and I don’t mean that sarcastically.
Yesterday, as we were finishing up dinner, I pulled out the iPad to look up children’s book author Brandon Mull, since he’ll be doing a talk and book signing at a library near us tomorrow and my son is a big fan (middle son, not the artist), and then looked at my pageviews (as, yes, I tend to do as part of my iPad-checking routine: facebook, e-mail, twitter, blog pageviews and comments). And there it was: traffic from instapundit.com. And not just any ol’ insta-lanche, either, but this:
AN INTERESTING BLOG: Jane The Actuary.
which, I have to tell you, really, really made my day. The whole family watched the pageviews climb over the course of the evening.
That, and I think I’ve been un-blocked on National Review Online. Either that, or they’ve got a super-secret way of hiding the fact that you’ve been blocked, with comments visible to you, but no one else. But I was looking at the Disqus screen that lets you scroll through comments that you’ve made on various Disqus-using sites, and my prior NRO comments were no longer showing as “removed,” so I made a test-comment on Kay Hymnowitz’s recent article on family leave and that comment still seems to be there, so that’s promising. (Though I never did get a reply to the e-mail I sent them.) And as much as I was trying to adopt my best “sour grapes” attitude, it’s quite frustrating to be excluded from replying to an article, or replying to a comment, and NRO is a pretty good source for opinion on a variety of topics.
But at the same time, it’s performance review time at work, and, simultaneously, engagement survey time, and the latter always gets me in a sour mood. Not that I think they use the engagement survey to determine pay raises, but their philosophy has lately become very focused on using the entire “raise budget” on the top performers (which mostly means, around here, the ones who work the most overtime), with only scraps, at best, for the average among us (that is, those who spend their spare time with parenting, blogging, reading, etc.), regardless of the degree to which we’ve learned new things and contributed to the team results.
Yeah, I blog anonymously. And it’s my impression that this is the norm at many employers these days, so I don’t think that in griping about my employer I’m revealing information that instantly identifies them. But it still has me thinking about where I’m headed career-wise, and blogging-wise, and how I can get the two to intersect — and that, without working full-time or relocating to the East Coast. It seems a bit of a long shot to try to do a Megan McArdle — that is, in the way she was offered her first journalism job based on her asymmetricalinformation blog. And the just-down-the-road Society of Actuaries is hiring a “Retirement Research Actuary” but that demands a lot more technical skills than I’ve got. I’d love to land at someplace like the Center for Retirement Research, but, again, I haven’t quite figured out how to get from here to there, or even if there’s a path at all. (They do have a job opening — think they’d take a part-time telecommuter?)
And I have continually good intentions of going on down to the local Republican organization and seeing what I can do there. But our candidates last year were really lousy. Heck, sometimes I contemplate running for Congress, knowing full well the seat has been gifted to the Democrats by redistricting, just so that the GOP candidate isn’t such an embarrassment as was the case last time.
But in the meantime, a couple years ago, I published an article in a retirement-focused publication, and I’m working on another one now, though it’s proving to be difficult to flesh out my ideas. But we’ll see how it goes.
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