They say you learn something new every day, and today I learned something about me. I learned I am “cold, calculating, sad and mad.” Also “lacking in essential humanity”. Oh, and just plain “weird”.  Can’t forget that one!

Why am I all of these things, I hear you ask? (OK, not really, but let’s pretend.) Because I don’t want to have children. And according to a certain columnist for the Daily Fail Mail (a newspaper I hate with every fibre of my being), this makes me all of the above, and more.

I read Carol Sarler’s piece on Why bosses are right to distrust women who don’t have children this morning (I know, I should know better to read anything in the Mail, but there was a link on Twitter, I clicked…), and spent the next ten minutes or so ranting angrily to anyone who would listen (sorry, Terry and Rubin) about how women like Carol are the reason we’ll never have true equality with men: because as long as women insist on putting so much time and energy into tearing each other down, calling each other names and being holier-than-thou about every little choice other women make, we’ll always just seem like a bunch of cats fighting in a sack. And we will never, ever  be taken seriously.

Here’s the part where I prove my point by tearing Carol Sarler down and being holier-than-thou. But where to start?

How about at the very beginning:

“Much as I like to trumpet the importance of a woman’s right to choose all things at all times, [says Carol] there’s one choice I simply cannot understand: the choice of an otherwise sane and healthy woman not to have children…if she says she hasn’t a shred of maternal feeling in her, moreover, if she says she would prefer to concentrate on her career and that a child would only get in the way of it, then my head might acknowledge her right to do so. But my heart whispers: ‘Lady, you’re weird.”

(more…)

So, taking a holiday when you’re self-employed is pretty tricky. And by that I mean, “I think I understand now why I always get ill as soon as I land“.

Not that taking a holiday is easy when you work for someone else, either, of course, but in every “proper” job I’ve had, there’s always been some poor sod who’s been forced to fill in for me while I’ve been gone, meaning that I would only have to come BACK to total and utter stress, as opposed to going AWAY filled with it, on account of I’ve had to do three weeks worth of work in advance, before I go.

Which is basically where I’m at right now.

We leave for Florida on June 18th (also Terry’s birthday, so whew, thank God I won’t have to find something as good as all those surprises for him, eh? Happy birthday, Terry, I am taking you to Florida! You are helping me pay for it! You’re welcome!) . We’re only gone for two weeks, but I’ll need packing time before I leave, unpacking time when I get back and… well, I’d quite like a few extra days to lie around the house feeling sorry for myself, too. Factor in the inevitable flu (possibly of the swine variety!) and I figure I’ll need three weeks. Which means I have to write three weeks worth of blog posts before I go. (Note: not for this blog, obviously. I will be taking the laptop with me, so I’ll be able to update this one “on the go”. It’ll be like you’re all there with me! Either that or it’ll be like I totally didn’t bother to write anything for a fortnight because I’m lazy. Finding out will be part of the fun!) If I don’t do that, I won’t get paid, and then I’ll have to go to the workhouse, wah!

All of which is a long-winded way of saying sorry for the lack of updates, recently, but I’m buried under a pile of BLOG and I can’t seem to get out.

So, how’s your week?

So, you know the recession? The big, scary one that’s been keeping us all awake at night as we wonder what the future holds, and just how we’re going to pay for all those dresses we keep buying if it all goes badly wrong? THAT recession?

That would be the perfect time to decide to give up your last remaining freelance writing job and strike out on your own instead, wouldn’t it?

Oh. Good. Just checking.

Today I wrote my last ever post for Shoewawa, which, as some of you know, I’ve been editing for Shiny Media for almost two years now, and writing for it for even longer. (The post itself won’t go up until Tuesday, which is the end of the month, but like the Boy Scouts, I like to Be Prepared, so I wrote it today…) Shiny, as I said above,  was my last remaining freelance client. When I first launched The Fashion Police, in 2006, I was still writing for lots of different people. As the site grew, though, and we added Hey-Dollface, I gradually got rid of them one by one (“got rid of” in the sense of stopping writing for them, I mean. There aren’t ex-clients buried under my patio or anything. Well, not many of them…) until Shoewawa was the last one standing.

