Oh but this has been a frustrating week and having Monday off as a holiday probably didn’t help much. Now that my job has an expiry date, it has dwindled to a tedious clerical grind. Sure, it beats the living hell out of flipping burgers and I’m so very glad that I’m not reduced to asking “paper and plastic?” but it’s tedious, tiring and requires more standing on the job than I’ve had to deal with in about a decade. Three more months of this?
Although I’m reminded of something I read in the book Predictably Irrational about a study where two groups of participants were given the same task of (I think) sorting papers alphabetically or by file number. The first group was paid something slightly above minimum wage while the second group was given a much higher wage. The researchers found that the folks in that first group all talked about how they made it fun and turned it into a game despite the tedium while everyone in the second group was in high dudgeon, shocked that they could be expected to do something like this! OMGWTFBBQeecummings?!?!ONE!1!?
Welcome… to the dudgeon.
BUT!
But this has gotten me off my ass (or at least off my feet) long enough to tighten up my resume so I can ship it around next week. I’ll run it by some people first and then go nuts. I’ll do data entry if I have to and I’ve got the chops for it, but I want out of this rut!
So it’s a good thing I have projects.
The Book project has expanded in fun ways. What started as something that Mara and I were doing to challenge ourselves has grown to a group of four people including her friend Sean and Noelle, a bartender at Betty where the rest of us spend a fair amount of time. The four of us got together yesterday to compare notes and see what our plans are, which was a lot of fun. It’s very low key, not much “planned” as such, just a personal challenge to try something different. For my part, my book is going to be hip shots and pictures taken when I wasn’t looking. I’ve been playing around with the technique a lot in the past month and I’m honestly surprised by how pleasing some of those pictures are when compared with the shots I’ve taken after deliberation and consideration.
Probably the best thing to come of it (apart from our decamping to Betty for drinks) was that it got me to pull out the files for my burlesque annual. Sean’s done a couple of photo magazines through Issuu and he explained a bit of his process, which got me thinking in different ways. So I’m breaking the page up and playing with fonts and generally having a lot of fun with this again. There’s still a long way to go but I’m excited again. Excited to have something more to do with this than just throw a bunch of pictures on a page and call it good.
Lovely.
Now that I’m away from the office and not crouched over a copier, I feel human again with a whole ton of things I want to write about here. I also have an Academy recital to shoot tomorrow and some serious quality time with Jen so that may have to wait a bit. Oh and sleep. Lots of sleep. I hope.
