2006-09-21 - 2:01 a.m.
I must confess that I am not delighted by the downward spiral of my life as of late – and I don’t rightly know what to do about it. This is probably why I have not updated here as much as I would normally. I am not pleased with things at the moment. In fact, I am rather embarrassed at the pickle I have gotten myself into. Peculiarly enough, I don’t think I can actually blame myself, really.
Well, of course one can ALWAYS blame oneself – we make the ultimate decisions in our life and if they turn out badly, it’s certainly because we’ve made the decisions. But beyond that point, I do not feel as though I have had any choice in the things that have gotten me to this rather dismaying and disappointing overall place.
It’s funny that the one thing I loathe thinking about is money. I can’t stand it. To me, it is disgusting. It is loathsome and detestable to have money on the mind all the time! A desire for money is revolting and materialistic and greedy. But I do not have enough of it! It’s frustrating. All I need is a gig that offers reasonable remuneration for, oh, what, maybe five or six scripts a week. That would be enough. And yet, the situation I am in I have people willing to offer me tasks – but not willing to pay me for them. Or they’re willing to give me tasks and pay me almost nothing for them. It’s appalling.
I find it ironic that the only things I want are stability and a few dollars – and those are the two things that I just don’t seem to be able to hold onto. I flit from horrible job to horrible job more than anyone I have ever met or heard of. And I have gone from my early dreams a few years ago of being a great and powerful Hollywood Mogul to being an ambitious worker bee, to just trying to hold onto a job, to hoping to land some gig that pays just enough money so I don’t have to worry about it any more.
I have a feeling that I might have lost my mind. How else can you explain my inability to hold down a job? How else can you account for the fact that two of the three newspapers I’ve written for have dropped me like I am a potato deep fried in dog doo? It truly doesn’t make any sense, unless I have gone mad and do not realize it. Yet, everyone tells me that I appear normal – or at least, I appear normal for me. I am not currently wearing a tin foil hat, nor do I plan to do so in the near future. And I do not wheel around a gigantic bicycle, from whose handles I have hung signs reading, “God is Lurv! And Meat is Murder!” I am not sitting here chanting to the great and glorious Yug.
However, I do not think I am in my right mind anyway. And I am not entirely certain that folks would actually tell me if I had, in fact, gone insane. They’d just talk about it behind my back and not tell me.
But the proof is really in the outcome. And, oh, I haven’t really LOST any jobs, per se. They’ve just gone away! That’s all. You are trying to make a living at such and such a stupid production company, but the number of scripts peter down from six, to three, to one. And how are you supposed to scrape a living as a story analyst on one frigging script? You protest to the Union and they give you no satisfaction whatsoever. “Oh, we’re working hard to find new jobs for you! We’re gonna get all those movie studios to hire more readers, we promise!” Sure they will. The Story Analyst’s Guild has done diddly for me since the day I joined the union. IATSE is a big corrupt boondoggle.
Anyway, I was fully expecting work to kick in after Labor Day, and it just hasn’t. It is still a matter of one script a week or two scripts. I have no money! And so I have had to lean on people for make piece work. This week, for instance, I have had to debase myself and take a part time gig as a paper grader and classroom organizer for a family friend who happens to be a junior high school science and math teacher. Can you honestly imagine anything more depressing?
It’s unspeakable, just unspeakable. I just want to bang my head against the wall like a battering ram. There is nothing more loathsome than sitting there, grading 100 exams about the layers of the Earth. Or entering into some grade book the chicken scratch notations of some brat who can’t even be bothered to spell his name correctly. As evidenced by their writing, the children are so stupid I want to scream! Who has the patience to teach these horrors? I would just want to beat them until their bodies were covered with welt marks. If it weren’t for the fact that I enjoy lunch at Amelia’s and blow jobs from men one meets on Gay.com, I would just shoot myself now.
The woman I am working for is this plump sixty year old, who is just trying to keep her job until she reaches retirement, at which point she gets a small pension. She hates teaching herself – and she’s damn awful at it! She’s also almost comically bad at organization. And, me – I am no mastermind at such things. So I go over there and help her with her papers, leaving them in three messy piles instead of two. Helping her is a total case of “shifting the deckchairs on the Titanic arund and around.” And that’s a fact.
Oh, this kind of work is so steadfastly disgusting I cannot possibly bore you with the talk about it. You did not click onto a blog entitled “Eeyore in Hollywood” to read about the adventures of a teacher’s assistant. It’s vile. It makes my head spin. It is unendurable. It is work that is so detestable you want to scream and pull your hair. At least I do not have to work with the horrible children, whom no doubt I would want to kill if I met. But reading their disgusting scrawls and their hateful utterances is such an odious chore that it almost makes you want to grab a pair of knitting needles, heat them up, and plunge them directly into your eyeballs until the vitreous humor sizzles and bubbles.
And now my mother has kindly put her hand on my arm and said, “You know, my ballet school is looking for someone to work in the front office, shuffling forms and making phone calls. Shall I mention you for the job?” Good grief. Just hand me a straight razor right now. It is deplorable. That’s the job I want: To be in some nasty office, surrounded by screechy, rich pre-teen girls, and having to take orders from some starry eyed dancing teacher. Yuck-o-roo-ni.
In addition, I seem to have caught myself an ear infection from that disgusting swimming pool at the YMCA. I am taking these moon-sized horse pills that are so huge I have to almost use a speculum to open my mouth wide enough to take them. I had not even realized how filthy that YMCA pool was until I randomly went for a swim in the tiny kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool in my own apartment building, which was, by comparison, as crystal clear as a mirror and as blue as a New Mexican turquoise necklace. The YMCA pool must be so filled with urine and vomit and feces that it is like swimming about in an untreated sewer. I have often come down with odd little allergic reactions to that filthy pool – sometimes I have noticed my nose a-running or my eyes a-watering after a swim. And there have been occasions when I have been for a swim and then had itchy skin for about two days, even after showering two or three times.
The grotesque pills I’m taking turn my stomach, making my every meal a misery. And given that my stomach is already roiling with rage and fury, I think you can imagine just how cranky and irritable I am.
Anyway, I must confess that I am not in the mind to blog right now. I would be much better off having a nice panic attack, which is what I am going to do now. So I shall bid you adieu until next time, at which point I do hope to have some more pleasant things to report.
