Bacon Jobs vs. Bacon Grease Jobs

People who know me in real life are probably sick of me saying, "I work for pennies." But it's the best quip I have to describe the fact that I make very little money. And it is a quip, not a complaint. I knew when I applied to work at my church that I would not be paid the equivalent of what I could make elsewhere for the same work. Everyone knows that. You take a church job like mine because you have a sincere passion for using your gifts to enable your church to better reach out to people who are hurting. You take it to give back to the people who have always been there to support you. You take it because you really can't stand that the church website is done in Microsoft Publisher.

(Side note: the job does have a lot of perks, like an overwhelming amount of grace and friends who come into your office to pray over you when you're having a rough morning and a ridiculous amount of homemade desserts brought in by people from the congregation.)

The other thing I've known from the beginning is that my time at this job would be limited. My mom has been able to work as the church bookkeeper for 15+ years because she is married to my dad, who has been bringing in the real bacon at his job for 30+ years. I don't have a Mr. Skirts, so if I'm going to get out of the house and start pursuing my goals as an independent adult, I need a job that pays in bacon, not bacon grease.

Pursuing the Bacon Job

I had tentatively set in my mind that I would start pursuing a Bacon Job in mid-2012, which is just around the corner. I'd also penciled in a move to San Francisco for the fun of it.¹

In order to make those dreams a reality, there are two really big hurdles I need to jump over.

Hurdle #1: Online Portfolio

After years of fighting it, I've decided that I'd like to pursue web design as a full-time career. If I could do that as a freelancer, awesome, but if I end up working in an office, that's cool, too. I actually think cubicles are adorable.

But I haven't had an online portfolio of my design work (which is mostly print publications now) in a really long time. This hasn't stopped hundreds of people from stopping me and asking me to build them a website or design business cards for them, which just goes to show the power of word-of-mouth testimonials.² Still, I eventually want to be able to have all or most of my work online — as proof that I can sometimes make pretty things, as evidence that I am obsessed with pretty ampersands, and as a means of getting constructive feedback from the design community.

I have a system in place to host and organize all of the content. I simply need to collect that content from all of my various computers, sift through it to find the crème de la crème, upload it, and write up accompanying descriptions for each project.

Deadline for collecting the content: January 10, 2012
Deadline for sifting through the content: January 20, 2012
Deadline for uploading the content: January 31, 2012
Deadline for writing up the accompanying descriptions: February 28, 2012
Deadline for launching online portfolio: February 29, 2012

Hurdle #2: Personal Finances

I am writing this blog post on a $2,000 MacBook Pro, one of the three computers in my possession.

I work for pennies.

. . .

If you haven't already guessed, my personal finances aren't in the best of shape. Things really got out of hand this month as student loans came back to haunt me. I can't realistically expect to knock out $80,000 in student loans before I move out of my parents' house, but I can make those repayments (and payments on a future home) a lot easier by eliminating credit card debt.

This is something a lot of my peers are dealing with right now. I'm so proud to know so many young people who are either in control of their finances or on a really solid path toward getting there. It's not easy with shiny new temptations being released every day, being talked about on Twitter, etc. I found myself looking at iPads and other tablets online before I even knew what I would do with one. What is wrong with me?

"Get out of debt" has been a resolution for too many years in a row, and I'm realizing it's something I can't do on my own. I'm joining forces with Shannyn of frugalbeautiful.com and several other amazing ladies who are committed to being Debt-Free Divas with her. I met Shannyn at the 20SB Summit in August 2011 because I was wearing a TARDIS sweatshirt. At the time, I thought it was entirely unfair that someone so stunningly beautiful could also be a Doctor Who fan and a beauty blogger who had her finances in order. Since then, nothing has changed. It's still entirely unfair.

I'm going to stick with using mint.com to set up my goals and my budgets, since they do a beautiful job of tracking that sort of thing. But first, I need to actually know what I'm going to be spending in 2012, and that's something that Mint can't tell me. I will need to sift through paperwork and emails to make sure I know the full amount due on all of my credit cards and student loans, along with minimum payments and interest rates. I'd like to look into either consolidating my loans or requesting lower payments from the individual lenders (at least until I can afford to pay more). I also need to round up receipts for annual and monthly membership fees and weed out the things I don't need to be paying for right now. (Sorry, Hulu+. It's not you. It's me.)

Deadline for collecting loan and credit card information: January 31, 2012
Deadline for minimizing student loan payments: March 10, 2012
Deadline for collecting recurring fee information: February 13, 2012
Deadline for cancelling unnecessary recurring fees: March 31, 2012
Deadline for getting out of debt entirely: ?
Deadline for setting a deadline for getting out of debt entirely: March 31, 2012

So to Wrap Up (with Bacon)

This is probably the longest thing I've posted to rachelskirts.com in years. But one of my favorite things about blogging, the thing that has kept me writing for a decade now, is that it's a tool for building communities. Shannyn is building a community for people who insist on being fabulous and debt-free. Hannah is building a community for people who want to Stop Being Crap. Pham sees potential communities that don't yet exist on YouTube, and he makes them happen. I don't know what my community is, but I know that I so deeply cherish the friendships I've made here. You've encouraged me to meet so many goals already, and I hope I can do the same for you.

