Reflections

 @owenabbott​ 

Apply to a  job, wait (1) day, then call.  Give them your first and last name. Tell them you submitted an application and that you’re very motivated to find [Enter field name] work. Let the conversation lead you wherever it takes. Be very polite. Say” thank you for your time, I’ll be looking forward to hearing back from you.” Rinse, repeat. This is to force them to be looking out for your application. 

 When you get to the interview, shake their hand firmly,  tell them your first and last name.  

Describe your experiences  as “ two years transcription and data entry” if you have a desk job interview and “ [however many years]  costumer service, retail and stock” for your retail jobs.  

Don’t use job “ buzz words” I stg they hear them all day. Say  things like, “ I’m detail oriented and am very good at taking instruction.”  “ I would like to work for a company with integrity and I feel that [ company name] would be a good fit”

When they ask you if you have “reliable transportation” say  YES. don’t tell them what kind of transportation, just say yes. (if you don’t do this, you wont get the job , I’m telling you right now). 

Research the company. Know what they do, why they do it, how OLD the company is. WHERE it was founded, and what kind of position you’re intending to apply for.

When they ask you “ give us a situation where you had to blah blah blah” Make one the fuck up. Make yourself sound good as hell, and like you put your company’s needs slightly above the customer’s needs, but make the customer happy. 

If they ask you about being outgoing, Say you “like to focus on your work so you can concentrate on doing things right” (which buys you out of having to act friendly all the time)

Questions for after the interview:

1.  Does this position offer upward mobility?

2. Do you enjoy working for the company? (if you’re not interviewing for a temp agency who will send you anywhere)

 Then, shake their hand,  Ask them to repeat their name (REMEMBER THIS) say thank you for your time, wish them a nice day and leave. write their name down outside if you have to, just remember the fuck out of it. 

AFTER your interview, send a card directed to the name of the person who interviewed you (I’ll give you them) that says “Thank you for the interview, I appreciate the opportunity. have a great day” This shows  that you have an understanding of professionalism, and will have them thinking of you kindly (or at least remembering you) when they’re shuffling through the choices. 

DO NOT tell them you just moved to the city over the phone.  In person, tell them you just moved to the city. Make it sound like the only reason you need a job is because you moved. Not because you’re desperate. 

__________

 The titles of each section are key words you can use to search for jobs on Snagajob.com  and Simplyhired.

Data Entry:

http://citystaffing.com/job/data-entry-specialistsmailroom-clerk/?utm_source=Indeed&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=Indeed

https://www.roberthalf.com/officeteam/job-search/chicago-il/data-entry-clerks-needed/43517752?codes=IND

http://www.simplyhired.com/job/data-entry-specialists-job/chicago-transit-authority/jepfivkhjk?cid=udsowkxtausyzitcfeecaeuzoxkltmbl

https://jobs-theprivatebank.icims.com/jobs/3435/temporary—data-entry/job?mode=job&iis=SimplyHired&iisn=SimplyHired&utm_source=simplyhired&utm_medium=jobclick&mobile=false&width=792&height=500&bga=true&needsRedirect=false&jan1offset=-360&jun1offset=-300

 Front Desk:

http://localjobs.joblur.com/jobapplication2/?jobid=99957&subaffid=300006&JobType=Food%20/%20Bev%20/%20Hosp&ix=1&c1=99957

https://jobs.ajg.com/job/-/-/109/1256110?apstr=%26src%3DJB-10280

https://pepper.hiretouch.com/job-search/job-details?jobID=32066&job=receptionist

http://accesscommunityhealth.hodesiq.com/jobs/default.aspx?JobID=5203566 (this one is close to the place you rented.)

