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.

Working more...

I got an extra shift this week because someone called out sick. It wasn't that bad, in fact, I may have over dramatized the dissonance at work that I was speaking about. I mean, after all, my perception was responsible for half of it. I can think of another way to look at it all together in which I look at it all as just another thing that I have to deal with like the people who honk their horns on my street at 7 in the morning, or the long wait for the D train. Some things are just a fact of life and we do much better not trying to avoid all those unpleasant things but rather observing them and choosing not to react or to react in a positive manner.

At any rate, I'm learning that I also shouldn't judge someone on their behavior on any given day because I've had my bad days (Monday being one of them) and sometimes I get angry or impatient. In other words, I probably shouldn't take it so personally. Any of it.

This afternoon I took my head shots to that talent agency, a small office in a building on Broadway between Herald and Madison Square. I then took a stroll down Broadway instead of going back to Herald Square and enjoyed the darkening sky and impending thunderstorm as I sat in front of the Flatiron building (which I had no idea I was walking towards until I looked up and saw it). Then I took a walk across the street to Madison Square Park and sat there for a bit. There's a Shake Shack there in the middle of the park and there was a line out to the street for burgers. The burgers there are so good and so cheap, ($3.75 for a regular hamburger) and they're high quality too. The meat is ground fresh daily. I ate at the location by the Natural History museum a few weeks ago with my friend who goes to Columbia. This whole run-in with the original Shake Shack location influenced my decision to get ground sirloin for dinner and make burgers in my cast iron pan (thanks for bringing it up Mom!).

Tonight, I'm going to work on some music as I'm putting up a profile on a page called Guru.com, a site for freelancers to peddle their skills. It looks promising so far. I'm also checking out this site, Going.com, a sort of social networking site for NYC and other metros. It's pretty cool so far as well. But we'll see. Enough for now, here's some photos I snapped in Sunset Park the other night.

Sunset Park at Sunset