Apartment hunting...a little early...

Next on the roster is the impending doom and/or excitement of apartment hunting in New York City. Again. It's hard to believe we're approaching that. Can I just take a second to gush about my accomplishments? Can I? Can you all grant me that?

I can't believe how far I've come. Sometimes, it just doesn't cross my mind but then sometimes, I do feel like I need to just take in a deep breath, forget whatever is bothering me at that particular moment and take it all in. It's been almost a year in New York City. Random song for the moment:

Only Living Boy in New York

Anyway, I can't help but think back to what I was doing a year ago: Sitting in front of the computer looking at craigslist.org apartment ads, corresponding with potential roommates, eating-sleeping-reading-breathing New York City and actually starting to despair a little bit. Doing something like this (this being setting a goal, however modest, and accomplishing it) really does something for your self esteem. And it sort of insulates you against any negative thoughts or pessimism about future goals that I may or may not have even set yet. And that's a brilliant thing to have. It's a forward momentum. It's motivation to the highest extreme that anything I think up, dream up, I can go and, at least try to do.

All right, I'm done. It's a bit exciting, to be honest, to not only be slightly more seasoned and street smart but to also have a virtual veteran of New York City on my side in the hunt for apartments. As I said before, we've little more than thrown out some ideas about neighborhoods and talked roommate rules and the like. But it's starting to feel closer. What else can I say but wish us luck?

Subway...

Some nights the MTA really gets me angry. But still, even when the D train wasn't running at Grand Street, in the end, it wasn't that big of a deal. I never stroll around Chinatown and I found myself right in the middle of a Billy Joel song (Big Man on Mulberry Street)

Mulberry Street...
...trying to remember the lyrics, which are a veritable map of Chinatown in themselves, in an attempt to find my way to the Canal Street Subway station to catch the N...which, by some bizarre stroke of luck was running on the D track and I was able to take it all the way home...only after grabbing the first Q train at Canal Street to Atlantic Pacific. This in no way compares with my train escapades last weekend though. Attempting merely to get to Fort Greene by using only two trains, the D and the G, and not having to walk a block to transfer, I wound up still having to walk that block plus on the way home, I ended up walking about a mile to avoid the G train altogether. Because let's face it, the G is the worst train in the whole MTA system, and it never runs on time even when it is running normally. They had it running both ways on the same track and only going to Hoyt-Schermerhorn. Which led me to believe that maybe it was just the one train running back and forth between Hoyt-Schermerhorn and the other end of the line in Queens. This is why, when I missed the train, I assumed it would be a half hour or more before it came back around again and just left the station in favor of trying to catch a bus to Atlantic Avenue...a bus which didn't even stop when I tried to wave it down while running frantically in the direction of the nearest stop.

These late night weekend subway adventures, as inconvenient and harrying as they may be, do teach me things about the city. One lesson is never to despair. There is always a way to get home. In last weekend's case and this weekend's, the nearest subway stop was not that far and both cases afforded me a walk, albeit not so leisurely last weekend, through a neighborhood I scarcely get to enjoy.

Which is good because now, less than four months before my lease runs out, I'm looking for a new one to call home. And luckily, my cousin and I will be looking together. We met the other day and discussed everything from what we need from a roommate to our respective budgets and target neighborhoods. Clinton Hill was nice, I noted, while beating the pavement and dragging my guitar around last weekend. Lots of older apartment buildings and brownstones, bars and restaurants (I saw a couple of French ones) all lined DeKalb Avenue. The subway stops wouldn't be that far off either and I feel certain we could find a decent place there for a reasonable price. But we are not limiting ourselves to Brooklyn neighborhoods alone.

No. The possibility of being a Manhattanite entices both of us. But we're being realistic about it. I'm aware of how ambitious it is but you all know me. I have to try. It won't be until January that we really start aggressively looking so that gives me a month or so to drool over Manhattan neighborhoods and weigh the pros and cons of them. It's also good to have a veteran New Yorker agreeing to room with me because there are so many factors involved in choosing a place to live, some which I may not have thought about yet. Not so much whether or not I want to live with rodents or insects, but more whether I want space or location more. Tough calls both, no doubt.

