Thursday, July 29, 2004
Baude writes:
6) a large, three-dimensional winged banana with orange stripes.
Read the whole thing.
I've been depressed a bit lately, and I've discovered why. In moving, my monitor bit the dust,
and this interfered in my ability to get online as much as I want, so I wasn't getting my minimum daily requirements of crescaty goodness. New monitor, still don't have the network hub set up, but one bottleneck removed. I have a job interview this morning for a month of contract work for (large multinational.) A main point will to be to find out if I would be able to get online during that time. I'll have to take the job either way if they offer it, but if I can be online, it works, and if not I'll suffer a bit.
This connects back to a point baude makes about work, while discussing norweigan sick leave policies. He says, that in the main, we work in order to get stuff, and put up with the work part, but would skip it if possible.
And he's right, given the qualifier. But EE Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful, sets out a buddhist view of work. Let's call it work as play. In this view, one gets stuff in order to be able to work.
Your task is to find the work you most want to do. Writers, those who make a living off it, talk about this a fair amount. It's not that writing beats flipping burgers. It's that writing is a drug, something they are called to do. When one has meaningful work, they take off sick days when they are sick, or when a family member is sick, or when the .. i was going to say when the clash has a reuinion concert, only joe's dead, and every other such band i could think of, some key person is dead. I digress. Work, and why I'm not doing it.
See, when i was offline most of the time the past couple weeks, it interfered with my ability to do work, and that was depressing. I'm not a good example - my meaningful work hasn't been paying the bills and it's time to go back to thinking of it as an expensive hobby, and get a job job to support my hobby. But the plan was to make a living doing the thing I do.
Which involves speaking truth to power. I thought this was going to be a much shorter post.
This is sort of a "morning pages" exercize, as advocated in the Artist's Way, a good book about unblocking writer's block. Get up, write three pages, and you'll find it liberates you to go on and do the stuff you've been putting off. But I had a point, and I can get back to it. Something about work. Oh, right. Now, I mentioned being depressed. one of the symptoms is that my expression of thoughts becomes, even more than usual, disjointed, leaping from point A to point Q, in a way others may find hard to follow. A large three-dimentional winged banana with orange stripes.
Makes sense to me, and I write for the sort of audience that gets this stuff, I'm not looking for USA today-style clarity. On to my point, anytime soon.
Last night, while not sleeping, I thought a lot about this problem I'm having. My work is important to me. Short version, I'm working to build legal precedents to protect anonymous political speech on the internet. But I'm not very good at it, and it gets frustrating, and the frustration contributes to my depression. The more depressed I am, the more I am challenged to maintain my professional competency. I have an obligation not to take cases if I can't handle them well. In the past, what has worked is to partner with older, more experienced lawyers with good case management skills. I made a mistake a few years ago in choosing a partner for my public interest law firm. It turned out neither one of us had good case management skills,
and things didn't work out as planned, and it was frustrating. Frustration lead to depression, depression lead to incivility, and the partnership deteriorated. I tried continuing as a solo,
with limited success, and than ran into another crisis a few months ago.
This resulted in, among other things, my missing a deadline by one day on a petition for cert, in an important case I'd worked on for 7 years. http://majors.blogspot.com.
That's one example, among others, of how I'm having a hard time maintaining my competence and professionalism, so I have a quandary about what to do with my existing case load (small, but non-zero) and what to do about new projects that would make good cases.
What I need to do is search for partners who are willing to risk associating with me, so that the meaningful work can continue. I was sent a smoking gun letter by florida, so there's a case there, but it's not a case I can open until I resolve these concerns.
If anyone out there is, say, a new solo looking for work, or a public interest law firm, or the pro bono department of BigLaw, I have a project I'd like to work together on. Much pre-negotiation would be required so we both understand the expectations and limits of the arrangment.
But it's potentially lucrative, fee-generating work, with important implications for the future of the net, and democracy in general. While I'm damaged goods, I have seven years of narrowly focusing on this topic and have developed significant expertise.
I think I could re-write this and post a version of it to my work blogs. This blog is more for play, but is public. I have a cascade of blogs. majors.blogspot.com is about this anonymous speech litigation project. ballots.blogspot.com is about election law generally. vark.blogspot.com is my public rambles on memes circulating in the blogosphere, often those of volokh or crescat.
And I have other blogs that are private, where i try to organize my thoughts, or keep laundry lists, or rough drafts. I digress again, like the twain story about jim blaine's grandfather's ram.
