Exhausted, no more social life, but happy, I swear!

Actual Post Date 4/17/08. Miss A is no longer able to churn them out... Without further delay, I give you the completely nonlinear stuff I wrote last night before I passed out with my computer on the pillow next to me. And now that it's done, I'm gonna catch a few Zs before I head back out...

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Thoughts are racing through my mind this evening, but in no particular order. I'm pretty exhausted tonight--another 13 hour day--and this time no martinis to blame it on. I actually had a good day at work... although the APOC commented on me looking worn out. I am kind of worn out. I'd like to think it's holdover from the nice evening I had with the IT crew from Womens Rights, but I know that's not true. This isn't physical.

In the interest of keeping it real I gotta say that I'm emotionally exhausted after a couple of weeks of people being noncommittal and flaky about hanging out (not Auntie though! And not my favorite IT department!).

I have a constant nature vs. nurture battle waging in my head. My nature is to trust people, to see the good in their hearts and to enjoy their company worry-free. The events of my life however have made me wary and skeptical, and I often project my own unrelated doubts and fears onto others. This is especially true when my mind is idle and left to entertain itself.

But, as we say in Brooklyn, Fuhgettaboudit! I am back to a place where I'm busy all the time and wiped out in the other two hours of the day. I no longer have time to worry about what anyone else is thinking. My body and brain are too wrapped up getting used to this work pace... Both of them have been kind of lazy the last few years, although taking Hurricane Katrina into consideration, several people have argued to me that I had a good excuse.

Back to the topic at hand though, I am off the market from Sunday at 10 pm through Friday at 8. Bye bye, social life, I loved you well, but I'm living my dream. Or something.

The producer even suggested a meeting tomorrow, but I just didn't have the energy to deal with his maybes and perhapses. I want him to be noncommittal about some things, but hanging out with me is just not one of those things. Now I kind of regret my impatience, both over the last few weeks (too much of that girl kind of impatience) and tonight (irritable and tired). Really I don't know enough about him to make any kind of real judgement call, but I do know that I'm starting to feel jerked around. That's nurture talking. My trusting nature tells me that he's really a great person who genuinely wants to be friends. It'd be nice to know, but I'm over worrying about it (especially since I gave up caring and blogged it).

My heart is in a good place, I'm feeling free and happy in spite of, or perhaps because of my exhaustion. I'm learning to let go of expectation and to replace it with hope and the joy of being a shiny little candle flame and living truly in the moment.

F--- YEAH.

I just did the unthinkable.

In one word I turned down a $40k annual salary for $650 a week, for a maximum of twelve weeks.. In that same word, I rejected the possibility of health insurance, paid vacations, or a 401(k). That word rejected a 9 to 5 schedule of laxidaisical event planning and scheduling meetings (and yes. blogging) in favor of 13 hour workdays of thankless phone answering and running back and forth and NEVER messing up, if at all humanly possible.

That word was a resounding and unequivocal YES.

I have to thank Aunt J one more time, and I'll probably thank her again tomorrow. Without her endorsement, who knows how long it might have taken? I certainly didn't expect it even this soon, but I'm sure glad it happened. Now I just need to make the best of it and impress the hell out of everyone in the production office...but if my past jobs are any indication, that will come naturally to me!

Because I... AM A ROCK STAR.

I am in love with nerds.

The boys in my office are real nerds. I love sitting with a bunch of IT guys and data jockeys...it's like ear candy all day long. I listen to their little debates about Spiderman's webs (controlled scionically, or not?) and their discussions about implementing an office-wide Wacking Day and how, inevitably, everything comes back to Star Wars.

I love it! They just don't know how adorable they are! 2.0's D&D habit makes me want to pinch his little cheeks. ODG is a little more mainstream; he has this cool, California-style facade, but it's fun to watch him get excited about programming pranks and Storm Troopers. And then there's AIG, with his adorable (damn him) ratty jeans and sexy (damn him) Puerto Rican grin. After a lengthy discussion about whether or not Batman could kick the Predator's ass, AIG called us all into the IT training room, which is basically a bank of computers with a big giant projector up front. After filing in, he busts out with this in full screen on the projector:


HOLY AWESOME.

Okay, first of all, that guy who played the Joker? Not bad! It kinda got my heart racing for Heath Ledger's Joker, which promises the creepy element that this dude has plus incredible acting that apparently gave Michael Caine the willies. Not to mention, the production values are sort of mind-bogglingly good for something free on YouTube... Which got me thinking about shorts.