At any rate, we'll have to certainly consider things like subway access and what floor we're on, doorman or no, elevator or walk-up, pre-war or new building, etc.

But there's still time for all that. With that, I must go to sleep. I've had a nice relaxing and also productive two days off. My scores are almost ready to be unleashed on the world. Plus, I've come up with a fantastic idea that I'll say more about as it unfolds. Good night.

Scroll down past the computer talk unless you care...

I need a break from trying to work on this scene. My computer's been acting up recently and I'm a little disheartened by it. I put so much time and energy into building this computer last year and it was supposed to be a brick. It was supposed to be able to handle all of this software I'm using on it and not crash on me. And yet, I'm just having so many problems lately. And I hardly have the time to trouble shoot them so I've just been dealing with it.

Here are the specs for those who care and know a little about it: Asus M2N-MX SE Plus mother board, 4 GB of RAM, a 2.61Ghz AMD Athalon 64 bit dual core processor, and I'm running Windows XP 64 bit. I also have a Creative SB Audigy Soundblaster sound card.

I've been having problems where I'll occasionally hear a crackling in the speakers on start up and sometimes when running audio programs that use a lot of processing power. I thought I had a conflict between the sound card on the mother board and the one I installed in the PCI slot but I don't want to go messing around in the Bios to try and shut down the one on the mother board if I'm not entirely sure that's the problem. It could be anything else. I seemed to somehow have resolved it by getting rid of a component that was opening on startup, something called Realtek HD Audio, which I know came packaged with the sound card I installed (I got it years ago for another computer and just moved it to this one and updated the drivers). But occasionally, I still hear it. Mainly when the processor gets really taxed. (I should also mention that I run the audio from my audio and synth software through my Tascam US-122L Audio/MIDI interface to cut down on latency from the MIDI software especially...I still run Windows Media and system audio through the sound card though).

Now, the main problem is that this new software I have sometimes is pretty processor intensive but I was under the impression that my processor could handle it. But I've been having crashes lately when I try to edit while the program is playing back audio and sometimes just whenever I try to run video in Sony Vegas, which I never had big problems with before. Now, the obvious first thing to check is that I don't have other background programs running that might also be taxing the processor simultaneously. I can't see that there are. Maybe I had Firefox open and Windows Media and for a bit there my task manager showed that something related to google talk was using up a chunk of RAM.

But I'm at a loss. I guess this is the life of a PC. Occasionally you have these idiopathic things that don't happen often enough to really indicate what the big problem might be. They only occur long enough to annoy you and then the thing runs great for a period of time.

At any rate, I do have other things on my mind besides the health of one of my investments. I found out today (and this was my suspicion all along) that CNN really is too good to be true. My boss informed me that I'd be coming in on an as-needed basis and that they didn't have any freelance work right now. I had half-expected that because it's just what one gets when one boasts a little about something and I'm not going to lie. I did a little boasting...or maybe it was just a little well deserved patting on the back. Either way, I let my guard down and relaxed for a second and got a little ahead of myself, counted my chickens before they hatched, as it were.

At any rate, as I've mentioned before (in so many words), there's nothing like a long stretch with nothing to do but think (like a train ride...or a long day at work with a lot of down time) to set your mind right. I decided I'm not going to do the easy conventional thing and lie down and start being negative about it. That's comfortable and sort of a cop out. I need to get creative. Then something occurred to me that's right under my nose. I've succeeded in taking advantage of connections up here more than I realize and there's no shortage of those. I should worry more about making as many connections as I can now while I'm actively seeking jobs because that can only serve to help me down the line, should I ever become unemployed again. And it's always nice to be able to pass on connections to friends, too. Besides, as much as I'd like to have a full time job and security, my mother said it best, this schedule lets me work on my music a lot more, and it allows me the leeway to work a bunch of different jobs (where they're available) and make a lot of different connections. Besides a foot in the door is a foot in the door no matter in what capacity I'm working there.

