Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been unemployed since the fourth of July weekend. I made a decision to take at least a month off to figure out what I wanted to do. The last time I had a stretch of unassigned time like that, it was the summer before my sophomore year of high school.

At the beginning of August, I began perusing the job openings unenthusiastically. I’ve written a few job descriptions in my time, but this was the first time I realized how dire and not-fun all of them sound.

“Must be able to multi-task and prioritize in a busy environment. Should be proficient in MS Office programs, Quark, Peachtree, and Photoshop. Marketing experience preferred. $30K to start + benefits.”

One, who know all that stuff? Ok, me, but not to the point where I can be on your admin team, your design team, and your accounting team. Which leads me to point two—certainly not for that amount of money. And three—the write-up basically says, “be willing to kill yourself for our benefit.”

I haven’t looked for a job in a while, but they all practically read like that. It’s depressing.

The position I left operated that way. The company is filled with great people, but I don’t think there are many entrepeneurial bosses out there who understand that if a top-notch employee goes all out to help the company become successful, he/she doesn’t end up with a multi-million dollar company and a prestigious reputation in the industry. The worker doesn’t even get a guaranteed future nowadays.

That’s when I decided, if I’m going to kill myself, I should do it for my own benefit. I’m not naive. I know that the self-employed and those who run their own businesses work harder than the average person.

Hard work doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve been doing it my whole life. But if I do what I do through my own company, perhaps I wouldn’t feel like my work is pointless—that I just need to not get fired and to get that next paycheck.

So I’m in the process of building my infrastructure. I don’t know how things are going to turn out yet, but this feels right. It’s certainly not as depressing as those job ads.

Tags: Life, Starting a Business by Ms. SP
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Top Gear from the BBC It’s not a surprise that a British accent and a British sensibility can improve almost anything. But since when do I care about high-performance automobiles? Truthfully, I don’t.

But these guys do. And enthusiasm is even more ingratiating than a British accent. I love watching geeks and nerds dork out about their passions.

Besides, they race cars against fighter planes and roller skaters wearing jet packs. Plus they have a mysterious masked test driver named “the Stig.” Who doesn’t want to see that?

Wonder Pets from Nick Jr. The show is made for preschoolers, but I absolutely adore it. It’s full of charm and laugh-out loud humor.

Three preschool classroom pets—a guinea pig, a duckling, and a turtle—become superheroes when the children leave. Animals from around the world call on them for help.

The kicker though, the magic, is that they sing almost everything. It’s a moralistic and educational adventure opera for kids. Glorious.

The boyfriend introduced this show to me. From the very first Wagnerian notes of “The phone. The phone is ringing,” I knew this was a winner.

What Not to Wear from TLC It’s along the same vein as Top Gear. Who would have thought that I would care about clothes? Although at the heart, I still don’t care that much. The difference is—this show is not so much about fashion as it is about clothes.

Stacy and Clinton, the two experts, don’t teach people how to be fashionable. They teach people how to find and wear the right clothes.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but I have learned and am applying a lot from this show. It’s entertaining and lively, but at its base, it seeks to teach. That’s what makes it watchable show after show, year after year.

Tags: TV by Ms. SP
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The label “The Clone Wars” has always confused me. Victors get to name wars so “The Clone Wars” makes it sound like the Republic is fighting clones. Instead, they are fighting with cloned soldiers, which makes the name of the war non-standard and in my opinion, really dumb. That’s just one of the reasons why I can’t keep this early Star Wars universe history straight.

The movie turned out to be better than I expected though. There are no major gaffs, but there are many things they could have done better.

Job one would have been to speed up the pacing. The story needed editing, and as a general rule, once you hit the climax, the rush to the end of the movie should be headlong and breakneck. The talk-fight-talk pattern may work for video games, but in this movie, it just made everything drag.

That would be my basic critique of this movie—It felt like a story that was written for a video game. The mission is strong. The political and military strategies are surprisingly sophisticated and coherent. But after every fight sequence, there’s a lot of talking that sets up what we’ve just learned and what still needs to happen.

Look-wise, the main detractions are the characters. A lot of the fighting machines looked really cool and were well designed. The landscapes and cityscapes are passable. But the characters, especially the human ones, looked wooden and strangely carved.

Still, there is a fair bit of humor in it. And it is Star Wars. So I did not mind buying my ticket. I’ll probably go see the next one too.

Tags: Movies by Ms. SP
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