So – a puff of ju-ju smoke, a my Buddha and an Insha’Allah to cover off my atheist beliefs – and my life is back to normal. Or as close to it as I ever get.
After five months, 11 days and one hour at the Khmer Times – no regrets there as it was a steep learning curve – I have reestablished my freelance self and found the “perfect” online editing site.
At MyDocomate.com I can pick and choose the assignments I want. Further, I can make enough money to live exceedingly well in the Kingdom. And spending March to May in Madrid with a follow-on trip to Canada for the first two weeks in June is looking more feasible all the time.
The first two weeks with the training wheels on were a touch daunting, but I figure I have it sussed. Or so I hope. Remember I don’t mistakes, instead I have “good learning experiences” and there were numerous ones as I fumbled through learning how to use the system. Andy – the co-founder and contact person at DocoMate who lives in Phnom Penh – deserves a medal for coping with the slowest technical learner ever.
Confession Time
I have become the most boring woman on the face of the earth. After the 12 to 14 hour days, 07:13 Sunday morning phone calls and deadlines at the Khmer Times, the control freak in me came to the fore-front. It was time to quit talking about it and actually get a life.
My new – yawn, yawn – schedule is:
06:00 – wake up and do stretching exercises, study K’mai and have breakfast. As an aside, my somewhat prissy K’mai teacher despairs that Rory down at Sundance taught me how to swear and that my pronunciation is perfect. For regular speech, however, it is so-so.
08:00 – turn on the computer, check emails and go to work.
12:30-ish – have lunch.
Somewhere in the afternoon – when there is space –listen to a 20-minute track of power-napping music. It doesn’t make me sleep, but at least it is timeout and I am working at getting some zzzzzes.
18:00 – happy hour with The Nurse – who now lives in the apartment above me – and/or whoever else happens to be around. But only if the work for the day is finished.
23:00 – go to bed – or fall asleep on the yoga mat while doing the stretches that are marked in my diary.
Sleep through the night and do it all over again the following day.
Dull though I may be, I don’t miss the waking up at 02:00 and working until 05:00.
That said, I am going to do a weekly column for the Khmer Times on Talk Real Polotik – links to follow. The reason? All editing and no writing will make me even more dreary than I already am and we can’t have that.
Then again, in the last week I have also cleaned up a couple of letters for a guy from Switzerland that I met briefly in Buenos Aires, corrected some notes for a Japanese guy who privately pays me so that his writing looks good to his supervisors – but, shhhhh, don’t tell anyone as it is a secret – and written two travel articles.
My DocoMate will be my bread and butter – even though I don’t eat much of either – but I will continue to send out pitches. Variety is, after all, about choices and options.
For my next blog, I do hope to be more exciting. But, frankly, I am relishing being boring. That said, it doesn’t mean I have given up attending openings, dining out, spending time with friends or catching up on Skype.
Actually I do more of all of the above since I have became Ms. Dull. Now I just have to listen to other people’s conversations more as nobody – but nobody – wants to hear about the latest CV I edited. Or how I had to fix-up a letter of reference. Glazed over eyes, blank stares. Forget it.
Such is life in the freelance lane, — even though having my payroll managed by HR is appealing — I am thriving on being dull.
Enough already, if you got this far you are already bored.
I hope all goes well in your world.