I don’t mean it when I say I’m only here for the open bar.
Because the food is nice, too.
A week after returning to the restaurant, I was offered an assistant position at a literary management company. Which made things tricky: work six days a week, plus my own writing, plus night and weekend reading. It could be done, but did I want to put myself through that?
I thought about quitting the restaurant. I remembered my father reminding me over the phone, when I first arrived in Los Angeles, “Look after yourself. That’s enough right now. Just do what’s best for you.” That’s what quitting would have meant: looking out for numero uno, making things easier on myself. It didn’t feel right, though. I couldn’t quit, effectively spitting on their faces, after they so graciously took me back when I needed help.
So I do both. My writing and job suffer for it, but that’s the choice I made. On my day off, I squeeze in down time and grocery shopping, maybe the gym or changing the car oil. The juggling isn’t easy, and you have to be ruthless with time to get it done. When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I weighed the pros and cons on taking an assistant job if you want to write, and it’s as simple as: you make time for it. You (as BJ Fogg so adroitly puts it,) “prioritize so hard it hurts.”
Besides slowing down my writing, assisting has opened my eyes to plenty of other weaknesses. Issues that I deferred for years, for the sake of writing and work. These days I wish I addressed those years ago, but for lack of that option, will settle for now:
- I don’t know shit about the entertainment or book industry. My boss called me into his office, and showed me a novel with a risqué cover, a woman’s hot mouth pressed against a bare shoulder. Then he asked me where he should pitch this project, a mild erotica-thriller (in the vein of 50 SHADES OF GREY.) I didn’t even bother bullshitting my way through a response. I had no idea, and that’s a problem.
- I don’t know enough about Los Angeles, my own backyard.
- Assisting has shown me how difficult the process of getting anything made is, how many moving parts there are in this arena. Everything must align. The pegs must be in the proper row at the proper moment to have impact on the world. For every great writer who says, “I just focused on the writing, I didn’t play the game or network. I just wrote in my voice and did what I thought was right, and I made it” (e.g., Hugh Howey’s wonderful post on his success with WOOL in the Huffington Post) there are a thousand artists who won’t get in front of the right people because they didn’t do their homework.
- I don’t spend enough time building relationships with other people. Which says nothing about being shy versus friendly, introverted versus extroverted – (self-examinations rendered moot when you force yourself to commit the desired behavior.) What I mean is that I’ve made a habit out of putting work/writing above everything, to the detriment of maintaining strong friendships and relationships. That’s something I want in my life, and it can’t be done sitting in front of a computer as life passes outside the window. This in turn means…
- Work focused, not just harder. There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can’t keep adding to-do’s to the top of the pile. Pinpoint exactly what I want to work on at any given time, and attack that. Identify what can fall to the wayside, and then let it. It all falls back to elimination, followed by prioritization
Ideally, I wouldn’t be 26 years old, still waiting tables on weekends to survive. In an ideal world, I could make it as a writer without working as an assistant first. But there are too many other things to be grateful for to dwell on this inconvenience as I work and rebuild, to have impact on the world.
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Photo Credit: PCCare247
The first thing I did was go back to the Thai restaurant and ask for my job back. I hunted down the manager, who emerged from the staff room, cash drawer and last night’s receipts in hand, looking frustrated with her day already. I asked if she was looking for help.
“Yes,” she snapped. “Who’s asking? You?” she jabbed.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She thought a moment. She started to ask a question, then stopped to ask a different one. “When can you start?”
I picked up my first shift back a week later. Three days after that, they cut me a paycheck – I was already back on the books. It took a total of ten days to take my first step towards rebuilding. I was ecstatic about the turn around, but there were mixed reactions as people found out I retreated back to waiting tables.
Some employees, like my manager, were genuinely happy to see me back. Others were pleasant, but they recognized this as a temporary move, the one-step-back to my next two-steps-forward. They understood the simple truth: sometimes, you just gotta make money.
The strangest reaction was from a young food runner named Rigo. Before I left, Rigo was my mentee of sorts: smart in his own way, a hard-worker for certain, but his own naiveties were often his own worst enemies. In the 9 months I’d been away, that naiveté had bloomed into a full blown sullenness, a FTW mentality, and I think he saw my return as a betrayal. Like, didn’t I tell him I was moving onto (bigger, better) things?
