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June 12, 2006

the sporting life

instead of turning my journal momentarily into yet another micro-version of nick hornby's 'fever pitch' (the few people i *know* read this are far too close to my liverpool obsession to need any reiteration about my enthusiasm for this month's football ubiquity - they've also written about it better than me), i thought i'd show the lucky few what i come in to work to face each day.

it drives me fair crazy that it looks so neat and simple and amenable, presented like this. i probably set 150-200 pages a day like this, in between bouts of proof-reading and editing (yeah, if you find a typo here, stick it up your spellcheck... this is playtime. though i do find grammatical accuracy VERY SEXY). the lowercase is a nod to ee. and laziness. shut up.

I interviewed last week for a new position that would have afforded me more money, more freedom, the room to actually be a little creative, was more compatible with my lifestyle (location, dress, ethics etc). I got down to the last two from a field of 40 or so. they gave it to the other candidate.

this is the sixth time this has happened to me in the past year.

a beautiful, fleeting someone who doesn't know me very well (apart from my body) suggested i might have poor interview technique; i disagreed, suggesting that, to get through three/four interviews it actually had to be rather good, and that it probably came more down to my personality.

ah. that made me feel better. knowing i must just shit/confuse/antagonise/annoy people at initial meeting/s (because early impressions don't count at all, do they?).

actually, all it comes down to is my natural restlessness. someone asked me a question at a casual couch-party-gathering kind of thing a few weeks back: describe yourself in a single word. i cunningly managed to not have to answer, as everyone was distracted. 'restless' would have been the word. that or 'defiant'. or 'spiky'. pity restlessness can so often come across as nervousness.

so many times *my* calm must have come across to others as antsiness. christ... i can change my interview technique, my CV etc, but i can't change who i *am*. i am growing gradually calmer and stiller as i get older, but i started out so jittery and full-tilt as a kid, i'm still nowhere near anyone's idea of thirty-something 'sorted'-ness. which triggers suspicion or mistrust, i reckon.

honestly, i am so sick of all the bullshit that goes with trying to improve my (job) lot; even trying to get the time off work to interview for this other position was such a bitch i nearly got fired because of *that*. how i wish i had the balls to just go into business for myself.

but there's the catch-22, innit? freelancing is all about personality - networking and pitching and getting in peoples' faces about your own ability and trying to forge that most elusive of bonds, 'professional' trust. when you're cursed with a god-given ability to rub people the wrong way, it doesn't really permit one the confidence to conjecture positively how such a career move might go.

i have always been a better collaborator than initiator/instigator; I have tons of good ideas, but work better with a brief/jumping off point/impetus thrown down for me by someone else; it's almost like i am so certain that i will approach any given problem/brief from such a skewed POV, one that usually won't have been thought of by others in the team, that i need something/someone to lead or define the parameters, just so's i can fuck with them. cause fucking with stuff is my way, what i'm good at... i love limits - they aid the creative process by forcing you to think in permutations of variables: the hitting of the wall/limit invariably leads you to 'what if' thinking, which nearly always lets you think through those walls and into somewhere that becomes its own genesis, something new - a creation.

but alas my present job is process-driven, and i am a 'mapper', not a 'packer'; i am a monkey with a mouse, and the repetition is stifling. there is no room for creativity within it and, when i come home, i am too exhausted to create alone (but then, for me, creating alone is exhausting anyway - it is collaboration that GIVES me energy, that fans the fire of my enthusiasm).

so. to distract myself from the pointlessness of my existence (presently), and the deviation from what i expected my life to be like, and my gobsmacked quiet envy at peers being able to turn their plans into realities, i pay disproportionate attention to beautiful things...

when i was younger, my sense of aesthetics was driven to the big, the bold, the dramatic, the larger than life - i had to play guitar faster, more intensely and bombastically, i had to shoot photos from within inches of performers to emphasise the sweat and movement, i had to write with the most showy vocabulary and the most outlandishly forceful similes and descriptions... these days, i like tiny stuff, stuff that could be missed if you don't have the right eyes. like this:

at first, i wondered why this building* was laughing at me. but, after a while, it didn't matter why, because it simply reminded me that this sort of thing is *always* there for those willing to look, and that is point enough. there is a chuckle full of rose petals sitting on a building backlot somewhere... it made me smile wide.

took my mind off the usual fixations. this week: going back to perth to celebrate the birthday of one of the most amazing women i've ever known (my mum's mum), in so doing passing up a chance to swing camping-out-stylee with some lovely new hepcats (in the birthday service of one particularly lovely hepkittten) - who, i am happy to be finding out - reek of at least as much substance to match their enviable style, a new skinterest who dug me out of a hole with her loveliness a week ago, an old skinterest who has replaced me, but nags with her insistence in my memory and lightning blue eyes/against the daylight, an even older mirror/magnifier whose boy must surely know about the motorcycle exhaust burn/scar on her leg (even if he'll never fall recklessly into the infinite potential of a freckle on her right shoulder), a dearest friend-cum-former-fiancee and sometime co-dog-parent whose birthday also drifted through, technology conspiring to keep me from contacting her

so much stuff... maybe we should all just be reading achewood instead.

* First to name that building gets a kiss and/or a beer from me...

Posted by reuben at June 12, 2006 4:39 PM

Comments

Posted by: Liz at June 12, 2006 8:28 PM

Posted by: elaine at June 13, 2006 3:13 PM

Posted by: marty at June 14, 2006 3:49 PM

Posted by: fungoir at June 21, 2006 11:06 AM

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