Confusing wisdom...

Finding wisdom in the inside of a label on a bottle of tea is pretty standard stuff these days.  And I drink a lot of tea.  But today, I had one of those interesting days where I seemed to be getting signs from not just tea bottles but just about everything around me and some of the signs were conflicting with others.

In truth, it all started with an impromptu discussion with a co-worker and friend of mine about working in the corporate world and how it's always going to be the same no matter where you go, as far as workplace politics go and you're really only ever going to avail yourself by being your own boss.  Which, in a way, has simultaneously discouraged me from even trying to job hunt for a better career in this climate and encouraged me to work that much harder at being freelance eventually.  The end of that conversation actually found me feeling grateful that I have a job and a lot more level headed about my general situation than I have been for months when at times, I tended to get rather frustrated that things weren't better with the money situation or the hours.  

It's file checking week at Learning Ally where we go through all the audio book files that have been recorded and spot check them for errors.  Today, one of the audio books that I was checking today at Learning Ally was some kind of business text book that had a ton of chapters about building resumes and interviewing for jobs, etc.  So, while I waited for my assigned booth to open up (the last volunteer was still finishing up her session), I perused a bit of it and got thinking about what I was doing wrong with my last few attempts to find a job.  Here I am now swinging back the other way in my thinking about what I need to focus on right now.  Should I take another shot at job hunting but be more focused this time?  Should I be so cynical about the job market?

On the inside of my tea bottle was this quote though: "Lack of money is no obstacle, lack of an idea is an obstacle." - Ken Hakuta

Maybe I just need a good idea.

Here's one, I'm doing some freelance audio stuff for George's next film and if it needs music, I'll likely be doing that too.  The audio stuff will be operating the boom mic for the first few scenes of a pilot for a series he's going to be putting together.  The scenes will act as a teaser/short for the pilot which will eventually be shot and pitched a few places to get support to do the series.  It's exciting because it could be some steady work and it seems very interesting.  I won't say too much else about it so as not to jinx it.

But anyway, all those confusing signs and I'm tired.  Need sleep.  Tomorrow I see apartments.  The first one is in Park Slope and I might just fall in love with it, so long as it's cat friendly.  Good night.

Hudson River Flicks and The day I almost saw Jennifer Aniston...

Today I was supposed to be an extra in a Jennifer Aniston picture called "The Bounty." I snagged the ad for extras on craigslist probably about 45 minutes after it had been posted and knew that if I hesitated to contact them, then there would be no need to bother. This is, as I've learned, why they post the ad on the day before the actual job. Otherwise, they'd be inundated with emails...well, they probably are anyway, but imagine if they had to sift through several days worth of emails of people wanting to be extras as opposed to just a few hours worth of emails.

Anyway, I went back to steeping the grains for my homebrew and waiting for my friend Mike to show up to help out with the rest of the process, checking back on my yahoo account every once in a while. Somewhere between taking the grains out of the pot and dropping the first dose of hops in the boil, I got an email back from them with a ton of info on the shoot, what I'd need to bring, where it would be, what kind of ID to bring, how to confirm I'd be coming. This is good because it certainly makes them look more legit. At this point, I had the epiphany that this has to be the closest I've been to getting an actual paid background acting gig. I was in. I had an effing number and everything. All I had to do was respond to the email with my name and phone number saying I was legal to work in the US and was non-union. And then, after 10, they wanted me to call the hotline to check in and get info on where to meet the van that would be driving out to Elmont, Queens where they'd be shooting a scene at the racetrack there.

Mike and I got the brew cooled down and pitched the yeast around 4:30pm with very few mishaps (okay, so I did accidentally spill a bit of the beer all over a dish towel, the microwave cart and the floor when I was trying to take a gravity reading before pitching the yeast in). I showed him my new guitar processing software and we messed around with that for a good bit, passing the guitar back and forth. At around 5:30 he headed off and we planned on meeting back up in Chelsea for the last of the Hudson River Flicks outdoor screenings. The movie last night was Pineapple Express.

I figured, when the movie was over, I would call the hotline and check in as they had asked. Hopefully, it would be not too early of a call time and I would be able to get to the van with no problem. Getting to Elmont on my own steam was sure to be a ridiculous adventure without their transportation.

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I used Mike's Blackberry to check my email again, because I hadn't thought to actually write everything down before I left the house, and, since I didn't have a pen with me at the time, I texted the instructions to myself and then saved the phone number in my phone as Jennifer Aniston's. When I called, I was sort of expecting to talk with a human but instead got a pre-recorded run down of the day's events, where to get the van (33rd and 3rd in Manhattan, Dad), what kind of outfits to bring, what colors not to wear, and a whole lot of other stuff that I can't remember right now, because the person on the recording was talking fast, monotone and haphazardly injecting 'um's' in her speech. The first thing that the recording said, unfortunately, was that numbers 160-270 needn't bother showing up because we weren't needed. I was number 258.

