I cracked up so very hard when I first saw this promotional website for the operating system I'm working on. The two beers I had at the Windows "Informational" Meeting that day probably contributed.
(Easter egg: don't click on anything for a while, and your host gets impatient.)
I'm a director now.
Yep, months of underpaid part-time insurance-free work as a "technical director," or "switcher" as we say in the biz, has officially paid off. A few months ago, co-worker Mike, the weekend director, got a job in Seattle; now his replacement, co-named Andrew, is moving to Nashville to work as a grip on Spike TV's "Power Block," which I'm told is four shows about trucks, or something. And it should tell you something that working as a grip on the Power Block is paying co-Andrew much, much, much more than what he made in Eugene directing the weekend news.
I started out switching the morning shows, a stint that slowly depleted my savings and held the tantalizing danger that I might get injured or sick and deplete other peoples' savings as well. The worst part of switching the morning show was not that I had to be awake and alert from 4:30am to 7:30am, nor was it that I also had to be back in the afternoons from 4:00pm to 7:00pm to do audio and chyrons for the afternoon shows, nor was it the fact that I only got one day (Sunday) off per week, nor the fact that I often didn't get that day off either and received only regular pay and not overtime pay for extra work because I wasn't working 40 hours a week. It was more a combination of all those things. Also awful: you come home from work in the morning, you go to bed, wake up in the afternoon, and go straight back to work.
Luckily for my sanity, after about eight months Mike got the Seattle gig, which meant co-promotions for co-Andrew and myself. At last I was full time, with benefits and the ability to get overtime and everything. But I was still in a kind of limbo territory -- being a technical director for a long time doesn't look all that great on a resum?, I imagine. I mean, I'm sure you could get a fine job with that experience alone, but I'm also sure you could do a lot better if you could just drop that pesky "Technical" from the title. Co-Andrew, however, said he was in it for the long haul...
Until a scant two months later, when suddenly he found a job in his dream city, Nashville, doing his dream thing, which was a show about souping up trucks I guess. He's very excited. And now I get his old spot directing. It's a totally different job from what I was doing before, and requires an entirely different training process, which I've just started. (A technical director "switches" the show, pressing buttons that correspond to cameras and tape decks and the like to manipulate what shows up on your TV screen; the director tells the technical director exactly what to press and when, while simultaneously instructing the sound guy, the floor crew, and sometimes the anchor. It's mostly about timing.)
So that's the latest from me. More on my saga as it unfolds.
(Explanation: This is the closing line from a 1980s-era anti-drug PSA on TV, in which a Len Bias-esque basketball star named "J.J." sees his promising career cut tragically short by the white pony. And now you know... the rest... of the story.)
and you're just a squirrel.
What's poppin' tonight?
Furdell matriarch "Mom" brings up a good point:
I think lots in the G and L community would be happy with civil unions as it affords them benefits and other practical things.
True enough. It's all the commitment with half the social acceptance.
In fact, I'm willing to enter into a civil union with Julia. Unfortunately they're not recognized by the state of Oregon, where we currently reside; and, even in states that do recognize civil unions, it's unclear whether hetero couples are elligible. That's right...they're separate, but equalish.
In the spirit of boycotting things, I'm boycotting pocket aces.
Seriously. They ought to win once a while. The went 0-for-2 for me last night. Ridiculous.
(Actually, my regular casino (Red Dragon) has a $50 bonus when pocket aces lose during certain hours of the day, so I'm just going to have to always play from 5-8 p.m. from now on. I would have been $100 happier right now.)
For those of you not up on your celebrity gossip (it pays to work at ABC), Charlize Theron has also decided not to marry her long-time boyfriend Stuart Townsend until gay marriage is legal in the United States.
Just in case someone thinks I'm unoriginal, I'd like to confirm here and now that -- while it's possible (though unclear) that Charlize may have come up with this idea before I did -- we each came to the idea on our own. In fact, I saw her make a declaration little more than a week after I had made up my own mind. Weird, huh? Isn't that what you kids call a meme?
BONUS: Watch next Friday's Judge Joe to hear the following awesome sentence...
Hey, if I wasn't a good mother, then my daughter wouldn't be able to sue me right now.
Well, it's about time I expanded on my little personal boycott on marriage. I'll try to lay out my whole thought process that brought me to where I am right now, and you can either sympathize with it or be even more disgusted by it than you already are.
If you'd rather not read an entire manifesto, just stick with the paragraph from my previous post, which sums things up pretty well.
