Friday, April 09, 2010

The Long Layoff: Bad Excuses for the Absence Productivity/ Want to Buy Nicholas Cage’s Mansion?

It has been a while since I made a post. I thought about it a few times. You'd think being unemployed since February 1 and having basically unlimited time at my disposal to spend feeding this blog with useless globules and unedited posts, a boon to my productivity with a plethora of grammatical errors, but one would be wrong.

You might think “oh, he’s been looking for a job.” Wrong. “Working on a resume?” Nothing could be father from the truth. More important things to do in general? Nope. Or maybe I’ve been working on a solution for world peace. Kinda, in a way.

There was Passover, the starting and stopping writing a novel, movies to see, museums to visit that are hard to go to if you actually work because of the hours, a speech by Johnathan Safran Foer on his new book Eating Animals confirming my continued desire to be a vegetarian, a trip to upstate New York for a possible start up venture, late night poker tournaments, softball practice, a day of Wii Fit (I have lost 9 pounds since I last used it 9 months ago), a birthday, and a few weeks of Beatles Rock Band/ Guitar Hero World Tour with my new drums & microphone(still can't be consistent passed medium but I'm an expert singer).

Truly though, it’s a case of motivation. Motivation is a difficult thing to corral. Motivation is easy when you're time is limited. A lapse in focus can lead to a destruction of motivation. When you have no job, no prospects, and no desire to search for one, a decent bed allowing for a drastic change to my circadian rhythm, along with Bejeweled and the reintroduction of online poker into your life, the motivation to spew out posts to limited readers seems to get lost in the shuffle. Don’t forget the 30000+ options on Netflix Instant Viewing (which I have only begun to scratch the surface).

The problem with having no goals is that there is always tomorrow and doing some work tomorrow is more palatable to the psyche than sitting down and getting down to business today. Besides that, I usually need something to spark my interest to truly get writing again.

Whether it’s an interesting story worth, a band worth writing up, the release of a New Nic Cage trailer (which there have been multiple, see below), a good concert, a great album, basically something worth spending time on giving a take.

In this case, I have been hired for a job with minimal effort. Of course that job is through the government and all that was required is that I show up (that was the difficult part) and take a 30 minute that anyone who made it through their freshman year of high school should ace. This job is of course for the US Census Bureau. I originally took the test to appease my housemate who is currently employed as a courier with no intention of actually taking a job but when I was offered the job (about a month after actually taking the test and three weeks before the training actually commences) I accepted if only to take a paid training class in fingerprinting at a church. (You think the priests are ready to line up for printing? Maybe I could even do the Pope)

There have been a few false starts. Each time I would begin to type, get into the groove, and…my laptop would turn off, killing (it just turned off again) my “progress” and turning (turned off again) my unsaved work into computer ether. I took this as a sign that it was trying to assist me in my decision like a truly mean editor/critic stopping me before I went too far. Soon I discovered that it was actually a computer problem, took it into a repair shop, paid $85, only to have the problem crop back up days later with a vengeance. During the first two paragraphs of this typing, it shut off seven times, yet I must persist.

Back to Nicholas Cage for a hot second, Cage will be filling numerous multiplexes the rest of this year with films like the terrible looking monstrosity Season of the Witch from the director of such greats as Gone in 60 Seconds and Swordfish Dominic Sena, and the ridiculous Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which Cage teachings a young man the ins and outs of sorcery in the streets of Gotham. Who comes up with this shit?



From the opening line, this is a truest form of a shit show...

Cage has a small role in the next week’s highly anticipated Kick Ass along with co-star McLovin as well.

No one even wants to buy Cage’s mansion. According to the San Jose Mercury News, “The opening bid for the actor's 12,000-square-foot home was $10.4 million, but there are $18 million worth of loans on the property. The Tudor mansion boasts six bedrooms, a central tower, home theater and an Olympic-sized pool…Even though he's one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars, Cage has money troubles. He owes millions in unpaid taxes and in January his foreclosed home in Las Vegas sold for nearly $5 million.”

I have also been catching up on my reading after reassembling my library on a practically new book case I found on the curb. For the past few years, I would go through a cycle of continually buying books while reading only ones I took out of the library because they have time restrictions on them (although you have to block out the fact that some books can basically be renewed forever). So now I've been clearing out the bookshelf a bit (computer turned off twice back to back).

If you’re interested in what (turned off again) I’ve actually read or am reading, there’s some type of Goodreads widget (tried to turn off three times) on the side there or you can check my profile here. And if (tried to turn off again) knows how to fix this fucking issue besides throwing the machine into the busy street in front of my house, please drop me a line. I don't know how many more timed I can spend 5 hours on a blog post that amounts to nothing but something was accomplished today, that's more than most days. No more patience for editing sorry.

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