http://ihg.taleo.net/careersection/all/jobdetail.ftl?job=R113601&lang=en&media_id=24863&src=Indeed&src=JB-10920

https://covalentcareers.com/employer/listing/86450f8517588197c9b04f5068ed4300/detail/?apply=1&ref=indeed&v=30&utm_source=indeed&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=indeed_optical

http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/jobs/jobdetails.aspx?APath=2.21.0.0.0&job_did=JHN0KY6823WBWZX21VM&showNewJDP=yes&IPath=JRKV0F

http://www.simplyhired.com/job/front-desk-receptionist-customer-service-sales-job/rosin-optical-co-inc/qaeoquzgdi?cid=ivdnhijkmxchdanahwfoupazcwisfnxt

http://www.simplyhired.com/job/receptionist-front-desk-job/all-us-jobs/fonj7wmldf?cid=trhyvmfcsgjltxkjxkemyinsjveewfjp

Other jobs you don’t need a degree for that aren’t retail:

Dental hygenist ( yeah, seriously, who knew!) They also make about 40,000 a year)

Stenographer-Court Reporter

Surveyer ( you need a certificate for this, but its something you can get while working a temporary job and doing this on the side. Also, they make like $55,000 a year sooooooo) https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGWEbHost/jobdetails.aspx?jobId=1406428&PartnerId=16023&SiteId=5118&codes=IND

Real Estate Broker

Purchasing agents, except wholesale, retail, and farm products ( basically you arrange to buy large things) they make like 60K

Claims adjuster 

Loan Officer

Subway driver (trains) they make like 60K,

Do you love vultures?

You should.

Here’s why:

1, They are simultaneously the most majestic, and the most f*cking derpy of birbs. Observe -

2. THEY’RE SO FUCKING BADASS. We all know that they eat dead things. Eww, right? Wrong. They’re capable of digesting fucking rabies, cholera, hundreds of strains of bacteria that would straight up kill your ass given the chance. They deserve ALL of the respect, but they don’t get any, because ‘eww they eat dead things’. 

3. THEY ARE FUCKING AMAZING AT WHAT THEY DO - Some of the highest flying birds ever recorded, with amazing eyesight and smell. Vultures are highly specialised - yes, that means they sometimes have bald heads. So what? People are all over sphinx cats and those semi-hairless dogs.

4. If you think they’re ugly, well, look at these precious babs and tell me you still don’t feel anything:

I have more reasons, but, look, I’ll just get straight to the point: 

THEY’RE GOING EXTINCT, AND MORE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.

Populations of some vultures have fallen more than 90% in the last 20 years, and that’s scary as fuck. Reasons for this range from livestock carcasses being contaminated with certain drugs, to poachers killing them off because vultures give them away. But whatever the reasons, they’re dying off fast, and we need to act before it’s too late. We need to help protect them and conserve them as much if not more than some of the ‘cuter’ endangered creatures. 

So what can you do? Here are some useful links if you want to learn more:

http://www.rspb.org.uk/joinandhelp/donations/campaigns/vultures/

http://www.hawk-conservancy.org/Documents/HCT_IVP_leaflet_2013_E_ver.pdf

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/africanvultures

http://www.tusk.org/vulture-conservation-project

http://www.save-vultures.org/

http://www.birdlife.org/europe-and-central-asia/news/international-vulture-awareness-day-%E2%80%93-no-cause-celebration

http://www.vulpro.com/

https://tristatebird.org/adoptavulture/

https://webcamvultures.wordpress.com/adopt-a-vulture/

http://www.wwfpak.org/species/Vulture.php

Please consider helping our seldom appreciated vulture buddies, either by donating, or even just by helping to change their bad reputation!! 

They really are amazing birds ~ thank you for sticking with my long-ass post 

My screenwriting prof.

I felt like a lot of people needed to hear this. Including myself.

And that they’re really against censorship?

And that nearly all libraries have policies that prohibit people from harassing others inside?

And that nearly all libraries have free wifi and desktop computers that erase history when you’re done using them?

And that librarians are totally chill with you hanging out all day? (provided you don’t spill things on the books)

And that libraries often have huge offerings of dvds which you can watch on your laptop in the library?

