Love Ya, Hate Ya, Love Ya, Hate Ya...

My husband goes around telling people that writing is my hobby. It is. Well, it was. Now that I write part-time to earn some extra cash, it has become a giant millstone around this rather puny neck. Whoever said they didn't think of their job as work because they loved what they were doing was up to their own neck in mushi.

I love the money, though. There's that, at least.

A couple of years before this, I was surfing write-to-ean websites looking for a tried-and-true-this-is-not-a-scam writing opportunity Last year I found two, and now I am neck deep trying to keep everything afloat: my day job, my family, my household chores, this little sideline.

I would have said before then that I loooved to write. My blog attested to this fact, and I filled pages upon pages of this and that. I wrote my husband's job applications, my supervisor's memos, my colleague's school papers (he's graduated, thank God!), my mother's office correspondence. Now, I am hard pressed to even document my own sons' lives.

But the money comes in, and that makes it ok, right?

I am way way way behind. I have missed several movies I've wanted to see. The downstairs blinds have gone a week without a dusting. I have cheated on my obsessive scrubbing of the toilet bowl. I may have added a couple of millenia to my sleep debt, as well.

Still.

Doing what I believe I do reasonably well has its perks. Apart from the moolah, that is. I may have had to conform the way I write to the client's standards, or ruthlessly edit an article to the barest 200 words (Oh paaaain!....oh agon-neee!), or type at harrassed red-eyed caffeine-loaded speed to meet a deadline. But the research I've been required to do for the pieces I've submitted have been toothpicks to prop up these weary eyelids.

I now know how I can “cheat” U.K. banks from levying bank charges. I am conversant on the properties of several Ayurvedic herbal cures. I will never willingly expose my skn to the sun again for fear of acquiring solar keratoses. Ask me about Medroxyprogesterone, Colorectal cancer, and Oral chelation, or about content management, Peritonitis and online speed dating. I can, in actual fact, hire myself out as a property manager in the state of Illinois. I know everything I need to know, truly. All I need now is a license. Hire me?

*Sigh*

I'm going to check my two email accounts in a while, and I know I will get off on the thrill of the feeling of dread that the presence of writing assignments glaring at me from my inbox gives. Am I making any sense? I love it, but I hate it.

I am a candidate for a bipolar disorder assessment, truly I am.

I have a goal, though: my sons are going to have their long delayed, long overdue kickass birthday party in two months. With a clown. And magic tricks. And fireworks (if Atch will let me). Ha. Send those assignments in, dusty blinds and late blog entries and scummy toilet bowl be damned.