No, not shorts (although it is almost 70 degrees today and I have a master plan to go watch the sunset over the Hudson River after work)... SHORTS. Short films...and how much fun I used to have making them. And how easy it would be to get back into it.

It reminded me of a discussion I had with the Producer about how Podcasts and new media are the wave of the future. Although I tend to disagree with him about traditional corpo-funded production being a dead end, I very much agree that the Internet has much to offer me in terms of creative self-expression. In fact, I'd almost forgotten about this discussion - and really that was the thing that initially piqued my interest in him. Thinking outside the box is hot.

During the singleness epiphany and social-life explosion of the last couple of weeks, I haven't really had time to process that discussion and come around to it, but then on Sunday PDF's Boyfriend mentioned that someone was looking for a Director's Assistant and got that bug crawling up my leg again...and armed with a brand-spanking-new resume and Aunt J's very kind endorsement to basically everyone she knows, I am making a renewed effort to pursue production work. So it was very much on schedule that AIG brought to my attention this amazing little Batman video!

Okay, maybe not amazing - the Joker dialogue is pilfered directly from the comic books (which is kind of cool, but also kind of unimaginative), and totally does not relate to the whole Batman/Alien/Predator stuff. I guess you could say it's nerd porn: what little story that is there exists in tandem to the real action rather than in support of it. Whatever; it's still cool. And my nerd boys are cool for loving it.

Doesn't "The Procrastinator" sound like a supervillian's name or something?

My resume has been Aunt J-ified!

"Get rid of this. You don't need that. Sounds nice, but nobody will read it. Chunk it up. Make this bigger. Make that smaller. Call this something else."

It's great! I love it! She's the best auntie ever!

After much procrastination (including text messaging practically everyone in my phone), I finally buckled down with Penny curled up on one side and Lu curled up on the other and got down to business. A snip here, a stretch there, a little color correction and visual effects and.... Ta-Da! This resume is the little black dress of resumes; stylish, simple, and it flaunts what I've got (broad experience) and hides what I haven't--without overembellishment, of course. I can dress it up with a fancy cover letter and a more traditional font or I can keep it casual and send it along as is. I feel better than if I'd gone shopping at Bergdorfs!

Incidentally, I also noticed today that I've worked with an uncanny amount of Jeffs.

Now hopefully when PDF's Boyfriend passes it along to his contact for this director's assistant position that he mentioned me for, someone else will think I did as good a job on it as I do!

I think my brain needs a 12 hour turnaround rule.

I am insane.

I have been rearranging the furniture in my apartment for a week and a half. Insane.

Okay, the roach thing? Completely insane, albeit kind of hysterical.

I have, as a general rule, stopped eating unless I go out somewhere and eat, or unless I'm at work having lunch. Painfully insane.

I am purchasing plane tickets for two cats. Somehow I expect these two cats to live with me in my <300 sq. foot apartment, with all their food and water and litter, and for us to all coexist in this tiny room in total harmony. What am I thinking?

I am all wishy washy about getting a job with my current temp employer (the women's rights nonprofit) because I have what can only be described as a masochistic desire to work in film production. Draw your own conclusion.

I met up in person yesterday with someone I met online (insane?) and after one very long conversation with this person I suddenly feel like I have a total handle on my JH situation in addition to a renewed idealism regarding my career goals. He happens to have experience in production, and now he's a producer for TV cartoons. And he definitely gave me a lot of food for thought about the things I like to do and how I can apply them to other careers in the entertainment industry, and how by limiting myself to production I am limiting my potential for self actualization within the scope of my career (which, we all know, is the main goal here). Needless to say, he's a very smart fella, and I'm beginning to think a little more broadly about my options.

The other day on the phone, Aunt J said, with no small amount of exasperation in her voice, "[Miss A], I don't know why you want to be an AD." She later quantified that by saying that yes, she does know....but the message still came through loud and clear. No matter how much I love being on set and managing others etc. etc., it's going to suck. I mean, I know all this. From the very get-go, from my very first research in high school about working in film, I learned that it sucks. Everyone tells you it sucks because they want to prevent you from being shocked by how completely unglamorous it is and by how non-creative it can be. And the career track for which I have set my cap is like the flagship of gray-hair-inducing unglamorousness. I know this. I do.