I really wanted to be typing this blog about my first experience with background acting in NYC, too. But, regardless, I've finally got a real strategy for getting background work and that I'm sure is a little more legitimate than taking my head shots to another "casting agency." When I called, instead of just dialing option 3, and then dialing 21 like they told me to in the email, I listened to some of the other menu options. This agency apparently casts for Law and Order SVU, and some other movies, Morning Glory included, that I happen to know are in production right now. So they sound pretty legit, and they didn't make me pay to be listed with them. This was an actual gig, unlike the other week when I went into that talent agency WMT casting that turned out to be a scam. So, now I know, the only really good way to get my feet wet doing this is to scour craigslist the day before one of my days off and respond as soon as the ads pop up. There's no use looking a few days in advance. So, now, with this deliberate plan, I think I'm going to implement it next time I have a day off...which may not be for over a week. I work 6am to 2pm tomorrow, have a film shoot on Saturday, 10am to 6pm on Sunday and then, from Monday to Friday, I work 6am to 2pm. If I can survive this, I can do anything...including pay rent.

Anyway, after I hung up the phone from that disappointing recorded phone call, I rejoined Mike and his friend in Vynl, a club/diner/bar on the corner of 15th and 9th Avenue in Chelsea where his friend worked. The menus were all old vinyl ablum covers. The bathroom door had Justin Timberlake's name on it, as though it were his dressing room. Oh, and Pineapple Express was a pretty funny movie. Kind of ridiculous in a way but entertaining despite that. Here are some pics on the pier where they show the movies, that Mike informed us was actually the pier where the Titanic should have docked...oops.

Hudson River Flicks

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

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

Things calming down, Coney Island and my inability to take care of electronics...

Good morning. First day off in seven and I'm just finishing laundry and eating lunch. Also finally working on a piano piece that will be part of a cycle that I intend to submit to the SCI 2010 conference. August 1st is the deadline. I have the first piece in the cycle written and the second piece is in the works. Three is the magic number so I'm planning on writing a really simple ending piece in the next week while simultaneously finishing the current piece.

Distractions have subsided a little bit. The basketball goal is no longer outside so I've been sleeping a lot better lately and learning to chill the #$%&*@ out. I realize that, in the wake of my little freak out about my rent, it was too easy to find reasons to hate this place and convince myself that the only possible solution was that I needed to get out, no matter the cost. But now, I'm trying to look at things in a different light now that they've calmed down a bit. I'd be much better off sticking things out then adding more complications to my current situation. After all, I do like living alone, for now, and this neighborhood is not nearly as bad as I make it out to be. Let's face it, when you're the only one you have to bounce your own thoughts off of, there's no one to tell you that you're over reacting, over thinking, or just plain off the mark except yourself. And it's really hard to be honest with yourself at these times. The simple fact of the matter is that things could still be a lot worse. In fact, these hard times of having to scrimp by are teaching me, as they should be teaching the rest of America, how to live within your means. This is a valuable lesson and honestly, if I had a little bit more money and were a little bit more comfortable, my first thought would be that I had license to spend more and then I'd probably end up right back where I am now, through my own carelessness. If this is instilling in me a certain sense of caution then maybe this is the best place for me to be right now.

I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having a little more money to work with here. I've figured how long it would take me to pay off my debt if I were working full time hours...10 months. But it would require me to be working full time. There is good news on the job front, on all sides actually.

First, I got called for an audition for some paid extra work today and I'll be going in for that tomorrow. Second, Part time vs. freelance employment is on the horizon potentially at one of my jobs (I won't say much more because I don't know anything yet for sure). And third, a co worker recently asked me to help him finish off a score for his short film. So I'll start that soon.

Good things come to those who wait.

In the meantime, I went to Coney Island finally yesterday. I am twenty minutes away from the beach and I haven't even realized it all this time. I was certain it was at least a thirty minute train ride. Karishma and I basically walked up and down the boardwalk, purchased some disgusting cheese fries from Nathan's Hot Dogs, walked out onto one of the piers and finally dipped our feet into the ocean before heading back. Coney Island is dirty by NC standards but nowhere near as bad as some Florida beaches I've seen. I'll have to go back now and ride a few of the rides, though. Seems fun. Here are some pictures from the occasion, taken with the camera I've owned for about two years which has, regrettably just been fatally wounded while riding in my bag. Nice big crack in the middle of the LCD screen. And this is one of those cameras that has no viewfinder. I was heartbroken. As I was when I sat on my 8GB iRiver MP3 player a few weeks ago. Do I have some kind of problem with taking care of my electronics? Here are the pictures:

Coney Island best

Gruesome details about cat potty training ahead, followed by me somehow tying it all into my life as a whole...

