Xander ,'Same Time, Same Place'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
I want to earn a living wage and get out of debt and walk out at the end of every day with at least a scrap of mental energy that I can use for more interesting things, but this isn't my dream job. In the 9-5 responsible grownup sense of the phrase, I'm pretty sure I have no dream jobs at all.
Unless the job is something like Theatrical Artistic Director/Managing Director/whathaveyou, I'm with JZ. Unfortch, the theater jobs I see posted are $20K less than what I'm making now. Cannot afford.
Okay, the second person today has called me "young lady" over the phone. WTF?
Heh, Susan. I'm completely unsurprised that we share a brain on this.
I've been watching the MSCL DVDs and just getting sad at how much time I wasted not following up on things I cared about -- I remember loving the show so much, being so amazed at its novelistic complexity and narrative richness and noting the places each member of the writing staff took the stories and characters, and I actually started working on a spec script to send to Winnie Holzman if they managed to pull off the miracle of a renewal for season 2.
And then, when it was cancelled, instead of reminding myself that it was one show, that Bedford Falls was a going concern with more shows in the works and each of the writers was moving on to new projects that would surely need new writers, I just... dropped it, and forgot about it, and frittered away the next couple of years on stupid shit (and some good shit that I also failed to follow through on, dumbass me).
My total true dream job would absolutely be "member of the writing staff of a Bedford Falls show," and when I look at my long-ago writings I don't see any reason for me not to be doing that right now, except clinical depression and self-sabotage and just a general mid-20s slackery sense that time was limitless and I could fuck around for ages before bearing down professionally. And now I'm a few months off from 40 and trying to find some way to do something more productive than kick my decade-younger self's ass.
Curse you, passage of time! And you, awareness of mortality, you bitch!
George Pelecanos(apparently) spent his twenties getting high and selling appliances.(Sometimes at the very same moment.) This is my very favorite making of a best-seller ever. By which, I mean that it's not really too late unless what you really want is a career as a youthful phenom. And look how that worked for Britney.
My dream job is managing director of a regional theatre. big enough to matter, but not huge enough for unending stress. I can even make decent money doing it, but I'd have to work my way up and I can't afford the pay cut right now. Come on, lottery!
On the whole I have, in many ways, my dream career. There are still plenty of soul sucking days and I do all kinds of stupid shit where I drop the ball and miss the details on things. At times I get down on myself about it, but I try to cut myself a break when I can. The fact is, even with a job you adore, work is work. Sometimes it is very rewarding, sometimes it is just long and arduous and you just want to take a nap. At least, that's my experience with it.
The sparkling red I linked to above is pretty sweet, it tastes like red grape juice with a little bit of alcohol kick. But it's not cloying—I've had a wine from Israel that was so sugary I couldn't get past the first sip.
Sometimes it is very rewarding, sometimes it is just long and arduous and you just want to take a nap.And sometimes you watch a giant Mr. Potato Head doing choreography on the stage in front of you.
self-sabotage and just a general mid-20s slackery sense that time was limitless and I could fuck around for ages before bearing down professionally. And now I'm a few months off from 40 and trying to find some way to do something more productive than kick my decade-younger self's ass.
Except for the bit where I'm not quite as close to 40 (I turned 37 at the beginning of the month), I could've written every. single. word. quoted above.
I absolutely know what I want, and I'm 99% confident I have the raw talent plus determination and willingness to stick with it to get there. I just have the nervous fear that the luck part, the having the right book at the right time in front of the right editor, is never going to happen. Because if it doesn't, all the talent and hard work in the world won't make a damn bit of difference for me.
I know that I'm putting too much of my identity in how the rest of the world perceives me, and that's never a good thing. But I hate that I know I'm a writer and a storyteller to my core, but what the world sees when it looks at me is an admin assistant/operations manager/etc. It feels so wonderful whenever I get to be a writer--to spend time working on my story, researching, critiquing, talking with other writers--and I hate coming down from that writer high to slog away at what pays the bills.
I think it's $2.50 chuck, now, though.
Only on the East Coast.