Saw Gillian Welch the other night. Never saw her act live before, but it was pretty much what I would have expected from her albums. Good show. Old Crow Medicine Show opened, and at the end of the night they all came back on-stage for a lengthy encore with Welch (which, we were informed, they hadn’t done before).
For Dean. Hey, he’s still on the ballot, and he’s the guy I wanted to vote for. I realize the vote is symbolic, but perhaps not a completely empty symbol. Kerry’s got the nomination locked up, but at this point, every vote for someone else is a reminder to him: “Hey, there’s a constituency out here that you need to address.”
At the sign-in table, there was one Republican judge, one Democrat, and two other guys who didn’t have any party role to fill. As I walked up, one of them asked me if I was voting Democrat; another said something like “he couldn’t possibly be a Republican.” There was some more partisan joking. The lone Republican kept his tongue. This was the first time I could ever recall election judges publicly making partisan jokes, and I have to admit, it struck me as a little unseemly. But very interesting. I live in a pretty progressive neighborhood, and this seems like a sign that the general election will be extremely polarized (not that it would come as much surprise).
I’ve been a freelancer since 1989, and in that sense, I get a new job every time a new document comes down the pipe. I am still a freelancer, still doing the same thing, but I still feel like I’ve got a new job.
When I started translating as a freelancer, things were kind of thin. Gradually, my client base and workload picked up, and by 2000, I was making a pretty nice income.
Then came 2001: my income was less than half what it had been in 2000: the Japanese economy–already bad–seemed to get worse, and we all know what happened in the U.S. economy. 2002 was slightly worse; 2003 about the same.
December 2003 and January 2004 were alarmingly quiet, and I could no longer pretend that I was riding out a lean spell and things would pick up in their own time. Either I needed to get more translation work, or I had to get a “real” job (though the idea gave me hives). In the past, I had occasionally made efforts to get new work by cold-calling, but I found the process uniformly unproductive and had given up. Time to try again. I contacted a lot of translation agencies. Most of them thanked me for my resume (if that much) and that was the end of it. Some had me do translation tests. This turned into a more labor-intensive way for me to wind up buried in a rolodex somewhere. But I contacted one company that was different. They sent me a very demanding translation test–a long passage (as trials go) of very challenging material. I slacked a little on finishing it, but eventually did so. And eventually heard back that they like my work and want to add me to their stable. And that they can, it seems, completely saturate my pipeline. And they pay pretty well (especially for Americans). In short, if I choose to, I can pretty much work full-time and exclusively for them. I feel both relieved that a long and difficult period seems to be ending, and anxious that I might screw up.
Jenny and I have discussed before the danger as freelancers of turning one’s client ecology into a monoculture, but right now, it beats the hell out of a xericulture.
While I was under the impression that the Austin city budget was hit harder by the recession than most cities, apparently I was wrong. Current city roadwork projects underway in the more-or-less central part of town include:
And that doesn’t include the eternal mess at I-35/Ben White, which is a TxDOT project.
I am genuinely curious: where has the city found the money to pay for all these projects? Did we pass a bond or something? And why are they hell-bent on taking on so many major projects in a relatively small, dense area all at once?
Expecting to see Shorty Long last night doing their usual thing at Flipnotics, we wound up seeing the Boxcar Preachers, the lead singer of which is a co-worker of Gwen’s. Old-timey songs about heroin addicts and Randy Weaver. They’re good. Check ’em out.