Things I didn't really think would work

To get caught up on where I am now, I should go back to where I was in February, when I quit my job.

I was miserable, but I had this whole list of things that I had been meaning to look into, where maybe there was a way out. I just never had time to get to them. 

Suddenly, I did.

Part of what allowed me to feel okay about quitting was that I would have my saved vacation pay, my tax refund, and my cashed out 401K. That buffer allowed me to look into some long shots.

For example, I did not think it was likely that I would get a MacArthur Foundation grant, but such a thing could really free me up to accomplish some good.

The process is impenetrable.

The identities of the people who can nominate are hidden. There is no formal application process where you could submit. The right person has to be aware of you, and you have no idea whom the right person is.

https://www.macfound.org/programs/awards/fellows/faq 

We limit our consideration only to individuals who have been nominated by someone from our constantly changing pool of invited external nominators. Applications or unsolicited nominations are not accepted, and any materials sent with unsolicited nominations will not be returned.

Connections are important in a lot of different areas, and they tend to be something I don't have. This was not going to happen. 

I was still glad I looked into it, because it made some other references make sense.

Most of the unrealistic things I looked into were jobs that I was not likely to get. 

Even though I have done other things, the only thing I got called back on was call center work. That was a last resort, but what would be some first resorts?

The most unrealistic of these was advice columnist. I believed that was something that I could both enjoy and do well, but how does one get into that line of work?

The best way would be to go back in time to when I was in school, and write advice columns for the school paper (this includes college, but high school wouldn't hurt). It's not the only way, because if you get some kind of fame somewhere else, or connections in newspaper work, it can still happen, but that one also seemed out of reach.

On the plus side, I read a sampling of current advice columns and the answers mostly seemed to be pretty reasonable and compassionate. It's not a tragedy that I am not doing that. 

Now, "data entry" was not a dream job, but something that I thought I could do and there are some great sounding ads. 

Don't believe the hype. They are mainly call center jobs; that is how you get the data to enter. There are also some where you can fill out marketing surveys for pay, but the "can earn up to" in those ads is doing some pretty heavy lifting, not to mention the amount of junk and frustration that will come with those surveys.

I didn't worry too much about these dead ends; I had more realistic things to try. However, there were to other things that required a little more effort and led to significantly more frustration, and they will get their own post.