BookWoman56

Freelance marketing copywriters average around $24-25/hour, with regional differences. I don’t have any ideas on how to break into that specific field. If you can handle some technical content, you might have better luck doing freelance technical writing work. That field generally pays better (average around $33/hour) and is also much more accepting of work from home without a pandemic going on. For either field, you might consider checking out any websites for freelance writing, and also seeing if you can get a short-term gig through a staffing agency. Frequently those are for three months or so, and give you the opportunity to build a writing portfolio, which is often requested for marketing jobs. It’s been long enough that I don’t know the websites any longer, but a few former colleagues who did freelance work had a portfolio on their website so potential clients could see work samples.

For me, provided everyone is over 18, I don’t think there is any automatic age difference barrier. I do think that from 18-30, it’s important to make sure that there’s no major power difference because one person is much older than the other. But compatibility overall is much more important to me than an arbitrary age cutoff. I’ve been in a serious relationship with someone who was 14 years younger. We were compatible on most things, but from the beginning it was never supposed to lead to marriage, because I had previously been married, had already had kids, and could no longer get pregnant (not that I would have wanted to). He wanted to marry and have kids eventually, but not until later. After a while he started getting too attached and I ended the relationship. Yes, the age difference was one reason for ending it, but there were other factors as well that would have made me end the relationship even had we been the same age. More recently I’ve been in a very casual long distance relationship with someone ~30 years younger. We met in person prior to them relocating across the country for work. With this person, our personalities mesh very well. Neither of us is looking for anything serious, just fun and games, with emotional support and intellectual stimulation. We’re both polyamorous, so there’s no issue regarding other relationships/partners. So, for me this works quite well, and the age difference isn’t a factor. I really think it comes down more to whether people have basic compatibility on major goals, values, and interests than age.

So in addition to being annoying, your sister believes that reading her mind should be included in your skill set as a sibling? She sounds exhausting to deal with.

Most of my siblings and I read everything we could get our hands on when we were kids. At least once a month or so, my father would take us to the bookstore to pick up a new supply of books. My brother and I had similar tastes, so we had Hardy Boys, plus some other action series. I also did Nancy Drew because I liked her independence. I never got questioned by librarians about the gender “appropriateness” of anything I was checking out, but I remember my 2nd grade teacher expressing a little mild concern because I was reading Robinson Crusoe in class. She said it might be difficult for a 2nd grader and didn’t want me to get discouraged, so she got me to read a couple of paragraphs aloud. When I finished, she told me to keep on reading because I obviously was having no problems with it. However, the following year my 3rd grade teacher threw a fit because I dared to read ahead in the book, instead of stopping at the end of the assigned section of the textbook. My pet peeve related to all this is there are too many teachers like my 3rd grade teacher and not enough like my 2nd grade teacher. I also agree that it’s ridiculous to designate toys, books, and clothes for young kids by gender. For clothes, up until the age that girls’ and boys’ body shapes diverge, what difference does it make regarding the color and design (dinosaurs or whatever) of the clothes so that some clothes are classified as appropriate only for one gender?

I have never understood the rationale for even having a gender reveal party. If the parents think their family and friends are that obsessed with whether it’s a girl or boy, then just post the info on social media or whatever. There are too many horror stories out there about the materials used in gender reveal parties causing fires, plus all the anecdotes about the father throwing a public hissy fit when he finds out he’s having a daughter rather than a son. I understand customs evolve and gender reveal parties are a trend now , but I really think that it shouldn’t be that big of a deal whether it’s female or male, and that if it is a big deal to one or both parents, they need to find out in a private setting and process their feelings on it rather than surrounded by other people.

I’ve conducted interviews before where I was 90% sure I was going to hire a specific candidate, based on what was in that candidate’s resume compared to the other applicants’ resumes. If my preferred candidate had flamed out in the interview, I would have adjusted my choice. During the interview process for one position, the applicant who had looked on paper to be 2nd choice became a non contender, and the previous 3rd choice applicant became 2nd choice. But I have also conducted interviews in which 2-3 candidates seemed about equal on paper, but one candidate really stood out during the actual interview. We’re required to ask each candidate the same questions, and those questions have to be approved in advance by HR. That said, I have been exposed to interviews where the hiring manager was already 100% committed to a specific candidate, generally someone already on the team who had applied for a higher position, and so unless that candidate completely imploded during the interview and told the hiring manager that he or she didn’t want the job, it was a done deal. That’s where I feel sorry for the other interviewees, because there is no way in hell they’re going to be even seriously considered for the job. The best they can hope for is making enough of a good impression that the hiring manager passes their name along to someone else who is hiring for a similar position. In that sort of situation, where someone internal has already been identified, I much prefer what my manager’s manager did with me. A higher position opened up, he outright promoted me into that position, and then got me to post my old position to find a replacement for most of the work I had previously been doing. To me, that seems like a more humane approach, but I realize that’s not always possible.