I think Penny's almost got the hang of toilet training. I was getting frustrated but then I had an epiphany. Let me start a few weeks ago. I got started back into training her again because I ran across some websites that dealt with toilet training and had some new ideas that were essentially post criticism of what most of the books say. I thought, "Great, some new insights." The first thing they say is to use a pan or a bowl that fits into the toilet. This I did but I had to improvise on how to keep it from falling in to the toilet because it was only just wide enough to hang on the lip of the bowl. What I did: Strips of cardboard that overhang the toilet bowl between the bowl and toilet, held in place by the sheer weight of the toilet seat. Worked like a charm and the bowl hasn't fallen in the toilet at all. Then they say that, if the cat sits in the bowl instead of on the toilet seat, then you have to train them to put their feet up on the seat. Penny does not respond to this at all. You try to move her feet and she whines and jumps down. It is crucial to make her sit on the seat because the next thing you do is reduce the amount of litter in the bowl/pan until there's nothing left and (and this is where they differ from the books) eventually replace it with water before finally removing the bowl. You can't have the cat sitting in her own excrement at this stage and then tracking it all over the house. First time I did reduce the amount of litter she did just that. It was inevitable. And you also can't have the cat always expecting to have the bowl be there and then get confused when it's not there. So, anyway, I would subsequently try to be there when she used the bathroom so I could train her not to sit in the bowl, but I have failed every time this week even though I've been home. And any attempt at showing her how to sit on the toilet when she doesn't have to go has been a miserable failure. But then something occurred to me. It can't be pleasant for the cat to basically pee on herself and she's a lot more intelligent than I give her credit for. After all, every time she pees outside of the litter box she attempts to find some place where she can conceal it (a rug, the bath mat, anything that resembles dirt or the ground). She's astute and observant and almost ritualistic sometimes. She can figure it out on her own. She has to figure it out on her own to really do it right, incorporate it into her routine, so to speak. So I cleaned up the mess and then just continued to use less litter but not so much less that it made a mess whenever she went. After a few days, I'm not seeing foot prints in the litter after she's gone so I'm thinking, she must have figured out how to squat on the seat on her own. I didn't need to show her after all.

Now, hopefully this'll keep up. I keep watching these videos on youtube and seeing cats doing their duty in the bowl but then I see one or two where the cat slips and almost falls in (Watch this one to the end). Penny is inherently clumsy in her middle age. Hopefully, it won't ever happen to her to the extent where she gets too terrified of the toilet to go back and starts to revert to more dirt-resembling places to relieve herself.

Anyway, how does this relate to my life at the moment? It's a lesson that can be applied elsewhere for certain. My general frustration is that I can't make things happen the way I want them to (even though we've been over this before it still lingers). With Technicolor, I hassled them a good bit before I just let it go and finally they called me. I can only assume that the rest of my endeavors may play out like this. As long as I'm doing my part in looking for opportunities and applying, I can't do much else. I need to let things unfold, as agonizing as that can be.

Only things is I find myself asking the question, "how much time do I devote to any given endeavor before moving on?" That's where I currently am. You can give so much energy but not see any results and then sit and wonder if it's time to move on, move on and then get a call from a job and have to either turn them down or give them the run around before taking the job. Ultimately, though regardless of what happens and when it happens, it's probably going to make sense which job to take, money being the big issue.

Anyway, in other random news, I got my hair buzzed really close. Decided to embrace the receding hairline and bald spot instead of persistently getting a haircut that just doesn't look good. Since there's no one around and the cat isn't so skilled at photography, this is the only time I will take a photo of myself in the bathroom mirror and post it online.

Blurb #8

Good news from yesterday. Technicolor called me finally and asked if I could work some shifts. I unfortunately couldn't work either of the two they offered because of NY 1. However, they made it clear they do want to get me back in there and that Ernie would be taking some vacation again at the end of the month so they'd be calling me then.

See? Things aren't so bad. And Thursday, I'll be helping out on a film shoot in Brooklyn to get some experience. Same guy for whom I wrote music back in March. I'm assuming it'll be grip type work, helping set up audio and lighting, or maybe just PA stuff. No idea what to expect really.

I also turned my head shots in to the casting agency so I should be hearing from them soon, hopefully, with some paying extra gigs.

(Here are the head shots courtesy of Tony Jukich)

Head Shots New Best

Also, Karishma's parents are in town for the next three weeks. It's been great meeting them (they're really cool) and I expect I'll be hanging out with them a lot over the next few days.

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

Networking and not working...

I went to that photo shoot in Greenpoint yesterday. Soon, I'll post some of the photos. They came out pretty well and I'm satisfied that I got a good deal...seeing as how I only had to pay the guy for the media (which was $10, so I'm sure I was paying for a little more than the media...the electric bill maybe, but whatever). He was a pretty nice fellow, an older immigrant from, I think Austria or Germany. Very much a people person. When I arrived at the building, on a back road in an industrial part of the neighborhood, Tony was already outside photographing two other people who had come for the test shoot. He greeted me warmly and immediately introduced me to Austin, another composer/musician who had come for the free photos, and said we should network. So we did.

I've noticed that it's getting loads easier to meet the people I want to meet, music and film types, but that not everyone is so keen on meeting yet another New York musician trying to "make it." Now, for my part, I'm not so much trying to make it in the sense that people most often think about. No, I've grown out of that and I think I'll be content if "making it" just means eating every day and having a comfortable apartment and a network of friends. When I mentioned that I was eventually going to start a band, his wry response was, "You and every other white kid in this town." Thanks, buddy.

I've decided a long time ago how I'm going to respond to this sentiment. After years of people telling me, "It ain't easy, kid," I've learned to respond, "I'm not doing it because it's easy." If I wanted something easy, I'd have stayed in Raleigh working in television.

Last night anyway, I went to Cobble Hill to hang out with an old high school friend, Mike E., for his birthday. One, I love that neighborhood and two, Mike has got some much nicer more humble friends. I met a guy who is a composer/jazz musician and we got talking about scoring because he's getting into that himself. I'd much rather associate with people like that who understand that it doesn't have to be so cut throat and you don't have to look at every new musician in town as someone infringing on your turf, like this is some kind of drug war.

