sleepover q's: I'm unreasonably curious about how people feel about their current jobs. Do you like your job? Is it something that you want to keep doing in the future? My job right now (clerical civil servant) is tolerable & I want to keep doing it for a long time because I still feel like I'm learning useful things about union organizing and disability access.
I'm also going to waste time at work by finally answering some of my built up asks from the past two weekends, though. Sorry to me from the future if it hurts me. Anyway the answer is: I feel about the same way, I would definitely call my job.... tolerable to good? It's a vast improvement over my prior job on basically every front, namely flexibility, company culture, and... shallow as it is, the ability to communicate a legible and comprehensible job title to people.
I like it in many ways and I think legal writing in some form is the best possible answer I've found to "how do you work an english degree job without subjecting yourself to the horrors of trying to find a Fun english-y job like publishing?" I like thinking through RFE arguments and I like getting little tidbits of various science that people do. I don't like the way that about 20% of my job right now is declaudifying client revisions but even this is fun and interesting in a way and helps me understand ai writing trends in a way that is probably useful for navigating the broader world. I also don't like how shoddy the quality control at my company is from other editors and writers and lawyers, I don't want to be haughty but there are some finalized PDFs I have to use at my job that are absolutely dire.
If the pay was better I could imagine staying at this specific job for the next few years. As it is, the pay is livable but just barely in the DC area and certainly not enough to save for Big Things in any kind of timely manner or pay rent on a non shoebox apartment. So one day I'll have to be brave enough to apply to local law firms that pay better and hope they like me. I think they feasibly could. But that issue aside, I think I do like my job. I'd be a little sad if it was still the main thing I was doing 20 years from now because one day I want to live a life more centered on writing, but there are ways to center writing outside your 9 to 5. My absolute dream job would be teaching writing in any capacity, but there's a lot standing between that and myself.