Based on your description, this very much sounds like a pro forma interview where they already knew they were hiring someone else. But there is zero excuse for the interviewer being significantly late for the interview. IMO, there’s also little excuse for being unfamiliar with the technology, either. She could have gone through a dry run with a colleague a day or two before your interview to ensure everything worked and she wouldn’t be fumbling around with the technology. The only advice I have for you going forward is to jot down your own questions for the interviewer ahead of time, and then tweak your questions as needed during the interview. It sucks that she ended the interview early without even giving you the chance to ask any questions. That to me is a huge red flag that the interviewer is inept and that she had zero interest in you as a job candidate, presumably because another candidate has the inside track for this position. I wish companies would be more honest about this kind of situation, where they have really already made the hiring decision but have to hold token interviews with other applicants for various reasons. If they were up front in the job posting itself, then they might not get any other applications, but FFS during the interview itself, don’t lead the other applicants on by making them think they have a serious shot at getting the job. Just describe the job and ask the applicant relevant questions, without phrasing it as “In this role, you would be performing A, D, and C” and so forth.

The charter school my grandson attended from pre-K through mid year 1st grade was one of those that boasts it has a 100% college acceptance rate. During 1st grade, I was monitoring my grandson’s reading and writing homework, and was appalled. Numerous grammar and spelling mistakes on homework instructions, repeated failures of the teachers to respond to questions I wrote back, and other issues. I did a bit of online research and found this particular chain of charter schools is notorious for hiring teachers who haven’t gone through traditional teacher training but instead have content-related degrees. Now I can understand that you must have teachers who know their content. But when they have no clue about the types of learning strategies that are appropriate for a 1st grader versus a high school kid, that’s a problem. My understanding is that the teacher pay there is fairly low compared to our public schools. Eventually I convinced my son and DIL to put their son into our neighborhood public school. I won’t say the public school is perfect, because no school is, but the homework is appropriate for his grade level and the instructions don’t make me want to bleed red ink all over them to correct mistakes.

I’ve been working from home full-time for about 5 years at my current job, and there came a point when I had to set some boundaries with family and friends. As you said, it’s easy to do some housework during the day such as loading or unloading the dishwasher, throwing a load of laundry in during a lunch break or whatever. Sometimes I can run an errand provided it’s not much more than an hour. But even though my schedule is flexible, if someone wants me to do something that’s going to take a couple of hours during the work day, then I will need to make up those 2 hours sometime during the week. If it’s 4 hours or more, then I need to use PTO or work those hours during the weekend. Not sure where the misperception came from that working from home is equivalent to being completely free for the work week, but people need to understand the reality. When my mother was terminally ill last year, I talked to my manager to explain there might be times I would have to leave a meeting early or spend some time during the work day to run into her room and deal with things, but that I would absolutely get the work done each week. Fortunately both my manager and his manager told me to do what I needed to do for my mother, whenever I needed to do it, and if I needed help with my workload, to let them know and they would adjust assignments as needed. I am very grateful for that support and the flexibility they gave me. But that kind of situation is different from a family member or friend assuming that just because you work from home, you can go run do their shopping for them or spend a couple of hours during the day looking up information online for them.

That may be carried over from having to do so at work. In the documentation I do for a large financial institution, I am required to spell out an acronym or abbreviation on first use in the document, put the acronym or abbreviation in parentheses immediately after the full version, and then use the acronym or abbreviation for the rest of the document. Part of that practice is because we can’t assume the audience already knows what the acronym stands for, and the other reason is that different parts of the organization use the same acronym or abbreviation to refer to entirely different things. For example, there are 9 different terms/definitions listed for “AA” in our online glossary, and none of them is for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes, social writing is very different from business writing, but some people may define acronyms without thinking about those differences.

Exactly. I can easily tell myself that the original horrific posts are only wishful posturing. But seeing the absolute vitriol spewed by others who are cheering on this kind of insane behavior makes me concerned about whether people are more accepting of horrible behavior than they used to be, or if that acceptance is just more apparent now because of social media.

