Careering

When does a job become a career? I had a job for eight years, and before that I had several other jobs, doing much the same thing, for another eight years. But early in 2009 that string stopped.

And one year ago I started driving a taxi.

I never wanted to be a taxi driver. Oh, at times it seemed like it would be an interesting job, and over the past year I learned that it can be an interesting job. But it’s not the job I want to do. The unfortunate truth, however, is that my chosen career seems to have abandoned me.

I used my new unemployment last year as my opportunity to pursue some dreams: acting, writing. But this job that supposedly allows me the flexibility of schedule demands so much time in order to earn a living income that the schedule is very inflexible, lest I starve, or choose between paying the rent or the electric bill. Where I had hoped to drive the taxi to fill in when the freelance video work and the paid acting gigs left gaps, it’s quite the other way around. There have been damnably few freelance production gigs, and the acting gigs to date have been pro bono.

Of course, a few relatively minor lifestyle changes could make being a taxi driver a little more comfortable. I could move into a smaller apartment; it’s not like I spend much time in my place, now. Or I could get a roommate; I would never get to know him or her, and neither of us would ever really be a bother to the other.

But I don’t want to be a taxi driver. Yet it’s what I am. For a year, already.

And counting.

A Yuk and Some Yuck

Q. What do you get when you drop your frozen toaster waffle on the beach?
A. Sandy Eggo.

I made that one up all by myself. Perhaps you figured that out on your own.

Hence my current trip.

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Frustration is being given a task to do at the office and then, suddenly, everyone else needs me to do something for them, and all of it is an emergency.

Frustration is having one person working on another task tell me how she needs me to prepare my contribution to her task, and then the other person working on that same task tells me she needs me to prepare my contribution in the exact opposite way.

Frustration is feeling like what I’m doing for everyone else should be everyone else’s responsibility but my own.

Frustration is going on the road to a nice place like San Diego where I know I’m not going to have any free time to play, and I don’t really want to go in the first place.

Frustration is having my coworker seated next to me on the plane with no one in the seat between us after he boarded the plane and approached my row, looked at his boarding pass, looked at the gorgeous, blond, single woman seated beside me with no one in the seat between us, and said, “16 F?” which caused the gorgeous woman beside me to look at her own boarding pass and realize she had sat on the wrong side of the plane, and now I’m seated next to my stupid coworker for three and a half hours.

Frustration is wanting to write, but being lured by the in-flight movie Mamma Mia, only to lose interest in it halfway through, and then resent the fact that now I don’t have enough time to write.

Frustration is not knowing if that’s really Meryl Streep singing (and believing that it really — unfortunately — is Pierce Brosnan singing), and — if it really is her voice — wishing that she had done more singing for public consumption over the last 20 years.