As I mentioned in the last entry, I had a bit of a career epiphany while on vacation. However, it doesn't seem to have gotten me too much farther in the mean time. Here's what I have for my perfect job description:
1) Must be production oriented, and focused on Getting Things Done, not talking about getting things done;
2) Ideally works closely with creative people (writers, musicians, artists, etc.);
3) Ideally is a position where most, if not all, primary decision makers are close at hand (that one's practically a pipe dream in this corporate age, but we're talking ideals here, right?);
4) Should be a smaller company with great flexibility and variety in daily routine.
So how does one go from a list of ideals like the above to an actual position? About now, I'm less concerned with whether I could get such a job (which, in all modesty, I know I could) as I am with what such a job would be.
I don't suppose this is a rare thing, what I'm experiencing right now. It's probably par for the course for mid-career professionals looking to make a change into something completely new. But it surely makes it clear to me why so many people just slide from job to job, always taking the next available step, and winding up in positions that they absolutely hate. It's death by a thousand paper cuts, really. Each blind step from one place to the next can be the one that turns us down the path from job satisfaction and a long and happy career to decades of watching the clock.
Happiness is damn hard work, but when I get there, I'll be sure to leave a trail of bread crumbs for y'all. And I will leave you with one of the few pieces of advice my father ever gave to me:
Don't be good at something you don't like to do.
That's some serious wisdom right there, boys and girls.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
The City of Angels
It's funny how we learn the things we know about ourselves. Right now, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles, writing this on a notepad made from old Grey's Anatomy shooting scripts. It's just one of the little things I picked up on a visit to the set of the show the other day. The other was a major personal insight.
I didn't know that my friend Julie was close friends with someone who worked on Grey's when I came to LA. And Julie didn't know that I was a fan of the show when she offered to get me a visit to the set. As we drove to the tiny lot in Silver Lake, just outside of LA proper, where the show is shot, Julie was apologizing profusely. It seemed we were going to get there just as everyone was breaking for lunch, so I probably wouldn't get to see any of the stars. But I didn't really care about that.
As our guide showed us around the dim labyrinth of the sound stage, bodies were everywhere. Crew members were catching a much-needed nap while the actors were all at lunch. On every gurney and operating table, there was a dusty overworked body, completely conked out. We walked through the nearly pitch-black sound stage and our guide joked that the place was more like the Winchester Mystery House than anything - which made perfect sense, considering the door marked "Exam Room #1" opened into the doctors' break room. The actors did eventually come back from lunch and I did get to see a take or two, but seeing the celebrities was really the least exciting part for me.
There's something magical about walking through an empty sound stage. It's the reality of the unreal that excites me – the strips of perfectly color-matched masking tape they use to hide the seams at the corners of the break-away walls, the various recipes for fake blood, the shelves lined with books on guns, medical maladies and a Seattle phone directory. The actors? The talent? I can really take or leave them. And that was the insight.
I'm a production person to the core. Yes, I am creative and I deal easily with creative people, but when it comes to what makes me happy, that's not where I want to be making my money. I want to take the idea and make it real, whose ever idea is it. I want to be painting masking tape to cover wall seams, I want to be figuring out what makes the perfect fake blood.
Of course, there's still a part of me that longs to write the Great American Novel or to see my name up in lights, but there's pivotal moment in every artist's life where he somehow finds that what he longs for isn't what will make him happiest in the end.
In either case, it's the magic that calls.
I didn't know that my friend Julie was close friends with someone who worked on Grey's when I came to LA. And Julie didn't know that I was a fan of the show when she offered to get me a visit to the set. As we drove to the tiny lot in Silver Lake, just outside of LA proper, where the show is shot, Julie was apologizing profusely. It seemed we were going to get there just as everyone was breaking for lunch, so I probably wouldn't get to see any of the stars. But I didn't really care about that.
As our guide showed us around the dim labyrinth of the sound stage, bodies were everywhere. Crew members were catching a much-needed nap while the actors were all at lunch. On every gurney and operating table, there was a dusty overworked body, completely conked out. We walked through the nearly pitch-black sound stage and our guide joked that the place was more like the Winchester Mystery House than anything - which made perfect sense, considering the door marked "Exam Room #1" opened into the doctors' break room. The actors did eventually come back from lunch and I did get to see a take or two, but seeing the celebrities was really the least exciting part for me.
There's something magical about walking through an empty sound stage. It's the reality of the unreal that excites me – the strips of perfectly color-matched masking tape they use to hide the seams at the corners of the break-away walls, the various recipes for fake blood, the shelves lined with books on guns, medical maladies and a Seattle phone directory. The actors? The talent? I can really take or leave them. And that was the insight.
I'm a production person to the core. Yes, I am creative and I deal easily with creative people, but when it comes to what makes me happy, that's not where I want to be making my money. I want to take the idea and make it real, whose ever idea is it. I want to be painting masking tape to cover wall seams, I want to be figuring out what makes the perfect fake blood.
Of course, there's still a part of me that longs to write the Great American Novel or to see my name up in lights, but there's pivotal moment in every artist's life where he somehow finds that what he longs for isn't what will make him happiest in the end.
In either case, it's the magic that calls.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Dork-ography
So now that I've got all this free time on my hands, I finally finished the Thomas B. Ford Foundation white paper on the textbook adoption process (link's below). After having read the assessment they delivered, I decided to do a little research.
Working in the industry as I do, I have ready access to about 20 years' worth of textbooks, so I took a stroll down to the company library and started picking a few books out at random. We have books from every program of every major publisher in the country and it didn't take too long before I came to one sad conclusion:
Modern textbooks are just about unreadable.
Sure, they're incredibly visually appealing, full of interesting photographs and pretty colors. But as is often the case in the modern age, appearance has overcome content. To steal a phrase, "there's no there there." The text flits about from topic to topic, as if looking for maximum density of ideas and minimum density of context. Facts are dropped like breadcrumbs, but they never lead to anything.
When I was a kid, I remember sitting and reading my 8th-grade American history book for the fun of it. It was visually bland – just words and an occasional black and white picture tucked in a corner (where pictures belong, in any decently designed book) – but it was interesting. The writing was captivating and presented historical figures like George Washington and Booker T. Washington as people who would actually be cool to know. I'm sure that it might have been a little slanted toward the "dead white male" point of view, but it was a real live book with real live stories to tell. The fact that those stories were history was almost incidental.
Of course, I also used to read the encyclopedia for fun, so it might just be me.
Working in the industry as I do, I have ready access to about 20 years' worth of textbooks, so I took a stroll down to the company library and started picking a few books out at random. We have books from every program of every major publisher in the country and it didn't take too long before I came to one sad conclusion:
Modern textbooks are just about unreadable.
Sure, they're incredibly visually appealing, full of interesting photographs and pretty colors. But as is often the case in the modern age, appearance has overcome content. To steal a phrase, "there's no there there." The text flits about from topic to topic, as if looking for maximum density of ideas and minimum density of context. Facts are dropped like breadcrumbs, but they never lead to anything.
When I was a kid, I remember sitting and reading my 8th-grade American history book for the fun of it. It was visually bland – just words and an occasional black and white picture tucked in a corner (where pictures belong, in any decently designed book) – but it was interesting. The writing was captivating and presented historical figures like George Washington and Booker T. Washington as people who would actually be cool to know. I'm sure that it might have been a little slanted toward the "dead white male" point of view, but it was a real live book with real live stories to tell. The fact that those stories were history was almost incidental.
Of course, I also used to read the encyclopedia for fun, so it might just be me.
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