It’s always been a bit of a balancing act. To start with, obviously, I needed the freelance work to pay the bills, but as my own sites have grown, I’ve been more and more aware that if I want them to continue to grow, I would need to dedicate much more time to them, and that’s time I just haven’t had because it’s all been spent on the freelance stuff. Catch-22.

Now, though, I’ve decided that the time has come to jump off the ledge, basically, and go it alone.  It wasn’t an easy decision to make:  I mean, I’ve been being paid to write about SHOES, for God’s sake, and if there are jobs out there that are better than that, well, I don’t know what they are. I’ve also met some abssolutely amazing people through Shoewawa (Gemma, Erin, Fi and Emma, to name but four), and,well, it’s going to be a bit of a wrench to leave it after all this time.

BUT.

I’m also really excited. You see, I never, ever wanted to have a “job”. I’m at my happiest when I can be my own boss, answer to no one but myself, and just generally make things up as I go along. Now, after an entire lifetime of working for other people, I’m going to be able to do that, and it honestly feels fantastic. I have lots of things planned: all of the sites in the Midas Media network will be moving to WordPress and getting a bit of a face lift, there’ll be various different features being added, and maybe even a new shoe-based project too, because clearly it would be too much to ask to expect me to stop obsessing about shoes.  Oh hell, no. 

I will probably be panicking quite a lot, too. It’s only fair to warn you about that.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to mark the end of my time at Shoewawa in the most fitting way I can think of:  by buying shoes…

I hate Fridays. Hate them. I know all the cool kids hate Mondays, but I reserve my ire for Friday, which is The Day From Hell for me, because, for reasons too complicated and boring to go into here, that’s the day I have to do more work than I do in the rest of the week put together. (Not for much longer, though, of which more later. </cryptic> )

Every Friday, then, I work until my arms ache and my fingers are almost numb.  I’m not generally finished until late at night, and when I finally fall into bed, exhausted, it is the happiest moment of my week, purely because it’s the moment at which I’m furthest away from next Friday.

This Friday was an especially bad ‘un, which meant the Surprise Red was particularly welcome:

A bottle of Amarone, aka “Surprise Red”.

No, I didn’t drink it all.  I did very much enjoy what I did have, though:

cheers!

Oh, and I think someone else enjoyed it, too:

TED! I don’t know. His behaviour’s been really erratic lately. I think he may be having a mid life crisis or something…

Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!

You know that scene in 24 where Jack is interrogating Audrey, and he totally knocks over the table, then grabs her and he’s shouting right into her face and she’s all “No, Jack! Have mercy! Aaaargh!”, but it’s all in vain because you just know that sometime before the top of the hour, the Bad Man With the Syringe is going to come in and torture her? Yeah, that’s kinda what this whole “filing the annual accounts” thing has been like.

I mean, I should make it clear upfront that Terry didn’t actually torture me. But also? He kind of did, in a way, because I? Hate this. HATE. THIS. I hate every penny-counting second of it and there have been so many times this month when I’ve wanted to cower helplessly on the floor, rocking back and forth and shouting, “please, no more! No more, I tell you!” Sometimes, in fact, I just went right ahead and did it. But it’s over. We survived. And next year, I really will be better. No, I really will, I swear.

From this point on, however, there are to be changes, both good and bad.

Good change: I am now being paid a salary! An actual, honest-to-God salary, that will be paid into my bank account every month, for as long as the business account can support it. (Possibly not very long, then).

Bad change: In order to avoid being taxed to the eyeballs, this salary will be the smallest amount it is possible to pay someone without being charged for it. If you were to take the number of hours I work (bearing in mind that being self-employed freaks me out to the point that I feel guilty if I stop for a toilet break) and divide it by the amount of my so-called salary (I’m sensing a theme here), it actually goes into negative figures. Yeah.

Obviously, this is not as bad as it sounds as I can also be paid dividends from the business. (Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about here? Or is it totally obvious that I thought dividends were something you got in Monopoly?) This, however, is frowned upon. By Terry, specifically, who seems to feel that I should have the ability to survive on fresh air month after month. It’s not good, people. It’s terrible being poor, especially when you desperately need new clothes.

In other news, it took me almost 90 minutes to get dressed this morning. I SO need to shop…