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

Sublease...

I'm going to sublet my place. I've done a lot of thinking about this over the past week and it makes the most sense out of any other plan I've come up with. The reason is that this place I'm living in has become too expensive for me to afford with any amount of uncertainty about my hours at work. I stand to save about $400 a month by doing this and that alone has been enough to assuage any apprehensions I have about moving again, leaving this place, going through the hassle of finding a subletter and a new apartment in the same month and any other random concerns that have come up with regards to this process.

To me, it's as good a plan as any and that it's a plan with a definite set of consequences, the bulk of which are good for me, makes me feel a million times better than sitting around worrying and trying to find extra side gigs and begging my bosses to hire me full time. That all can wait. In the meantime, the name of the game is to make a gigantic stride towards being able to effectively spend less than I make for once. I've reached my limit with all of my other expenses. I literally can't cut back anymore short of not eating or drinking a few nights a week and unplugging even my fridge when I leave the house and never using my A/C ever.

Survival instinct has kicked in. This is what it has come to. I had an epiphany that my lifestyle right now is essentially what is expensive and that I needed to consider doing this one big thing to change my lifestyle, i.e. roommates instead of living by myself, in order to not be so stressed out about it. That's one of the root causes of panic, when you feel like you have no other options. So I just needed to add some options to the table. At least one other, that is.

And now, I just have to go and put the plan into effect. I cannot decide if I should take care of finding a new place first or if I should sublet this one first. Let me explain. I've read on the NYC Rent Guidelines Board website that in order to sublet I have to give written notice to my landlord 30 days before and in this letter I must include the name of the sub lessor and my address during the sublease. ??? How the eff am I supposed to do that? So then, I get thinking. They don't need to know when exactly the sublet starts. I could make like it's starting in August, thereby giving them thirty days, but I could go ahead and get the sub lessor in here now and myself out. Or at least fudge the days a little. This way when I write them the letter of intent to sublet I can at least have a name of who is subletting and where I will live. But then, if they turn down my request? This is what confuses me. If there's the potentiality that they will turn down my request to sublet, why am I going to ahead and find a place that I could end up having to turn down? Maybe I could just give my parents address.

Not to bore you all with the details of it all. Half of this is just me writing it out so I can read it back to myself and, by that, perhaps make more sense out of it all. I think I'll just write them a letter of intent to sublet and keep it at that. Turn it in tomorrow morning and wait.

I hate that it's come to this. In some ways. In other ways, I'm looking forward to the potential to get out of this neighborhood sooner rather than later (March 1st next year). Also, I think it would solve a lot of my problems with socializing in this city if I can find roommates around my age that have been here for a while and have a network in place and if I can move to a neighborhood where there are sundries and hangouts nearby and I can feel like I don't live in suburbia. Incidentally, this is one of those random reasons I moved to the city. To be closer to people. It seems a bit ironic, sometimes I complain about the noise in my neighborhood or I come across as a bit of a curmudgeon but honestly, I'd love to be around people my age. That's the qualifier: my age. Not around families and high school kids. I feel like an outsider here (and not just because it's mostly Hispanic and Chinese and Indian families here who keep to themselves).

I was hanging out in Park Slope the other night with some people from my UNCG days, people that studied film there and that I could be found hanging out with just about any day of the week back then. I'm looking around the bar and seeing all these twenty and thirty somethings doing what I'm trying to do. Live a life in New York City. I've had apartment jealousy, I've had neighborhood jealousy. Now I'm having life jealousy. I know how absurd that is, by the way, to look at someone and, effectively making a snap judgment by the way they appear to me, wish I had what they had. Especially since I know nothing about their lives. It may suck to them. But at any rate, it looks shiny and attractive to me, and though I'm wary of wanting, I still want it or something like it. Comfort and stability are one thing but at least to be able to pay my bills and live near people my age would make my content. After all, there's nothing wrong with goals is there? Just getting attached to results. I'm certain that I will want something else as soon as I move to that brownstone apartment in Park Slope.

