"Associative Looseness"

Tuesday. Three more days till I leave a job I learned to love for five months. I was apprehensive at first about being an online English tutor for Koreans. It seems that this has become the job trend for the new blood. That is – jobless, newly grad, experience-less job hunters. I don’t belong in that group, heck no! I was comfortable sitting at home with my laptop, my cat, with the television and DVDs; until I craved to see the sun everyday, and see people in live action.

Hence, I applied. Got accepted and five months later, I resigned.

The experience was refreshing, for the first time I was surrounded with people my age or younger. In my previous jobs I was the youngest usually and the people I mingle with were mostly old men in their barongs and suits.

I must say I had a hard time saying goodbye. I was torn between two clashing rocks and there’s no way for me to escape but to drown or fly – I chose to fly. I will miss the people who accepted me for who I am and listened to all my rants about that concept who haunted me listlessly. I chose to break free and admit defeat and insipidness of my actions, and my existence. Who am I kidding? I like the people but I don’t like being taken advantage of. I must therefore assert myself and stand to my rights and say goodbye to a system that is bound to fail (I hope not, for the other employees’ sake). However, only people constitute that system so probably remove those people and the system would run smoothly, eh?

Nonetheless, I will surely miss the good times.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Writing Crisis

It’s been three weeks since my last writing project. A project that usually only takes 3 nights to complete, took me a heavy two weeks to finish. Those two weeks did not necessarily mean that I have been working the whole time. I spent the good half of my working time (that is 1 am to 6am) staring at my laptop and playing beautiful eyes with the fluorescent light.

I didn’t know what was going on with me. I have the energy to write but it seems that inspiration has deserted me. My fingers missed the feeling of stroking the keyboard but as soon as it touches the surface of the laptop, I freeze. Literally, and figuratively-I freeze. As I was suspended in a catatonic position my mind also went blank.

That was the first time I was at a loss for words. My mind was speechless and I am not able to write anything intelligible – not even a simple blog entry. Nada. Zilch. Nunca.

The surprising thing was, I was not scared. I was actually relaxed, even as the days turn into hours before my deadline. Perhaps my mind was wandering somewhere else that I had to go find it and force it to work, just this last time… and I did. Five hours before my deadline I spent an agonizing night finishing up a 25-page thesis proposal. Not my best, I know… but better than nothing, right?

AND…for the first time in a long time. This appears to be my first entry this year, after three months. I am writing again. I am back in the creative realm. Not just in the academic-commercial side of writing. Maybe that’s what's missing in my life. The creative flow - It had abandoned me long ago when I decided I am going to make money from my writings; which I did. So, it left me hung and dry. Until I summed up my courage to rouse it back in.

I first thought that being an online English instructor is a piece of cake since all you have to do is speak in English. Correct your student’s wrong grammars, pronunciations and dictions.

I was not mistaken: D

I applied hoping that I’d get my English skills honed up in preparation for the forthcoming IELTS examination. I could help young Koreans with their English lessons, a little bit of their Math and Science subjects too; so an Online Tutor.

My shift starts at 2pm and ends 11 in the evening. I get 10 minute breaks but literally not applicable since we are required to log in to the system 5 minutes before the class starts. When we say class, my company has this virtual screen classroom where we could teach young Koreans across the world by clicking on colorful icons and underlining everything while chatting non-stop about the lesson. It was fun. It is fun.

Now I’m back to the basics. Learning my had, have, and has; my on, in, and at placements; the correct pronunciations of all words. And speaking very slowly and clearly; our trainer actually said I have a good junior voice. Perfect kindergarten teacher voice; I appear to be a very caring teacher, which is very suitable since I am teaching young Korean (not so young, too) kids :)

This is an amazing experience. Working with a young pool of dedicated English teachers, I, myself is learning through the process. Both in English, and with Life :)

I’ve got a job interview today, for a BLOGGER position. Nice, eh? So I went online to check the company’s profile. It’s an IT offshore company and I don’t really know what they are up to with regards to products and sevices. I was just interested in finding out the job descriptions so I could prepare for the exam and possible questions during interview.

The obvious things: must finish a four year course, proficient in speaking and writing english, grammatically correct, ability to adjust to flexible hours, hardworking, and fast learner and adept in SEO strategies.

OK. What was that again? SEO STRATEGIES?

