What do I have? Let's see:
- Peddled sports cards, comic books, and porn.
- Mediocre proofreading of boring-as financial publications.
- Uncreative catalog copywriting on tools and power equipment.
- Data grinding (misleadingly labeled "editing") with unique/proprietary software (read: nontransferable skill).
- Purveyed cheap but expensive furniture and other low quality goods to churlish people with too much money.
- Drafted speeches and communiqués that ultimately got so revised that little of the original was left.
- Contributed infrequently to own blog.
I guess I also have had the opportunity to study two Asian languages for free, but in both cases did not have enough time to dedicate to learning them that I came away with only a rudimentary understanding (one of which is all but forgotten now).
So as far as I can tell, if I go back to try to resume a less mobile lifestyle, my key skills are:
- Can sell stuff, but really only to people who already know they want it.
- Can write stuff that gets trimmed, reworded, or otherwise revised to be entirely dissimilar to the original.
- Can have insufficient time to devote to mastery of skills or regular expression of own thoughts.
Those don't seem to be particularly transferable to anything I think I'd like to do (such as doing work at a job and getting paid money for doing said work). It appears that the best I could hope for is to sell chunks of text that may or may not be my original work to people who have an equally paltry grasp of English as I have of Korean or Chinese but have plenty of money and know they want my hastily and poorly crafted product.
I do have a coin, though, and I'm pretty good at gripping a coin and moving my arm back and forth, so maybe I should put those skills into scratching lottery tickets.
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