Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Working the System at 3am

It's 3:30am, a scant 210 minutes after the Labor Day Holiday, and I am up. I am up, attempting to cram a blog entry, some coffee , some Cinnamon Toast Crunch and maybe a baby feeding in before I leave the house in 20 minutes for... WORK.

Ok, it's sort of work. What began as an attempt to work the system and get "laid off", led me to go to sleep at 9pm last night an get up 45 minutes ago (my disability and Paid Family Leave Act have run out, and if I get laid off, I can file for unemployment for the rest of my "maternity leave"). One of my closest girlfriends is an extras casting coordinator and I had asked that she consider hiring me (and laying me off) if she ever needed help on one of her movies on days when they had a lot of background actors coming in. I said that on a Saturday - the following Saturday, I was up at 3:30am in order to help her check in 110 extras at 5am. While I wouldn't really consider hanging out with ME (those are her initials, not a capitalized "me") for 5 hours and standing on set chatting with co-workers I hadn't seen in months/years work, she did pay me and lay me off, thereby enabling the all important unemployment claim. The kicker came when she said, "What are you doing on Tuesday? I could really use some help with these 225 extras I have to check in..."

So here I am again at 3:40am, having laid my unemployment claim aside, to go do this thing called "work." Later, when I come home, I guess I will once again do the thing called "mama" with the thing called "baby" and continue to try to research my next project, which is by necessity a part-time thing called "thinking about starting a website". Maybe I can get to that after a nap. Or two.

1 comment:

  1. it sounds like you could use this thing called "coffee"

    ... or a very stiff drink...

    i think it's remarkable that you are able to balance all of these responsibilities, and still have time to be humorous and candid in your writing :)

    ReplyDelete