I also know that I can hack it, if given a shot. I can put up with 5 am calls and seventeen hour days and I still do a good job and keep focused and get things done quickly. I know that, in spite of the long hours and the nasty working conditions, it is really fun and exciting to be a part of the machine.

I am nervous about things like health insurance and income stability and budgeting. I am curious about other parts of the machine. And now I'm taking a step back and thinking very actively about all that.

Please don't sue me, Amy Poehler. I loved you in Mean Girls.

PDF and I had a simply fabulous evening downtown tonight. It felt great to actually something with him instead of just hanging out at his apartment uptown. We talked about growing up without dads and how that causes us to shut ourselves out of the world sometimes. It was nice; we had this amazing gorgonzola cheese stuff at Niko's on Broadway and 76th, then headed downtown.

When PDF said he was taking me to a place called Turks and Frogs I wasn't sure what we would find. He has previously taken me to a totally cute Moroccan bar (with the best make-out spot I've ever seen in my life, although we're not quite each others' type), and I kind of expected something like that but more...Turkish. We wound up in this too cool for school type of place...a total hipster joint. It's not really my scene, but fine for a glass of wine. So we're ready to order when suddenly this blonde woman walked by us and I think, "wait a minute, I know her..." Then PDF looked at me and said, "Hey, isn't that...you know...from Saturday Night Live?"

Turns out, Amy Poehler and a few of her SNL buddies had shown up in the bar....so, being with PDF, the most fabulous person I know (silly PDF), we bought them champagne! Amy was nice enough to stop by our table and thank us very personally. I could tell she was doing the famous person duty of making nice with the fans, but it was still very classy of her to approach us graciously. The rest of her gang (I deliberately leave out names) was less gracious and only thanked us when they were forced to walk by to get to their table (LAME!). I think I know why Amy has come so far; the rest of them have something to learn from her.

On a side note, I'm watching SNL right now, and I just saw a couple of the folks from the bar tonight. That's kind of surreal, and kind of cool! I wonder how you get to be a PA on that show... (turns out $40 worth of champagne charged to PDF's boyfriend doesn't do the trick).

Kanye West is on the TV right now too. For what it's worth, coming from New Orleans, I agree with him about George Bush.

After Turks and Frogs, we were walking down some street...I forget because I was a little boozed on two glasses of wine...and we passed a high school gym, where there were about twelve couples, mostly gay male couples, who were all square dancing. No kidding! There was a dude with a microphone calling out the moves and all these people in their late fifties square dancing around this big, relatively empty gym with Valentine's decorations in it. It was very surreal.

Then, all of a sudden, PDF mentioned that he had seen one M. Silberschatz coming out of the subway a couple of weeks ago. Strange, since I just thought of him yesterday. M is a figure from the distant past; someone I met during Spring Break of 2001, which was spent in PDF's dorm at AMDA. I'd nearly forgotten about him and then something the other day reminded me of a very strange evening I spent at this party with this boy... I had even forgotten his name until PDF reminded me of it. "You have to remember who he is!" said PDF when I didn't recognize the name, "You completely disappeared with him for twelve hours!" Most of what I remember is noisy pigeons on an air conditioning unit and that PDF forcing me to write this ridiculous letter...and socks. I remember lots of socks.

The letter never sat well with me, but we were nineteen and melodramatic and PDF was acting like a complete turd and threatening to make me go home. It was a nice evening, really, and PDF didn't even get it. I think he was a little angry that I had fun without him...like tonight, when he said he didn't want to go out I said "Okay, well I'm going to the Jay Brannan Concert then." Suddenly he wanted to go downtown with me.

I wonder how I ever forgot a last name like that. It's so very distinctive, especially to a Catholic girl from Ohio. I don't even know why it's significant or relevant now; I guess it's just one of those things that I need to write down to get it out of my head... And it's another one of those things that's so weirdly close--PDF saw him on the 79th st. subway station, a place I find myself fairly often. Everything in New York is so weirdly close. It's such a tiny little place with so much packed in.

I always knew I identified with Peppermint Patty for a reason.

Continuing to read some other blogs about New York twentysomething life, I have realized that I am disappointed with my own experience so far. It seems like I keep sabotaging myself somehow and setting myself up for that disappointment. Like every time I try to hit one of my goals I miss by a quarter inch. And then I get surly. And then it makes things even worse.

