Take Your Pants Off / And Make it Happen

The prompt for Reverb10 was: "what is the wisest thing you did this year?"

Considering this resulted from my own foolish decision to take the fucking job in the first place, I'm really not sure this can qualify, but the wisest thing I did all year was to quit my job. I had been out of work for almost a year - on a kind of sabbatical, sort of, if losing it and going on indefinite leave counts as a sabbatical - and had decided to take another PR agency job to pay the bills while I figured out a real plan for what was next. I knew from the get go that it wasn't an ideal job. It was a rung or so below the last agency job I'd held, and at a smaller, less prestigious agency, and I was making considerably less money. But I was worried I wasn't going to employable anymore if I didn't get back to work, and I knew it was a job I could do, so I took it with the full intention of phoning it in. 

It was fine at first - we had clients, and they were sort of low maintenance and dumb enough to not require any real effort. We had a couple of actually interesting clients in the pipeline. But my boss, whoa-hoh, my boss. I knew going in that he was a Manhattan Beach frat boy/permanent child type who was a douche and sort of a joke, but his stated goal was sales, and the deal we struck was that I would lead all the account work, and he'd stick to administrative functions and new business development. This was fine with me because I don't particularly like sales, and anyway, I knew he'd be easy to manipulate.

What I didn't know was what an epic clown this guy turned out to be. First of all, I discovered he had a ridiculous nickname that I can't put in here, but that was along the lines of something like "Skip" or "Styles" - pure California cheese. And then there was his irritating habit of listening to bad 80s music on Pandora. All day, every day, if we let him get away with it. It was a small office, maybe 15' x 8', and if we didn't have music playing it was too weirdly quiet to work comfortably, so every day was a race to get good music on first before he could come soil us with Mister Mister and the like. Which he hated, but, to his credit, tolerated, because he was a good enough guy that he genuinely wanted to be a good boss and let the underlings have it their way. One time I had on Radiohead and he exploded with frenzied laughter that suggested he'd been biting his tongue all morning and said, "Jesus, do you just want to kill yourself, or what?" The answer to that question was debatable, given that remark, but my co-worker and I laughed it off. 

Anyway, that kind of idiocy was readily apparent in his work style too. He was embarrassing to me in his transparency - not knowing what he was doing, he pretty much never had any actual good advice for clients - and mostly he wanted to talk about partying and getting drunk. (He is 39.) One day I was at a client lunch and all he could talk about was how awesome his old client's party at E3, a videogame tradeshow, was, and how they spent a million dollars on an event that contained strippers dancing around a pole. He also once told a female colleague to never use the word "swallow" in an email, because no man would ever be able to take it seriously. (!)

But I think the true breaking point for me was when we were working one morning and the song "What a Feeling" by Irene Cara came on the radio. It was 8:30 am on a Tuesday, and none of us were in a good mood. He started singing, and then stopped to tell us about a lyric he'd misinterpreted. "Guys," he said, addressing me and my 28 year old female colleague and our very naive 19 year old female intern, "when I was little, I used to think the part where she says 'take your passion/and make it happen' was 'take your pants off/and make it happen!! Isn't that hilarious?!!"

That was pretty much when I knew I would no longer be able to work for that agency. I quit within a couple of weeks, and since have landed a couple of freelance gigs that pay OK and are keeping me going for now. Next month, who knows, but I'm still getting by. 

Posted via email from Jane Donuts is Starting Over

How to have a total change of heart in 24 hours

Is it possible to have a total change of heart in 24 hours?

I did after I wrote that last post. I woke up the next day and thought, wait, I don't want to leave LA. I like it here still, despite many, many issues. There will probably be a time - a time in the not so distant future - when I am forced to leave for economic reasons, but that time is not here yet. And I have a life and friends and a great apartment and a whole professional network here that I am going to need to tap into if I want to make this next phase of my career work.

Big decisions are always like this for me. Usually what happens is that I start to feel like I need to make a change, and I convince myself I need to do something. (Like move to ATL, for example.) Then I ponder that for a while and come up with a whole list of reasons why it is imperative that I do that, and why it makes the most sense and is the best possible course of action, and so on and so on. And then, like a good girl, I zoom out and try to look at it from a holistic perspective and be as objective as possible about the whole thing, often even making a list of pros and cons for each side. It is during this point when I vacillate wildly between the two choices, and drive my friends nuts with declarations that change on an hour to hour basis. 

