it's a magical world

I'm currently in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, stage managing a solo show for one performance. Which means that basically I've been bumming around the beach and various bars/restaurants with my actor for the past 24 hours. Tech only took two and half hours yesterday, and the show itself tonight will only be an hour, so then we will go back out and continue drinking on the beach. This is exactly the sort of working vacation I desperately needed. I spent the day walking along the beach in the sun and 80F weather, guys. In NYC it's supposed to snow tonight.

Particularly needed this because there was a MAJOR disaster at New Job that hit last Friday, which meant that I was working from home for much of the weekend, and this past week was pretty stressful and hellish. I seriously considered just quitting somewhere around Tuesday night. This side trip has given me space to breathe, a chance to sleep, and some perspective, thankfully, so I shan't do anything rash (like quit the job I've only had for three weeks).

(The New Job disaster was a massive fuck-up on the part of a guy at the home office, and neither I nor my boss nor any of my immediate coworkers were in any way responsible for it, so it's not like I was in trouble in any way, shape, or form. It's just that the NY office has to clean up his fucking mess, and boy, is it a huge fucking mess. Like, of the he-has-definitely-been-fired variety. It's been a nightmare being on damage control, and that's going to continue over the next few weeks. But I do realize that this is an extraordinary situation, and not actually indicative of what working at New Job is normally like. Still. It's been dispiriting, to say the least, when I'm still so new in the position.)

Haven't had any brainspace left for fandom lately. Dunno if I'm gonna be able to muster the energy to continue my Sleepy Hollow recaps -- it's hard to drum up the enthusiasm anyway, given how shitty the show has become. I haven't even watched the latest episode yet. I do hope this brief Florida interlude will settle me enough that I can jump back into other fandoms when I get back to NYC tomorrow, at least.

I am strangely unstressed about Yuletide, despite the fact that the deadline is in less than twenty hours and my fic is not yet complete. Maybe it's because I had a good writing session last night, and I know I don't have much further to go, and anyway the whole thing is gonna be very short (which for me means less than 3000 words). So...yeah, I'll finish that tonight. It'll probably go unbetaed, but for this particular fic, that doesn't bother me. (I've rarely had much luck with Yuletide betas, anyway.) Incidentally, though -- is there no IRC chat this year? Or has it just moved to a site I don't know about?

Had a good second interview for the "interesting" job today. It still pays too little, and the work would either be really interesting or really stressful, but I got a REALLY good vibe re: office culture, which is pretty important to me after the toxic nature of the kids theater. They're going to bring me into the office Monday to shadow the current person in the position and see if it feels like a good fit, which is kinda weird but also kind of awesome in terms of making a smart choice about the job. (I'm not sure if any other candidates are doing this as well, or if I'm their top choice.) So...that. I'm more optimistic than I was expecting, at least. And while the starting pay is low, it's still within my budget, and there's definitely opportunity for growth (and bonuses). Plus they're very flexible/reasonable about the possibility of me picking up stage management gigs on the side, which would not be the case with the other job I interviewed for (due to potential conflict of interest).

Plus I just got offered a show in April for a theater group I've worked with before and loved, and they actually pay okay, so if I can juggle the schedules, that would be nice.

In other news -- December posting meme!

ranalore asked: What makes for a good viddable song?

I am firmly of the opinion that ANY song is viddable...with the right vidder. So there are certain sorts of songs that I do well with, and some that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. But that doesn't mean those songs wouldn't make awesome vids! Just that I'm not the right person to make them. BUT ANYWAY. I'm generally drawn to lyrics/lyricality first and foremost; I prefer songs that really tell a story, either through the lyrics or through the music. I don't like highly repetitive songs, which is why I very rarely vid pop songs, unless I can twist them into meta commentary -- i.e. Die Young taken literally for a Buffy vid. I love Vienna Teng and Tom McRae (maybe a little too much), because the lyrics are sharp and smart, the music is often surprising, and the choruses tend to shift musically with each repetition. But really, it's mainly that a song needs to click in my head as belonging to a certain fandom/character/idea. Often it's a single lyric that sells me -- for Human, which had been in the back of my head for a while as a potential sci-fi/fantasy vid, the lines "And so long to devotion / you taught me everything I know / wave goodbye, wish me well / you've gotta let me go" were SO OBVIOUSLY about the Raven/Charles relationship that I basically just hopped around impatiently until good DoFP source became available and I could vid it. More rarely, I have a strong idea for a vid and then basically shop around for a song that matches; for example, I knew I wanted to make a creepy Wishverse (Buffy) vid, but it took some searching before I latched onto the theme from Rosemary's Baby as the right music.

I have been making an effort to vary my music selection for vidding lately, because while I COULD easily vid every single Vienna Teng and Tom McRae song, that doesn't mean I SHOULD. But my personal musical tastes are fairly limited, in terms of what I actually listen to on a regular basis, so it's kind of an ongoing process finding new material to work with. I'm not really a music fan -- by which I mean, I LIKE music, obviously, but I'm not fannish about it, and I don't seek out new artists or care at all about bands or ever attend concerts. So maybe it's kind of weird that I get so obsessive about vidding. I dunno.

