My Four Jobs

Despite my aspiration to not be as insanely running-around busy this summer as I have been all year, the lack of any deus ex machina wheeling itself down from the heavens and granting me a normal job has inspired my current lifestyle, and also the title of this post (also inspired by that TV show back in the 80s, but I digress).

Job One is one of those stictly at-home contract-type dealyos. It involves creating a manual for a job, hiring someone to do that job and then training them to do it. My current rate of procrastination on this job is utterly shameful, although it was the first job I had nailed down for myself before leaving L.A. (even more shame!). I'm going to do some work on this tomorrow, I swear.

Job Two is really multiple jobs, but I group it under one heading. It involves using my fancypants knowledge of this here English language to try and help:
1) Quebecois health workers hand in reports in English that correctly differentiate "aid" from "aide",
2) Completely disorganised grade eight students understand what a noun is and hopefully pass English 8,
3) Smart kids without chops in the writing department gain confidence and strategies to help them do well on the English Provincial next Wednesday,
4) Irritated college students understand that no, I will not write their paper for them,
5) Super-awesome hyperactive Korean 10-year-olds who yell on the phone and get so excited trying to tell me something that they skip words to slow down because I can't understand what they are saying.

My favorites are #s 3 and 5, particularly 5, who is a smart little show-off living in a crumbling apartment with stains on the walls and attending private school and who will most certainly be more determined and therefore successful than her peers like only the poor immigrant kid can, and I really want to take her and my little cousin to go play in the creek in Hay Park one of these afternoons and have popsicles afterwards.

Job Three is a small firecracker burst of excitement, as it is my first real film job. I'm the assistant to a casting director who is casting a TV pilot (although it's technically the first episode, because they already have a pilot). It's a small gig, yes, and it isn't going to be a lot of work, but duuuuude, I'm working in the industry and for once being paid cash-money to do it. And I'll get to fly-on-the-wall for some Producer-Director-Writer-Whoever discussions. My boss is one of those ideal-type bosses who has you over to her house, which is a tranquil hideaway of sun through the skylights and mellow music, and feeds you tea and then, as you yawn for the fourth time, says "you're tired" and lets you sit on her couch and read the first 16 pages of one of her novels (which she will later lend you) and chill out while she putters around upstairs.

Job Four is the most normal job-type job I have. It involves doing random stuff that needs doing in my friend's dad's law firm. Currently: moving paper around from files to binders and binders to binders and some things to the trash. The firm is in Bentall One (Vancouver's answer to the WTC) but is tiny, with just dad-lawyer, daughter-lawyer (not my friend; her sister) and legal assistant and me. And sometimes the family dog. The legal assistant is a completely fantastic mix of being so anal that she lines up everything perpendicularly ALL THE TIME and so wacky that she talks to herself in funny voices in her office, uh, ALL THE TIME. Everyone's very friendly, even the dog, there are lots of cookies around, and the work is that kind of organizational-type labour that would get mind-numbing if I were doing it all the time, but two or so days a week makes for a nice break of orderly calmness in the midst of uncertainty, mad-scheduling, and doubt.

I'm also trying to do some work on producing a film next fall, and then some writing, and I really need to get a haircut and go to the dentist and renew my driver's license.

And I also need to pencil in some time for smoking weed up on the high school field and for sitting on a rock by the ocean all day until I feel deaf from the lack of any noise but the wind.