Some weeks I'm busy.

Jobs and opportunities in LA are fleeting. Here one minute, gone the next. Sometimes they move on without you, sometimes they simply cease to exist. It's a lesson you (meaning me) can learn over and over, as much as you want.

So when I tell my dad about a project, it means one of three things:

1. I've been working there for two days.
2. I'm trying sound less like a failure.
3. I have gone and made a classic error of optimism.

You work on a pilot that gets picked up, and the series doesn't hire any of the staff from the pilot? So it goes.

Offered a cool job on a studio movie, and it actually goes to the star's nephew, who has no experience in your job? That's just the nature of the business, it seems. Or the town. It's okay. In some ways, it's better, because at least you didn't lose on merit.

The contract for $20,000 worth of work dries up after $200? That sucks, but it'd be worse if you told everyone you had a big windfall coming your way.

I get repeat business from some producers, which is terrific. But when they haven't got anything for me, it's time to go out and sell. A day like today, I've emailed 3 feature films that are looking for an editor. On many of them I'll never hear anything at all, but in a given week I'll probably talk over between 1 and 5 possible new gigs with possible new clients or collaborators.

I'm not going to tell my dad about most of them. It's like sending out 'Save The Date' cards featuring a woman you saw, but didn't actually meet, on the bus. It's going to raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about her health and whereabouts.

I'm not sure that any project that has put me 'on hold' has ever come through. I don't think it's because I told my dad about them. NDAs were not involved. But when I call him up and tell him about an upcoming movie that says I've got the job and I'll be staying in a hotel in another state for two months, and then later it turns out the company that was going to pay for all that went bankrupt and didn't make any movies at all, well, those are the more memorable examples.

Put another way, I have no objection to trying and failing, but usually, I prefer to do so in private. I tried an experiment sometime last year where I applied for every job on every want-ad type site that I could possibly do (related to media production, that is), regardless of budget. By the end of the week I had met in person with producers and agreed to edit a complete feature film for free, color correct an 8 episode web series, also for free, and co-host a daily podcast about video games from an office in Santa Monica, whilst living in Burbank. Hands were shook, tentative dates were booked, and nothing was produced. And nobody had to hear anything about it.

It happens all the time. Like actors auditioning or surgeons blending horses and monkeys. It just got me again. A decisive factor in moving to my current apartment was convenience and proximity to a job that probably doesn't exist. But, y'know, I'm an optimist. Sure, the rent on such a place would be a lot more affordable with the job than without, but that's just motivation to keep looking for new gigs.

This isn't a "woe is me" kind of story. I mean, I manage to keep kinda busy. Some weeks, I'm so busy I only spend a couple of days thinking about which of a thousand tiny mistakes spelled my doom as the potential second full-time employee at Sandwich Video. Not this week, of course, but sometimes.

Solon City Schools Closed Tuesday

Neat. When I was there we had snow days, and exam days, a flood day caused by burst pipes, and even a bomb threat day, but never did we have Hurricane Day.

But then, I also missed out on the 2002 Veterans Day Weekend tornado outbreak that took the roof off of my middle school.

Speaking of which, it sounds like this lovely new web site is going to be taking some time off due to the server on which it is stored slowly filling with water. So… see you around sometime, I guess.

Solon Schools Closed Tuesday

This cone is keeping traffic off the hood of this truck!

Sometimes you have to resort to desperate measures to get people to stop driving all over your pickup truck.

I liked reading Kibo so much in high school.

New Dwellings, Online and Off

After three years, I've moved back out of Burbank and into the city of Los Angeles.  The house where I was renting was a money-losing operation for the owner, and he decided to sell.  I thought that I would be safe from eviction, since the owner only referred to me as "the other one" when announcing his decision.  It's pretty tough to serve papers to "the other one."  But then the day came when he called up one of the roommates to ask what my name was, and one day later, boom! NOTICE TO MOVE OUT.

So I did.  I'd been looking forward to it, even planning and counting on it, sometime this year.

The last time I moved, I was Improving My LA Experience, and it was the keystone in that project.  The general quality of LA-livin' has been better since then, but I haven't spent much time actively improving it, either.  So maybe that's something to do.

What I do know is that I seem to have, in the past, made a habit of using a move and fresh start to make as many other changes at once as well.  Not in a new year's resolution-y way, but in a hopping-in-to-the-pool way:  I'm about to have to adapt and adjust, so I might as well do all of that at once.

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to do a new web thing for a little while.  I've decided to take www.normalwebsite.com away from Leopold the robot, because it's a pretty great domain name, and it lets me try new things without blowing up my old site, to which I will be able to retreat in the event of catastrophe.

There are old posts here that I'm proud of, and others that seem embarrassing, and I'm reluctant to mention either since I am not trying to encourage you to look through the archives.  I'm encouraging you to check out the new thing, and I hope the few regular readers I had there will join me over here.

504

Here's a short documentary about Los Angeles comedian Joseph Patrick Larkin.

I have Joseph's first two comedy albums and his book, and he's been gracious enough to let me produce shows of my own in some of the clubs he owns.