It looks like I'm going to be in the job for about another six months, and at times I find that an alarming prospect - although that said, I've successfully stuck it out for nearly a year already, and I know I'm quite lucky to have it. The pay is decent and when I walk out of the door at five o'clock every day, I can (mostly) forget about everything until nine o'clock the following morning.
But...the boredom. At times it drives me nuts, and I've been thinking about the best way to deal with it. My casual observations suggest that the people who cope the best with it, and manage to avoid letting it get to them, are the people who have lots of other stuff going on in their lives. There's one person in particular who does so much outside work that it makes me feel dizzy just thinking about it, but she seems well able to deal with the petty office politics and mind-numbing tedium of it all. I'm not sure she ever sleeps, and that's not something I could ever do, but it's made me think about what I should do with my time and energy in order to prevent boredom-related brain-death.
I've had a couple of modest successes in selling photos recently - very modest indeed in terms of income, but it's a start and it's possible that I might get somewhere with this. One of the sites is Photo4Me, and you can see my work here. I reckon that investing some time and creative energy in this will pay dividends, more in terms of enjoyment than anything else, so I need to get some more images up there. Sadly, another site where I've had modest success (Picture Nation) is about to close, so I'll need to look at setting myself up on another photo library site or two as soon as I find time. I love taking photos, of course, and the satisfaction of knowing that someone likes my pictures enough to buy them for display is awesome. The shot I sold on Photo4Me made a mere £6 in commission, but I felt all warm and happy and excited about it for about a week. :) So...this is a project worth devoting some time and energy in.
Another thing I love doing is writing, and this blog has been a major source of enjoyment and relationship-building over the many years I've been writing in it. Sadly, LJ is a mere shadow of its former self, and traffic has slumped, and DW doesn't seem to be much better. But...I look at my recent entries and there's not much to show. You get traffic when you provide good content that people want to read. So...another project, I think, is putting some effort into blogging more regularly and providing some decent material. There's several things I enjoy doing - book reviews, photography stuff, old technology, observations on life and issues, and commenting on things cultural. I'm going to try and write in here more often, and I think bit of a re-launch is long overdue. I need to encourage my friends to read and interact again, and seek out some new audiences - when this thing goes well, again the satisfaction is priceless and I could do with some of that. So watch out for Blog Relaunch.
Finding time for this next one might be a bit tricky and might have to wait a while, but I'd love to do some volunteering again - I loved being involved in the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway when I wasn't working. Current thought is to get involved with the Museum of Communications in Burntisland, because it is awesome. I could easily spare a few hours here and there, so I'll see how that pans out.
It's really tricky squeezing everything in, but when I put my mind to it, I'm good at not procrastinating, and it doesn't take much effort to make things happen here and there. Each day, I should be looking at advancing a thing or two in my life a little bit, getting closer to doing more of what I want. If I do that, the day job will become a lot more bearable. We'll see how it goes.
This entry was originally posted at http://primitivepeople.dreamwidth.org/22
