The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: career

  • The Lost Art of Reverse Engineering

    Goal first, process second.

  • One of the Guys

    Most of my life, I’ve toiled in male-dominated fields.

  • Having Something to Say

    It occurred to me recently that before you can be a writer, you must first have something to say. You have to have opinions and thoughts and ideas. You have to be good at explaining and/or describing things. You can’t be hesitant to speak your mind. I’ve always had something to say. No doubt about…

  • Finding Your Joy

    Recently, a friend introduced me to this Youtube video of S. White, a Taiwanese street performer. Now I can’t stop watching it. Not only is she a very talented drummer, but I can’t look away from the pure joy she expresses while she does her awesome thing. I can’t help but envy her. She’s 23…

  • Feeling Fraught about Kevin Spacey

    Sex scandals abound these days, it seems. It feels so much worse to me when it’s someone whose work I always admired, like Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, or Woody Allen. I had built these men up to such heights in my mind, I almost take it personally that they knocked themselves off my pedestals in…

  • False Starts

    I remembered something last night that I hadn’t thought of in years. I went to travel agency school! I had recently gotten my Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and my Associates in Sociology, and it was becoming increasingly obvious, to my horror, that I was not going to be able to do…

  • A Crisis You’re Not Even Aware Of

    I just discovered that the last college I attended, Indian River State College, no longer offers the degree I earned there: Dental Laboratory Technology and Management. This is very sad news. It was the last school in Florida to offer that program. Now, if you’re a Floridian and want to study this subject, the closest…

  • What Do You Do?

    Americans sometimes shock people from other countries by asking them what they do for a living. In many places this is considered rude. Here, it’s almost as if you can’t really decide what to think about a person until you know what’s on their resume. In Seattle, I often hesitate to tell people I’m a…

  • #FirstSevenJobs

    I overheard someone talking about a hashtag that was floating around in social media that encouraged people to talk about their first seven jobs. I was immediately intrigued. First of all, what an interesting world we live in now, where it’s a safe bet that most people have had seven jobs. In the past, you…

  • Loving My Thankless Job

    A friend of mine recently pointed out that I have a thankless job. As a bridgetender, I’m always shocked to discover the vast number of people who don’t even know I exist. People tend to assume that all drawbridges are automated. They don’t realize how lucky they are that most aren’t. People can easily die…