11:29 am - 05.06.2008
Now Hiring: Professional Masturbators

Mon 5/5/08 (10:21 a.m.)

Well, in happy news, Jane is a grandmother - again.

Nate - her oldest son - and his wife Katrina had an 8 lb 4 oz girl, delivered by c-section last night.

(Supposedly, the new arrival arrived fifteen days early, but I think someone must have been a little �off� in their calculations.)

They haven�t picked a name yet, but I guess Jane�s floated �Leah Katrina�, which I think is very nice - it has a good �flow�.

(I was less impressed with �Sunday�. Though if you like distinctive names - I don�t, particularly - it does have that; I can think of only two other women, one real and one fictional, whose names are days of the week - �Tuesday� Weld and �Wednesday� Addams.)

This happy news actually makes me feel a touch melancholy (Cause everything is ultimately about me, after all). You know, �passage of time� stuff, thinking about what�s not going to happen in my own life, wishing I could be at least a small part of �Leah Katrina/Sunday�s� life (If I were still in Lansing, I might get to see her sometimes while she was at "Grandma Jane's" house), that sort of crap.

But anyway...

It didn�t feel like the best start to the week. But getting another check for the Comcast promos, a bigger check than the one I received last month, did a great deal to �ease the pain�.

(While I really need to be generating new acting income - and it would be nice if my AT&T spot would start running sometime this decade - it�s cool to still be reaping rewards from last year�s success; even running on fumes at this point, so far this year, my income from acting is still outstripping what I make at ArcLight.)

I didn�t go into my work week - my six-day work week - feeling terribly happy about ArcLight, or about my working life in general.

And I still don�t understand why I only have one day off this week, while other people - people who want/need the hours more than I do - have two or three days off (On �Jim�s Scale of Unhappiness�, I was ping-ponging between �furious� and �miserable� over the situation).

But a few nice things happened (I kinda/sorta introduced Jon Favreau for the sold-out midnight showing of Iron Man at The Dome on Thursday), and I caught a few breaks (On Saturday I had a Dome box office shift, which is maybe the easiest shift to have at ArcLight next to Phone Operator. And yesterday, I managed to get out of doing regular Box Office for most of my shift), and that did a lot to mitigate my displeasure.

But while I might have had a few relatively nice days at work this past week, that doesn�t mean I still don�t want out, because the overall "arc" of this story is that I�m wasting my life at shit jobs like ArcLight (And besides that, places like ArcLight have a way of making it clear when it�s time to start looking for the exits. And with the recent turn of events, it feels like that time has come).

Thinking about my non-acting work history, I�ve realized how profoundly �off� I�ve been in my thinking; I�ve always taken jobs based on this logic - �I like ____ (hamburgers, books, movies), so I might enjoy working at _______ (McDonalds, a bookstore, a movie theater)�.

My logic should have been �I like to _____ (read, write, speak/perform in front of people)�, so I might like to ______ (Do something involving what I like to do), and not just work making/selling a product I like to consume�.

But I understand why I went down what has clearly been a wrong path in my working life.

It was much easier to say, for example,"I like books, so now I will work in a bookstore" than to say "I like to read, so now I will do...something...that involves a lot of reading. Whatever that might be...".

(That's been a problem in general: Get me past acting, and I'm hard-pressed to figure out how the other things I like to do might translate into money - For example, I don't think many companies are looking for "professional masturbators".)

There are actually a number of reasons I�m in the position I�m in (a smart, capable, soon-to-be-47-year-old-man still doing the type of job he should have outgrown 25 years ago), ranging from "lack of guidance/direction" (When I was younger), to "fear of getting stuck" (If I had a non-acting job I could "live with", I was afraid I'd end up...living with it, and quit trying to be an actor. Which, sadly, is exactly what happened anyway, for twenty years), to low self-esteem, to now, amongst other things, being stymied by "practical considerations" (I ask myself, "What can I do, right now, that would be fulfilling, that would pay decently and provide decent benefits..." - it may sound crazy, but I think my "straight job", whatever it is, should actually cover my bills - "...that would leave me with enough time and energy to pursue acting?". And I come up with a big nothing).

It may be stupid to hope/expect, in my situation, a "straight job" to be a satisfying, well-paying proposition (I could actually live with just "satisfying", if acting would hold up the "well-paying" side).

But that's what I want. Cause I can't go through the rest of my life working shit jobs, waiting for the day my acting ship will come in (Of course, I hope my "acting ship" will come in in the next few days...but I know I can't count on that).

And now that I know what I want, and I know I should be thinking "What do I like to do?" and not "What do I like to consume?" when considering employment, the question becomes, "How do I use this 'knowledge' to change my reality?".

How indeed...

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