Oh heyyyyy
Careful what you wish for, as they say.
Was it me who was a bit (year+) ago admitting I wanted the world to stop so I could get off for awhile?
Enter: multiple industry strikes. Yeah, they're over, and roughly a year from the first batch, there's the possibility of another (couple), so for whatever reasons (I could speculate, and have) there's still almost no work, and that's not really what I meant I wanted, for the record.
Can't imagine I ought to feel any shame for admitting I've had around six weeks of work since last May, and I'm possibly one of the lucky ones.
It's actually pretty extraordinary to have volumes of free time if (unlike me) you're someone that can manage to use it while in a 24/7 state of panic about how you're going to keep a roof over your head. I could do so many things with it. If.
I did do one Really Cool Thing (I'll get to it, in another post) but otherwise my brain has some holes if you haven't noticed, and when things go awry I can't make much sense of anything (someday maybe I'll get into Small Awry vs Big Awry / recovery times / worldbuilding / contextualizing difficulties in this swiss cheese brain of mine, maybe not – for now just imagine I need sort of a life stability exoskeleton - but also am unskilled at achieving that – or things just swish around and get dizzy) and can end up pretty paralyzed, so there's nothing too fun about this.
[New wish: start the world again; I want to get ON. is that how this works? I don't know how to person, so also I don't know how to achieve goals]
Are there still people reading this? there appear to be. I don't know who you are or why – maybe we're both happier that way – I'm not going to storm in, hit the overhead light and demand you show yourselves. (rude!) It's totally fine, just chill. Oh! hahah ... remembered recently (won't name him but) someone sent me a "Want to hang out soon? Netflix and chill?" text years ago before I heard that term and I was like "yeah, sure, soon" ..er, possibly disappointing him. welp. Say what you mean, friends! dropping hints here.
I did need a reminder to write. Someone reminded me to write. Thank Eu. Writing is free. If there are consequences to it, like chat gpt is being trained on my babbling, that's unfortunate, but how helpful would it be to the big fake brain anyway? Sorry buddy, move on to a lawyer or somebody who tells good jokes or whatever, idk.
Possibly AI writing is most easily identified due to its repetitiveness or inability to understand what a joke actually is (that sounds familiar - I mean as is my writing, maybe, so while I imagine I contribute nothing, I could be selling myself short here and I could be a cog in the machine .. a *further* cog in a *new* machine, not just the same old cog in the previous machine, which was/is a tiny flea on the film industry dog that does little things here and there and just demands pay in blood, a parasite to the zaslavs and igers who I refuse to capitalize) << when I put it that way, I'm begging to be a flea again, aren't I?
To sum up here, my hope is this becomes a solid time of reckoning, not out of financial necessity but straight from my heart, that some things unravel that I'm tied down by, and new seeds are planted that create a new structure for my life that'll ultimately be more fulfilling. Do I want to go back to the grind? NO. I've got nothing to show for it. You can never run fast enough on the hamster wheel. It's fixed.
But I've got stories to tell, and instead of begging for scraps on the Hollywood Hamster Wheel, I'm going to tell them.
When I do go back to work, that is just a day job. They can have my labor but they cannot have my life.