A pet peeve I’ve recently developed is what I would call “revenge culture,” as manifested online. I’ve been reading a lot of threads excerpted from Reddit, and am horrified at the tales of revenge for infidelity, other bad actions, and so forth. These are frequently posts by a male who discovers that his wife or girlfriend has had sex outside the relationship. Male feels completely justified in not only ending the relationship but also taking revenge on the SO. I have read posts in which the male brags about having planted hard drugs on both the wife and the affair partner, and tipping off the cops to have them arrested for possession, to a guy tricking his girlfriend into thinking the meal she had just consumed consisted of her horse. Now, I will readily concede that these original posts are total fabrication most of the time. But the responses are almost always totally supportive of these acts. And of course there’s a huge double standard. If a woman posts that she’s discovered her husband is unfaithful, a few people will tell her to end the marriage, but many will advise her to consider the impact on any children and suggest couples counseling. OTOH, if a male posts that he just discovered that when his wife was 15, she started flirting with another guy an hour before she officially broke up with her designated BF, then the responses are almost uniformly to divorce her because “once a cheater, always a cheater. “ IMO, the adult response to discovering one’s SO has cheated is to decide if it’s a dealbreaker and move on based on that decision. If you want to end the relationship, do it but without being a horrible person. Getting your former SO fired, sending explicit videos to their family, trying to get them arrested, etc., are things I would expect from a 15-year-old, not a so-called adult.

Pretty effective birth control, one would think.

@PRgal, this is a decision you and your husband should make, based on your own criteria of what the best solution is for your son. Your parents already had their opportunity to make that decision for your education, and while it doesn’t hurt anything to listen to their perspective, it’s not their decision. I would caution against making the assumption so many people do, that a private school is automatically better than a public school. Based on my own experience having taught at a private school a gazillion years ago and having my daughter attend a completely different private school for K-2, that’s not always the case. Check out the specific schools you are seriously considering, including their websites, visiting the campus, and if possible, chatting with a few parents whose kids attend the school. Based on your assessment, make an informed decision. I also agree that if your son has the opportunity to acquire a second or third language, it’s better to do so earlier rather than later. A few years ago, I was editing a linguistics doctoral dissertation, which focused on acquisition of a second language versus acquisition of a third language. The conclusion was that it’s much easier, regardless of age, to learn a third language than a second language, because with a third language, the learner has already internalized strategies to acquire a new language. I’m not sure what the situation is with your son’s language skills. If he’s already speaking both English and Cantonese, for example, then it may be fairly easy for him to learn French. My grandson speaks English and Cantonese; my DIL is from Hong Kong and talks to him almost exclusively in Cantonese so he doesn’t forget the Cantonese he learned while they were living in Hong Kong before moving to the U.S. At some point, based on living in San Antonio, he will probably take Spanish. But my daughter had a different experience; she really struggled in K-2 studying English and Hebrew simultaneously, but had no issues at all studying German and French simultaneously a few years ago while completing her undergrad degree.

Sorry for the confusion; I'm usually about 5 years late knowing what acronyms mean and stupidly assumed these would all be commonly used and understood, since I had encountered them quite a bit over the last couple of years. To recap, MOH = maid/matron of honor in a wedding. AITA = Am I the asshole? (I don't use reddit but apparently there are discussions there in which people describe a situation and ask the community to chime in on whether the original poster was an asshole for doing something; then there are people who take screencaps of those posts and turn them into YouTube videos. A lot of these focus on wedding issues, and I've been watching some of these videos just for the train wreck value.) BSC = bat shit crazy.

Can't remember if the movie explained the function of the groom's cake, but it's essentially just an alternative to the wedding cake. The groom's cake might be chocolate or some other type of cake that isn't as bland as the wedding cake. I've been to weddings where the groom's cake was chocolate (as it was for mine), strawberry, or something like Italian creme cake. I have never IRL seen anything resembling the armadillo groom's cake.

