everythinggoodisgone.com

10.12.07

i am running up against a wall in my current employment - starting to hate that i work for money-grubbing jerks...when i began my time in commercials, i really did think i could find a director for whom i could produce & with whom i could have the kind of creative partnership my father enjoyed for so many years with Kenny, his producer...but the more time i spend in this industry, the more i realize that this is a pipe dream - the business has changed a great deal since my father was involved, & the vast majority of directors w/ whom i've worked are, well, pampered children who are barely capable of getting themselves to the office on time for a meeting much less actually _directing_ - they rely on the skills of their 'team' to do their job for them. hence, most of them don't last for long - 3 years at the outside - in comparison to my dad, who spent almost 30 years working... mostly though i am frustrated because i did think of this as a means to an end - a way to transition to more "meaningful" work - but the chasm between commercials & everything else is so deep i'd have to start over again at the bottom being berated & judged by my boobs instead of my brains just to get a 'foot in the door'.

& so i am exploring my options. in a way i feel as groundless & confused as i was 6.5 years ago when i graduated from college. but certainly my experiences, work & otherwise, are valuable? at least i could be a baby-sitter or au pair for spoilt rich kids without much difficulty... but i also do believe i could take my skill set, wide ranging & logistically explicit as it is, & do something worthwhile. what, exactly, that will be, is still up for discussion. i've been tossing about the idea of journalism, in a sense multimedia journalism - that is, mixing my nascent joy of photography (i used to be paralysed by my parents' success into a sort of mediocrity - god forbid i took a bad photograph, so all of them were fairly awful) & my pleasure in writing to create saleable packages of words & pictures... seems like a decent idea, something that could allow me to take advantage of my love of learning new things, my desire to affect change while experiencing the world, & my immense feeling that i'm not doing enough to express my (sometimes unique but always vigorous) opinions.

i did for a while think about working for an NGO but it seems experiences have been so negative & frustrating... i have so much respect for some people's drive to make their passions concrete... they always seem to be doing something for the betterment of mankind in a way i envy - how do you even go about getting these jobs? what do you need to know how to do?

along w/ friends of mine, during katrina we all felt so angry that the response was so damn slow - if any of us in this business took as long to get some stupid narcisist his special bacon sandwich as it took to get MRE's to survivors, we would have gotten fired, not the presidential medal of honor... for a while i tossed around the idea of starting a crack team of production people who would go in & get shit done during disasters...but the hurdles of 501(c)3 status & actually trying to get these faux-idealists off their asses to do things frustrated me right out of the box.

i think that gets to the root of it for me - i have idealist tendencies, but pessimist strategies, for existence - i somehow lost my "i can change the world" glow a long time ago - but am finding myself more & more drawn to a desire to do _something_ rather than _nothing_ - & giving money to the ICRC, ACLU, & joe biden & seeing it mis-spent is just more fuel for the endless cycle of well maybe but then...

as you can see i'm still thinking through how i'm even going to approach this...classic prema - i'll be thinking 'til the locusts actually do show up in SoCal...

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