Continuing on, I met a friend of Karishma's the other night at the Juilliard. This one works with a human rights media outlet that develops documentary content about human rights issues. Karishma and I were going there to meet her for an Indian art house movie but we both ended up being late and couldn't get in. So we romped around the Lincoln Center and surrounding areas just chatting about life until the movie was to get out. There we waited until her friend left the theater. Karishma and her friend talked for about ten minutes straight catching up on Mumbai connections and everything and then we started to head back to the train. On the platform I casually dropped that I was composer and we exchanged info. She said sometimes they need composers but it's all pro bono work. This is the kind of thing I would not mind having my name associated with at all so I told her I could totally work pro bono.

I'm going back to work after several days off of feeling useless and wishing I were making money with my time. I did do some job hunting while off and I have some good ideas about how to get in touch with this job as a Tape Operator at Deluxe Post Production. They are located literally right around the corner from Technicolor and it occurred to me they might either compete with or do business with Technicolor. Therefore, I might have a connection already. We'll see.

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.

Spring has sprung...

It's already hot as hell here...in my opinion, at least. 80 degrees is hot enough. Tomorrow, accuweather.com is saying that it's going to be 89 degrees. Then Wednesday it's going to be 65 and raining. See, we never get a real transitional period, at least not a pleasant one, like the ones I remember from my childhood. It's always just slightly warmer, but rainier and still too cold to put away the jacket and then, you get one day where the weather is perfect and then, suddenly, it's hot, and everywhere you go, you sweat.

It sounds an awful lot like I'm complaining. The weather, heat aside, yesterday was amazing. It's not even just the weather itself but what the weather precipitates: Hoards of people out enjoying the weather. The city felt alive this weekend. Bands in every square, people in sandals, girls in bikinis, ice cream, people laying in the grass, people sleeping in the grass. I enjoyed myself. I did have to work on Saturday but hung out with friends in Cobble Hill in the evening and played poker. Afterward, we went to a bar down the street with a terrace. In fact, the entire bar was a terrace. It was pretty cool.

It's slowly starting to creep in how cool it is, this city. I mean, I have this thought in my head that goes something like, "It's cool to live in New York City in the summer," but now I actually understand what that means. Sorry, can't really put it into words though.

On another less abstract note, I've met a filmmaker at work who knows a lot of musicians and filmmaker types and has sent me a list of people to get to know through myspace and facebook. It's pretty cool to be finally meeting people. One of them works with us as well, a girl in engineering who also plays the bass. We're talking about getting together and playing some, which should be cool. Now I have to contact these others and see what they're about. Oh, and it's laundry day.

Saturday

It's been quite a week just in terms of my outlook bouncing around all over the place, from excited or elated, to panicked and depressed. I started the NY 1 job on Friday with a half a day of boring HR orientation and another half day of sitting and watching the Media Ingest Operators do their job. I got to know a few of them and sort of got an overview of the job. Starting next week, I'm full time 8am-4pm, shadowing the day time guy. This should cover rent. Thank God.

But I'm quite honestly getting a little freaked out about the uncertainty of everything else. I did find out from Technicolor on Friday that they still are depending on me to be available soon when business picks up (when I contacted them to get employment verification documents forwarded to Time Warner corporate, i.e. NY 1, I got to chatting with my old boss over there. When I told them about NY 1, they seemed genuinely interested in finding out if I would be full or part time). But they still can't tell me with any amount of certainty when exactly business will pick up. They were able to tell me that the SAG strike is over and that the New York City tax incentive for filming has been renewed, two factors that would affect whether or not people will actually film in the city this year. But beyond that, they can't tell me when they will need me again, just that they will. I can only hope that the timing is just right.

After two weeks of full time training with NY 1, I will be back to sparser hours, hours yes, but all dependent on other employees taking vacation. So, if Technicolor got really busy in two weeks, it would be awesome as hell. Meanwhile, I apply. Mostly composer jobs and internships, a few recording studio and music company assistant jobs.

What a shit time this is. No one wants to hire anyone full time, if they're hiring at all, and if they're not hiring they're more than likely laying people off at an incredible rate. I keep hearing that the film industry is recession proof but I'm waiting to see evidence of this.

I hung out with three different groups of people this week (four if you count last night's romp around Manhattan), all of which were unemployed. I'm not talking about a few of my friends in these groups were unemployed. I mean every one of them were unemployed to some degree. It's depressing but at least we all have each other, even if we don't have any money.

I'm beginning to think this must be the craziest thing I've done in my life, moving up here without a job at a time like this. And here of all places. "If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere." Scoff. If I can make it here, I won't ever want to uproot myself again.

I've been reading a lot about Zen lately. One of the books is by Brad Warner, a punk rocker and monster movie enthusiast, who's edgy take on Zen comes off somewhat cynical at first. The title is "Hardcore Zen." There was a chapter that spoke of dreams (as in goals) in terms of our attachment to them.

"Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are."

"The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams come true, they never really come true."

These spoke to my need to keep this all in perspective. Regardless of what happens, I can't get caught up in things unfolding exactly as I want them to. That's really the source of all my suffering through this period of my life. If I didn't have such big ideas about the way I wanted things to happen then, I might be a bit more transcendent right now.

As my loving sister put it, "What's supposed to happen, will happen when it's supposed to happen." I think that's comforting, in a way. But also frustrating. But again, the root of that frustration is my own ideas about how this should happen. No one ever gets life exactly right the first time and there's no one way to go about achieving your goals, only a myriad of ideas about what has worked for others.

