Arc

For years, now, I have lamented about how my occupation(s) has cramped my writing time, and how I need to find a way to put more time back into my life to give to writing. I finally got out of the taxi in July of this year, walking away from it ...and right into a sporadic, stressful schedule of school portrait photography. At the beginning of the school year I was busy, and the hours were all over the map ...er, clock ...with some days requiring me to leave my apartment at 4:30 am, and other days to leave at 9:00. As the fall semester wore on, the schedule lightened up, and the "part time" nature of the job that had me working sometimes 50 hours a week at the start made itself more evident.

Waning hours — and pay — aside, I remembered soon after I began the job that the part I had really hated about the video job I'd had from 2001 to 2009 was the lugging-around-the-heavy-cases-and-setting-up-so-much-crap-all-the-time part, which was exactly what I was doing again with the photography job. I was promised with the photography that, as the portrait photography aspect slowed down, the sporting event and candid photography aspect would pick up, and I would continue to have somewhat steady work. However, since the other thing I wanted to get back into my life after leaving the taxi behind was acting, I didn't want the sporting event and candid photography to take up my evenings, which is when theatre commitments occur.

I had to find something else.

One evening of feverish and reckless Craigslist searching netted me an interview with HealthPark Hospitality/Advantage Valet, a company headquartered in Barrington, Illinois, a mere hop and a skip from where I live. I never knew I wanted to be a valet; fact of the matter is, I never did want to be a valet, but, in the dark hours of that evening it seemed like a swell thing to look into.

They touted full-time work, steady, regular hours and choice of schedule. The bonus is that the property where the position was open is a hospital a mere ten-minute drive from my apartment. BONUS! But I think I already wrote that.... I started with HealthPark Hospitality on November 10, and — despite how primitive-brain valet work may appear to a reader, I'm having a blast with a job I get home from at the same time every day, that I don't have to bring home with me, that I don't stress over the night before, that I don't have to carry anything to or from, and that there is no expensive equipment for which I am responsible on a daily basis ...if you don't count the occasional $150,000-ish Mercedes Benz I have to back into a parking stall between two other cars.

And now the cows have come home to roost to put the money in the proof pudding where my mouth is. Or something like that. Translation: time is what I wanted; time is what I did this for. It's time to start getting my brain focused again on writing. I was doing so well — at least exercise-wise — prior to the taxi and Facebook. Fucking Facebook. But now, with what little writing discipline I had when fate dumped me into a taxi all but lost, I find myself struggling to get it all back in gear, to observe life and formulate a topic, to concentrate on that topic and to whip words into a coherent pattern to make that topic interesting to a reader, even if it's something about a long-neglected avocation. And then there are the writing projects I long to get back to which have sat on the proverbial shelf for way too long, regardless of how much or how little writing I have done since 2009.

Since 2009. Jeesh. Five years. What the actual fuck?!



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