perspective

Busy, but alive. Indeed.

The last couple of months have been quiet here, but just as still waters run deep, so does the seeming stagnation of this blog mark a span of months that have reduced me to a soul-sick, dead eyed shell of my former self. The beauty of working in film -- the terrible, bleak beauty -- is that there are literally hundreds of job for which you are wildly overqualified, and if you bust your ass you can squeeze a lifetime of futility into a few short weeks.

So then, a recap.

There was, as you may recall, my brief tenure as a PA on a Russian feature, the vast majority of which was split between driving a van between Brooklyn and New Jersey and telling tourists and angry truck drivers that they couldn't park there, and which, while it still managed to be an almost entirely a pleasant experience, culminated with me being roped into being an extra in a dinner scene and getting food poisoning when the director demanded, through a translator, that I actually eat the food.

Then there were the two days I spent as a PA on a cooking show shooting in a high-end kitchen showroom near Union Square. My job was, among other things, to stand outside the front of the store in the rain and tell people that no, the store isn't closed, but yes, those are cameras inside so if they could wait for just one second, we'd really etcetera etcetera. Luckily most people shamefully wealthy enough to cover their sink in gold don't like getting their diamond-studded umbrellas wet, so most of my day was spent silently commiserating with the passersby who, for reasons of their own, had been forced outside on such a miserable day. Then the coked-up head of sales stormed onto the showroom floor and accused me of scaring away a six figure deal and demanded that I be fired. Someone, some terrified millionaire, had called the store and said someone, a bearded someone, had scared them away from the front of the store before they could spend one hundred thousand dollars on their kitchen.

Then there was the day I spent with a director "organizing tapes," which, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be an obvious euphemism for "spending 14 hours cleaning out a garage for $100 and two slices of cheese pizza."

Then there was the month and a half I spent logging footage for the upcoming Margaret Cho reality show.

Ah, and so now we come down to it.

"Logging footage," it turns out, is also a euphemism. In a literal sense it refers to the act of transcribing the hours upon hours of inane, catty bickering that have been captured on tape. But in another, truer sense, "logging footage" means "seeing how long you can stare into the empty, baleful eyes of the angel of death before realizing that your entire life, every triumph and defeat, every moment of joy or sadness great or small, every time you've ever laughed or cried or hugged someone, the very sum of your existence is this, now, this very moment, typing 'Margaret mimes eating pussy' for the twenty-second time that day, or 'Margaret pretends to finger her asshole while her father tells everyone at the dinner table how proud he is of her success' , or copying down word for word a tearful exchange in which Margaret complains that nobody knows how hard it is growing up looking different to a fucking midget."

And that, sadly, isn't a euphemism for anything at all.