So, frustrated and scared, though I may be, I think I'll make it through this if I just remember what Zen Buddhism has to teach and follow through calmly what I know I need to do. And that is wait...while also applying to as many jobs as I can find, trying new approaches when I find something might not be working, and remembering what my sister said.

Here's to uncertainty.














In the Grand Army Plaza subway station.

Job, or jobs...

So, I got the job at NY 1. It's a freelance gig meaning I can work a total of 1000 hours a year, 1080 hours less than full time. This is not a bad thing, of course, it means that I need to keep looking for another job, or jobs, to fill in the spaces. But now I have a good idea of how my budget is going to work out. Thankfully, my first two weeks of training are going to be full time. So that means I will definitely be able to pay rent in full for May. Jeez, I make it sound so terrible, don't I?

In all honestly, I'm confident that I'll find other work. My next plan is to badger the living crap out of Technicolor (yes, I know I said delicately before but things have changed...mainly my attitude). Then, I'm going to simultaneously look at film internships to get some experience doing grip work, lighting and audio stuff, too. These are the kinds of jobs that will not only pay well on down the line, but will put me in a good place to network with directors in the city. Don't know why I didn't think about it before. I could have been interning the second I got off the plane.

I mentioned in my last blog, not wasting my time with something if I wasn't going to enjoy it. It's not even just the fact that I don't want to do something I don't enjoy, but the fact that it could be wasting my time is actually a pretty bad thing. Because, why? Time is money. That's right. Even time for which I'm not getting paid is money. I realized that, okay, realized is not the right word...accepted that I haven't been giving enough attention to my music career as of late.

One of my biggest problems is that I get these ideas about where I should be by now and some times I just want to jump to that point quickly and "catch up," as it were. I can't do that, I keep telling myself. I need to regroup often and consider what the next step is before I go kicking myself for, for instance, not having finished anything new in the past few months. (Started a whole bunch of stuff, I did).

So, then I think that it's probably a good idea to do some research and consider what I want to do with my music, make a decision about it, set some goals, come up with a plan and then implement that plan. Steps.

I figure I've got three questions to ask myself. What do I want to write and for whom? How am I going to market it to them? It all starts here. This is what I'm supposed to be using all of this glorious free time for. That and finding good, inexpensive health insurance that's not a scam. Ha. Wish me luck on that.

Blurb #7

Just got back from interview #2. Feeling pretty confident. Still haven't heard from Technicolor. Meanwhile, enjoying the neighborhood but I must figure out how to ask in Chinese if I they sell chickens without heads at the Asian market I go to. Also, I must learn what beef pizzles are. I have some idea what they might be but refuse to believe anyone would eat that. Anyway, they must know me by now at that market because I'm there once every couple of days. How can I stay away when a pound of strawberries is $1.73? Pretty soon, I'll be known as the guy who always has his own canvas bag, "Mr. No Bag." That or I'll be known as the only white man who goes in there. I caused a stir in there the other day because the line was so busy the cashier didn't look up when I came to the counter which resulted in her giving me my total in Chinese before looking up when I paused and laughing when she realized why I didn't answer her. "70 cent," she said.

Here's some photos from the past two excursions of mine:

Prospect Park and Brooklyn Bridge II

Money for money's sake...

Lately, as previously mentioned, I have been spreading myself incredibly thin across a wide spectrum of income-generating endeavors and have yet to begin narrowing my pursuits to those most crucial and most lucrative of efforts. Until today, that is. I had a bit of an epiphany today. I realized that the reason I'm having trouble with the idea of all of these side gigs in addition to the day job and the musical endeavors is that I have strong feelings about the notion of pursuing something solely because it will generate income. That strong feeling being that pursuing something solely based on the amount of income it will generate is detrimental to a fulfilled life and is also, not me.

Perhaps it's that when pursuing something because of the money it would generate, you are often, in fact, pursuing money and not the thing itself, therefore your dedication to becoming good at that thing can only be halfhearted due to the sheer wont of laziness and leisure that more than likely has generated such a strong desire to pursue money as a thing in itself in the first place. For what does money allow us in the end? Leisure. To spend your life pursuing only money, or money as fulfillment, and not something more wholesome such as a career doing something you enjoy, is to spend one's life pursuing laziness and leisure. These are great things at the right time, no doubt, but a life with only laziness and leisure is not a fulfilled life.

That having been said, if I'm not enjoying a pursuit, or I don't feel I'm going to enjoy it, then it's not worth continuing to pursue, regardless of how much potential income it could generate and regardless of how easy it is, or may seem.

I already know that I don't find life enjoyable when I'm not pursuing my main interest of composing. Nay, I feel quite hollow if I'm not pursuing music. And pursuing music successfully is something that one could only do because one loves to.

So why am I wasting my time trying to find ten dozen ways to generate income while I job hunt, none of which is music related? I'm not in such dire straits just yet that I need to be thinking about thirty different back up plans anyway. Just a few that I can actually, and feasibly, devote time and effort to, and that I enjoy enough to justify devoting a portion of my day to them. But, if none of these is music-related, my supposed area of expertise, then what the hell am I doing?

So, new goal: find out ways to generate income doing something you enjoy while scaling back those things that you can identify as a waste of your time. Oh, abundant free time.