And ultimately, I arrive at a decision that is some combination of reason and gut feeling, and usually I just go with it and everything is fine. But then occasionally, like with this decision, I get a clear sign that I picked the wrong side and have to reverse course. In this instance I just woke up feeling completely differently even though I had resolved the matter and started making plans to pack up my apartment and sublease my room. Sometimes it's a little more dramatic, though. 

Case in point: when I was 28, I decided I'd had enough of New York, and I went back to my parents' house in ATL to figure out what was next. I was thinking of either staying there or moving to LA, and was looking for jobs in both places. Odds were totally against LA - although I had friends and family out there, I had very little money and no real job leads, as opposed to a whole mess of resources I had in ATL. It didn't make a whole lot of sense in strictly logical terms. I ended up getting an offer - a really good offer - from a PR firm in ATL one Friday, and told them I would get back to them on Monday. I spent the weekend going through the process detailed above, and landed on the decision to accept the job and stay in LA. I went to bed on Sunday night with the plan to wake up the next morning and call to accept the job. 

And then I woke up nauseous on Monday morning at the thought of staying in Atlanta. 

I left for LA the next week.

My new favorite cafe/dance studio - Paper or Plastik

Posted via email from Jane Donuts is Starting Over

Decisions, decisions and the frittering away of time

Things I've done while procrastinating writing this post:

• Read a blog post by David Byrne on the ramifications of digitization and computer networking (interesting and scary)
• Tried to find online evidence of David Byrne's sexuality (indeterminate, as far as I can tell)
• Listened to the Police song "Miss Gradenko", which was in my head when I woke up this morning (decent little song that I haven't heard or thought of in 20 years or so)
• Read the NY Times review for "Up in the Air", which I saw at the Arclight this afternoon (I give it a B+/A-)
• Read a bunch of crap on Twitter, including a story about penniless brothers who were living in a cave in Hungary and who have just inherited a billion dollars from their long lost granddaughter (!!!)
• Listened to Ode to Joy (uplifting)
• Read a bunch of "best of 2009" music roundups (a colossal waste of time once you've read a few, as the indie music media/blogosphere is mostly a big echo chamber)
• Sought out the MySpace page of local LA band Warpaint, based on recommendation from aforementioned lists (decent)

All told today, I've probably spent five hours meandering aimlessly online, and, truth be told, that is probably less time than usual. It's the result of a combination of a surfeit of time, chronic laziness and plain old fear. Time because I'm not working right now. Laziness because I'm not being disciplined about the use of my time - because I have so much of it, I squander it, whereas if it were more limited, I would probably be more efficient and not, say, spend hours reading blogs that give advice to writers (ha.) Fear because, let's face it, I'm terrified of this whole business of being a writer.

I have known that writing is a calling for me since I was pretty young - probably since second grade, when I "published" my first story, a mystery revolving around an international jewel thief. (My aunt, a lawyer, had her secretary type it up and bind copies for my family.) In the years since, I've stumbled in and out of writing - I've taken classes in creative writing, screenwriting, memoir and "writing from a spiritual perspective"; I've had at least four blogs that have never really taken off; I've written freelance articles for a few publications here and there; and I've entered (and lost) short story writing contests. But I've never been able to commit to a regular writing practice, and that is my biggest struggle of all.

And now here I am, having completely burned out on my career in public relations (which is a story in its own right, but for another time,) and feeling like the only thing I'm sure of is that I want to focus on the craft of writing. Great, right? Right. But then there's the problem of making a living. And here's where it gets tricky. I know for a fact that I need a full time job so that I stay out among the living and so that my time is structured, so this is no lament that I don't want to work. Rather, my dilemma is deciding exactly how - do I try to get paid to write in some way? Or do I go for a job that pays the bills, is not too mentally taxing, and allows me to write whatever I want in my free time?

More to come.

Posted via web from Jane Donuts is Starting Over