I started studying to become a Scopist

10 Jan, 2025

Things I got in order to prep for this:

• Bought the grammar book referenced as well as the workbook attached to it for extra practice. I then bothered to take photos of every single page so that I have a digital copy I can read on my computer. And if I spill water all over my desk again I won't lose something I paid $150 for.¹
• Figured out my printer situation. My sister hates buying new cartridges because they're a scam by printer companies so instead she drill a hole in the cartridge and puts new black ink in. Well, the problem is that it never works quite as well and the printing usually has streaks. I tried doing the printer cleaning function but it didn't really help. Setting the print quality to high did work though, in that each pixel column prints at the same opacity rather than it being a roulette, but for some reason it is all looking gray instead of black now. Oh well, at least the words are whole.
• Emailed the course instructor my paperwork which is very obviously "I swear I will not share this material with people who haven't paid." I don't even know who would be interested in looking at this stuff, anyway.

I bought the Fundamentals section a few years ago before I got sidetracked by a job that paid under minimum wage but was still the only job I've actually held due to mental issues.² Well now after moping for an entire year from quitting that job + a surgery gone awry, I'm back with the full course.

I'm trying to pace myself more with everything now and to just go slow to lower my stress and to stop triggering debilitating migraines and general teeth clenching when I fall asleep. This new attempt at a different mindset is something I have to thank "The Healthy Compulsive Project" for.

In terms of pacing, I'm thinking about spending 2 years here. Ambitious people can do it in 6 months, but I'm not ambitious. I just want to be doing something that counts to normal people who don't respect mental differences + have a plan B if my to-be-doctor project partner dies or something and I won't be able to just live off their paycheck as a full-time comic artist.

The good thing is that the idea of learning about how law works is semi-interesting to me. Not interesting enough to try to study law since the actual rules and whatnot seem boring as hell, but I'm interested in the people part and how law affects their lives. Something I like doing is working with transcripts and reading what people have to say / how they say it, so this taps into that and maybe I will feel very smart once I learn how to read stenography.

While my previous job was definitely exploitative and its low pay means that my dad didn't even regard it as a "real job" -- even though it was out of my mental comfort zone enough that the stress led me to develop terrible migraines for the first time in my life -- it did at least involve transcripts. Ultimately, the most interesting job to me would be to code transcripts for social research, which I sort of helped with in college. But that's not accessible to me when I can't talk and market myself very well and want to go hide in a remote hole. Doing transcription / quality checking for entertainment transcripts in my past job was somewhat interesting but also made me feel like I was somewhat wasting my time. Like everything was necessary for the people putting together the shows, but how badly does reality TV actually need to exist? I'd much rather read about how people's lives are going rather than how they script the interview segments they put in "reality" TV. (Though getting to see behind the curtain was interesting, once you get a sense of how they're all done there's not much more to learn there.) Not to mention that the "quality checking" was pretty atrocious in general because they only really need 70% of a functioning script when 95% of everything will just get thrown away on the cutting floor anyway. It really bothered my organization brain to not have nice transcripts though. So at least now I'll have an excuse to go through an entire transcript instead of like 2% of it and make sure it all looks good. Ahh.

So anyway. I studied a bit today, maybe like an hour or so. I need to work through all the Fundamentals again and then get to the actual course. I'm reading everything 3 times over; once in the browser, once in downloaded PDF form where I highlight stuff and save it to my computer so my search can find keywords, and then I print it out and highlight again on paper and put it in my binder. And I'm adding little section and page numbers to the upper right-hand corners that are color-coded, because I might as well make this fun. My binder is an Ohio State University one because my dad used to work there decades ago. It's nice to put something more academic in it since it totally doesn't suit the vibe of cute stationery and letters.

The nice thing about being able to study at truly your own pace is that you can take some time to think about how to make things fun rather than just efficient. I'm actually blogging this all instead of reading more material because I want to increase the "fun" factor of it anyway. I used to cram so much stuff for school but it would be nice if I could internalize things because they're actually interesting to me. Reading things over 3 times seems like a good place to start, at any rate.

Still up for debate on whether I need to make myself an Anki deck like I did with school stuff for terms. Need to get farther in the course to see how many things need to be brute-forced by that method.

I think I'll make some sort of excel sheet where I can color in little blocks whenever I finish a lesson also so I can see myself inching towards the goal.

Footnotes

#life-logging #studying