The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

Greening up my world yet again

I've been trying to re-kickstart my life for the past several months--only this time my life-motor seems to be having a bit more difficult time than usual turning over. I think at least some of this is due to the crappy economy--it's a little harder to revamp the work and the living situations when the regional financial weather makes the choices a lot harder. I confess I'm also finding it just a tiny bit harder turning the physical health habits and mental attitude around--one gets a little older, a little tireder, a little more "oh hell, not again?!?" ... especially in light of the economic weirdnesses.

But I've also had the Fate Goddess hand me a couple of lucky windfalls recently, for which I am incredibly grateful -- one of which includes a new living situation which I will be moving into over the next couple of weeks -- so I want to take advantage of that momentum, and see if I can turn a bunch of other stuff around.

Blogging's been a tool for that kind of self-motivation thing for me in the past, so I went and checked out National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) to see what this month's theme was. And interestingly, it turned out to be "Green." Now, NaBloPoMo allows one to be very liberal in interpreting their themes, and I could already see several interpretations that could fit my current situation.

Green is the color of growth and renewal, and one could definitely say that I am currently in the situation of re-greening my life once again. Green, to be much more literal, is the color of vegetables, and one thing I desperately need to re-green is my whole healthy-eating regimen, which has frankly been in the trash-hopper for so long that I've basically put back on almost all the weight I took off a few years ago.

And a third, pragmatic interpretation of green is ... the color of money. I continue to work at fixing The Job Situation--especially since I am in the process of letting go one job position that is just not working out. So I need at the very least to replace that job, and ideally to acquire a more long-term career solution.

So--green things green things! Every day on this blog for the month of August. Cheerleading the need for more green in my life, on all these levels and probably a bunch more that will occur to me as I go along. Let's hear it for the power of green!

Will blog for food? Will write for money?

As those who have been following my blog know, I have been furiously working on strategies to deal with the job situation and associated financial insecurities. Especially as the standard procedure of simply sending out resumes and networking like crazy has not turned up anything long-term, my strategies have needed to get more creative -- like going back to school to update my computer skills yet again, and buff up the ol' resume.

Or starting to write for Examiner.com to build my portfolio of online writing samples and gain experience with SEO and viral marketing; the actual pay on this gambit is symbolic at best, but it does allow me to claim that I had a paid online writing gig. Plus, God/ess help me, I do love writing about food...

Y'know, a couple of decades ago there was this totally-hot New Age-y type affirmation book called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. I always had my share of doubts concerning that philosophy, knowing that several of the things I loved to do more than anything else in the world (writing, acting, scholarship) had long-established track records of not making money for more than a very lucky few. I wish I could track down the wag who re-coined that slogan as "Do what you love, even if the money doesn't follow" ... I want to say it was someone associated with the Artist's Way movement, but my copy of the book is in a box somewhere and I can't verify it through a Google search.

But in any case, over the past several years I have been trying to come up with various ways to do what I love, either combined or not combined with something I do for money. Let's just say it's not succeeding as planned, which finds me in this situation. So ... back to the drawing board once again.

But in the meantime, I figure there's no harm in putting out to the world at large that, hey, if you like what you see in this blog, and are interested in having me come write or edit for you, or run your blogs and other online viral marketing stuff, I'm available.

New horizons on the verbing-of-nouns front

Alexander Haig may have been a little more famous for his "I'm in charge here!" verbalization, but for word-geeks like me he'll earn a special place in one of the circles of literary purgatory for declaring that "there is no noun that can't be verbed."

Well, the flood of verbed nouns has continued so unceasingly since then that it's easy to miss a few here and there. So I hope I can be forgiven for missing the fact that, somewhere in there, Facebook became a verb. Geez, it hasn't even been a noun all that long!

Mind you, I'm not only a member of Facebook, but I have this little widget (now there's an annoying little word invention right there) that posts a little notice on my Facebook page every time I post to my Typepad blog. So I don't really have a leg to stand on here.

Except for the fact that I'm becoming a curmudgeon in my old age, and curmudgeons reserve the right to be curmudgeonly at anything, at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all. How's that for the gentle art of curmudgeoning? (Hey, do I get extra points for not only verbing it, but gerunding it as well?)