Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.   Robert Green Ingersoll

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Chinese whisper

So, anyway, I forgot to lie on my application form for a visa for China and had to write a statement that I was only going there for tourism and not to work. Because it's the last thing China needs, rogue textbook editors running around fixing up copy.

Actually, I could do with the work. If anyone were to ask me to fix up a textbook while I was strolling the streets of Shanghai or Qingdao, I would take them up on it. I sit down at night with columns of figures: on one side, the work I can count on coming in and my current resources, on the other, the outgoings I must meet. It seems a million miles from my carefree, often broke youth. I suppose this is what "growing up" comes down to.

It has taken the shine off my trip a little, knowing that if I didn't go, I would be financially secure for the rest of the year. But uncertainty is, I suppose, part of being a freelance, and so too is being flooded or being parched. I daresay I will score a couple of projects later in the year and you will find me, come November, moaning that I just can't keep up.

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