So, I'm slightly crestfallen, but not defeated. No, never defeated. The funny thing about accomplishing your goals is that the more of them you have under your belt, the less likely you are to give up the rest of them in the face of adversity. You can more easily tell yourself that, hey, you've done it before, why not again?

So there's your pep talk for the evening. I gotta get some rest, one more shift at CNN tomorrow and then it's a whole lot of uncertainty about when I will work there again. We shall see. I leave you with a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones tune that is running through my head and kind of fits the situation.

Trouble and Strife

One day at a time...

Walking back from the train this evening, the smell of soap wafts down from someone's apartment (not the first time I've noticed this) like they have a giant bar of Ivory in their apartment and it's perfuming the entire block...at least it's not everyone's garbage. That's usually Monday and Wednesday. And at least there are no children playing dodgeball in the street at 2am tonight. (They were thankfully at the end of my block and thus, out of hearing range, the other day). And although the apartment door is wide open when I come home at least it's back on its hinges. They've been redoing the lobby the past few days. And although it's humid as it can get in my apartment to the point that sweat beads up on my forehead the second I step inside (I know, I need a fan), at least it's not as hot as my friend's place in the Upper West Side where I was last night.

I had great train luck coming back from Karishma's this evening, and by train luck I don't just mean that the train was in the station upon my arrival at both Franklin Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. It was, but since I had to run down the stairs both times, the luck I am referring to is that I didn't trip and fall either time.

I'm feeling quite on a roll these days despite everything...well, mainly quite recently because, first, I won a poker game for a change last night and this morning I found out that my new job at CNN is going to pay really well. I can only hope that I'm also going to be working there enough to be able to tell that it pays well. I must wait until next Tuesday to know for sure.

But as it stands, I have the next few days off and I'm going to try and enjoy myself. I didn't do much today because my new software came in the mail and I spent about four hours installing everything. And I'm still not done.

When it is installed though, I'm going to have a fresh new palette of sounds and instruments to work with. I'm like a kid in a candy store. And I have two projects going on simultaneously. One should have been finished months ago but, as there's no deadline, no one's exactly rushing me.

Anyway, this CNN job, and the circumstances surrounding it, are about the closest I've gotten to my latest goal...which is to break even and maybe put some money into savings one of these months. I've realized, too, that maybe that's what this whole adventure is about and what life is about, making little goals before big goals can be achieved. Taking things one day at a time. I think I'm okay with that, as that's about all I have the energy for anyway. When you have a mind as active as mine and you think so damn much, it's relieving to be able to tell yourself that you don't have to get there right away. I likened it once to realizing that to get up over a wall, you need a ladder and what is a ladder but a bunch of individual rungs, rungs that you can't skip over and have to take one at a time?

I should get some sleep or I'll make a bad habit of staying up until 2am every night.

Here's a song that's in my head:

Weed Party

Another job! and the perils of finding background acting work in the city...

My, how quickly things unfold. The friend whose picture I'll be scoring referred me to a friend of his who works at CNN and told me to contact him regarding freelance work. Wouldn't you know it, half a day after I did that I got a call from this guy's manager, not asking to interview me, but asking me to come in and train as soon as I could. Awesome.

I got the call when I was waiting in line for the audition which turned out to be slightly to moderately lame, depending on what angle you view it from. Upon arriving on the second floor and finding the suite where the casting agency was located, I slid into a small room with a window and a booth, where sat a totally uninterested girl who chatted on her cell phone for a full minute before noticing I was standing there. She asked my name and slid me an application through the hole in the glass and told me to go ahead in. I opened the door into someone who was standing by the door filling his application out against the wall, and subsequently realized how full the room was and that it was not the room but a hallway turned waiting room with seats along each wall and a TV sitting on a stand playing MTV (bad pop music videos). I found a seat among the gaggle of people that mostly ignored me and finished my application, leaving blank my suit size because I didn't know it off the top of my head.

