ur local gap year

while my mom was pregnant with me, she was delivering chinese food on bike in new orleans. i like to think that the music she heard in the streets made me the way i am now.

To be a good UI/UX designer, you have to understand your users. We are an education product; our users are teachers and students. My background before this job is working with high schoolers, I have basically worked with high schoolers in a leadership capacity since freshman year of college when I just stopped becoming a high schooler myself. So naturally I started becoming invited to calls about school outreach, pilot programs, etc. and because I potentially wanted my work to be closer to education, I said yes.

I was also part-timing with the high school program I worked in throughout college, because the program directors have their own day jobs among other things in their personal lives to keep afloat. More or less, I feel like I was holding the program together, because after I left, they essentially aren't running the program anymore.

Before I left, one of the students in that program approached me about opportunities at my current company, and I essentially (on top of my daily technical work) organized and supervised a project for them to do in my company's lab while also driving the student to and from the lab, which was something I was used to doing in aforementioned program I was part-timing with. One thing led to another and tomorrow I am doing this again, except this time it's about 100 miles round trip, to give them the opportunity to present their work, which for the past week I have lost considerable sleep over due to logistics and responsibilities that I assumed the student understood but apparently they did not.

I am no longer working two jobs but I can't believe that I have somehow managed to still be a part-time teen supervisor/shuttler. And an overwhelming amount of high-stakes deadlines to deal with in the meantime.

I know this is a FRACTION of the mental load that actual moms and teachers have to deal with and I am seriously re-considering any ambition I ever had to work with youth or to be a teacher at all. Maybe if it were my only job, I wouldn't be so hung up about it. For now, well, my manager is texting me why the twelve test environments he created yesterday in our cloud platform aren't working. No, I don't get paid extra for any of this.

Mina:

Re: Frankenstein is an audio drama adaptation of (you guessed it!) Frankenstein, with an award-winning all-trans cast!

Support trans & indie art at igg.me/at/refrank and get some cool perks out of it!

But we have a family sacred vow in our house.

On the weekend everyone gets 1 hour generally right after lunch on both Saturday and Sunday, to do their hobby. It is built into our entire weekend schedule, we plan chores, activities, errands everything around it.

It isn't a lot of time, just an hour, but it is that dedicated close off the world, leave your phone in a different room, moment to just engage in the thing that makes you happy.

Gives you something to look forward to, gives you something that you can plan for and around. And once you make that one hour on Saturday and one hour on Sunday, you'll find a hey I can do 30 minutes on Wednesday night and build that time in.

Also - legit, do your hobby at work. I moved my spinning wheel into my office and one lunch break a week I spin yarn for 35 minutes. I also found fellow cross stitchers and we have lunch and stitch on Thursdays.