... or at least it seems that way judging by my blogging output.
All sorts of things are going on here.
The news in the last weeks of the economic meltdown nationally, and then internationally, has been in my head. Can't help but wonder what shoe is going to drop in my life because of all this crap.
Prior to the meltdown news, there were already rumblings at work that things weren't going well.
They aren't selling as many ads as they like, so that may affect us, like in terms of lay-offs.
Okay, actually, my boss said (more or less), that ads are down and the owners are going to be taking a much more hands on approach to things. The various managers of the departments are going to be giving a report of where they think they can save money and then they'll see what shakes out from those reports and recommendations.
Meanwhile, my boss intimated that if there was a layoff (or more), I wasn't going to be affected. For now (that's me saying THAT).
This info was passed on to me and a couple other employees because we were in my boss's office complaining about a particular situation and then he dropped this news on us. He said that if there were any layoffs (and specifically, I think he had one particular person in mind) it wouldn't affect us three.
But the bad news regarding the company's situation was news to me and sort of overshadowed the main reason why I went in to see him.
My reaction was this: prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
And then, a week or so later, the whole $700 billion crap hit the news and fans.
I had been idly thinking about getting another job already, like, for the last several months, primarily to escape my two overnight shifts a week. If I it weren't for those two days (well, nights, actually), I'd probably be more content to simply working there and trying to do my creative stuff on the side.
But, I didn't have any real options that I was considering in terms of other jobs.
Really, I'd like to do something with film and/or comics.
But, I'm not really prepared with either (in terms of a resume or portfolio), and even if I was, the job(s) I kept envisioning was purely an impractical fantasy, like self-publishing comics.
So, now what?
I don't know.
The good news is, I'm not laid off yet.
So, I think my current game plan is this: impractical fantasies be damned, I need to work on my resume/portfolio so I'm not starting from zero if the big layoff bomb drops on my head.
From an art standpoint it first means: get off my ass and draw a lot more. Like, at all.
So far, I'm still in the talk more and do (draw) less mode, when I should be in a draw more, talk less mode, obviously.
Regarding film(making): this year I've been elected to be the co-programming chair (along with Phil Utech) of this years's Buffalo Movie and Filmmakers Club (or BM-VM), which is in its 75th year. We meet once monthly, and Phil and I are in charge of coming up with the meeting's programming.
But along with these duties, I still occasionally help people out with their films, doing whatever they want me to.
But I haven't made my own film yet.
And I'm currently looking to finagle an iMac in order to enable myself to make some movies.
In order to do this, it looks like I'm content to exploit my retired 82 year-old father's finances. I won't go into the specifics, but that's basically the situation. Actually, more or less with his blessing. But still... I feel a little guilty spending his money.
However, if it means I actually start to make some damn movies, even short ones, instead of just whining about other people's films, then I really don't care.
Alright, this was just getting my toes back into the blogging water.
And, I think I'll be whining more often here, using this blog like a diary, ya lucky sucks. Whether that's good news or bad news for you "readers", I don't know (uh, althoguh I have a hunch).
Anyway, thanks for checking this out if there are any of you out there!
Later.
Showing posts with label whining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whining. Show all posts
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Saturday, August 04, 2007
THINKING OUT LOUD: 150 DAYS LEFT UNTIL 2008 (33/150)
Hi-ho.
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
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