I have probably mentioned that I love my job. I do! I like working from home, I like being my own boss, I like having a schedule that waxes and wanes. For a while I wanted to focus more on medical editing and stop doing academic editing altogether, and I wrote to I think every teaching hospital in Europe and got exactly two responses and that made me sad. But then I started doing some more academic editing that I enjoyed and I am grateful for the variety. Like, I am really interested in neurology and Alzheimer's disease and almost anything involving parts of the brain that sound funny, but I also like getting to do the history of puppetry in Central Europe.
I also really like doing voice work — dubbing and audiobooks. I remember a time when I did not love the sound of my own voice but uh I got over it. It does not sound as good as it does in my head so you'll never get to hear it as beautifully as I do, but I no longer recoil in horror when I hear a recording of myself. I sound pretty good.
It's therefore kind of sad for me that the last month has been frustrating. I assume part of it is COVID burnout. It's also that usually I just work and do what's asked of me and take joy in finding typos and fixing them, and in finding more significant mistakes and fixing them, and in taking a sentence and massaging it into a thing of beauty, and in snipping off the fat, and in reading something incredibly difficult and then reading it again and understanding it. I like doing what I do so much that I don't need praise, so when I do get it, it's like: ahhhh, nice. But the project I've been working on for the last month, in addition to being full of grammar/ spelling/ syntax/ style errors, which is fine, that's what they pay me for… it just seems pointless. And sometimes that happens; sometimes the work I do feels like the author wasn't interested at all. It's hard, but I get through it; work isn't fun all the time. But this is nearing 400 pages and the amount of nnnnnaaargggh is taking me to dark places in terms of questioning my own self worth, why I accept things I don't want, can I do this for seven more years, etc etc.
More humorously, I was asked to do the voice over for an ad that the client wanted to sound "like Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings" movie. Which seemed odd, as it was an ad for a tech thing, but you know people can be weird so ok. So I did that, and then the client was like "Ooh, that's lovely, but it sounds too much like a fairy tale. Can you do it like that, but less so?" and we went a few rounds before we landed on a crisp, businesslike voice that was about the furthest from Galadriel as whatever the other end of Cate Blanchett's spectrum is, but without the Australian accent. This would have been frustrating except that the engineer mixing the tape was more perplexed than I was so it was merely funny and in the end I got paid which is the happy ending for all work stories, isn't it.
We've passed the anniversary of the first lockdown, but since we had the "eye of the pandemic" (like the eye of the storm, not like the eye of Sauron) all summer here I can't really say it's been a year of my life sucked away or anything. I'm working hard now so that if there's a chance to travel safely I can jump at it with no regrets. I might maybe take a weekend off soon though, cause nobody loves me when I'm whining, especially not when I actually have it pretty good. I know.
tuckova 
Leave a comment