If you've made it this far, I owe you a piece of bacon. If I still owe you a signed piece of bacon from the days of the Bacon Famous podcast, I guess I owe you two pieces of bacon now.

Deadline for giving bacon to everyone who reads this blog post: the day after I get my own TARDIS.

¹ And because I've seen every episode of Full House at least fifty times. ↑
² Or there is a time bubble surrounding my county and keeping it in the Dark Ages, before computers and Photoshop and the internet came into existence. My family is immune to the effects because my dad is a child of the computer gods. ↑

Credit for the photograph of the Golden Gate bridge belongs to Anthony Larson.
Credit for the photograph of the bacon heart belongs to Jim.

I spoonerize words all the time. All. The. Time. Good spoonerisms and bad. In my head. (I worderize spoons all the time. Tall. The Lime. Spoon Gooderisms band ad. Hin my ed.)

I was reading the above quote from Neven Mrgan's blog in the midst of a long week which turned into a long month which is still dragging on toward eternity. Ahem. The whole article got me thinking about a number of things, like the first time I heard the word "spoonerisms" and what a great-looking Tumblr page Neven has and how I should really get around to reading through his archives some day. (I went traipsing through the archives five minutes later.)

But the actual content, the story about how he has been intentionally spoonerizing words for years, has been stuck in my head all these long weeks. I just can't fathom someone who intentionally does what I try so hard not to do.

When I get really stressed or if I find myself surrounded by people who intimidate me or somehow make me nervous, I leak spoonerisms. They don't stay in my head for my own amusement. They spill out in awkward gushes in the middle of conversations, so my tongue tries to do a U-turn, and hi, is Rachel channeling demons? Maybe we should take our punch and cookies elsewhere.

It's one of the many things I had hoped to outgrow after childhood, but here I am at 26 and still unable to match syllables together in the right order. And even if I can get the words right, my brain starts jumbling up colloquialisms until I sound like a foreigner trying to repeat jokes I heard on informercials. For example, "ruffled her feathers" and "got her undies in a bunch" join forces to become "ruffle her undies" or "got her feathers in a bunch."

The worst part of it is that people just nod along with what I'm saying, the only hint that they caught my mistake being the glimmer of pity in the corner of their eye. Sometimes, it takes me days to realize what I've said, and I then get an instant replay of the pity and the glimmering and the silent nodding that I should have known was for me.

Anyway, I guess this is just one giant warning to the people who will meet me at VidCon and other shindigs in 2012. I'll try to wear a name tag, but you can also just wait 'til someone says, "Oh, you know what they say! 'A fly in the hand is worth two thousand words!'"

Sigh.

Best nickname given: POOPKLOUT McGOOG
Best nickname received: Burrito
Best Twitter name squatted: @Catladriel

Best store: Sephora has all of my money now.
Best purchase: Plane tickets to and from Longview, TX, so I could see a lot of my favorite people at once
Best worst purchase: MacBook Pro

Best song that isn't actually a song: "Every Day I'm Tumblrin'"
Best album that I'm surprised to own: Watch the Throne
Best concert: Dave Brubeck and sons, performing at Ravinia

Best TV shows: Doctor Who and The Sing-Off
Best movies: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which came back to theaters this summer!
Best reality TV show character: That Irish kid who tied as the winner of The Glee Project

Best video game played: World of Warcraft
Best video games watched: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 & 2
Best video game for Lord of the Rings references: Dragon Age
Best worst iPhone app: The "Talking Gina" app provided two whole days of laughter when my cousins and I first bought it. You wind up playing patty-cake with a giraffe's face, so you should maybe give it a whirl.

Best gift received as a surprise: I got a lot of really great things in the mail this year, but the TARDIS salt and pepper shakers from Chris are really sort of the best things in the world. But I also got the Lord of the Rings PEZ set that I've been wanting (from Sexy Beast! aiee!), so basically don't ever let me complain about anything ever again.
Best gift received on my birthday: The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-ray (extended edition). Duh. Thanks, Adam.
Best gift received at Christmas: I'm strangely obsessed with my new Thermos. It keeps coffee hot for five hours! It takes me roughly four hours to remember that I poured myself some coffee, so this is neat.

Best shower idea: Mad Libs Monday
Best worst shower experience: Getting stuck in Phampants' bathroom while getting ready for the second day of the 20SB Summit. (Nico did the same exact thing twenty minutes later.)

Best meme: Steven Moffat killing Rory
Best meme that never really caught on: Tiger Thursday
Best fashion trend: Bow ties

Best beverage: Guayaki Yerba Mate cans, Revel Berry flavor (thanks, iJustine)
Best meal: Pizza as a vegetable

Best book that I haven't actually read yet: Yotsuba&!, Volume 10
Best punctuation marks: Semi-colon, ampersand, and em dash

Best word I finally stopped saying: "Umm."
Best word that made me laugh myself breathless for thirty minutes: "Tadaaaaaa!"
Best sentence heard on the radio: "It's a big cluckin' deal!"

Best list ended abruptly: This one