Fear not the ob - STAC - les in your path...

I did a lot of thinking today. Could have had another freak out about how badly this recession is affecting everything. I found out this morning from my contact at Technicolor that they're all being forced to take mandatory vacations and the soonest bid for work they have is June. I've been seriously afraid of doing my budget for the next month, I was afraid of what I might find out. But I just made myself sit down and do it anyway. And now, I have a nice little strategy. Instead of freaking out that I won't be able to pay everything on time without dipping into savings, I decided to look at it in figures: how much I cost, how much I know I will make at the one job and how much more I will need to pay for myself. That third number is the important one because knowing that I can realistically take a look at all my endeavors and figure out which one will make that amount up and focus all my energies on it.

Now, I know that the above is very rudimentary accounting and any idiot who's ever had a rent payment could figure it out but that's not the point. The point is that the third number, instead of being how much I'm short, it's how much I need to make. It's all about perspective. If I stop looking at it as a barrier that's blocking me and start looking at it as an obstacle I can overcome with a little ingenuity, then it becomes much more surmountable. Suddenly, nothing is impossible. Or was that always the case?

Of course, the logistics therein, i.e. actually finding the missing income in the sea of, sorry, let's edit that...small puddle of jobs out there, are a little foggy. But today, I applied for yet another job and Thursday I'm getting my head shots done for free at a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn so that I can start finding casting directors for extra jobs.

Today, I also got a chance to look at the short that I'll be scoring. I met with B. Warzak at Think Coffee on Mercer Street and we plugged up his lap top, with some difficulty in finding an outlet, and watched through, talked instrumentation and timing ideas and generally spotted the picture. He still has some editing to do and almost all of the ambient sound needs to be done but I've got an idea of where I want to go with it. Sometimes when there's no ambient audio, it's hard to think of how the music will fit into the picture. It comes down to certain things sharing frequency ranges and one noise overpowering another. I can still come up with basic thematic material and ideas about where music should go and how it should mesh with the dialogue, whether it should be present at all when there actors have lines, etc.

I met Karishma afterward and ate at our new lunch place: this hole in the wall Chinese place on 38th Street in Manhattan near the corner of 38th and 8th Avenue. $4.50 gets you a Styrofoam plate with rice, two meats and a vegetable. It's extremely substantial and cheap and right next to Karishma's work place. It occurred to me that we're probably pretty brave for eating there for all of the sanitation laws they might be breaking. I left the bathroom with still damp hands, mumbling about lack of soap before using my hand sanitizer (germ juice as I like to call it), all the while thinking about the kitchen employee who had left the bathroom before I used it...hoping that he was able to wash his hands somewhere else. Meh.

At present, I'm eating the rest of Karishma's birthday cake to me. It was a divine chocolate torte that she acquired at Trader Joe's, which is also quickly becoming my go to for cheap drinkable beer among other things (cute cashiers from Charlotte being one of them but never mind that for now). Their cans of "Simpler Times" Lager are $3.99 a six pack. I'll bypass the slightly cheaper Miller Lite and the like for that any day.

I've gotten in touch with two of my coworker's music friends so far. Monday night I'm going to schlep to Queens to check out the LIC bar, where one of his friends books bands, and chat music and musicians with this guy. Bunny, the engineer at work who plays bass, and I might jam next week as well.

Things are looking good. All monetary crises aside.