Different kinds of work...

Wake up to NPR, Snooze once, turn over, crack spine twice, jump out of bed, throw on work out clothes, grab mp3 player and keys, walk out front door rubbing eyes, two blocks to sunset park and JOG! Come back do crunches and push ups, start day.

If I only I could start every day like this. On a random Monday morning seems a good day to reflect on the routine that I've developed since moving, or rather, I should say, semblance of routine. With my shift hours changing every day, it seems I can hardly call it that.

Though, it is nice to have a series of things in my life that I can expect to happen an almost daily basis, one of them being work. I have so many friends who are still unemployed or only partially employed like myself. Some of them are enjoying themselves to a degree but others are experiencing something ranging from minor depression to severe identity crisis.

Freelance work has a different character to it then anything I've ever known. Being employed full time with benefits is great because once you go through the initial vetting process and start getting along with all of your co workers, you can relax and become, god forbid, complacent. With freelance work, I'm finding, there's no room for complacency. Become complacent and the jobs stop flowing. It's almost like they never really do flow but they just have the illusion of flowing or not flowing because you're having to wade through them, constantly.

As such, I feel in a bit of a weird position working at NY 1 because I can see both sides: how nice it is to not have to think about (at least not as much or as intensely) if you'll work next week or not by being close to my co workers on a daily basis, and also how important it is to never stop looking for other work. On the one hand, boy, would it be nice to not have to think about my hours (or even health insurance) but I can see the complacency running rampant in that place. People just do their jobs because they have to and not because they enjoy doing it. Granted, I've been just as guilty as having a bad day and complaining about it (but honestly it's contagious. It's like you walk into that place sometimes and take a huge lungful of the negativity and soon, before you know it, you're breathing it back out all over the place. [Joelle told me I should use that analogy after I invented it, spur of the moment, during our chat last night]) But anyway, I speak as though I don't enjoy it there. Everyone has their ups and downs and I keep saying I'm determined not to join in the negativity, but on occasion, I do.

But meanwhile, I love the job because the boss is understanding of the freelancers plight and does all he can to get me hours when people call out, etc. And it can be fun. And there are some nice people there.

But then there's the other half of my freelance life, which has been quite meager and I'm pretty sure I'm to blame. I have so many opportunities in front of me, I don't know which one to grab at first. Technicolor finally calls me in for shifts that I can't always work (in fact, the first one I will get to work is at the end of this month). I keep missing out on opportunities for background actor work. I've been underestimating the jobs on guru.com until recently, it occurred to me to under bid for some of them and see if I can compete with the "gurus" up there. But then, I just found a site called Humtoo.com, a virtual marketplace for the exact kind of music I want to be writing and have written. So I'm signing up but with a certain wariness about it all, intellectual property rights being of the utmost importance to me.

I actually got thinking about copyright registration after I got the email from the guy in Arizona wanting to perform my piece. So, I have a lot of online paperwork type stuff to do in the next few days plus I need to finish recording for the film score. I didn't do any work related to that on my last three days off because of all my friends being in town. So I'd better go. Got laundry to do as well.