That's pretty much how my first wedding reception went, except it was evening and no dinner. In my part of the country, at that time, dinner at a wedding reception just wasn't a thing. My mother worked at an upscale women's clothing store, which was one of maybe two stores in town that routinely carried wedding dresses and bridesmaids' dresses. She bought my wedding dress and paid for the bridesmaid dresses for my sister and my cousin; the MOH and another bridesmaid paid for their own dresses, but at a discounted price. I deliberately chose dresses that didn't look like traditional bridesmaid dresses and could be repurposed; the mother of one bridesmaid in fact called my mother a couple of months later to express her appreciation that she'd been able to take her daughter's bridesmaid dress, have a bit of beading/braid added to the neckline, and repurpose it for a country club dance. We had the wedding cake made by a one-person cake shop; my mother's friends made the punch and mints, and another friend made the groom's cake. We just bought the nuts and served coffee and tea in addition to the punch. (Again, this was fairly common at that time. My mother and her friends had helped each other out over the years making punch, mints, finger sandwiches, etc., for graduation teas and other relatively small parties.) In retrospect, while it wasn't that expensive, it was still a bit OTT for my own personal preferences and was done to accommodate my parents' and the in-laws' wishes. My second wedding was much more low key, done at my parents' house. I've been divorced for a long time now and can't envision ever getting married again, but if that were to happen, it would be a courthouse ceremony in everyday clothes, no guests, no reception, etc., because I have neither the energy nor the inclination to plan a "wedding" at this point in my life. Much of my annoyance when watching the wedding-related AITA videos was how often the couple wanted something low key but the parents insisted on a big blow-out, and how often the couple and their family members turned into complete jerks because they've been brainwashed by the wedding industry and others that things must be a certain way or else the wedding doesn't count. Literally, telling a bridesmaid she has to dye her hair so that the bride is the only person in the wedding party who has blonde hair, etc., or that while everyone else can bring a plus one, cousin Joe can't bring his same-sex partner because not everyone knows he's gay and we can't have any distractions from the couple, in case the homophobic members of the extended family choose that moment to throw a hissy fit over cousin Joe's sexual orientation. That's in addition to the ones in which the couple/parents insist that wedding guests "must" give gifts equal or greater in value to the cost per person of the event. In roughly 95% of those videos, I'd have told the parents and/or the couple that I would not be attending if I had to jump through their insane hoops. Watching those videos and reading the comments about them have convinced me that far from being a nice event with family and friends to celebrate a couple getting married, entirely too many weddings bring out the absolute worst BSC and entitled behavior that one can imagine.

If this pandemic has any potential good, it might be that more people realize they can have a small wedding wherever the fuck they want to, and use Zoom or something similar to share the wedding ceremony with other family members/friends who can't come in person. Again, unless everyone involved has a ton of disposable income, expecting people to spend thousands of dollars to travel to a destination wedding is a jerk move. And even if everyone has the money, people shouldn't feel obligated to travel to exotic location ABC just to attend a wedding. I am old enough that when I got married the first time, the expectation was that the bride's family paid for the wedding and the groom's family paid for the rehearsal dinner. But this was back when wedding costs were much more reasonable, and there wasn't this mindset that if you couldn't have a lavish dinner for 300 guests at your reception, plus days of OTT bachelor and bachelorette parties, an outrageously expensive wedding dress and bridesmaid dresses, a live band at the reception, etc., then you might as well not bother having a wedding. These days, it makes more sense for the couple to pay for their own wedding and avoid the clashes of two sets of in-laws demanding things for the wedding that the couple themselves don't want. I personally can't see the point of parents spending $50K on a wedding for their kid; if the parents have that kind of money dedicated for a wedding, it makes much more sense to me to give your son or daughter the money to use toward a house instead. Also, to add to my original list earlier: Just because a family member or friend has a business providing a service that the wedding party will want, such as a bakery, florist shop, photography, etc., does not mean that the family member/friend is in any way obligated to provide those services for free to the couple getting married. If they do offer the services gratis, that is their wedding gift to the couple and nobody should be demanding an additional wedding present.

At Columbus AFB? I lived in Columbus for a couple of years several decades ago. Keesler AFB also does training, but I think primarily for technical roles. In any case, accents in Columbus are quite different from accents in Biloxi. I only have myself to blame for this new pet peeve and it doesn't really affect me, but I fell into the rabbit hole of AITA videos on YouTube, and quite a few of them focused on weddings. So my new pet peeve is the wedding industry in general and the people who turn into dictators when they or family members are getting married, or who in general use the dynamics of a wedding to reveal that they are total jerks. My apparently unpopular opinions on the wedding industry and weddings in general include: A wedding that costs $2K is just as valid as a wedding that costs $20K or even $200K. Hell, a wedding ceremony at the courthouse that costs $200 total is just as valid. Unless everyone involved has a ton of disposable income, it's a jerk move to ask someone to be in the wedding party and expect them to spend $2K on bridesmaid dress/tux, travel, etc. Whoever came up with the edict that all bridesmaids, regardless of differing body shapes, complexions, height, etc., must wear matching dresses (both color and design) is an idiot. WTF is wrong with just asking bridesmaids to wear something they like, so everybody feels good instead of one bridesmaid having a dress whose color and cut flatter her, and the other bridesmaids wearing dresses that they hate and make them look dreadful? Similarly, I do not see the BFD of a guest wearing something that is white, ivory, cream, etc., provided it's not an actual wedding dress. Do people really think that the guests are going to mistake a woman wearing a regular dress that happens to be a cream color for the actual bride wearing a fancy wedding dress? Apart from the dress color, if your wedding guests don't know what the bride looks like enough to distinguish her from someone else, then maybe they shouldn't be attending your wedding. Parents who set up wedding funds for their kids: If you have more than one kid, then the amounts should be equal. Don't rob one kid's wedding fund or college fund to pay for another kid's wedding. Parents who do not set up wedding funds for their kids: Don't do stupid things like taking out a 2nd mortgage to pay for an extravagant wedding for your kid. The couple getting married and the parents, if they're going to pay for it or chip in, need to set expectations early about needs versus wants and realistic budgets, and stick to them. Finally, somebody else's wedding is not an appropriate venue for a guest to propose to another guest, announce a pregnancy, come out, or throw an impromptu birthday party for a child, unless the couple getting married has explicitly approved the extraneous activity well ahead of time.

