Been feeling quite sick today. I had to skip my morning class because of it. My illness’ primary symptom is a deep and heavy feeling of malaise. I just plain feel unwell. And it has me kind of worried.
I spent a lot of this morning feeling like death insufficiently warmed over, or maybe death where something went horribly wrong with the warming process and now you’re stuck up an elephant’s asshole and for some reason you can only express yourself via tin whistle.
Can you tell I’m reading Pratchett?
But the thing is, I have had these symptoms before.And it’s always ended the same way : at some point, the whole thing lifts and suddenly I feel fine.
As of this moment, I am still waiting on that. Granted, I felt much better this morning after I finally managed to get to the kitchen and make (and eat) some lunch. There’s nothing so bad that low blood sugar can’t make worse, after all.
But I still felt pretty crappy. Luckily, I was able to marshal my inner resources and get some work done in the afternoon, namely generating notes for tomorrow’s class.
Pilot 3 class, to be specific.
There has been some movement on the issue of the kind of notes I write. My language and logic corrections. For a while, I felt bad because my notes were about such small details and everyone else talked of things that are far more substantial.
But then I realized that the fact that nobody else gave notes like mine means I had a niche. I was That Guy, the one who handles the little details. That’s my job.
That made me feel better, but I still wondered if I was doing any good or whether people rolled their eyes at the minutiae of it all and tossed my notes into their circular file.
But two things have happened to make me feel better about that :
First, Kat, one of my instructors, remarked approvingly about how good I am at catching the fine details. That made me feel a lot better about the whole deal.
Then a classmate, Aash, told me how much he enjoyed my notes.
So that’s that, I am not just some weird guy obsessed with trivial issues of logic and language. I’m appreciated. It’s a good feeling.
It’s made me start to wonder if this capacity of mine is marketable. It seems like it would be. I could help people polish up their scripts, or polish them up myself. After I was done with their script it would flow more smoothly, the language would be stronger and clearer, and a lot of redundant (or even terrible) content would have been trimmed out.
Surely that’s worth $50 to somebody. And I need the money for things like a decent set of clothes, content entry fees, secret lists of producer’s home numbers, and the like.
I have a career to launch, after all.
I find it very odd to be in the position of being the person who focuses on the little things in something. I think of myself as a big picture kind of person and quite frankly I am often annoyed with people who obsess over small details when there are larger issues at hand.
It all boils down to priorities, I suppose. I have no issue with detail oriented people using their skills to make things better. In fact, I love that kind of thing precisely because it is outside my wheelhouse and therefore seems just a little bit like magic to me.
But if they obsess over tiny details when they should be paying attention to the big picture, I get angry. I have nightmares about someone obsessing over the graphic design of the safety posters while the building is burning down around them.
Pull your head out of your ass and help me put out the fire.
And that is usually where my temperament stands. But I have always had an inkling that language would be the one area in my life where that did not apply.
Because I feel language, All those little errors I point out in my notes are things I found painful. This is such a strong aspect of me that the emotional reaction happens immediately and all the intellectual mind does is figure out what is bugging me.
This has led me to the conclusion that I would be one hell of a good head writer. Or something like that. Someone in the writing food chain that has the authority to make writers go back and fix their mistakes.
Or I could fix them myself. But I doubt a lot of writers would go for that.
I would have to live with the fact that I would not be very popular, though. People tend not to like the guy who keeps telling them :”WRONG! Do it again. ”
In fact, if I was in their shoes, I would resent me too. But I would take the instructions to heart and learn to do things the way this ogre of a gatekeeper wants them done.
And to be honest, it would probably make me a better writer.
And being that fine polishing guy would be a better starting job for me than script coordinator. I could be a script coordinator but I would not enjoy it.
Come to think of it, I would be a bit of a prick there too because I would make everybody sign for their bloody scripts so that I knew who was on what skit.
The part of the job I would really hate, though, would be to be the person in the writer’s rooms who types up what the writers decide should be in the the script and makes the changes they want to the script later, too.
I couldn’t do it. I know this because that’s what my instructor for Writer’s Room,. Jenny, has been doing for us, and while I find it absolutely magical to be able to just come up with ideas and have someone else write it down, I would not be cut out to be that person.
Why? Because it involves a lot of people giving you suggestions (or orders) at the same time,. and in situations like that, I just plain shut down until clarity appears.
That was true back when I was the youngest of four kids and would have five people telling me what to do at the same time, and it’s still true today.
One time it made me so frustrated that I shouted “ELECT. A SPOKESMAN. ”
Imagine that coming from a little kid.
Hmm, I should use that in Sam!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.