I'll keep doing the ChaCha thing because I was accepted as a guide today but I'm going to have to get good at it for it to be worth my time. The thing I like about it is that, on their website, they don't tell you that you'll make so much money, or that you'll be able to quit your day job. They're honest and up front that it's just a part time side gig for even those who devote a great deal of time to it, so it's easy for me to be realistic about it. And you can get paid whenever you like, not when you reach $100 or anything like that. I also like the research part of it, when it's a decent question. I could write an entire blog entry on the questions, ranging from silly to stupid that I see, but...another time.

I'm going to also keep pursuing finding a job here and there pet sitting as well. I got some hits on the web site for jobs in and around Manhattan. I still need to finish my profile and once I do, I'll start applying. I like pets.

The movie extra thing, I decided, is not for me. Never mind that Talent 6's website was not very useful and I was unable to find any paying extra gigs. And I don't think I'll check out the other casting agencies either because it occurred to me that if I'm going to spend an entire day waiting to be in one scene, even if I get paid for it, that's a huge waste of my time. Doing any other "work-at-home," set your own hours type of gig, I'd be able to stop and write music if I got inspired. As an extra, though, I'd be stuck on a movie set for 8 hours and unable to bring work with me. Meanwhile, I'm sure I'd be going crazy waiting for it to be over. I hate being idle, unless I planned to be that way. It might have worked if I knew I was going to be unemployed for a long period of time and I knew I wouldn't be potentially spending my entire weekend on a film set, when I could be writing music at home.

Really, though, the point is that I'm going to give myself more time to write by slowing down all of this frantic searching for semi-lucrative side gigs. I'm incredibly frazzled for most of the day and I feel like my time is mostly devoted to half baked schemes, none of which ever comes to fruition, like a perpetual to do list where nothing ever gets checked off, and I'd much rather be hurling that frantic energy at some creative endeavor, whether or not it's going to make me instant money that I can spend on groceries and beer.

So without further ado...

Frugality and Job Hunting

I have internet back for an indeterminate amount of time so I'm going to frantically type out an update of the past few days. It's been the same routine day to day of getting up to jog, then coming back and surfing the internet for jobs when I have a signal, interspersed with forays out into the neighborhood to pick up various things so I'm not stuck inside all day getting frustrated with the computer. Things like a universal remote control for my free DVD player and TV (which was a mess to program), a light bulb to replace one that blew (only to come back and have two more light bulbs blow after realizing that what I had bought was a sub par CF bulb that gives off an eerie blue light), and dish soap. Another time, I ventured up to Verizon at Atlantic Avenue to have my phone reprogrammed to see if I could fix the problems I have been having with dropped calls and low signal in my apartment. It didn't fix the problem. And Karishma came over a few nights ago to hang out and have dinner.

I've realized that these little annoyances (the internet being sporadic, my phone crapping out mid conversation and half my calls not getting through) have been upsetting my daily flow. Of course, it's never a big deal; if the internet is out, I take it as a sign to get out of the house and do something. Whenever my phone calls don't get through I just get the message and call back. When I lose calls, it's never a big deal because I can almost always get back through. I have been getting a little antsy and frustrated over it, though, so ultimately, I finally decided to buy internet. Hence my phone call to Time Warner the other day. Cablevision will be here tomorrow.

With what I'm doing daily, not just job hunting but also sending files to the guy I'm working with on the commercial and other money making efforts that are based on the internet (which I'll tell you about in a second), I can't sit here and wait for someone in the building to leave their computer on so I can access the internet.

As for the phone, Verizon told me I'm eligible for an upgrade on April 17th, so I think I'll hold out until I can get a new phone before I do anything drastic there.

That's been another theme this week: learning how to not spend money when I don't need to. When I can get by without spending money, I've made sure that I don't. The light bulbs are a good example. The light in the kitchen went out and I had one to replace it with already. But then, the bathroom light went out so I felt I had to go get a bulb and did so without thinking. The one I bought didn't fit in the bathroom fixture, though, so I tried putting it out in the kitchen and putting the one in the kitchen in the bathroom. Then I noticed that the new light wasn't bright enough for the kitchen and was giving off an eerie blue glow. Kind of a sub par bulb, it was a CF bulb but must have been older technology before they got the warmth thing right. Anyway, then the bedroom light went out next. Now, I had already gone out and bought one light bulb but, when the bedroom blew, I thought for a second before I went back out to find more not so blue bulbs. There's a floor lamp in my bedroom with two bulbs in it. I took one of those out and put it in the kitchen with the blue light and realized that I never use the overhead light in the bedroom. This saved me having to go out immediately to buy light bulbs. Yes I know bulbs are not that expensive and the CF bulbs last a looooooong time. But the point is, I'm thinking ahead to what I'm going to need to use that money, if I don't get a job in the next few weeks. Frugality is the word. Every time I buy something, I ask myself, "can I eat this?" It's a good rule. I was killing time in Target while waiting for my phone to get programmed and I kept seeing $5 DVDs that I wanted, some of them double features. But I stopped and thought, "can I eat this DVD?" "When I'm out of groceries in a week, am I going to be glad that I have this DVD?" The answer was no.

I know I'm not hard up just yet, but I think it's a good rule when unemployed to think like you're unemployed and you have a finite amount of resources to sustain yourself.

