Current mood:

optimistic

Clocks tick
and lives change.

I've been maudlin of late; back to my old ways of tension, nervous energy and demands upon myself and everything I do that are so far out of any proportion as to be fairly comical - from the outside. In the past this has thoroughly baffled me, but I believe I'm kind of reaching a conclusion.

I'm about ready to knock my current lifestyle on the head, get a Job and Settle Down.

Whether this means I'll automatically lose most of my hair, fall out of whatever shape I'm in and start driving a 7-year old Nissan, I don't know - but I'm ready to explore it.

The thing with "living in the arts", see, is that it's all fueled by myth. If you're An Actor, for example, you adapt a certain lifestyle. This comes with certain things - you swan about town looking for jobs with a thousand-yard stare and much better posture than the crawling commuter bugs around you, you get to say "Aihm an akk-tooor" at parties and you get to lie in on a Wednesday morning if you so please. The myth and joy of this existence then masks over the fact that all the crawling commuter bugs get *paid* on a monthly basis, when you state your thespian cred at parties the next question inevitably is "so what have I seen you in?" which often goes unanswered, and freedom (as Janis so memorably said) is just another word for nothing left to lose - you get up at noon on a Wednesday because nobody needs you to actually be anywhere. To a certain extent this goes for all professional creative endeavours. The people at the top of it spend about 4% of their time creating an illusion of swanning between glamorous, engaging assignments and then they spend the other 96% working - and working HARD - to earn an office assistant's wages doing what they (possibly used to) love; because for each one of the top people there's 10 people waiting in the wings, ready to hoover away every single crumb of cake that you've spent your life accumulating.

And one asks oneself - is it worth it? Is it worth pursuing a dream that requires you to create a delusion for yourself to live in? Lines like "oh my god I don't understand nine-to-fivers. I so couldn't do that" (uttered by yours truly on many an occasion - slightly rarer in later days though) perpetuate the myth that there is The Struggle/Graft/Hustle or there is nine-to-five wage slave death. Nothing in between at all.

And to that I say - bollocks.

Does anybody know of a Snorri-relevant job out there? :-D