Month: December 2021

I made the mistake of reaching out to a number of the “dangling, unresolved career opportunities” a few days back to, basically, try and resolve them before the end of the year. If nothing else, I thought, at least I’ll hopefully have an answer and not have to keep wondering about things. I was a fool, let me tell you.

It’s not just that getting multiple, “The answer is no, we just didn’t know how to tell you” messages in quick succession does something to your self-confidence, although that’s definitely the case — although, to be blunt, my self-confidence is pretty much in the toilet thanks to everything else in 2021 as-is, so it could be worse, I guess…? Actually, no; getting rejected repeatedly, even from opportunities that I had already pretty much figured were rejections by dint of simply refusing to engage, is really not any kind of fun, and ends up feeling like an encore of the big Broadway number where you’re told that no-one actually wants you. It’s really shitty.

Anyway, it’s not just that, honestly; it’s also the fact that, with every closed door, I get that little bit more melancholic about the future, which led to a recent morning where I’d been woken up by one of the pets and could not, for the life of me, get back to sleep. I just lay there, feeling as if a void of Something That Wasn’t Writing But Joke’s On You I Have No Other Employable Skills was lying in wait for me, just around the corner.

On the plus side, I feel as if a midlife crisis centered around the idea that you have no real job prospects is oddly fitting for someone in their late ’40s, even as I’m simultaneously appalled at being such a cliche that this could apply to me. Remember those halcyon days when I had consistent, well-paid work? Remember (checks notes) 18 months ago? [Writer rises from desk, stifles sob, says, “Excuse me, I have something in my eye,” and runs from room, dramatically.]

It’s beginning to look a lot like the end of the year, which means that I have to take stock of the important things — like, for example, just how little money I actually made this year. To put things in perspective, the income I had this year didn’t even cover my share of rent over the past 12 months. (I will forever be particularly grateful for the good luck that saw me get money from the divorce when I did, otherwise this past year would have been very, very different indeed.)

I am nearing the point where I’ll have to make a decision about my future, insofar as work is concerned. I promised myself I could have 12 months to, basically, fuck around and find out if freelancing irregularly for outlets would work out financially, and the answer is a pretty definitive “no.” So, instead, the question becomes, “Well, what’s next?”

I have had no shortage of exciting opportunities come my way since the discovery that I wouldn’t be staying on with THR in the way I had been, way back in January; the kinds of things that would, at any other time, had been bucket list items instead of potential life rafts. Unfortunately, in almost every single case — there are a couple still out there, unresolved — every single opportunity vanished.

I was going to write, “vanished before I’d had the chance to accept it,” but that’s not even true; I had accepted more than one, only for it to disappear after the acceptance but before any of the benefits had kicked in. That experience, which has repeated pretty consistently across the year, has been genuinely dizzying, going from, well, that’s a strange and unfortunate coincidence to wait, am I cursed somehow to where I currently am, which is a vague cynical expectation that nothing positive is going to happen career-wise, because past experience has taught me that.

There are but weeks left before I have to decide if I’m going to continue to live off savings and try to make this thing work somehow, or if I have to go off and find something, anything, better to do. Despite everything, I still harbor a forlorn hope that something magical can happen, even if, really, I’ll believe it when I see it.

This time last weekend, I was feeling no shortage of jealousy over not being at San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition, the official name given to the mini SDCC running over Thanksgiving weekend. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying time off and spending it with Chloe and the family here at home, just the opposite; but I would check social media or websites and see people who were there, talking about how it was a Comic-Con like SDCC used to be, more than a decade ago; where it felt more about the comics and less about the movies. Where it wasn’t a mass of humanity that felt like a crowd at every moment for a five day stretch. Where it might even have been — dare I say it? — fun.

(I saw a report that said that Hall H, the mammoth room where the big movie presentations normally happen, had been transformed into a COVID testing area, which felt like some kind of larger point was being made about the world we’re living in now, but, well, this is the world we’re living in, now.)

I’d check in and see people I know post photos of places I know, and I admit it; I’d feel as if I was missing out. If only I could just be there, it would be just like old times, I thought to myself wistfully, because I miss comic conventions and seeing friends the way things used to be.

And then, all the news about the Omnicron variant started breaking, and I thought, well, at least I didn’t have to travel and hang around in airports when that was happening. And then the news this week broke that the second person identified as having the Omnicron variant had attended an anime convention in New York in mid-November, and I thought to myself, really, what are the odds that someone from that convention was also at San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition? Probably really good odds.

That, dear reader, is how I learned to stop worrying and give up being jealous about not going to comic book conventions. At least, this time around.

I have, like seemingly half of my Twitter feed, been watching The Beatles: Get Back over the last few days, intermittently. It’s something I do passively, almost — the nine-hour runtime and exhaustive (and exhausting) approach to what to include make it near impossible for me to sit down and concentrate exclusively on it, so I put it on as background in the evening when my attention wanders — but it has, unexpectedly, been a revelation in ways that go far beyond the music for me.

Something that stuck out from the first episode was a reference to the band being 28 or so at the time it was being filmed; turns out, that was only true of half of the band — Paul McCartney was 26, and George Harrison just 25. That feels extraordinary to me, today. Imagine being that young, and having done so much, having lived through all of that — Beatlemania, writing and recording what was essentially the basis for modern pop music for the next half century at least, being celebrities of such status — and you weren’t even thirty yet. For that matter, imagine knowing, as I suspect at least McCartney did, that your career and creativity might have already peaked at such a young age…!

When I was 25, I was at a loss; I’d graduated a year earlier and was teaching, but I had no long term plans that seemed achievable, or at least, no idea how to achieve them. Nonetheless, I felt young and at the start of things, as if I had the whole of my life ahead of me to accomplish everything and anything. Imagine being at that age and having already created With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, et al.

Stranger still, for me, than re-contextualizing the Beatles as young men, was the realization that my father was a contemporary of the band, at least in age; he was born in 1941, a year after John Lennon and Ringo Starr, and a year before McCartney. At the time Get Back was being shot, he was 27. That feels almost impossible, in some way. (I always, always imagine/remember him as being in his late 40s, the period I’m in now.) I watch the footage and try to imagine him that age, in the late ‘60s fashions, young and vital as the band seem. It’s a dizzying, bracing experience, but an oddly affirming one.