I am being Bad Contractor, the person I vowed I would not become, and I am typing while I should be working on my money-per-hour project. Here are the things I always let myself forget when it comes to pure contracting and have to learn all over again: one, the jobs that people contract out are those that no one internal wants to do, and there is usually a reason for such broadly endorsed antipathy. And two, it�s very difficult and taxing to remain focused on workworkwork all day. I�m the only one tasked with slaying this particular beast, so I don�t even have colleagues with whom to chitchat about it, and in this early stage of the contract all the work is of a piece, which means that when I get sick of what I�m working on or feel my attention flag I don�t have the option of switching to something else just for the sake of variety. Like the last lap of the 1600s I used to run at high-school track meets, I have to gut it out. Only sometimes there is no first three laps, and it�s nothing but gutting. Previously I�ve felt like that only for maybe an hour at a time, but I�m in a testy mood already today (of which more anon) and I don�t know how I�m going to make it through today in a state of anything like productivity. When I�ve contracted as a freelancer, I�ve tried to build into the contract the fact that � this is how I see it, so forgive me if I sound defensive � I am not a machine and I cannot promise steady and concentrated effort all day and every day, and I�ve only committed to six hours a day or something like that; hence my intermittent slackness is ratified as part of the contract, at least to me it is, and I�ll "work" the whole day yet have no compunction about messing around online from time to time. Here I didn�t get to negotiate, and it�s eight a day through May. I�m trying to buck-up-little-camper to myself: for example, I can take work home evenings and weekends and make up then for my daytime messing around. Or maybe my conscience in this regard is itself too much of a shiny penny � a long time ago I had a part-time thing going on, something along the general lines of a brainy variety of piecework that one did at home, and I wanted to be Good Contractor then the same way that I do now, so I worked with as steely constant focus as I could muster and the project manager ended up deciding to pay me as if I�d worked a third more hours than I actually had because my work was better and faster than anyone else�s. It sounds like bragging but it�s not � Catharine and I were talking about this just the other day, how good god I�d love to learn how to go easier on myself, I wish I could. Unacceptable and also impossible, says the robot in my head, so severely that I want to take back what I said and apologize for it, for myself, because who am I with the temerity to counter such swift and robotic judgment?

All that said, the project remains an interesting and challenging one (blagh) that will look sexy on my resume and in my portfolio and I am glad to have been chosen as its shepherd and there is another argument to be made that the whole thing is in first gear pending (a) a conference call this afternoon with a consultant who makes $4000 a day; (b) the completion of a few interviews I have to do on Thursday; and even (c) whatever comes out of an all-day workshop scheduled for not this Friday but the one after. It�s certainly the case that after next Friday I will never be lacking for secondary tasks to pick up when the day�s primary one is getting on my nerves. Though I just typed that and realized, Well that is so, but I *want* to be able to send e-mail, I *want* to quit what I�m doing and take the refreshing break of reading the paper for a while. Who knows � I must assume that I will figure something out. And if I can�t, gutting it out for less than three months is not going to kill me, and then if I want to I can take a little break to slack full-time before I go back to temping and to the dismal trough of potential employment. I�ve also been intermittently overwhelmed by second thoughts about my decision to take this job rather than the administrative one that promised a year�s contract and benefits at only a slightly smaller salary and the implicit expectation that I could slide into it like home plate, permanently, at the end of that year. Oh, to type �permanently� and mean it, to have home plate in sight. I try to be optimistic and to have faith in myself as a person who among other things has been judged able to hold her own with a $4000-a-day consultant, but religion is a tall order for empiricists like me, and most days I am deeply skeptical that a ballpark still exists.

By the way, here is something funny.