Now that I don’t know. I searched it online and saw that it’s an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. Too technical?

It’s basically your effectivity in generating income through ads and being ranked number ONE in search engine results such as in google, yahoo, ask.jeeves and alta vista.

I was quite skeptical before about people getting rich through the internet like the google brothers (or was that the yahoo brothers?). How could you possibly get money through putting up a website and then just write and write and write? Quite ignorant, am i?

Little did I know that it has to do with advertising. The same principles that govern the television and radios are the same principals that are behind the money in internet. Advertisers would want to market their products on your website if you get more than 500,000 visitors a month. Now in internet language, they refer to this as clicks. How many clicks you get on your website. And some website really generate to as much as 1 million clicks in less than a month! Or more than that. Amazing, isn’t it?

Now how do you get people to go and visit your website and give you their most elusive clicks? I also researched on that and I’ve come up with some answers which are basically obvious but i’ll say it anyways.

Tell people. Of course tell your friends. Get the word out. Come visit my site.
Advertise. Append your web site address in your email signatures. In your Friendster even. Just everytime you make a transaction append your web address.
Submit your site to search engines – google, yahoo, alta vista, netcape, etc…
Strategically place keywords on your content that would be highlighted and you think that it’s what people are going to search for. Like LOVE, money, or anything as long as you don’t compromise your web content.

For more tips regarding search engine optimization and what really is it aside from my mediocre description. Visit this site. It’s like SEO in a nutshell.

Now, ask me if this is really working. Well, I did place ads on my blog. I signed up for Adsense and it’s really quite doing well! Considering that only few people know about my blog, I generated an income of $0.24 USD in just 4 days. Yeah that is small but the world doesn’t end right there. It’s continuous and so is the internet traffic, and so is me consistently updating my blog, and in time – I’ll get a check all worth my efforts. For just doing what I like. The check is a long shot since I live here in the Philippines but who knows.

So, go and place ads on your website. Also contribute articles on Helium, except that I don’t have a credit card account so I can’t activate my PayPal account, I have 0.10USD there already. I earn points everytime someone clicks on my articles. Nice, right?

The more clicks the more money! Money! Money!

p.s.

please don’t forget to click on the advertisements on your screen. Your donations will go to my fund, the imee cariaga kawawa charity.

Thanks and mabuhay!

Looking for an online job is the same as looking for a real-time job in person. I have probably searched all job engines looking for part-time, internet, writing, blogging, tutorial, english-online instructor, research jobs!

Whew!

I am most keen in applying for writing jobs because I thought that it would only be per article per submission basis. Which would be very comfortable with my schedule since I am going to work in a hospital (very soon!) Also that I love writing and I could go the whole day in front of a computer and just write away with basically anything. The Company where I applied the position of Creative Writing actually invited me for an interview, and when I went to search online the company’s credentials – I discovered it is an outsourcing company that caters to basically anything. It requires graveyard shifts and rotational shifts instead of the flexible hours I am looking for. In short, this is NOT creative writing per se. It is not a part-time deal for it requires 8 hours a day of work. Letch.

Then online english instructors/tutors. One Korean company called, declined the interview twice -- so I guess they figured out I’m not really that interested in teaching koreans how to speak english -- I said I’m a writer not a speaker. I have a little bit of problem with T’s and H’s and S’s. Anyways, not my calling.

So here comes the blogging, writing per article basis jobs. I applied to maybe a dozen but only one replied. I checked the pay per article and it’s

200-300 words = 60p
300-400 words = 75p
400-500 words = 100p
500 above =120p

That’s in Philippine Peso. *sigh. The going rate per article is not really that encouraging.

Then there’s this one company who actually sent me a job order. I was really excited because at last my efforts didn’t go to waste - but then the job order was for an Accounting Expert. I could research on it but I’m not really an accounting expert. My article might be filled with errors and I wouldn’t even know it, how would I know it? Hello?

So I requested the company to send me job orders regarding the topics I am most updated and and interested -- like Healthcare, Medical, Literature, Movies, Politics, Religion, History, People, maybe reviews on techie objects, Cars or Laptops and Cellphones. But not anything with numbers please…

I could be a Physics, Math, Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, Chuvametry tutor but only at the Highschool level. I took Arts in college! Hello?

Anyways, I hope I get another job order.

-- aymi --