Anyway, I've got a formal letter to write. If anyone has any advice or information on how to go about subletting if you've ever done it before, please let me know what you know, I'm all ears. I'm off. Have some pictures from my romps last week:

J Scott's Visit

And here's some from poker night last night:

poker Night

West Village

My cousin finally got a job. I was so happy because it was a lead I was able to pass on to her from a friend of mine. The job is a marketing assistant position at the American Symphony Orchestra, so, for her, it's a career move and one that is back towards the arts, something she had been considering. Anyway, tonight we were out celebrating with dinner at a Mexican Restaurant called Tortilla Flats in the West Village.

As we were being led to our table, I looked down and realized that the gentleman sitting at the table right in front of us was none other than Zachary Quinto from, not only my favorite television show Heroes, but also from the new Star Trek movie. As it dawned on me who he was I could see a grin forming on his face, as though he could tell he had been recognized and was bracing for an awkward confrontation. I spared him and moved on, immediately leaning toward Katrina to tell her that Sylar was sitting behind us.

He left shortly after and after our meal we went for a walk around the West Village, stopping at Magnolia, a rather famous cupcake shop, and winding up back around Chelsea, where I work and eventually walking to Union Square and catching the subway, each of us in opposite directions.

Incidentally, it was the second time this week I walked from Chelsea to the West Village and I was snapping photos the whole way both times. Thursday night, after a really long shift at work (nine and a half hours), Karishma and I met at a restaurant called Baoguette for some traditional Banh Mi sandwiches (pay particular attention in that article to the bit about head cheese). After chomping down those sandwiches, we walked out past the West Side Highway to a park along the river bank and walked our feet off until we wound up down by the financial district, stopping briefly to sit on one of the piers. Again, snapping photos the whole way.

Check them out:

West Village June best

Those were from both nights. The West Village is one of those neighborhoods that you aspire to live in. It's so nice and it feels like a whole different city, even though there's several avenues plowing right through it. It's below 14th street where all the streets start to slant all over the place so you'll find all kinds of nooks and crannies in there.

I may write some more about the West Village but right now I'm tired so check out this link.

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.

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.

Weekend.

Had a fun night last night. I met Karishma at her apartment and then after watching most of Bend it Like Beckham (sad, I had never seen it before), we took the subway to Park Slope to meet Apoo. It was a sushi place on Flatbush Ave., called Sushi Tatsu. Great atmosphere, though slightly cramped. I had a 16 ounce Asahi and a mushroom soup.

After that we went to a place called Soda, near Apoo's apartment. A dive bar of sorts, though it only met a few of the criteria that would earn it the moniker; the first being a smelly bathroom with graffiti-ed walls. There was draft beer galore but one could of course, as I did, go for the PBR in a can, criterion number 2 in my book for a dive bar. For all you North Carolinians, I paid $3 for said canned goodness; a full $0.75 to a dollar more than I would have in NC. I guess that's not too bad. I got to drink it in Brooklyn for crying out loud!

The way home saw major train luck, the likes of which I've not seen on a Friday night in Brooklyn since I arrived here. The 2 was at the station at 7th Ave. maybe a minute after I arrived on the platform and when I made the platform for the D train I only had to wait about five minutes but I still had time to snap this photo of cheeky subterranean humor.


During our outing yesterday we got talking about how many people we know are out of work, whether after having been laid off or having chosen to leave a job during a recession, like yours truly. It's interesting to see how many are handling the ensuing unemployment, while not curling up into a ball and giving up. And how many are getting creative with job searching, i.e. trying to find things out of their comfort zones, while others are sticking with the safer method of applying for their usual fare and meanwhile, tucking in and cashing those unemployment checks, not leaving the house at all, eating Ramen noodles and drinking cheap (or no) beer.

Different strokes, I guess. Still would make an interesting topic/sub-topic for a blog. There are tons of 'em out there already that are devoted to just being unemployed.

Here, here and here, for starters.

If I did write about unemployment it would be my own experience with being marginally unemployed (i.e. still being employed at least part time or with several freelance gigs). Also, said blog would be a series of entries in my greater blog, rather than one devoted entirely to unemployment, because, let's face it, I don't really want to be blogging about unemployment my entire life. I plan on being employed by April, to tell you the truth. Just might be interesting to chronicle my first experience with it, with the exception of college, since I was too young to work.

At any rate, I have that composing gig with the filmmaker that I met at Farah's Oscars party and today I went to the shoot. That deserves an entire entry to itself, but here's a photo I took on the way home of a playground a few blocks away from his studio.



Yes, a playground shaped like some familiar buildings.