Steve and I went looking at apartments on Sunday. The number of viewing appointments he can schedule in one day and yet maintain a relatively positive outlook is fewer than I can, which is good to know for the future. Property manager, showing us around: "It�s pretty big for Capitol Hill, isn�t it?" Steve: "It�s pretty ugly for Capitol Hill, isn�t it?" OK, so he would much rather be buying a house and he finds the bacon shack nowhere near as despair inducing as I do. I say, No that�s crazy, I don�t have a job and even the temp market is iffy and my stomach would eat itself from the inside out as I worried about whether each month was the one in which I wouldn�t be able to come up with half of a mortgage payment. He says, No it�s you who are crazy, you need to believe that things will work out and that you�ll find a job soon, after all there is anecdotal evidence that the market is perking up and soon you�ll have that fat IT project to brag about, and besides what about the case of [middle-income friends of his] who bought a house despite his imperfect credit rating and her preference for freelancing and part-timing? I say, Well that is fine for them, because they made the commitment years ago to stay in Seattle, but I don�t feel like I can do that yet and anyway the issue is that I do not want to buy a house if I don�t have a job, what they did is fine for them but what you are suggesting seems to me instinctually wrong. He says, Don�t call it wrong, call it what it is which is a whim on your part, I will obviously go along since here I am apartment-hunting with you, but it�s not my first choice and I�m not going to pretend to be happy about it. For months, for ages, whenever the subject has come up I feel like I�ve howled myself hoarse trying to marshal the facts to my side: his friends bought their house several years ago before the housing boom started and a similar item now would cost maybe a third more; not every mortgage application is deemed worthy of those vaunted interest rates he wants to jump all over and that even if rates went up if I got a job too then the net effect would be at least a wash; the impact of buying something unappealing yet affordable just for the sake of owning property is negative in terms of quality of life so it makes sense to wait. Yeah, I know I said I wasn�t going to write about this stuff anymore. Sorry. But, again while talking to Catharine, a breakthrough: Why must I be right? Why can�t I just shut up and be happy about the going-along-with and, let�s spell it out, about how no matter how vexed Steve is about the situation he apparently doesn�t consider it grounds for dumping me? I�ve been pulling out my hair trying to figure out how to phrase my counterarguments about things like mortgage rates, the effects of the housing boom, and the foolishness of banking on optimism in such a way that they will make sense to him, because to me they already make such perfect sense � nay, they are immovable bulwarks of logic and reasoning � that winning him over to my side must only be a matter of semantics. Right? Right? Howled myself hoarse, I tell you. And what if I stopped. What if I didn�t have to have the whole cake and my name on it too, what if instead of prostrating and flagellating myself before the jury I disconnected that unforgiving robot and before it turned itself back on agreed essentially to settle out of court?

And what if in so doing I could see a way to do the same thing in other arenas too?

Ha ha. Let�s not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we? It�s just something to think about, maybe. And then on Sunday afternoon, the last apartment we saw � this was right after the ugly one, and we almost called to cancel the appointment and go home � was really choice, and we put in an application for it, and if we get it then it could be ours around the first of next month. Views, high ceilings, two bedrooms, eat-in kitchen, a fireplace, hardwood floor in the living room, access to the outdoors for Marcus via a back staircase outside the kitchen door, in the same neighborhood as we are now but a little closer to downtown and Capitol Hill. Oh oh it would be so ideal, I am trying to convince myself that speculation equals punishment, after Casa Rebecca and the bacon shack I feel like I can�t let myself imagine living somewhere so pleasant. And that is enough of that.

Tonight�s the last night of one of the classes I�ve been taking, the ungodly awful one taught by the shrill and animatronic troll with the yellowing collection of five-year-old transparencies. On the next-to-last homework assignment, I don�t remember whether I wrote about this here, I was between an A and an A minus for the class so I spent the better part of a weekend, a sunny weekend no less, doing a tremendous job. I researched, I wrote, I edited, I proofread and double-checked and reconsidered and consulted the sources and finally buffed and polished until my little assignment glowed with scholarship and righteousness. First of all, the instructor didn�t hand back those assignments in class last week even though the next and final one was a more in-depth version of the first one (so, you know, it might have been nice to have had some feedback with which we could have approached the final), though this did not stop her from doing something she called "going over it," an interesting choice of words considering that for us students and our empty desktops there was neither "over" nor "it." I got my grade and comments back from her yesterday morning. Into her decision to give me a 2.6 out of 4 (62 percent), she wrote, had gone such factors as my open flouting of the directions not to change the to-be-edited work into "a very different type of document." But I didn�t! It�s still a Word doc! What�s so avant-garde about a text box? The directions also told us to make it look nice on the page, so couldn�t a rational person conclude that she had some layout leeway? Oh blah, you�re not interested and I am pouting. In any case: reading that and the other things she wrote, some of which I as a sometime professional editor know to be either not correct or a matter of opinion and not many of which were constructive, I felt humiliated and then angry, so I spent about 45 minutes on the final project and then e-mailed it to her, and if I can persuade one of my classmates to grab an extra course evaluation form for me tonight, I�m not going to bother showing up. She was the worst instructor I�ve ever had and that was the worst course I�ve ever taken. I may be re-evaluating whether I want to chance it next semester with the next two in the sequence � clearly their standards for adjunct stuff are lower than my dignity can sustain.

Other things: I like abbreviating "Office of the Secretary of State" OSS. In a falafel place in Pioneer Square last week, I saw the guy who played Mr. Katimsky on "My So-Called Life." Next weekend, to celebrate my first free Saturday since classes started, we�re going to Astoria. Today is the last day applications are being accepted for the Pam job and mine will not be among those collected.