BlakeAtwood.com

I tweeted this yesterday:

Because the day before I felt like this:

While there are thousands of people much worse off than myself, part of my self-pitying ice cream coma arrived as a result of finally learning the answer to a specific job application process that’s lasted for the last three months. (The answer was no in case the picture didn’t clue you in). I drowned my sorrows in a PB&C shake from Cold Stone Creamery. It helped. A little.

But today, like every day, is a new day. Motivation has returned. Self-confidence, ever wavering though it may be, came back to roost. I have ideas for better utilizing my time. (I’ve watched the entire first season of 24 in about a week – thank you Netflix streaming -  and tore apart my defunct PS3, among other things). I’d like to help you, or your friends.

This is where you come in.

• Do you need a simple website?
• Maybe a brochure or newsletter or heck, even a magazine?
• An article written and pitched?

I can write. I can design. I can do layout. Yes, I will ask for a fee in return for these services, but it will be a mutually beneficial venture: inexpensive for you, experience for me. Pricing will be discussed up front, before any work is done, and will be on a case-by-case basis based on your needs.

So if you or someone you know is in need of a small website (I can host it as well), graphic design work, or copywriting, use the contact tab on the left side of this website to contact me.

I promise not to spill chocolate shake on your website.

[P.S. I am still looking for a full-time job in the DFW area, but plan to continue freelance work when a new gig is obtained... as long as the new gig is OK with it.]

While I’ve had the fortune to not have had to look for many jobs in my years of being an adult, I’ve always heard it was about who you know; in other words, it’s networking. This notion always scared me because I thought I’d have to know a lot of people, and I thought I’d have to know them pretty well for them to be interested in helping me find a job. Thankfully I live in a time where networking floats in the air I breathe, in the digital bits of the tweets and status updates of social networks. Now that I’m embarking on a new adventure, I sat down at my computer last night and wound up spending two hours “networking.”

It began with this article: HOW TO: Find a Job on Twitter, from Mashable.com. At the end of the post, the article lists multiple twitter accounts to follow if you need to find a job. I clicked the ones of interest to me, and as I was about to start clicking “follow,” I thought…Wait a minute… If this new account decides to follow me back, or if any other traffic should arrive as a result of starting to follow these accounts, do I really want my lame Twitter page to be their first impression?

So I googled “Twitter background templates” and found this free downloadable Twitter background PSD file from @chadengle of fuelyourcreativity.com. I edited it and wound up with the background currently seen on my twitter page. It’s still fairly simple, but it’s direct and looks better than before.

Finally, I felt confident to start following new accounts (listed here for your amusement). Then things got really fun. I’d begun using Hootsuite online recently at my current job and knew it would be a useful tool for this new endeavor. I didn’t realize how powerful the tool they’ve created is until I saw how it could help me in a job search. I created a list on which I could place only twitter accounts related to my job search in Dallas and Fort Worth. I created a column that only tracks the hashtag #tweetmyjobs. I created other columns that deliver real-time results for “Dallas jobs” and “Forth Worth jobs.” In perusing the results, I found @writerjobsdal, an account aimed directly at the type of job I’m looking for. I started to find interesting jobs almost immediately, but my eyelids could bear their burden no longer. I left the search until today, but knowing that I’d set in place useful tools for my search allowed me to sleep soundly.

Feel free to make recommendations of Twitter accounts, or share your own story if and how using online tools helped you get a job. Or, you know, offer me a job in DFW.

I picked up the perennial bestseller (10,00,000 copies!) of What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers on Sunday. The top line of the cover lists this version as the “Hard Times” Edition. Seeing that made me wonder, again, why in the world am I doing this, when so many people have been out of work for so long? It’s a question I dismiss quickly. Despite the inherent fears in jumping into the great abyss of an unknown future (well, it’s all unknown), I know this to be the right thing to do at this point in my life. So, in hopes of a good conclusion to this journey, I’ll document some of this process.

