Recognizable conscience

Over Xmas I told Ricky that I sometimes blog things that he says, and he likes this. Just now, he asked specifically that I post this, recited to me over the phone:

Once a captain, once an officer. Once a recognizable conscience, always a captain.

This is bouncing around in his brain after he listened to an audiobook about naval officers. I really don't know what he means by it.

The phrase "recognizable conscience" has been a major point of obsession with him for a couple of years, and he's been struggling to define it verbally for others' benefit. He knows what it means but can never put it into words. When he tries he inevitably gets lost in a labyrinth of half-constructed metaphors, one fitted to the next. People who know this habit tell him that it's cool, he can try again later, and he'll say OK.

Br. Hamilton's example

of what not to write for a high school assignment of writing a poem addressing world hunger:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You're hungry
While I chew, chew, chew

Empowerment

taskboy3000 just gave me an impromptu IM-based empowerment lecture, from one independent software contractor to another. Some of you tried to knock some sense into me when I first stepped into this, but I had thought since then that I'd been handling myself correctly, choosing to ignore the fact that I've been barely able to make ends meet despite an hourly rate that still looks really good on paper.

The problem - so goes Joe's argument - is that I have not embraced my contractorliness, instead treating myself as an employee of my customer. This isn't just a mental shift, this has had real consequences seen most obviously in how I've been billing. Having someone suggest this to me in conversation gives me pause and makes me feel a little chumpy.

The correct course of action here is for me to sit down and decide how I want to play the money game, long-term. I can't disagree with this and now that I write it out it seems really obvious. I've been working like I always have, when I was salaried, putting in however long I felt like, just with the additional step of noting it on timesheets and then stamping those onto invoices. And the way I've been doing it, this results in barely enough money to meet rent.

I am wicked smart. Even if it takes me three months to see the obvious, once I do, I can figure out what to do next. I also have many excellent and smart and experienced friends to call on. This will be interesting.

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As much as I hate tying things to the calendar, the new year has already proven full of auspiciously life-reboot-ish events. I find myself only setting up more, all along the lines of the four major pillars I defined in an earlier post. My world is changing so abruptly that I'm experiencing a kind of background nausea from staying balanced through it. It's OK; I'll take it. It's good.