(no subject)

A muscle in my lower left eyelid has been twitching on and off all day. It might be stress causing it, or it might be the fact that my body likes to find new and exciting ways to mess up. Regardless of the cause, it's frustrating me because at any moment, my vision in that eye could be affected by the eyelid fluttering and causing me to lose focus.

I found what looks like a decent technical writing course that I can do online, which I'm considering taking advantage of since it's only a 12-week course, which means that another avaenue of employment would open up to me, one that might allow me to save more money for university in a shorter period of time than a lot of other options. The course is $500, though, and the only way I'll be able to afford that is if the government pays for it for me. They may, but I'd need to speak to an employment counselor first, which I'm not looking forward to doing. My social anxiety runs high enough these days that talking and looking people in the eye is extremely difficult, but if I have to, I'm willing to fake being normal for a little while longer, to get what I need.

It beats getting the government to pay for a 2-year course in something I have less interest in. I know I have talent as a writer, and technical writing is one of the few ways I can put that to good use without investing a lot of time in something like a journalism degree, or any other degree that's required to freelance for magazines and anthologies I have an interest in.

And writing for a living means that I don't have to force myself to put on a fake smile every day and interact with people when I'd much rather be alone. I enjoyed working overnight at the last call centre for those very reasons. I needed to deal with calls and employees for about three hours, and for the other seven hours of my shift were spent doing work on the database or sealing envelopes, or else just messing around because there was no actual work to be done.

Because I don't have enough things that need doing, I'm thinking once more about transcribing podcasts to pass the time. I remember reading Ajora's journal once, where she mentioned that so few podcasts have transcriptions for those who are hard of hearing. I have hearing problems myself (sometimes between my ear and my brain, sounds stop connecting to meaning and I hear a bunch of gibberish or words that people didn't actually say), but unlike people, podcasts don't mind if I get them to repeat themselves until I've figured out what was said. Podcasts won't get frustrated by it, and won't get annoyed if I get things wrong at first.

I'll send emails around to a few podcasters and ask if they mind me transcriptions of their shows. I can get some piddly little free website to host them on if the podcasters don't want to devote webspace to them, or just to have an archive of the work I've done so that I can put it on my resume later.

But that will come tomorrow. Rei will be home from work in a few hours, and then we'll be going to Cass's for spaghetti, so I'll spend my last remaining hours alone watching some more Digimon Adventure 02 episodes. I've almost finished that season, and I've got a twisted pairing in mind that will pretty much guarantee that I stay on the fringes of fandom if I bother to write it.

[Edit] - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Game, in all its 8-bit glory!