strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jul 17 07: anger, too, is unhealthy
You know, a while back I had the audacity to ask Megacorp, my employer at the time, for a raise, pointing out that the wage I’d been living on for the previous four months was laughable1 and that the timetable for the promised promotion-and-raise had gone seriously awry. In response, they treated me as a ‘volunteer’ during the round of layoffs going on at the time. And I have gritted my teeth and said, hey, that’s business with the Megacorps of the world.
Since then, I’ve been freelancing, and have spent well over a thousand dollars keeping my health insurance going, paying Company A a fee to keep telling Company B not to discontinue my coverage. The outlay of cash isn’t really an issue here. Sure, it’s outrageously expensive, but given that it’s no less than I paid when I was working at Megacorp, because Megacorp runs its staffing scene such that they don’t have to contribute to many of their workers’ benefits, I don’t really feel the pinch. But you’d think that by now, after several months and a lot of money out of my pocket, Company A and Company B would have agreed that I do, in fact, have health coverage.
You’d think. But no! So I get to pay for my drugs all by myself if I want the prescription filled today. Company A says that surely Company B will have this little snarl all fixed within the next 48 hours. Company B says nothing, because their customer-service line has already closed for the day. But to hell with all of them, because I’ve had this sore throat for a week and a half at this point and I am no longer in a mood to be patient.
Still, I’m just glad I don’t live somewhere with universal health-care coverage, because then I’d be a fucking Communist.
1 No, really. An hourly wage that I had to bargain them up to that still makes people laugh because nobody could be expected to live on it in NYC. People think I’m kidding.
Jul 7 07: sand
Got dragged off to see Ratatouille last night by some swimmers. I could tell you all about how utterly fabulous it is, and how it was exactly what I needed, and how I’m going to be seeing it again on the big screen for sure — and maybe I will, but I’m not doing it right now.
Because it’s a beautiful day and I’m off to the beach.
Jul 3 07: [peeks out from under sofa]
Am not dead.
Spent much of the last couple weeks in one of my periodic hyperventilatory bouts of writer’s block. It was my turn on the slab with the Secret Cabal last night, which meant that I had to get, you know, an actual story that people could read into their hands well ahead of time. And although sometimes a deadline is exactly what I need to spur me into action, this time it just triggered a meltdown, and I stopped answering emails because doing so would require sitting at the computer and typing. Which, you know, would just raise the question in my own mind of why I wasn’t working on the story. Anyway, I got there eventually: I finally turned in a 1.0 draft of a story idea that had been rattling around in my head for nearly a year.
As the Cabal rightly pointed out, there were some good ideas in there, but they didn’t really get treated very well. In my panic I had resorted to writing another conflict-free gay-themed romantic comedy with cool technology in it but no characters of particular interest. Still, on the subway home I had the 2.0 plot blossom in my head like one of those capsules that kids drop in the bathtub: poof! It’s a big rubbery lizard! With conflict and stuff! So we’ll see where things go from here.
If I need to take a break from that, Nora is all over me to do a revision on the Stevie Nicks Death Androids story, and I may just have to knuckle under and get her off my back.
Anyway, not dead. I was only hiding.