And that libraries tend to have lots of resources for folks who find themselves in distress?

Hello, cishet white people. I am a fellow cishet white person, and we gotta have a bit of a heart-to-heart. 

Some of you have decided to do that wear-a-safety-pin-to-show-solidarity thing. Thank you for making that decision. I shake your hand and give you a friendly clap on the back. Seriously. When the choices are “show solidarity” or “meh”? You made the right choice. You have shown that your heart is in the right place. Yay!

But here is the thing. It’s not enough for your heart to be in the right place. In the coming weeks, months, and years, it’s going to take deliberate action, not just good intentions. When your friend breaks their leg, you help them, right?  You call an ambulance, or you take them to the hospital, and you help pull them out of immediate danger so they don’t get even more hurt. And then, THEN, once they’re getting medical treatment, then you say, “Get well soon!” or decide to pray for their quick recovery.

If you watch your friend break their leg, and then stand there saying, “Oh no, this is terrible. Let me know if you need anything, okay?? I’m here for you!”… You see what I’m getting at? A good friend says, “Oh shit, oh fuck, you have health insurance, right? Does it cover ambulances or should we try to get you in my car??” 

Our country has broken its leg. 

Well, okay, let’s be honest – the country broke its leg a long time ago. Last week it also got hit by a high-speed orange train. 

And now we come back to the safety pins. You’ve put them on your lapels to designate yourself a safe space. Good start. But, fellow cishet white people, I’m hearing that some of you who have safety pins are standing by and watching while other people get bullied and harrassed. What’s that about, friendo?

I kinda know what it’s about. Privilege blinds us to a lot of what other people go through, and now your eyes are starting to open and you want to help but… you saw something going down and you froze. You didn’t have a mental script for how to help. Your brain went “!!!!!!!!” on five different levels and threw up 404 errors and while you were standing there trying to reboot quick enough to make a decision about oh my god what do I do… the person being harassed looked over, saw your safety pin, saw you standing there doing nothing to help, and felt like you personally had betrayed them.

I think you’ll agree that that’s the exact opposite of what you meant to do.

Fellow cishet white people, I gotta be honest with you: You have to ask yourselves why you’re wearing the pin. Because it’s a responsibility, and some of you just aren’t ready to be shouldering that, just like how we don’t ask someone with zero first-aid training to be on the front lines of an emergency because they’re more likely to hurt than to help. Or they, y’know, freeze up. 

But you want the safety pin, you want to help, you want to be part of the fight! Again, good! GOOD! Yes! Welcome! We want you to want that! But you’re gonna need some training first. So I have a few small suggestions for you: FIRST: Put the safety pin on the inside of your jacket (or the inside of your purse, or in your wallet, or a photograph of it as your cellphone background), somewhere that you’ll see it and touch it often, but where it’s not visible to anyone else. It’s not a sign for anyone else now; you have nothing to be showing off about. It’s a sign for YOU. In the Renaissance, rich folk would carry around these things called prayer nuts: tiny wooden spheres that opened in two halves like a walnut. Inside would be carvings of Biblical scenes of particular significance to the owners, and they’d use them to remind themselves of the sins they were trying to vanquish and the virtues they aspired to. The pin is now your prayer nut. It’s a reminder to you that you have a duty of honor, a social obligation, to be part of the fight and to stand up for people who need help. It is a reminder that you have to try every day to be better. Whenever you see it or touch it, I want you to think, “Did I do enough? Can I be doing more?” It’s for YOU and your betterment, not a sign to anyone else. Not yet. SECOND: You’re concerned, I bet. You feel a little weird about putting it on the inside of your jacket. You wanted something to show that you’re part of the movement. Maybe something to signal that you’re not a threat, that you’re not about to launch into horrible racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic rhetoric, and you thought the pin was a pretty good symbol of that. I’m stiiiiiill gonna ask you to keep the pin as a prayer nut for now. Instead, go out and get yourself some of those lapel buttons for causes you specifically support: the LGBT rainbow buttons, BLM buttons, anti-ICE buttons… Put those on your clothes. Your message of, “I’m on the good guys’ team” is still there, but you’re also not designating yourself as a Person Who Will Instantly Leap to Someone’s Defense. 

