Today’s soundtrack: we’re gonna rock on to Electric Avenue
Today at 1:02am: Don’t ask.



I like spending Sunday mornings on my back, and by that I mean unconscious and in my own bed. But this particular Sunday found me on my back fully-dressed and wide awake on the floor of Wendy’s West Village studio while she lurked over me with a DV camera. A Polish woman crouching next to me fed me lines.

Wendy’s shooting some test footage for her short. I’m not sure exactly how it works but apparently she screens this initial footage for her classmates and professors, who offer suggestions and criticisms before she breaks out the actual Panaflex and starts buying cans of film.

The script calls for me to deliver my lines while lying flat on my back completely dazed, which, luckily for me, is not much of a stretch from my working personality. (Interesting thing about Wendy’s scripts--this is the second time I’ve been in a film of hers where a female character knocks me down. Wonder what’s lurking in her subconscious.) I follow Wendy’s directions, put my eyes where she wants me to put ‘em and deliver my lines.

The Polish woman is extraordinarily insecure, even for an actress, and flubs her lines several times, requiring I remain on my back for an extra four takes or so. Hardwood is not comfortable and for a moment I recall Japan, where I seem to remember having slept on a lot of floors.

Katja apologizes for having “coffee and cigarette breath”--as Wendy experiments with the angles, she directs Katja to put her face closer and closer to mine, until eventually we’re an inch or two apart and for a moment I worry she is going to lick my face.

I don’t really like being around people so the forced intimacy requires I disconnect something in my psyche. Internally I fumble for the cord and pull the plug.

Wendy moves lower with the camera. “Closer,” she directs, and now Katja is so close to me that she actually gets blurry. I got out of bed early for this.

“Action,” says Wendy.

“Are you okay?” asks a blurry Katja, searching my face for something.


Before Katja got there it was just me and Wendy, and she ran me through some techniques that I guess directors run through with actors.

“Okay, lie down,” she says, and I assume the position. “Move your arm a little more to the side, yeah that’s it. Not symmetrical.

“Okay now this time before you say the lines, think of [such-and-such]...okay that was good...now this time pretend that you’ve just [done so-and-so]...okay, good...now this time pretend that you’re all [such-and-such]...okay, great.”

The difficulty of some of the things she asks me to do make me appreciate what an actor’s talent is. I still dislike them as a class of people, but at least I understand their job is a little more difficult than I’d thought.

The end of Wendy’s script calls for me to cry, I still haven’t figured out how I’m gonna pull that one off. I suppose if I was an actor it would be easy--I could just picture being at a party where I wasn’t the center of attention and no one told me how fabulous I was and that would do it.

Then again, for someone who’s uncomfortable with this world I seem to be saying yes more than I’m saying no. Wendy introduced me to a fellow film student of hers named Saysi, who asked me to audition for something on Tuesday. She seemed cool so I said yes, we’ll see how that goes.

The great part about not being an actual actor is that if the project looks like it’s going to be an actor-filled hassle, I can just say no and spend my free time doing what I’m doing now, which is tapping on plastic squares to make words. I’ll go to the audition for shits and giggles, it’s just student stuff anyway.


Sunday afternoon we had rehearsals for the Movie Talker thing. It’s stressful for me because I rewrote parts of the script but the other actors are not reading the lines the way I intended them. Some of the stuff I’d written is intended to be funny, but a lot of the jokes are timing-based and their sense of comic timing is...different.

I’m just not a person who enjoys working with other people. Given a choice between a shooter on a firing squad or a hitman, I’d choose hitman every time.


Rehearsals ended around 4:30pm, and then I headed up to The Corporation. There’s a big project due Monday morning. I should have been working on it all weekend but I couldn’t bring myself to go to the office.

I clock in at 5pm, roll my sleeves up and get down to work. I put 80s pop trash on the stereo, roll the knob up to 10 and break it off.


By 1:30am it’s becoming obvious that the project is not going well. I’ve already spent more hours here today, on a Sunday, than I do during a normal business day.


By 2:30am I advance the project into its final stage and see the light at the end of the tunnel.


By 3:30am I uncover a massive technical error that runs through all of the drawings I have so laboriously slaved over.

I have two options: I can start over again, which means I will be here until people start showing up for real at 8am, or I can just throw a coat of paint on it and hope no one notices. My boss will notice, but there’s a chance he’ll be too distracted with other projects to give a damn. There’s also a chance he will delete my number from his speed-dial and begin interviewing people for my position.

Well, late-night decision-making being what it is, I decide I Don’t Give A Fuck. I even say it out loud to reinforce my decision as I hit the ‘print’ button. I just don’t care anymore, and you can’t make me.


At 4:12am I put the completed and flawed project on my boss’s desk, then lock up and take the elevator downstairs.

The security guard at the front desk is different than the one who was there when I walked in. I hate that. If I’ve spent enough time in the office that there was a fucking shift change, well that’s too damn long.


Midtown is dead at 4:15am. It’s all dark, shiny and silent skyscrapers and there aren’t even any taxis. I take the 6-train home, dead-tired and feeling like Mel Gibson must’ve felt after he finished shooting Braveheart.

There was no one on the six so I took a picture of myself. I told myself it would be a reminder to find a way out of this “career.”


A few hours later I was in bed when my phone awakened me. Anyone who calls me at 8:12am on a Monday morning can wait so I let the machine pick up.

It was my boss. “Rain, if you’re there please pick up,” I heard him say. The tone of his voice was neutral, perhaps a little hurried, but I could chalk that up to his morning coffee. I flipped my pillow over and tried to remember what I was dreaming about until he hung up.

A second later my cell phone rang. I stared sleepily at the ceiling and waited for it to stop ringing, because if you wait long enough, it always does.