Queer Art and Work and Words

Reading – skipping lines, dropping words, mutating forms, skimming – as a kind of poetry

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some rules of alliance born of sound display

Today I went from opening a regular email to clicking to a list of 50 Best LGBTQ books on Oprah Magazine, to a review of Jean Cocteau: A Life, to more work by the reviewer, to a piece on Instagram and looks.

In a separate distraction, a search auto-populated with some past page I must have opened of an i-D article on side-hustles that I’m now fully reading. Looking at quotes like “inactivity as a goal”

floating notes: aspiring artists used to make porn in the 70s.
giving the audience exactly what they want describes porn

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Instructions for instructions

This weekend was a long one. As a part of a ridiculously generous company policy, summer Fridays exist for all employees regardless of seniority.. what does that mean for me, an entry-level Marketing Assistant?

Well, since my hiring on August 5th, 2019, I’ve had every other Friday off. That’s incredible! To make it even more insane, I also took my personal day last Friday, which means for the past three weeks I’ve had work off on Friday. Labor Day was today so I got a four-day weekend at the end of my first month (has it already been that long?) at Hachette.

Since end of June, I’ve been scheduling daily posts for this blog with the consummate litany of tags and categories that I thought would promote the likes and views and follows that I had been seeing earlier this summer. Although the views remained more or less consistent, engagement dropped and I haven’t seen much change except when I post a non-scheduled post.

I won’t pretend that I know how this blogging game works. For now I’ll focus on having the drafted archived posts up for posterity.

Notes on Office Life

cropping out my manager’s name. The office has two stories. I sit on the fourth floor!

Here are some quick notes and updates on my first week as the Consumer Marketing Assistant in Executive Marketing Strategy at Hachette Book Group:

Dress code:

• Fridays people wear jeans and more casual wear. Plain white sneakers and other monotone closed-toe shoes are acceptable. Polos have been spotted!
• notes from my manager: sneakers are ok – untucked shirts are ok – personal style is ok – jeans are ok !!!
• Not ok: no ripped jeans or shorts.
• Plaid is …also ok apparently! 

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Some office life thoughts:

• Tough question: what about the office doesn’t sit right with me….what does work? Basically, as a new hire, what do i think about the office environment? It’s a priority that I feel comfortable. I can’t think of anything, because I like the office so much that I even have a hard time leaving at the end of each day (which I’m low-key trying to play cool). My manager caught me staying past my required hours on Friday and I tried to play it off like I was charging my phone – which I was !
• Professional relationships between supervisors and assistants, assistants and the supervisors of their supervisors, and more: my manager is very friendly. She has brought up the fact that I am young and connected to the youth and more in the know. I don’t know if I know anything about all that. But I definitely have friends who are/do know.
• Office environment: as I sit right next to probably the most beautiful Take Shelf in the entire office, I do get lots of people near my desk all day. I’m also located in front of the printer room and a conference room which are also infrequent sources of noise. Usually people aren’t loudly talking in the office, but it does happen and this can be kind of distracting. 
• As I noted earlier in the week: sometimes people aggregate near the spiral take shelf next to my desk, but that’s okay. I can always move to a common area or just put in headphones.

Final points of note: I can’t believe every time I see the CEO just walking around like a regular ol’ Joe! I wonder if he feels like his position has warded him off from new hires. Would love to say hi to him one day and introduce myself. The amount of times I’ve spotted him my first week (3-4 times?) has been alarming in an office of 450 employees.

Despite my attempts to keep my pile of to-be-reads low, I have already stock-piled several free books digitally and through the online lending library and am inevitably going to collect more. I am also unsure what to do with my two drawers, shelves, and file cabinet. Currently I have a belt, my expired passport from orientation day, and the packets from training awkwardly settled among the empty spaces.

Content blues

Deciding what to post now for the next few days. As of this draft, 08/01- a Thursday night, I haven’t told the current start-up company I’m working with that I’ve accepted a job offer with Hachette Book Group. It begins Monday! I don’t know how and when and even if I should announce this on socials. I updated my closest friend, told a close one vaguely and basically told another close one through my previous blog post delivered to their email but refrained from sharing that post on socials by disconnecting my socials, that I set to automatically share on all blog posts here, from that post. Right now I’m thinking of blog posts surrounding it that I could write. This one was supposed to be about the interview.

Tonight I want to work on the social media for the startup including: building out their August editorial calendar. Creating more assets, completing the rest of the week’s duties like writing social copy for next week. I want to be more proactive with the Instagram as well, with the look and with creating a link in bio.

As for the blog, I guess I’ll start to draft some current content for today and tomorrow. I’m under the impression that Autostraddle is going to read my blog like my supervisor at Hachette did and be the opposite of impressed because the recent backlog is realllly bad.

I want to tell my coworkers at the startup that I’ve accepted the job offer by Friday and provide options for work going forward. I also want to create a blog post about applying to jobs as a full-time job and another on the process of this job with the help of my email inbox timestamps. I also want to make one about what the job entails and about my future anxieties. Eventually I want to write one about budgeting too – all of these have been on my mind since I got the job.