THIRD: Seriously, sit down with pen and paper and come up with some things you as an individual can do to help when you see someone being harassed. Come up with scripts and scenarios and rehearse them in your head. I’m not kidding. Half the reason that bystanders are bystanders are because they can’t fucking decide what to do, if anything! So make a decision BEFOREHAND, in a calm, secure, sober environment, and practice it a bit so your brain will be able to cope. You know how trainee pilots do flight simulations of all kinds of different scenarios so they’ll be ready if any of them happen? Same thing. Educate yourself! Read articles, listen to people from marginalized and threatened communities, use what you learn to revisit and modify your mental scripts. Not all of us are social justice warriors. Some of us are social justice clerics, and that’s okay. If you’re not the type to get in someone’s face and scream at them, then there are other ways you can help. Figure out what they are. Some action is better than no action. And maybe after a while when you’ve gotten some practice, you’ll find yourself shouting someone down even though you never thought you would. I’m not requiring you to be a certified superhero by tomorrow. I’m just asking you to figure out your plan of attack so you can be a little more effective. This is going to be a growing experience for you. (Just don’t expect your marginalized friends to give you cookies and pats on the head for your growth. I’m sure they appreciate you and your friendship and solidarity, but again, they’ve got enough on their plates right now, so chill out.)

FOURTH: Execute your mental scripts when you see someone being harassed. Do this until you achieve some kind of minimum level of proficiency and you can count on yourself to be an ACTIVE helper, as in: a helper who TAKES ACTION. 

So according to computer scientists, the election results might have been hacked in 3 important swing states. x x 

So according to computer scientists, the election results might have been hacked in 3 important swing states. x x 

and I started thinking about how a lot of edgy radicals & leftists essentially agree with this but in the opposite direction–as if we need to utterly shun love as a necessary & revitalising force in order to be capable of revolutionary action or self-defense

in the same way that liberals will say “we must love and see the humanity in our oppressors, so that we cannot use violence against them even if we are ourselves the targets of violence” (or–more likely, since these kinds of people aren’t likely to be people who have ever been seriously targeted by violence–”more immediately & materially marginalised people shouldn’t use violence even if they are themselves the targets of violence”), edgy radicals will say “we must be prepared to use violence against our oppressors, and therefore we must hate and demonise them, as if they are somehow essentially, ontologically evil by virtue of their identities.” & I think that both of these approaches are fundamentally misguided

of course we must be prepared to use violence in self-defense against institutions that commit violence against us–but ultimately, the basis of revolution or whatever cannot be hatred and it cannot be the romanticisation of violence for the sake of violence (and again, a lot of these edgelord-y people have probably never been seriously targeted by violence, don’t have bodies that are marked out for violence–they just like the thrill of it all). it has to be love–love for ourselves & each other & for the future that we have to believe is possible–& that will include love for the people who used to be our oppressors. because otherwise what is the point?

to me “love your oppressor” doesn’t mean that you can’t fight back against violence and it doesn’t mean that you can’t hate the people who hate you or else you’re just as bad as they are and it doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry… what it does mean is that you have to have some kind of fundamental respect & empathy for people’s humanity

it means that, rather than just assuming that all white people are evil by some kind of mystical biological necessity and thus The Revolution requires killing them all or something (I’ve seen this suggested, which is… terrifying), you’ve got to try to understand the material and psychological factors that play into white people behaving in the way that they do (such as, applying class analysis to the racism of poor whites–see, the psychological wage of whiteness, etc.). that attempt at understanding is what I mean by “empathy”

and of course this has a necessary practical function in addition to a theoretical and psychological one–because how can you hope to fight a system that works to fragment and divide the people whom it oppresses without understanding & fighting against the reasons for that fragmentation?