I'm going to conclude this here, I think I'm done.
6) a large, three-dimensional winged banana with orange stripes.
Read the whole thing.
I've been depressed a bit lately, and I've discovered why. In moving, my monitor bit the dust,
and this interfered in my ability to get online as much as I want, so I wasn't getting my minimum daily requirements of crescaty goodness. New monitor, still don't have the network hub set up, but one bottleneck removed. I have a job interview this morning for a month of contract work for (large multinational.) A main point will to be to find out if I would be able to get online during that time. I'll have to take the job either way if they offer it, but if I can be online, it works, and if not I'll suffer a bit.
This connects back to a point baude makes about work, while discussing norweigan sick leave policies. He says, that in the main, we work in order to get stuff, and put up with the work part, but would skip it if possible.
And he's right, given the qualifier. But EE Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful, sets out a buddhist view of work. Let's call it work as play. In this view, one gets stuff in order to be able to work.
Your task is to find the work you most want to do. Writers, those who make a living off it, talk about this a fair amount. It's not that writing beats flipping burgers. It's that writing is a drug, something they are called to do. When one has meaningful work, they take off sick days when they are sick, or when a family member is sick, or when the .. i was going to say when the clash has a reuinion concert, only joe's dead, and every other such band i could think of, some key person is dead. I digress. Work, and why I'm not doing it.
See, when i was offline most of the time the past couple weeks, it interfered with my ability to do work, and that was depressing. I'm not a good example - my meaningful work hasn't been paying the bills and it's time to go back to thinking of it as an expensive hobby, and get a job job to support my hobby. But the plan was to make a living doing the thing I do.
Which involves speaking truth to power. I thought this was going to be a much shorter post.
This is sort of a "morning pages" exercize, as advocated in the Artist's Way, a good book about unblocking writer's block. Get up, write three pages, and you'll find it liberates you to go on and do the stuff you've been putting off. But I had a point, and I can get back to it. Something about work. Oh, right. Now, I mentioned being depressed. one of the symptoms is that my expression of thoughts becomes, even more than usual, disjointed, leaping from point A to point Q, in a way others may find hard to follow. A large three-dimentional winged banana with orange stripes.
Makes sense to me, and I write for the sort of audience that gets this stuff, I'm not looking for USA today-style clarity. On to my point, anytime soon.
Last night, while not sleeping, I thought a lot about this problem I'm having. My work is important to me. Short version, I'm working to build legal precedents to protect anonymous political speech on the internet. But I'm not very good at it, and it gets frustrating, and the frustration contributes to my depression. The more depressed I am, the more I am challenged to maintain my professional competency. I have an obligation not to take cases if I can't handle them well. In the past, what has worked is to partner with older, more experienced lawyers with good case management skills. I made a mistake a few years ago in choosing a partner for my public interest law firm. It turned out neither one of us had good case management skills,
and things didn't work out as planned, and it was frustrating. Frustration lead to depression, depression lead to incivility, and the partnership deteriorated. I tried continuing as a solo,
with limited success, and than ran into another crisis a few months ago.
This resulted in, among other things, my missing a deadline by one day on a petition for cert, in an important case I'd worked on for 7 years. http://majors.blogspot.com.
That's one example, among others, of how I'm having a hard time maintaining my competence and professionalism, so I have a quandary about what to do with my existing case load (small, but non-zero) and what to do about new projects that would make good cases.
What I need to do is search for partners who are willing to risk associating with me, so that the meaningful work can continue. I was sent a smoking gun letter by florida, so there's a case there, but it's not a case I can open until I resolve these concerns.
If anyone out there is, say, a new solo looking for work, or a public interest law firm, or the pro bono department of BigLaw, I have a project I'd like to work together on. Much pre-negotiation would be required so we both understand the expectations and limits of the arrangment.
But it's potentially lucrative, fee-generating work, with important implications for the future of the net, and democracy in general. While I'm damaged goods, I have seven years of narrowly focusing on this topic and have developed significant expertise.
I think I could re-write this and post a version of it to my work blogs. This blog is more for play, but is public. I have a cascade of blogs. majors.blogspot.com is about this anonymous speech litigation project. ballots.blogspot.com is about election law generally. vark.blogspot.com is my public rambles on memes circulating in the blogosphere, often those of volokh or crescat.
And I have other blogs that are private, where i try to organize my thoughts, or keep laundry lists, or rough drafts. I digress again, like the twain story about jim blaine's grandfather's ram.
I'm going to conclude this here, I think I'm done.
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