After what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, someone opened the door through which I had come and said, "Yo bounce! They gonna make you pay!" So half the room did just that. I decided I'd stay and one guy sitting across from me mumbled something about at least seeing what they were about. So four of us stayed behind after the room cleared out. Next, the guy comes out who's going to be interviewing us, a pudgy guy with slicked back black hair, simply oozing with every Hollywood cliche you've ever heard of. He's about to call three people in but he stops short when he realizes how the crowd has thinned out. "All right, I just need one person," he says. A minute or two later, he's back and asks for three of us at a time. He sits us down in three stools in front of his desk and asks us each at the same time, "You guys trying to make it in the business? Have you ever done any work like this before? Do you have head shots?" Each question in rapid-fire succession. Dumb looks from our side of the desk and he realizes he should probably ask us each individually if he wants to accurately record our answers. I tell him when he gets around to me that I don't have any experience yet and that I left my head shots home because I didn't have time to reprint any but that I'd bring them tomorrow if I needed to. Then, he starts to go through a list of the projects that they have on a crinkled and stapled together stack of papers pointing rapidly at each one, three to a page, before turning the page before any of us can actually read them. (Some of these films I'd heard of from working at Technicolor and they even had listed the movie that was being shot at NY 1 a few weeks back). After that, he asks me if I can bring in my head shots tomorrow and then, he escorts me out (a different way then I came in), as though I couldn't find the door on my own. A little put out I went on with my day and figured I'd try to get my head shots printed at a Walgreen's and get them to him later that day. I'm still debating it honestly. But I did find this after Googling, "WMT Casting," "NYC," and "scam." Seems to be an even split of disenfranchised naysayers and happy campers.

It sounded in the ad like they had a specific project they were submitting us to but in reality this is just a casting agency and I assume that what that guy meant by, "They make you pay," is that they make you pay to be listed and then maybe they'll call you if a director wants you. Bullshit. I'm already listed for free with another casting agency. If they want to charge me I'm not going to pay them.

Anyway, I left and went down to NY 1 to pick up a copy of the film I'll be scoring for my co worker and I've yet to look at that. I filled the rest of my afternoon with researching whether or not Walgreen's still had my head shots on their website from when I uploaded them a month or so ago and eating lunch in Union Square. A family of French tourists sat down next to me on the benches as they argued in French about where they were going to go next. I offered up my seat so they could all sit together and the lady said, "Merci," forgetting she was in New York, I guess and I said back, "Je vous en prie." It was a nice day in the park all around despite the bleeding heart guy who stopped me on the street in front of the old Virgin Superstore to make me feel bad about not being able to donate $20 to starving children in Nicaragua or wherever. I promptly left Union Square and walked down Broadway, intending to catch the D at Broadway Lafayette, and then I remembered that the Grace Church on Broadway has organ concerts during the week and it's usually Bach or something Baroque. Being a sucker for free live music of any kind, I stopped in to rest my feet a bit and meditate. After that I shot back to Brooklyn to write this blog and try to figure out what else to do with my day off.

I need to make a list. Half of me doesn't want to do anything else for the rest of the day but I need to be semi productive. Even though I feel like rewarding myself with a laid back evening for snagging another job, however hapless it may have been. Half of me just wants to take these days off and really enjoy them since I worked a lot earlier this month and just finished a seven day stint at NY 1. And I kind of have, Coney Island was nice and even though I had the "audition" this morning I had a laid back afternoon for the most part. I am also going upstate to visit my aunt and uncle on Sunday through Tuesday, about which I am very excited. So that'll be nice. Meanwhile, I have a movie from Netflix to watch tonight and a monstrous hunger that needs to be satiated somehow.

For now, a new idea I've had, to put up a playlist of what I've been listening to every once in a while:

End of July