Democracy depends on a free and independent press, which is why all tyrants try to squelch it. They use seven techniques that, worryingly, President-elect Donald Trump already employs.

1. Berate the media. Shortly after the election, Trump summoned two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower to berate them for their reporting about him during the election. For twenty minutes he railed at what he called their “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. According to an attendee, “Trump kept saying, ‘we’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong,’” and he called CNN a “network of liars.” He accused NBC of using unflattering pictures of him, demanding to know why they didn’t use “nicer” pictures.

Another person who attended the meeting said Trump “truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”

2. Blacklist critical media. During the campaign, Trump blacklisted news outlets whose coverage he didn’t approve of. In June he pulled The Washington Post’s credentials. “Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,” read a post on Trump’s Facebook page.

After the election Trump agreed to meet with the New York Times and then suddenly cancelled the meeting when he didn’t like the terms, tweeting “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!” (He reversed himself again and met with the Times.) 

3. Turn the public against the media. Trump refers to journalists as “lying,” “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” Referring to the journalists at his rallies, Trump said, “I hate some of these people,” adding (presumably in response to allegations of Vladimir Putin’s treatment of dissident journalists) “but I’d never kill ‘em.“ 

He questions the press’s motives, claiming, for example, that The Washington Post wrote negative things about him because its publisher, Jeffrey Bezos, a founder of Amazon, “thinks I would go after him for antitrust.” When the New York Times wrote that his transition team was in disarray, Trump tweeted that the newspaper was  "just upset that they looked like fools in their coverage of me” during the presidential campaign.

4. Condemn satirical or critical comments. Trump continues to condemn the coverage he’s received from NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” In response to Alex Baldwin’s recent portrayal of him as overwhelmed by the prospect of being president, Trump tweeted that it was a “totally one-sided, biased show – nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?”

When Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor who plays Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” read from the stage a message to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience – expressing fears about the pending Trump administration for the “diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations” on the cast – Trump tweeted that Pence had been “harassed,” and insisted that the cast and producers of the show, “which I hear is highly overrated,” apologize.

5. Threaten the media directly. Trump said he plans to change libel laws in the United States so that he can have an easier time suing news organizations. “One of the things I’m going to do if I win … I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

During the campaign, Trump specifically threatened to sue the Times for libel in response to an article that featured two women accusing him of touching them inappropriately years ago. Trump claimed the allegations were false, and his lawyer demanded that the newspaper retract the story and issue an apology. Trump also threatened legal action after the Times published and wrote about part of his 1995 tax return.

6. Limit media access. Trump hasn’t had a news conference since July. He has blocked the media from traveling with him, or even knowing whom he’s meeting with. His phone call with Vladimir Putin, which occurred shortly after the election, was first reported by the Kremlin.

This is highly unusual. In 2000, President-elect George W. Bush called a press conference three days after the Supreme Court determined the outcome of the election. In 2008, President-elect Obama called one three days after being elected. 

7. Bypass the media and communicate with the public directly. The American public typically learns what Trump thinks through his tweets. Shortly after the election, Trump also released a video message outlining some of the executive actions he plans to take on his first day in office.

Aids say Trump has also expressed interest in continuing to hold the large rallies that became a staple of his candidacy. They say he likes the instant gratification and adulation that the cheering crowds provide.

The word “media” comes from “intermediate” between newsmakers and the public. Responsible media hold the powerful accountable by asking them hard questions and reporting on what they do. Apparently Trump wants to eliminate such intermediaries.

i know i made donation posts not that long ago but my mother passed away a few hours ago and i don’t have much money on me at the moment and I’m currently struggling for the funeral costs and finding a place that doesnt charge me so much so please help donate or signal boost. my mom’s body can only stay at the hospital for two days