12:12 am - Mon 12.21.2009
The Game Of Life - You Can't Win If You Don't Play

It's taken a couple days, but I'm about back to where I was before this whole "dating" mess began - Lightly bored, depressed, and anxious, wondering what I have in my life other than "acting, and feeling the usual holiday-related existential angst...but functional.

The date was basically an audition, and not only didn't I book the gig - I didn't even get a callback.

Extremely disappointing. And hard not to take it personally.

But as I know from experience, that's the way it goes - I just compiled my audition stats for the past year, and I booked five gigs from 54 auditions, meaning I averaged one booking for every 10.8 auditions.

The game of life, if you're playing it right (If you're playing at "championship level"), is mostly about losing, about trying...and failing. And sometimes it's not much fun, trying and failing - which is why I avoided it for years - but to quote the old Michigan State Lottery ad slogan, "You can't win if you don't play".

And for the record? While I was prepared to give my date a "callback" after Wednesday night, the more I've thought about it, the more I think she wouldn't have booked the gig anyway.

I'm just saying.

Thought #1: Other than "To avoid criminal prosecution", there's no real reason not to "be myself" in here.

(I've thought that on-and-off for awhile now.)

Thought #2: If I could spend my life watching people perform half the time, and perform the other half the time, I think I'd be pretty content with life.

Actually, just weighed myself a couple times, since the first time, I weighed 199 lbs, four lbs over my goal weight (And two lbs over my acceptable " weight range", as "Lifetime Member" and Weight Watchers employee).

I then stripped down, spit out the giant wad of gum I'd been chewing, took off my watch, and went to the bathroom a few times (You can file this under "TMI", but I'm kinda "bound up" tonight), and got to 196 lbs and change.

That's still too much, and I'm not happy that my weight has "crept up" in recent months - Clearly, I need to get "rein myself in" here - but I don't want to go directly from my little "dating" crisis to an "I'm getting fat again" crisis, so we're going to move on...

Two things were particularly noteworthy - I had twenty more auditions than last year (Reversing a downward trend over the past number of years), and the auditions were almost evenly divided between "commercial" and "theatrical" (In the past, it's been about five-to-one in favor of "commercial" auditions) - and I don't know if either noteworthy thing is meaningful, but I like them nevertheless.

Now that my little flirtation with dating and mating is out-of-the-way (At least for now), I'm back to just wanting this year to be over, so I can return to the business of auditioning, and working.

Cause that's what I came out here to do, after all.

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