working on.




Welp, off to go empty bedpans.