Lost the capacity to handle workplace cruelty.

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Okay, I guess give her full benefit of the doubt that she is a friend, although she does have constraints.

And you know, my small amount of experience with tutoring is that less is more, especially maybe given my aspie propensity to overexplain. If I just explain a little bit in math or a few suggestions for a paper, the other person can take it and run with it (hopefully).

Anyway you could view yourself as a coach on the grantwriting, instead of the doer? Almost as if you're cheating the university by working too few hours. Although really, you're doing more stuff of your own choosing and/or working a more normal, reasonable schedule.

Oddly enough I'd suggested the coach role a few months ago -- it takes about a week for me to edit/revise a poorly-written proposal, and it'd go much faster if the scientists brought me in at the concept stage, before they started writing. They can be as defensive as they like while I say, "k mm, that's not a story" or "and they care why" or "how's that different from these 400 other proposals" but they also know I'm often right about these things.

As it happened, more freelance work walked in the door today, nice stuff too, though I may have to turn it down. I badly need a rest. One nice thing about living on university time is that rests will actually happen in summer, when I can be out in the sun. I didn't really take advantage of that last year, but will now. One of my student writers has also convinced her dept chair to let her take my class as a core class for her major, which is fantastic news -- if he agrees to turn that into a permanent arrangement, I can stop worrying so much about drumming up business, and students will just arrive. There'll still be some heavy lifting to do in a couple of years to do with who actually pays me, but at least that'd be one part nailed down.

I really can't handle the politics, though, and am about to walk into more of it on Tuesday. The turf wars over everything are insane, and they've got this bizarre ethic, like if you're a sane person who doesn't want to drink poison, you're just a p**** and you can't hack it in the academy. I'm unbelievably glad that the life I've made till now has been outside universities -- can't imagine going in at 18 and not coming out again. But I guess that's right in line with everything else I've ever learned about self-advertisement. Guys who say they're funny or nice are reliably unfunny/jerks. Watch your wallet and everything around people who say they teach ethics. Crunchy-greeny outfits will rob their employees with an untroubled heart. And universities are like this. I wonder what mine is.

I've tried different writing projects. You may be quite a bit better than I am, and more power to you if so. My next project might be songwriting.

I just think it's hard to be both the creator of something, whether magazine articles, songs, or even professional accounting services, and also the person who sells and does the administrative side. I heard the mystery writer Archer Mayor give a talk back in 2005 or '06, and he had a schedule where about the first five months of the year, he worked on a new book. And then in the summer he did editorial stuff and/or administrative stuff, and then in the Autumn he promoted the new book. And it sounded like this worked for him. And I kind of understand, that it's just really very different hats you've putting on.

About what you say about the institutions who promote themselves as being benefactors, maybe like Starbucks coffee who can't help but disappointing people. I think if a business can just avoid shaving their employees paychecks, which believe it or not a fair number of businesses do. And also if they can avoid jacking with people's schedules, where they have them work for example, 5-10 pm one night, and then come in the next morning and work 7am-3pm.

That's sometimes, but not always, done so that people don't stay in the jobs long. It's an anti-unionizing thing. The hospital here rotates shifts like a tumble dryer. As someone who used to schedule employees in hourly jobs, though, I can tell you it's way, way easier to have a steady schedule. It's usually just impossible to do -- hourly employees tend to have volatile lives and little commitment to the job, so they'll tell you they're not coming in on days XYZ, sorry, or that they're going on camping trips or whatever, or just want more/fewer hours for a while. Employee scheduling, it's not unlike Tetris.

If you tell your scheduling manager that you'd like to keep your hours steady, though, sometimes that can be accommodated. It does mean that other people get moved around more.

Anyway -- I solved my work problem by pulling way back, dropping back to half-time, and picking up more freelance. I've got no shortage of work for the next year, it looks like, but -- well, it's unfortunate. I guess if I wanted to I could be aggrieved at getting pushed out this way, but there isn't really any point. When it comes down to it I'm not really suited temperamentally to be university staff, so I'm lucky to have the job at all, and it's fulltime bennies for halftime work.