“What about everything you said?” he demanded. “About trying something once, then moving on? About always looking forward?”
“I tried,” I replied. “I tried something new. It didn’t work out. So now I have to rebuild before I try again.”
He shook his head, not understanding, and walked away.
The other noteworthy reaction I received happened last week, when I told another entertainment assistant that I moonlighted as a server. His eyes darted up from his Blackberry, as a flicker of recognition crossed his face. Then a hint of smugness with the words, “Oh yeah, we order from there all the time,” treating my statement as if it was an admission of humiliation. It wasn’t.
I’m not immune to what others think, though. There’s a reason why I still haven’t shared with my family that I returned to waiting tables, something I started when I was 14 years old. There’s a reason why my bosses don’t know why I cut out at six o’clock sharp on certain days of the week. Not humiliation per se; humility, however, is safely in the ball park. But there’s not a dumb egg amongst them, so it’s likely they already know – it’s just a matter of who’s going to bring it up first.
Then there’s my own pride I have to contend with, the idea that I am “too good” for this station in life. Last night, I approached a couple to get their order. The man looked me in the eye and said with a straight face, “I take it this is not your day job.” When I asked him if it was that obvious, he shrugged and returned his gaze to the menu. “You stand out. You don’t belong here.” Then he ordered a vegetable pad thai.
It reminded me of my friend Karen’s father, a man whom I met only once. He was a multiple-Master-degree-bearing man who found himself jobless in 2008. He remained jobless as he uncollected his unemployment checks. And he continued to remain unemployed through 2009, and into 2010. His ex-wife, Karen’s mother, busted her ass to provide for Karen while he shrugged off his various parental duties, like child support, or being-the-fuck-around. Not that he didn’t receive job offers – he received several – but he refused to take one that was lower than his level of “prestige.” The jobs weren’t good enough, and he let his family suffer for it.
When I let that inkling of superiority creep in from the edges, threatening to leave me feeling ungrateful or entitled, I compare Karen’s father to my own. He had his own fiery and tumultuous rise in the restaurant business, where he reached an enviable level of success for someone barely into his 30’s. And when it all crashed down around him, he found himself set back further than where he started out seven years previous. My father, too, had to rebuild, but with a family of six, he had far more at stake.
He took on a blur of jobs during those years, as he worked to right his course. He managed sewing factories in Queens, a failing Chinese restaurant in Albany, then he tried getting his foot in the door at the chain restaurants. So between sending out resumes and going on interviews, my father started waiting tables again, swallowing his pride, and providing for his family.
Which is how I know that no matter my humility, or the smugness of others, or what any customer may say, I’m right where I belong.
Photos Credit: gttexas
No one expects to wake one morning and say aloud, “Yup, this is it: today’s the lowest point in my life.” You don’t anticipate rolling out of bed and thinking, “I don’t have a fucking clue why I’m even getting out of bed today.”
You sort of just arrive. While you’re pouring your Fruit Loops, or dumbly clicking your mouse. Or head to your unpaid internship, where you watch Youtube videos for eight hours straight in an urban cave shared by two dozen other 20-somethings, an activity gently dubbed as “business development.”
A few weeks shy of my 26th birthday and inside that cave was where I sat, unsatisfied with my work, unsatisfied with my writing. I didn’t know what I was still doing in Los Angeles. Later that day, I trudged back to my car in the rain, and I found a lovely note from the county’s parking enforcement, asking to please remit $63 to their offices.
If a child kicked my shins and a dog pissed on my shoes, I wouldn’t have been surprised. All I wanted was to bury my head in the sand. I wanted to stew in my misery and “figure my shit out,” whatever that means. It’s the approach I took for the first 25 years of my life: bottle it in, tell myself not to be a pussy, and get back to work – except it’s taken me 26 years to realize how self-destructive and insidious self-this behavior was. Doesn’t matter how hard you shovel, you can’t dig your way out of a hole.
Instead I called a friend. And she stayed on the line until I spilt everything I: how incredibly shitty I felt about myself, and what I hadn’t accomplished in two years, that maybe it wasn’t worth it and I should move back to New York. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing with my work, that I hated being poor and stopped feeling good about writing a long time ago.
