Back to the Grind

[rinue]

Back at work this past week after a week of being off work but at home. I am reminded how much I hate having a day job. That knowledge is always there in the background, but it is usually further in the background, because it is not usually right next to a week when I was able to set my own priorities instead of having to clock in.

It's not as though I disilke my job. It's interesting and aligned with my values, and gives me an almost unheard of amount of paid time off by U.S. standards. However, when I get to the end of a workday I feel like I haven't done anything. Certainly, I made money to support myself and my family, and I helped tens of thousands of television viewers with disabilities fully participate in the public discourse. It's actually nice that I can leave work at work and not worry about it when I'm off the clock. But I wind up berating myself for not making any progress on the list of things I want to get done, even though I had a whole day...because I forget I was at work for eight and a half hours.

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My fingernails growing have been growing extra fast lately. I don't know why. They always grow quickly, as does my hair, but I feel like I have to clip them every other day or so. WHY?

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Today I wrote about 800 words of my autobiographical essay about Edward Lear (due in 2 weeks), and patched together another 3 minutes of the "Tick Tock Toe" rough cut. (I'll have to come up with a real title one of these days.) Runtime's just over 12 minutes so far, and I'm though page five of the nine-and-a-half-page screenplay, so my guess that it's going to be a 20-minute film is bearing out. A lot of the editing is simultaneously arty and throwback, but I know it's comprehensible because I've shown it to a 7-year-old and he could tell me at every given moment what was happening in the plot. Granted, this is a 7-year-old to whom I've taught film theory, and who I yesterday showed 2001: A Space Odyssey (his favorite part was the apes). Still, I feel I have executed the video equivalent of spellcheck.

(The arty/throwback editing is less a reflection of my aesthetic {although that's present; for example, I tend to use hard cuts rather than optical transitions like crossfades} than it is inevitable with the source material. Contemporary commercial projects by and large have more shot coverage than what I'm working with. In this footage, I can usually only see the action clearly from one angle at a time, and have to jump to another angle to see the rest of it, and there are major continuity errors from shot to shot so I can't always do this smoothly; I have to use a side road or a repetition. This was common in the days of early cinema, and is not common in the blockbuster era, which is defined by big budgets and unrestricted film stock {inifinite video ratio}, not to mention reshoots and major digital alterations in postproduction. My budget alone places me aesthetically in the 70s or in art museums. But the visual style is not the style of a fine artist doing video paintings, and is not immitative of the 70s. Hence a sense of the familiar unfamiliar.)

Comments

[sabotabby]

I continue to be in awe of all of the things you manage to do.

I wish I could work half as much for, like, 2/3 of the pay. Then I could be creative and not exhausted all the time. Alas, my job is the sort that expands to fill the time I can give it.

[rinue]

I mean, exactly. I would rather cut back to a 30-hr/wk schedule, but I've recently realized I can get pretty close to that just by using PTO (I get a lot because of my seniority), hence the sudden uptick in my getting stuff done. For me it all still feels extremely slow, but that's sort of by design (sort of; I really took to heart that aesop's fable about slow and steady wins the race, and in fact do very well in endurance races even though I am a terrible runner and hate running) and sort of because the stuff I am not getting done is more visible to me than it is to other people who can only see the stuff I am getting done.

Example: You make fake propaganda posters and I see them and think they are great, but presumably you don't think of them as counting down the list of stuff you want to get done, because they are impromptu and don't cross anything off. It is the same land I live in over here.

[sabotabby]

They occasionally do make my to-do list, when I have a good idea but can't execute it immediately, or more frequently these days, when the union specifically requests one. But I see your point.