That's just bad management/project planning, pure and simple. Any good PM would have known project A was close to ending and ramped up for project B to start as soon as project A was done, including figuring out work assignments for the people involved. Or if there were some rational reason that there needed to be a 1-week gap between the two projects, have notified the people involved ahead of time.

I had my first WFH full-time gig almost 20 years ago, and now I've been WFH for 5 years. One thing I'd suggest is trying to set up social engagements on an ongoing basis with friends or close colleagues. For example, a friend and I would go grab lunch or coffee together every other week. Obviously the pandemic makes that option a bit more difficult, but maybe a short phone call just to stay in touch. Overall, just schedule some personal interaction into your life so you don't wake up one day and realize that it's been 6 months since you talked to anyone other than colleagues on business calls. As a fellow introvert, I am quite fine WFH full-time, but my daughter lives with me and my son and his family are less than 5 minutes away, so I can't become a complete hermit. To me, the advantages far outweigh the possible risk of becoming isolated, which is something you can control. I don't in any way miss commuting, getting up early and having to dress in business clothes, and listening to colleagues be on the phone all day or worse, coming into my cubicle just to chat while I'm trying to get work done.

It's the same for me, although from the perspective of a person, not as a civil rights lawyer. I've seen way too many episodes of L&O:SVU and other cop shows where a cop doesn't hesitate to intimidate and hit someone who doesn't immediately jump when the cop says to jump, which usually amounts to not answering questions before an attorney is present. There's also the total disrespect the cops on those shows display toward attorneys and prosecutors, bitching and moaning because a prosecutor won't bring charges against someone based solely on the cop's hunch that this suspect is really the perpetrator, or that a defense attorney actually does his or her job with a client who's a suspect. Finally, I hate the "us versus them" mentality that is so prevalent, evidenced by making almost all non-cops be obstructive jerks. In real life, what BFF of a murder victim blows off the cops investigating the murder by claiming they have a business meeting/golf game in a few minutes, that is way more important than finding out who murdered their BFF? Yet I cannot count the times I've seen this scenario play out on cop shows.

Several years ago, I was on an interstate in FL and a car passed me that must have been going at least 90 when the posted speed limit was around 70. For as long as I could see it, the car was switching lanes back and forth to get around other drivers who were going the speed limit, even driving on the shoulder at times. A few minutes later all the cars in front of me began slowing down and then stopped for a while. When I finally got to the spot that was causing the slowdown, sure enough, that same car had crashed and was in the median, with the car flipped over. I don't remember seeing another car damaged there, so at least his recklessness didn't injure anyone else. The driver was the sole occupant of the crashed car. My pet driving peeve is people who realize too late their exit is coming up and try to veer across multiple lanes to reach the exit ramp. FFS, just get in position to take the next exit and then adjust your route as necessary. Better yet, figure out ahead of time when you're going to need to exit and get into position to take the exit normally.

To me, Jamie Bamber is just a generically attractive guy without any special appeal. On BSG, I found James Callis (Gaius Baltar) infinitely sexier, along with Tricia Helfer. When the show was going on before I started watching it, I read a lot of hype for Katee Sackhoff's acting but had never seen any photos of her and knew only that she was blonde. So in the pilot, when Tricia Helfer's character was on screen, I assumed it was Sackhoff instead, and it took me a little while to figure out that Sackhoff was instead playing Starbuck.

I had a weird dream a couple of nights ago in which I was doing some sort of biographical sketch for work, and while I was writing it, suddenly remembered that I had murdered a dozen people, and thought, "Best not include that particular piece of information." Even in the dream, I couldn't remember exactly which people I had murdered and/or why, other than a vague sense that they had annoyed me. Upon waking, I had to remind myself that no, I have not in fact murdered a dozen people other than in my thoughts.