So...haven't been posting much RL stuff lately. Or at all. ( work stuff, or, unemployment, yay! )

In the interest of staying positive, though, I put together a Kaylee (from Firefly) costume for Halloween, which I was quite pleased with! ( Shiny, cap'n! )

Yeah, so apparently when I locked up the theater office earlier tonight, the latch didn't completely click in the door or something, because an hour later something nudged it open again and the motion-detector alarm went off.

YES, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED IN MY LIFE WHEN MY BOSS IS ALREADY PISSED AT ME.

It doesn't matter how many things I take care of without her even noticing, or how I've improved my game by like 150% in the past two weeks, because the one time a fucking door doesn't shut all the way, it's back to everything I do being wrong.

Well, this weekend was pretty much a wash. I pretty much spent the entire weekend rewatching West Wing for no apparent reason. No writing, a bit of packing and organizing but not much. Oops. Still, I kind of needed that.

Friday was my last day of work at the Big Gay NPO; I'd been there almost three years. I won't miss it much. Some of the people, maybe, but not the job itself. Being done is a huge load of stress off my back, you don't even know. Granted, now I have moving!stress and oh-god-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life!stress, but still. Totally worth it.

I have less than a week before I leave D.C. Huh. I've pretty much said all my goodbyes to people here; I've been more social in the past couple of weeks than in, like, the six months before that. Figures. But now I've got nothing left but packing. UGH I HATE PACKING. I'm taking it slow, just doing a few things every day. But yeah. This week's practically a vacation for me. Hopefully I won't squander it all away watching more West Wing, but I make no promises.

I did just do a major rewrite on a section of my Reversebang -- I'd been stuck on it for weeks, because I couldn't decide whether to keep the section as is or overhaul it to favor action over character moments, and I couldn't move forward because my decision would significantly affect the next several scenes. But the pacing just sucked, so I bit the bullet and rewrote it, axing out a LOT of Charles/Erik stuff in favor of Erik being an impulsive asshole. Which makes more sense for his character and improves the pacing and keeps the stakes a lot higher, granted, and that was why the section wasn't working before, but still. It's always hard for me to make massive cuts like that. Oh, well, hopefully now I can move forward. There's still a LOT of this fic left to write.

I'm back on another show now (started last Tuesday), which means I pretty much dropped off the face of the internets for the past week. It's been fun readjusting to running eight performances a week all over again, and this show's a bit more labor intensive than the last few. Less stressful, because I've taken over as ASM and am only running backstage rather than the entire production, but there's a whole lot of crap to run backstage on this one. Two-hour show, ninety solid minutes of preshow prep and about half an hour of postshow, and I'm on my feet doing shit for all but maybe half an hour or so of all that, scattered in small bits and bobs throughout. Which is totally fine and doable -- it's not like I'm working a 12-hour shift waiting tables or anything actually taxing -- but it's taking a little adjusting to. My last couple of shows at this theater were much lower key during the performances themselves -- I got through all of A:tLA on last winter's show, and wrote bucketloads of XMFC fic during the summer show. For this one, not so much with the down time. And I didn't check DW/LJ/Tumblr at ALL over the weekend, so spent most of my downtime at the day job today catching up. Still, it means my internet/writing time will be greatly curtailed for the next few weeks while this show's running. Such is life. Also, I'm tired, man, I'd forgotten how brutal getting home at 11:30pm every night and getting right back up again at 6:30am for the day job with only Monday nights off can be. But it's a good show, lovely cast and production team, so I'm not sorry. It's more that I wish this were my ONLY job.

Not feeling very optimistic on the getting-out-of-DC front at the moment. I applied for about ten different summer theater gigs, and have only gotten one interview out of the whole batch. But pretty much the only thing that gets me to work in the mornings is telling myself that it's only for a few more months. If that turns out to be a lie...I don't know. My morale at my day job is absolute shit these days. I want out very, very badly. And I'd vastly prefer to leave FOR another job rather than just leave for no reason but my own unhappiness. It's an easy job, decent paycheck, great benefits, good organization. It's just that I've been there for two and a half years and I'm so bored I could weep and I'm just flat out sick of answering fucking phones all day every day with no end in sight. Urg. Being unhappy all the time is exhausting, y'all.

Way behind on responding to comments and things. Also, totally forgot to pimp out white_lotus, which everyone who loves Avatar: the Last Airbender should really be checking out because the Lunar New Year exchange is awesome. I got a very sweet Katara/Zuko fic, Waiting to Spark, which people should read because yay! And it handles Mai and Aang very respectfully, albeit offscreen, which is important to me. I realize that I happen to ship a pairing that's at the epicenter of a very ugly shipwar in the fandom, which saddens me because I just love all the characters so much, okay, why can't we all just ship whoever we want without having to bash other people's favorite characters/ships in the process? I do not understand fandom in this way. ANYWAY. This fic doesn't do that. And it's very IC for both Katara and Zuko a few years down the line, and it makes me very happy. The end. :) Not sure how obvious my own contribution to the exchange is, so feel free to guess once everything's been posted. As always, I'll make you a thing.