But anyway, speaking of employment, now for the good news: I have an interview at NY 1 next Tuesday! They want to speak to me about a Media Operator position, which is not the one that I applied for but it's very similar; tuning in live satellite shots, making sure the video looks good and working with the assignment editor to organize the feeds, etc. I'm hoping this one pans out but I'm also going to keep on Technicolor about their job. I could get frustrated about the fact that these are part time gigs, both of them, but I decided to look at it as a chance to learn a lot of other things I can do and maybe even try out some unconventional sources of income. Maybe unconventional is the wrong word. Alternative. We'll go with that. No I'm not talking about adult entertainment (that's a joke, mom).

I'm talking about doing more freelance work and using the internet to my advantage. I started looking into getting a job as an extra on a few sets. I explored Talent 6 first, but they don't seem to be very focused toward what I want to do. They go on about how it's a good way to break into the industry as an actor, and I keep saying, I don't want to be an actor, I just want to make some extra money. Then their casting calls are so incredibly diverse and the list massive yet, if you search for just the keyword "extras," you only get about 10 in your area that aren't already expired and most of those aren't paid. So Talent 6 is a dud. The deal is they make you pay a monthly fee after 2 weeks to gain access to their list of casting calls...but then they post them all on craigslist anyway. But they tell you you can't apply to them unless you're listed on their site. So I get listed and I find out that not only are there not enough casting calls up there now that are paying (sue me, I'm only in it for the money), they also have a pretty user-un-friendly interface. You can't attach a resume to any of your submissions. You just fill out your profile but you have limited space. How is that going to get me a job on one of these shoots if half of them explicitly ask for a resume? So I'm fed up with that and am going to quit their directory and try another casting agency.

I'm also looking into being a guide for Cha Cha. One of the Emilys got me into the idea of doing it but I'm only now getting set up to do it. People text in any kind of question to the web site and it's your job to look up the answer on the internet and send it to them and they receive it as a text message. Mobile answers. Sounds like fun, right? Just a couple hours a night of doing that, I'll make a decent little chunk of change.

Beyond that, there was, of course, the Shutterstock thing which I'm going to back burner for a while, but also, the idea of doing some voice over work occurred to me because there were a few casting calls up on Talent 6 for voice work. I can't count the number of times someone has said to me that I should do voice over or radio. So, I've been reading through this, a document about getting started in the voice over industry and thinking about recording a demo of some sort.

Beyond that even, is the Sittercity.com site that lists you as a pet sitter (or babysitter for that matter) which is free and you can get money for recommending parents and pet owners. I haven't seen many hits on it. I suppose a lot of people aren't using it yet for pet sitting services. So, I may have to back burner that one for a while even. But, eventually, I may pursue other avenues of finding people in need of pet sitters.

I know, the interesting thing about this list of schemes is that none of it seems to be music related. While I am doing music gigs now on the side, for no pay, everything that I've been exploring for actual sources of income are not music related. Is this because I'm too insecure to go for paying gigs right now? No. I'm still applying for those but I'm being realistic here. I'm spreading myself out a little and I may find out that I'm spreading myself out too much, that my ambitions are too diverse and that my head might explode trying to juggle all of this stuff. Well, hopefully, it won't get that far. I think I need to do all of this to really get a sense for what kind of day job will sustain me while I work on the music career. I need time to hone my craft, no matter what anyone says. Even if there's someone out there who might pay me for my work, I still feel I have work to do. And perhaps I will start getting paid soon.

I've just finished reading this horoscope that set my mind at ease about a lot of things. Never mind the fact that it was incredibly eerie how right on point this horoscope was. Usually, they're fairly vague and I only read them for recreation and amusement. But I've been getting daily mailings from a site called Daily OM. It's great for lovers of eastern thought. This horoscope was talking about being frustrated about the pace of things. And here I am reading it just as I was sitting here getting so frustrated that I can't get out of my apartment when I get antsy because I don't know enough people here to go out with and I can't justify going out whenever I feel like it because I don't have a job yet. And here I am being assured by a horoscope about something that should be obvious. But that's what I'm going through right now, if you want the raw truth. I'm constantly wanting things to start happening here but then realizing that it's going to take time. Here's a quote from the end of the horoscope:

"It may be that we are less concerned with our relative pace, and more interested in bypassing those challenges that frighten us most. Yet it may be that these are a vital element of our development and necessary to our ongoing growth. To skip over them would serve us little, and our lives would be irrevocably changed as a result."

No kidding. I'll leave you with another quote from Walden, that I giggled at the other night, that seems strangely pertinent tonight:

"It is impossible to kill time without injuring eternity."

Blurb #6

Woke up to jackhammers outside the apartment this morning. Any other day I'd be pretty fussed about it but today, strangely I feel pretty laid back. Something in the air. Went for a jog...that thing that's in the air might just be spring. Or something. A week until April. I'm calling Technicolor right now because they said business would pick up in April. I'll let you know how that goes.

Meanwhile, have a photo album from yesterday in the park. Stopped by that Asian Grocery again. I love that place. Incidentally, really cheap eggs.