I am disappointed that I live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to midtown from where I live. Late nights on the subway it has taken me over two hours to get home, with crazy transfers and a Q train that recently decided not to go through at Atlantic (instead they make you transfer from the D line, which is one of the most obnoxious transfers I have had to make). The annoying building I live in wouldn't be nearly so bad if it were, say, the first stop in Brooklyn or, say, in Manhattan somewhere. I don't feel safe in my neighborhood late at night. I don't feel like I can walk the ten blocks to the closest Duane Reade if I need to. It's not New York. Not really.

I live in PLG because I was desperate for an apartment. I took the first thing I could get--300 square feet with lots of closet space, a full-but-small kitchen, and a full bath for $900 a month. For $900 a month I should have looked in Washington Heights more.

I was desperate for an apartment because I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement that would allow me to sleep on someone's couch for three months...everyone seemed to need their couch for something else once every couple of weeks. My best friend Alecia lives three hours upstate, an hour north of the last stop on the Hudson line of the Metro North Railroad. Her house was the closest place I had to park my boxes and rest my head until I found that apartment I so desperately wanted. I hit a deer with my car during my three hour commute that first month.

I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement because I couldn't ask for one from PDF, who I had barely spoken to in years before my visit last July. I couldn't ask for one from cousin Jeannie because she has so much going on all the time that I just feel in her way when I'm around her. The big one though, is that I couldn't ask for one from Aunt J. I can't ask her for anything. I can barely talk to her without getting nervous and frustrated...

When I actually spend time with her it's so nice! She's really funny and relatively easygoing...relatively because everyone on that side of my family, including me and my sister, is typically very high strung and hard to please. So she's relatively easy gong (for one of my relatives), and it's obvious that she cares about me. Her girlfriend R, as is typical of people who marry into that side of my family, is very warm and sweet and incredibly approachable.

I love hanging out with them. I want to do nothing else! I want to tag along with their entire life! When I rented my apartment, a block and a half away from Prospect Park, I imagined their house, a half a block away from Prospect Park on the other side, in trendy and safe Park Slope. I imagined waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and putting on my goofy neon green shorts and my ipod and running out through the park, and all of a sudden I see Aunties J and R throwing the frisbee to their sweet little dog. They wave me over and we all have a nice time running around and frisbeeing. And then we go have brunch in Park Slope. What happens to my running shorts in this particular fantasy, I do not know, because I definitely do not wear them to brunch.

I guess I'm afraid of Aunt J because someday I want to grow up and be just like her, a successful filmmaker, a former Manhattanite who abandoned the noise and the grit for the sunny side of Propsect Park, living in a homey 4th floor brownstone apartment with my pets and my girlfriend or whoever, turning 40 and looking back and feeling like I accomplished something.

There's more than that though. My sister and I often wonder if that side of the family sometimes doesn't want us around because we remind them of him, of my dad. For a long time, particularly during my teenaged years after Mom got remarried, we felt like the Aunties were the only people we could talk to about him...so every chance I had, every time I saw one of them, I would press for more information like a squirrel frantically collecting nuts before winter sets in and all the nuts are gone. It may have made me a little one-dimensional in their eyes.

I guess a little of that goes both ways, like when I see Aunt J it's hard not to think of her in terms of her relationship to my father (his youngest sibling). She was thirteen when I was born, and by the time I could really remember stuff she had gone to college, so I don't remember her much from my childhood. From what I do remember of her, she used to tease me, but in the nice way that grownups tease little kids they love. Like in the same way that my dad was funny, but in a way I didn't understand when I was a little kid. I guess in a lot of ways it feels like every time we look at each other or talk to each other my dad is sitting right there in the middle, and a little bit in the way.

Attention, Supervillians! Whoever gave Robin that wedgie had better start running.

Today is the day!

My friend LM from New Orleans got me some info about some productions that are coming up (very nice!), and today is the day I will flip open the telephone and talk to someone. I am not afraid. In fact, I am kind of excited!

And anyway, what do I have to lose? I'm smart and capable and (a little) experienced, and I really and truly believe that I can do the job better than most people could. And besides, I'm a badass.

I'm also considering applying for the DGA trainee program. It's one of those 3-zillion-people-apply-and-only-4-get-in things. But whatever! If I don't apply, I'll never have that 1 in 3 zillion chance, right?

I'm feeling all empowered. I spoke to JH the other day and he agreed to sell the house. I think he finally figured out that I'm not going to leave him alone until he does. Having significantly less debt is AWESOME! And it makes me feel like the badass that I am!