Nothing was resolved. She didn’t offer any takeaway or sagely advice. But that wasn’t the point. She was there to listen when I needed to say something.
Part of me knew that the job would get better. That if watching Youtube videos and buying up channels was a skill I wanted to excel at, I could get there. I just didn’t know if this particular dip was one I wanted to conquer. No matter how good I got at it, would I be happy signing Youtube talent?
I quit the next day. I decided this wasn’t where I wanted to be in terms of my career, my writing, or my finances. I couldn’t unravel which tangents brought me down this path, so my only choice was to start retracing my steps, trying to remember when my trail was last good again
Photos credit: A guy called John
This is a continuation of the previous post, thoughts on living in Los Angeles after two years.
The other day I was hunting through my closet and I realized: I had nothing to wear. I felt a familiar flash of junior high awkwardness, tearing through dresser drawers looking for something acceptably cool. At the time, I think I settled on a baggy polo and a pair of Dockers.
Aka the epitome of pretty-lame.
On this go-around, it wasn’t my level of awesomeness hindering me (a level which clearly has grown exponentially since high school.) It was my experiment in minimalism two years ago, where I gave away everything I owned save for few choice selections. It was an adjustment, but well-suited for my goals at the time.
Now that I’m living in Los Angeles? Not so much.
Annoyed as I am though, I think if I didn’t put myself through that, I wouldn’t be standing here in my Culver City apartment, the one besotted with Craigslist furniture and a dish set that sort of showed up in our cabinets one day. I couldn’t grow resentful at the thought of sacrifice because I had nothing left to give up. I couldn’t grow jealous over things I didn’t have because I didn’t have anything. If I didn’t make those choices, the thought of moving across the country would have seemed more daunting.
Looking at life through this lens, it feels like all events leading up to now are just a sequence of experiments, one building upon another. Minimalism was an experiment in sacrifice. Summer days spent working in Chinese restaurants as a teenager were lessons in work ethic. Solo traveling was an experiment in being comfortable in my own shoes.
Even writing a blog, is an experiment in making myself responsible for my words. Each post is an experiment in hitting “publish.”
I mentioned how the idea that Los Angeles is feeling less like an experiment, and gradually receding into what feels like life. In its wake I’m left with one idea: experiments sometimes fail. They almost always end. Score isn’t kept by how many tallies you have in one column or the other, but rather, how close are you to the life you imagined for yourself?
That’s the goal of these experiments in our lives: not the individual successes or failures, but whether the sum of their parts brings you where you want to be.
Photos Credit: glencm
My two-year anniversary with Los Angeles approaches. Living here was an experiment, drawn out on cocktail napkins and e-mails before throwing my life into a car and arriving with no job, no apartment, and no clue. And as much as there is to love about LA, looking around at the trappings of my life, it’s obvious I never thought of it as more than an experiment.
And it’s like coming back home. It smells familiar. You can take off your shoes and get comfortable, because you’re in the hands of an artist, who may not show you where she’s taking you, but she won’t release you from her world either, until there’s nothing left to explore. I had forgotten – this is what made me want to tell stories in the first place.
That’s what (all non-affiliate links) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan did. So did Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer,) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz,) City of Thieves (David Benioff,) and (crossing genres now) BRICK by Rian Johnson, 500 DAYS OF SUMMER by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber and shit, okay really genres hopping Pain (Johnny Cash) and the time I listened to an artist whose first name was Neal and last name I left in Nashville at the Bluebird Cafe, who sang “That’s My Son” which still keeps me up at night, but right then I had to march up to him and thank him because that song meant the world to me, even though I knew I’d probably never hear it again and haven’t since.
Photos Credit: Arts Westchester
It’s strange to think our relationship grew from hate.
Well, maybe not as intense as “hate.” “Loathing” is close.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in his book, BLACK SWAN, that we are creatures of revisionist history: we edit history as we see fit, giving cause or linking relationships between events that aren’t there. It’s part of human nature he says, to search for meaning in daily occurrences. If we don’t find it, we’ll make it up.
