Friday Five

[ornoth]

There's a lot of inane stuff on LJ, but I think I've gradually come to think of the Friday Five as something marginally useful. It's weekly, which is a good frequency, and its questions do give you some degree of insight into the person who is answering. So I think I'm gonna start doing them myself.

Now, I can hear the jaws clanging off the floor, and the now-jawless people trying to articulate "But I thought this journal was just for yourself!?!"

Well, it is. But obviously some folks do read this, and FF would be a good way of sharing. But moreover, it's also a way for me, sometime in the unspecified future, to get an idea of what life was like at the time of writing. I guess it's another way to record / infuse this journal with more of my personality than you get from the typical-but-infrequent rant...

So let's see how this thing works:

What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not?

I am currently unemployed. In a sense, it's what I chose, in that I was planning on taking a three-month unpaid leave of absence from work all summer anyways; now, with a good severence after seven years at the firm, it's sort of like taking a paid leave of absence! But as far as occupations go, I'm a Web User Experience Designer, which includes everything from user research to information architecture to visual design to HTML to database implementer; basically, I do it all, but right now I'm focusing on bolstering my graphic design skills.
 

If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be?

That's difficult. I love the Web work I do, and that'd be hard to trade in. I also aspire to be a novelist, although most of my writing is short stories. I also think it'd be cool if I could work full-time on the e-zine I publish; its mission is establishing a collaborative and supportive environment that brings aspiring writers together in the interest of helping them improve their craft. And I would also think that photography would also be a really wonderful career. I never would have anticipated it, but there's a strong theme of creativity there, isn't there?
 

What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices?

My father... started as a jeweler, then became an advocate for local businesses working in various chambers of commerce, then became executive VP at a firm that did lobbying at the state level for small businesses. My mother was a nurse, then head nurse at a hospital, then a specialist for a urologist practice. Those have had no influence on my own career.
 

Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family?

No. I've chosen not to have a family (which sort of includes all relatives, not just spouse and offspring), so that it doesn't interfere with my career and my other pursuits (such as my writing and magazine, mentioned above).
 

In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why?

I think photography is likely to be one of the easiest. While there is undoubtedly both an art and a skill to it, photography seems very forgiving, and I suspect it usually doesn't require quite as much effort as some of the other creative arts. Hardest jobs would include ones with a great deal of physical risk or stress, and ones which involve much interaction with the public. In his college days, my brother used to spend his summers painting the insides of the huge oil storage tanks you see near seaports. I can't imagine that was much fun, between the fumes and the oppressive sun beating down into those things...

That's it. Doesn't feel very exciting, but we'll see how it goes.