$1.37

$3,188.97

The former was the teaser.

The latter was my final paycheck.

It will be in the bank account tomorrow. This amount covers February rent, March rent, and all of the bills left in February. With the buck thirty-seven, after all those payments are made, our bank account will have 78 more cents in it than it does at this moment. (AKA enough for the basic necessities for the next couple of weeks).

Sense. Of. Humor.

Here are the extended ironies that make all of this more entertaining.

This money is only enough to cover rent and expenses. It is not enough to cover a cut-and-run bail-out move back home. (I've been contemplating that the last few days.)

This check was by no means guaranteed. I knew I'd receive a final settlement around this time, but there was the real possibility that I would OWE the company money for repairs on the truck (I've heard enough stories of that happening).

This settlement was not expected until next week. If it had not come this week, the bills due by Friday would not have been paid.

In my mind, I'd been hoping against hope that, at the outside, the check might amount to $3k.

And, finally, LITERALLY just now, as I finished the last sentence, my inbox showed a message for a call-back TODAY before 5pm...wait for it...for a PAYING JOB!

Woot.

All right.

At this point, the money issue has gotten so ridiculous and abstract that it no longer seems real.

I want to work and I want to work desperately. The reason? Not the money. I'm just bleeding bored.

Bored.

Bored.

Bored!

God has a sense of humor.

In all this hurricane of money-less-ness, we've been holding out and holding out...bumping back our rent payment, shuffling bills, all the usual suspects, hoping and praying for some relief from the pressure.

Yesterday an envelope came in the mail: once opened it revealed that there had been a discrepancy on the payments we made on a storage unit we rented waaaay back when Alicia was going to come drive with me (before the advent of babies). The storage place, in good faith, refunded our overpayment.

The total:

$1.37

Of all the cosmic jokes that could be played...this was perfect. If it'd been $20, it would have just felt like a little help. But a buck thirty-seven? Cute.

Hopefully (hopefully), this will be followed up with a big, friendly, "Naw, I was just teasing; here's the real help."

I had an audition for a student film last night.

It was funny. The project is like a half hour long, the sides were three lines, and the whole process took about five minutes.

But the other guys in there were all nervous as hell. You know how it goes. The foot tapping, the pacing, the trumpeter's lip warm-up (never understood that one), the staring into space. On that last one, no actor ever has to work at the thousand mile stare for war movies...all they need to do is act like it's an audition.

I have no idea if I was what they wanted, but I do know two things: I don't need to question whether I did it "right". I made my choices and delivered. Also, I followed direction. He asked me to do it again, a little differently, and I did.

Beyond that, doing audition autopsy is just an enormous waste of time and energy.

Dear Lord, why am I so broke? All this show-biz stuff seems soooo natural.

I have an analogy to draw.

Bear with me.

Matthew is breastfed, and one of the technical aspects of breastfeeding is something called the "let down". The milk has to let down into the nipple in order for the baby to eat.

Sometimes when Matt's hungry, he gets impatient and flails and fusses...even when he's on the breast. It's because he's not getting any milk yet, because mom hasn't let down.

The only way he can get the milk is to keep sucking until the let down happens and he gets a supply. If he's too frantic to eat now he risks not eating at all because he won't suck enough to get the milk flowing.

This is exactly what I'm doing in my life. Assuming that things will happen eventually, and that keeping at it is the key, I'm doing all kinds of worrying and flailing and getting frantic, and whipping myself into a frenzy about how I'm not getting anywhere (after a month)...and all it's doing it making it harder to focus on the eventual reality of pay off.

Okay, so maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but it works for me.

Staying calm sucks.

More accurately: I suck at staying calm.

Since California is so short on things called "seasons", I hereby annex the seasons and rename them...or at least this one.

This one shall be called "Doubt".

I've bounced back and forth a lot in the last...almost 10 years (ever since I started high school)...trying to figure out what I cared about.

No. Really that's not true. The stuff I cared about landed on me with both feet. Music and Theatre dropped on me like a bomb. I didn't have to go searching them out. The choice between a music and a theatre degree in college was a pretty simple review of who I felt I identified with more. Thus theatre.

Then writing dropped on me, and I like that too.

Then the confusion hit. The fear sprouted. The doubts about the future. The approaching apocalypse of real life, responsibility and finance. I started vacillating.

Write? Act? Day job? Be "Responsible"?

As retarded as it sounds, I never anticipated the difficulty. I'd lived in a world where ability and diligence were requisites to achievement, and nothing else was really needed. Big Fish: Small Pond.

I had no experience trusting Providence for the outcome, it was never necessary.

I've been convinced, sometimes on alternating days, that I wanted to write for a living or act for a living. What I cared about was running headlong into what I wanted out of life. I found myself smack in the middle of the biggest blind spot I never knew I had.

I know what I care about, but I don't have a good sense of what I want to make out of that care.

So I don't have a good read on the best course of action, because all I've ever been good at is getting into the arena and aiming as high as I can.

I'm sure this is all wonderfully vague to anyone having a read. It's the same when I try to communicate anything like this to Alicia. It all makes sense up in the coconut, but when I send it flying through the air, it winds up soured somehow.

I care about acting. I never really sat down and thought about how to make that work for me. The best I could come up with was an either/or decision about which major conventional market to enter, and make up the rest as I went along.

Is it really gigantic ambition? Or is it just tremendous lack of imagination?

I've always thought of ambition as the drive to succeed or overcome despite any and all obstacles. If that is the measure of ambition, then I've got none. I've got some of the most basic obstacles facing me just now, and I don't even want to try to hurdle them. I'm short on cash, and having trouble getting in the door on auditions...any audition. This is pretty standard fare. Do I want to persevere? No. I want to act. I don't want to work for it. I just want it to happen. And why is that?

Because I've never had to work for a damn thing in my whole life. School was easy, the jobs I've had before now have been relatively simple (I suppose I did earn the CDL, but that doesn't really measure up to this), it's all been kinda like dominoes, falling in sequence. Now I've got to hang on by my toenails and really hustle, and I don't want to...even for one of the few things I really, really care about.

Am I really so hyper-obsessed with things being straight-forward and unambiguous that not even a chance at my wildest dream excites me to action?

Do I have such a faulty grasp of my spiritual convictions that every time I try to involve God I just give myself another reason to quit?

My life has never been open-ended like this, and, frankly, it's terrifying that I've come to this place now, married and be-childed...long, long after I should have caught an inkling of this shortcoming.

I thought it would motivate me to burned the ships on the beach, coming out here like this. Turns out, I'm pretty fucking hard to motivate.

That's a disappointing hole to blow in one's self-perception.

Or, perhaps, this is another crappy excuse, and my real problem is that I'm just a tool.

Current Status: So confused.

It's all supposed to mean something, but why did no one tell me that it would be written in a different language?

Still here, still ticking.

Dealing with the whole "patience" thing.

Lack of patience manifests itself in a number of curious ways...I'll not ennumerate them here.

Suffice it to say, parenting is harder when shit that has nothing to do with your kid is on your nerves.