Thursday, January 20, 2005

 
I'm sick. Taking the day off, if you will... where's my government check?!? hurry up you bastards. This morning, I woke up to a strange tapping coming from the other side of my basement room, which turned out to be a pigeon stuck in the exhaust pipe above my water heater. This I ascertained by the weird claw sticking out from where the heater meets the pipe. I'm sick, and I did about four hours of pretty hardcore manual labor until 3 a.m. last night, so I said fuck it and went back to bed. I am a heartless bastard, obviously, and my mom would kill me if she heard this story, but there was no way I was dismantling the top of my water heater to deal with a wild animal in my condition. So I went back at 1, when I got up, expecting to find a dead bird in the pipe. But... nothing. Did I hallucinate the whole thing? It did seem kind of unlikely...

So I had a post kind of sketched out in my mind about working for free, and how somehow, it seems to be hard to do in NYC. This imaginary post involved using words usually associated with amphibians and homosexuals to refer to the widely-respected charity organization Doctors Without Borders. You see, Phase 1 of BQ's stint on unemployment was to include a) volunteering for the Kerry campaign and b) getting the band on track. Let's see, Bush was inaugurated today, and we've played one show. Crap. Phase 2 was to involve getting a sweet creative internship and/or volunteering for a good nonprofit and turning that into a job I could be unashamed of, all by the time the dole runs out.

I didn't count on the holidays taking a good month out of my schedule however, so I got started on Phase 2 a little late. But a month after mailing my resume (along with a tastefully ass-kissing cover letter) to DWB, I had heard nothing, and I was a little bit shocked. Umm, I'm trying to give you my time, for free, and you don't want it?

The internship search wasn't faring much better - a good friend of my mom's had opened her music-production rolodex to me, with nary a call, or email, back. This I can kind of understand; there's a million kids in NYC who want cool internships, but come on, whatever happened to some good old-fashioned nepotism?

In the same vein, your friend and mine, Mat Lynch, wrangled me an interview at the production company for which he works, for an internship helping to develop documentaries. The interview went great, but after a week of no contact from them, I was starting to get discouraged. Finally, Lynch brought me in to be his personal apprentice, learning Final Cut Pro. As I was there, logging footage from the Pixies tour, the girl who interviewed me for the development internship came over to offer that one to me. Then, today, one of the music production guys called me back to meet with him next week.

So I may now have the opposite problem from before, which is to say, too much free work to do. I think I probably only have a month and a half left on the dole, and after that, some savings... anyway, updates later, maybe, if I feel like it.

Also, Ben and I are playing a show next Wednesday as Monarc (since Gay-riffin can't make it due to a show with his other band) at the Knitting Factory's old office.


bq 2:23 PM

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