And...yeah. So that's stuff. We apologize for the stultifying dullness of this post.

At work, we (being the Operations team) had to break down a huge corporate event thing.

Coworker J: Where's the easy button?
Coworker S: Shit, I left it on my desk.

Heh.

Well, looks like the temp agency has finally pulled through, because I've got another job to start shortly. They will never understand that I want to work part-time, not full-time, but it bothers me less this time around. Having three-hour instead of four-hour rehearsals and waaaay less transit time to get to the theater helps in that regard. It's a temp-to-perm position, which I'm less thrilled with as I have NO intention of taking a job like this as a permanent hire, but at least it's more likely to give me steady employment until a theater admin job turns up, and lord only knows how long that'll take. We'll see how miserable it is when I get there. If the people I work for are cool, it might not be so bad, but I don't have particularly high hopes. Still, paycheck. And the theoretical possibility of complete financial independence from my parents someday.

Well, I've got an interview tomorrow, which is a good thing, although it's for a temp agency, so not exactly my dream job. But ANY job is looking fairly dreamy to me right now. Annoyingly, it's a "professional" interview, which means my usual theater interview clothing is mostly too informal. I hear bright colors are a no-no; is this true? Because there goes my favorite purple blouse. And apparently, I've lost weight since June, because the Brand New Wardrobe my parents bought for me as a graduation gift includes several long-sleeved blouses that are now too big for me. Well, they were always too LONG for me, but the overweight thing made that a necessary evil in order to make buttoning possible; now they're just all-around too large. So...not so good for an interview, I'm guessing. Do people wear vests these days? I might be able to pull this off if I buy a nice vest-type thing to wear over the too-large shirts. Or a blazer, except I look moronic in blazers. I hate clothes, have I mentioned? And don't even get me started on my utter loathing of most shoes.

Either way, what I definitely need to purchase is an ironing board and an iron, because I've been putting it off far too long. And since I possess no printer and now no roommate with a printer, I need to head over to Kinko's to print out two copies of my resume. And other such nonsense. Oy.

I made interview today. Yet again, one of those lovely commute for two hours, have twenty minute interview, and back for another two hours. Urg. But I really want the job, and the commute wouldn't be as heinous from my new apartment. They said I'm eminently qualified for the position and I interviewed very well, but, of course, there are four other people up for the one position so there are many considerations, etc, I'll know sometime next week. So, basically, it's a lottery. Well, we'll see.

And apparently the girl who's moving into my old room is coming by around 9:30am tomorrow, instead of at around noon like she originally told me, which is going to be inconvenient as my friend helping me move the rest of my stuff won't be here to pick me up until 12:30ish. So, that. On the plus side, I'll have to get up, which means I'll have time to travel through this neighborhood of great sketchiness to the post office where my BSG DVDs are have supposedly gotten stuck.

Also, there was Remus fic posted a couple of days ago. Y'know, just in case you missed it. ;) I am such a feedback whore, it's really kind of embarrassing.

Oh, the joys of waking up early on a Saturday morning to get all dolled up and sit on public transit for an hour and a half (so that's three solid hours round trip) for a twenty minute interview.

Which I was kind of confused by, actually, because the woman just sort of talked at me for a while, then asked if I had any questions, and then when I asked her if she had any questions for me (I mean, she's supposed to be deciding if she wants me for this position, and I've said practically nothing about myself the whole time), she just sort of glanced back down at my resume and cover letter and was all no, I think we're good. And said I should keep in touch with her by e-mail over the summer about my job situation and what hours I could theoretically work.

Did I just get offered this internship? I haven't the faintest idea. And I had applied for either a fall or full season internship -- which am I being offered, if either? Or did the whole keep-in-touch thing imply that she'll let me know later in the summer about whether or not she wants me? I am so confused right now.

And then while I was walking back to the El afterwards, this random guy on the street cheerfully informed me that if he'd known all the women in Chicago were so hot, he would've moved here ages ago, and that I had a beautiful smile and great complexion and "baby got back," and "you've really got it going."

I thanked him and kept walking.

Gah. I am such a terminal procrastinator. I simply cannot muster the willpower to write this cover letter. They're asking for something so obnoxiously specific that I really can't just adapt my standard letter of interest, and the thought of starting from scratch just...ugh.

I mean, I know I have to, and I will, but I really think I ought to read more of my favorite House and QAF fics again first. And eat cookies. The cookies are crucial. Obviously.

Also, the prescription uber-ibuprofin that I got back when I had strep and have lived on my desk ever since (because the next time I get a migraine, being able to find these bastards in a hurry will totally rock my world, hot damn they were pain-relieving) look like House's Vicodin, which means that when I'm in a snarky mood (which is, y'know, fairly often) I really want to carry them around with me and rattle the little prescription bottle lots and possibly toss a couple back whenever I see someone really annoying. Which is kinda silly, since I don't even take Tylenol all that often, but still.

Wow. I can ramble on about just about anything if it means avoiding thinking about this cover letter.