Unemployment

Unemployment is boring. It's a recipe for desperation.

In what has been my chosen profession, unemployment comes with the territory. Film people work from gig to gig, and unemployment is what happens inbetween.

The problem is I never know how long between gigs is going to last. One of the problems.

The other problem, the fat man sitting on the seesaw of unhappiness to which unemployment is the fulcrum, is that I hate looking for work. Hate it.


I work to escape the problems I have in the rest of my life, which means when I don't work, I have to face those problems again.

I've come up with a few ways to be semi employed, like writing and tutoring, but they're ultimately unsatisfying. It's hard to feel like these are real work after doing production, where the work is so real it effectively kills off the rest of my life.

That leaves me with ways to kill time, i.e. Mr. Ribbles on the couch with the remote, which, of course, just makes it worse.

There are only a few jobs I feel capable and qualified to do. At the same time, I know most of these jobs are or would be killing me. The crashes after the high of work are too much. Until I can learn how to be happy when I'm not working, I have to give up production.


This happens to a lot of people, and I hate that it's happening to me (by the way, ever see this? Nothing will make you feel dirtier.)

I'm not really quitting production, anyway, since that would just make me more unemployed. I'm just not going after jobs, especially long jobs like features - I'm just doing the ones I'm being asked to do. Here's what you might call the plan:

1) I've stopped watching t.v. during the day. I've been doing this for about a week.

2) I'm producing a very small, very managable short film that will show at First Sundays on January 7.

3) Today, I took my resume to a film equipment rental house in my neighborhood.

4) I've got that writing project I mentioned before.

5) Oh and then I'm blogging a lot. Maybe you could call this series "ribble's Quest For Non-Cinema-Related Happiness."

6) I'll keep working for my regular clients as a PA. They're aren't that many, and they tend to have short gigs.

7) If a big, interesting project comes along, or a friend is doing something and I want to be involved, I'll probably do it anyway, but I'll be choosy.

Not much of a mandate - in particular, I need to carefully consider the merits of a real day job. But, it's a start.