Which helped me realize this blog (in its half dozen itinerations, but especially in this current version) is an exercise of revisionist history as I work in the entertainment industry. I edit, filter, and draw causal relationships between events, hunting for logic that may or may not be there. And I do these things in the face of two truths:
One: I don’t know what I’m doing.
I base my decisions on my personal value system, my limited knowledge of the entertainment terrain, and the advice of my peers who are in similar positions. Yet at times I catch myself writing as if this was all part of the grand master plan I concocted while I was still in New York.
There is however, perverse comfort in the belief that most everyone in the entertainment field is groping blindly in the dark – some are just less aware of it than others.
The second truth is that in my effort to “make it” in entertainment, and to make it as a writer, I revise and filter my writing about making it in the entertainment and writing. Voices whisper each time I sit:
“Don’t write about how you view the executive/assistant relationship – what if you want an assistant job?”
“Don’t sound optimistic or hopeful about this prospect – you’ll sound naïve. Or worse, desperate.”
“Don’t call out certain rude tendencies of professionals in this industry – what if you offend someone?”
“Don’t talk too much about what or who you love – what if it changes? What if you have to take it back?”
These all boil down to fears I think a lot of us share: what if I’m held accountable for what I write? What if I have to make a stand? What if I upset the wrong people?
A solution is to write anonymously. Take my picture off this site, change the URL, and take cover behind the shroud of a pseudonym. But I think this is a cheat solution. As Travie McCoy of Gym Class Heroes so eloquently put it:
“Bitches post anonymous.”
A more acceptable solution starts by making a few admissions. I admit that most days:
- I don’t know what I’m doing.
- I am scared I’m doing the wrong things.
- I wish someone would reassure me, “you’re doing the right thing.”
I also admit that every day:
- I am accountable for my words. For what I say and write.
- I can do good work without knowing “what am I going to get out of this?”
- I should focus more on being honest and making a stand, and less on upsetting others.
Photo Credit: Stepzh
How many scripts does it take to turn a script reader sour to spec scripts?
I imagine not too long — if you’re patient and forgiving, somewhere in the low 200’s perhaps. Eventually you see the same mistakes repeated over and over again. Your patience wanes. Your forgiveness falters.
I embraced the process when I first started reading scripts — even as an unpaid reader.
I thought, if I pour myself into my reads, and take care to learn from the successes and mistakes (mostly mistakes) I’ll write better material.
It’s tough to keep up the positivity. Script after script, you offer the same notes: show don’t tell; what does your character want?; dialogue feels snappy but where is your story? And these notes are directed towards the good material… never mind the scripts sent by writers who obviously didn’t proof read: glaring typos on page one; lengthy sections of prose; scenes completely omitted explained with the words “insert scene here” to indicate something will eventually “fill in the blank.”
It gets more difficult to be kind. You can’t hold your tongue in your critiques. You lash out — cruelly, at times — if you think the piece warrants it: “Good, I hope their feelings are hurt. They’ll put more care into their work before sending it next time.”
Perhaps some of these mistakes are because of negligence. I think just as often they’re the mistakes of a first-time script writer. And a first-time writer needs to make his first crop of mistakes at some point in his career — you’re just the reader “watching” as he dips his toes. These are people who, if they put in their time and dedicate themselves, could probably create something quite good — it just wasn’t this project or this script. And what a terrible thing it would be to destroy someone’s potential.
Confidence to put material out to the world is difficult to build, but it’s easily crushed.
Which is precisely the temptation at times. To crush egos, to remind people, “you’re not as good as you think you are.” Each time I’m compelled to do so, however, I remember my first script. An assistant whom I interned for offered to read it and give me notes, and I took her up on it.
It’s only now I realize the gravity of the moment. This act was the catalyst that pushed me to show my work to others, to just put it out there. It taught me to stop treating projects like my darlings; that if you’re going to be a professional, you just do your best before casting them out to the world to see who thrives and who dies.
This assistant could have decided she was tired of reading bad scripts. She could have gotten onto her soap box and preached to me about all the beginner mistakes I made that she’s sick of seeing. She could have said, “Stop writing like this. We get it. You love the sound of your own voice.”
She didn’t. Instead she said, “It’s clear you’re a good writer. Here’s what you’re going to work on for your next script..”
Photo Credit: Dmitry Kaminsky