In What Color is Your Parachute, author Richard Bolles lists a few sites for career quizzes. While I’m fairly knowledgeable about who I am, what I can do, and the type of job I’m looking for, I thought I’d give a few of them a try. The very first test, all of twenty-four, very easy to answer questions, pegged me. If you’re looking to be told what a good career path might be for you, try the Princeton Review’s Career Quiz. Here are my results, if you’re interested:

Your Interest Color is BLUE
People with blue Interests like job responsibilities and occupations that involve creative, humanistic, thoughtful, and quiet types of activities. Blue Interests include abstracting, theorizing, designing, writing, reflecting, and originating, which often lead to work in editing, teaching, composing, inventing, mediating, clergy, and writing.

Your usual style is YELLOW
People with yellow styles perform their job responsibilities in a manner that is orderly and planned to meet a known schedule. They prefer to work where things get done with a minimum of interpretation and unexpected change. People with a yellow style tend to be orderly, cautious, structured, loyal, systematic, solitary, methodical, and organized, and usually thrive in a research-oriented, predictable, established, controlled, measurable, orderly environment. You will want to choose a work environment or career path in which your style is welcomed and produces results.

Careers from The Princeton Review Guide To
Your Career linked to “Blue” interest:

Allow me to quote a quote of a quote:

“He was a frail, sickly child, afraid of many things. So he stayed inside his house a lot and read books, mainly adventure stories. One day he was reading a novel by the English author Frederick Marryat. In his autobiography, Roosevelt records what happened:

‘In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.’”

In context (The Art of War for Writers, to be precise), author J.S. Bell is talking about feigning fearlessness in the face of the daunting tasks of living a writing life, to act as if you are one until you become one. Author Steven Pressfield would call this manning your station, day-in, day-out, so that the Muse will find you hard at work and reward you as such.

And while this is helpful and true and beneficial advice, I read more into it.

The warring parts of my soul (some might even say the Jacob hovering above my right shoulder and the Lockeness Smoke Monster hovering over my left) answer the conundrum of feigning fearlessness differently.

Smokey answers: Your bad habits? The things you despise about yourself? The things you always want to change but you never seem to be able to shake them? You’ve been feigning godliness for a long time. Your pretense is not your reality. I know what’s real. You should just give up.

Jacob answers: I know what’s real. I can see behind the facade of your charades. I know your heart, your will. You have, actually, been feigning godliness for a long time, but that makes you just like all the others. And to see that you still try, despite the short hand you’ve been dealt? That you keep pressing on and pressing in and pressing forward impresses me. Don’t forget that. But don’t let it go to your head either.

And I answer: I used to be afraid, and because I was afraid I became numb. When the world changed and I was shocked back into feeling reality, I barely held on. I almost lost my grip, but I kept feigning fearlessness, and now that fearlessness… it’s almost real.

…as copied from a footnote in Brian McLaren‘s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity. The quote isn’t indicative of the book as a whole, thus it’s inclusion in the footnotes, but it resonated with me, and I thought it appropriate to post:

“Bernard of Clairvaux understood what it means to be a friend to oneself. He spoke of four stages in the spiritual life, beginning with learning to love oneself for one’s own sake. This is the infant, nursing at his mother’s breast, ecstatic in the warmth of being held and filled, but unaware of anyone outside his own skin.

Then comes loving God for one’s own sake. This is the child who learns to appreciate his mother, maybe to draw her a picture or gather her a bouquet of flowers, overflowing with love mixed with gratitude for all she dos for him.

Then comes loving God for God’s own sake. This is the adolescent or young adult who begins to see his mother for who she is, not just for what she does for him, and his love grows even deeper.

One wonders how any love could go deeper than this, but Bernard sees yet another dimension to the journey of life: loving oneself for God’s sake. This is the young man who has made a mess of his life and feels knocked down and beaten up, but then thinks of how much his mother loves him, and her love inspires him to not give up, but to get up and give life another go.”