Sunset Park Tuesday

Job prospects

So I just signed up for a talent agency. I thought it'd be a good idea while I have all this idle time waiting for call backs from full time jobs, to get a piece of the movie extra pie. I kept seeing ads for talent agencies looking for movie extras on craigslist and thought why not. I looked up as much information as I could find, the best of which is well summarized here. Pretty educational. Most of the terms I already knew, having been a film major.

Anyway, I think it'll be fun. I don't expect to make it a full time thing but a few jobs a week at $100-$300 a day could be some nice pocket change on the side. I'm sure there'll be some down side to it all that I will at some point discover (first guesses: the jobs aren't going to come as fast and it'll be on the low end of the pay scale when they do, it's going to be a lot of standing around and a lot of getting yelled at by the assistant director, or maybe my wardrobe might not be up to par) but how will I know unless I try it, right?

NY 1 news' recruiter finally returned my call this morning. They haven't begun the interviewing process yet so my hassling them was slightly premature. The recruiter told me to email my resume again (this is the third time) and she emailed me right back confirming and saying I should expect to be contacted next week.

So I feel I've been pretty productive today but I'm going to spend another half hour searching the job listings and then call it a day, or even a weekend. All told, I applied for six jobs this week, not including signing up for the casting agency. The other side money makers, submitting stock photos to shutterstock.com and signing up for a profile as a pet sitter on sittercity.com, didn't pan out, or haven't panned out yet (much more optimistic there). Shutterstock rejected every single one of my photos. My problem there was that I submitted photos that weren't taken with stock photography in mind so the composition of most of them was of no commercial value; that and most of them had white balance or lighting problems because, again, since they weren't taken with professional use in mind there were all sorts of photographer rules I was breaking out of laziness. So, I resubmit in 30 days. No big deal. But I might want to try another camera, preferably an SLR with lots of manual overrides, or I might want to spend some time with my camera and submit some of my photos to the online forum to see if I can get some pointers.

As for sittercity, I haven't really paid it much attention this week. But perhaps I'll take a look at it presently.

Being unemployed is not half as bad as I had thought it would be. I thought I would feel useless but I'm already doing everything I can daily to make sure I don't stay this way long. There is a bit of freedom that comes with it. And I don't just mean free time. I mean freedom to go in new directions with my job hunt, freedom to try new things. Years ago, I would never have thought to try being a movie extra; never mind the fact that I was in a city that had no major film work going on. But this sudden survival instinct that kicks in when you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from has really boosted my confidence in myself, purely out of necessity. If I didn't have confidence in myself I would curl up into a ball and do nothing and just wait for the perfect job that I'm fully qualified for to come along.

I can't wait for that though. I don't have the luxury. In fact, I don't have any luxury right now. This isn't even my internet connection.

Bikram yoga and my hermit lair...

I guess the one good thing about it being so hot in my apartment is that I got to experience what Bikram Yoga must be like tonight without having to pay for a class. Seriously, the pipe for the radiators gives off enough heat that I don't have to open the valves at all. Nor would I.

I stayed in tonight and watched three episodes of Dexter. I stayed in on Saint Patty's Day. I got my fill of Irish festivities today at the parade on fifth avenue.

St. Patty's Day Parade

That was enough for me. Besides, it costs a lot more money here to drink Guinness at a pub and pretend like I have some idea what this holiday is all about, when it has to be more than just wearing green and getting obliterated on a weeknight.

While I was there in Manhattan, my blinds finally came but FedEx wouldn't leave them because I obviously wasn't here to sign for them. They'll attempt to deliver again tomorrow, so I'll more than likely stay here at the apartment all day. This is good. I have one and a half more cover letters to write and some resumes to tweak. Each job is slightly different in such a way that I can't get away with writing the same cover letter (at least not all the same) nor can I just haphazardly chuck out my usual resume. So, being forced to stay in and work on it is a good thing.

I'll probably break the day up a little bit with an early jog (I mean it this time) and some riffing. I've got a composing gig after all. A composer whom I met through Farah has asked me to score a 24 second spot for a competition he's submitting for. If he wins, it'll be a Chipotle commercial...and there might be pay in that case. Excited about that. The turnaround is March 31st so I've got a little bit of time to knock it out too. Not much though.

I'm feeling a lot better about making myself stay in and not whining or griping or just generally complaining (whatever it is I was doing days ago) about not being social. That will come. I have at least three open offers out to get drinks and I was supposed to have been hanging out with Columbia U. friend who is on spring break this week. And that girl who I asked out, turns out she was out of town with a broken Blackberry and now she has less than 10 days to find a new apartment and move. So, I feel comfortable putting all that nonsense on the back burner for now.

I'm actually enjoying being a hermit. After all, I'm being productive for a change. And the thing I've always known about productivity, is that the more productive you are the more productive you become. It's like gaining momentum.

Sure, staying inside isn't that bad. And tomorrow the apartment will be that much more comfortable when those mini blinds get here. I won't have to worry about putting a shirt on just to walk into the other room and get the lights.

Daoust, out.

Blurb #4

Loads of Job hunting this morning. Applied to a few jobs, mostly film, sound design and film score jobs. Then, more walking around Manhattan. I got my haircut on 44th street at the underground barber shop. Then took the F to Roosevelt Island and took the tram back across. Really wish I'd had my camera. You float across the East river on a set of cables. The whole ride takes about five minutes and you can use a metro card to get on. I'll go back with the camera. Now that I have the camera back from Karishma, here's another album:

Sunset Park