Got called into the office after class today. Hygiene issues. People have complained. I can’t say I am surprised. I knew I had been letting things slip lately.

For whatever reason, my old difficulty with the shower came back. So for a while there, I was only showering once a week. Sundays. Normally I shower a minimum of three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday nights – aka my social nights.

But it got hard to talk myself into the shower for a while there. Very not good. I don’t want some future employment opportunity to pass me by because someone thought, “Michael Bertrand would be perfect for this job, but man, does he smell bad. ”

So I will up my game back to at least presentable levels. I will probably never be the sort of person who showers every morning. I just can’t even. But I can at least get myself back to the level I was at before.

That’s the thing about depression. It can make even the simplest of things much, much harder to do. Like taking a shower.

I suppose I was telling myself that as long as I wore deodorant and my clothes were clean, I could slip by unnoticed. But clearly, that is not enough to get the job done. The body itself gets dirtier and the only cure for that is a shower.

Ironically, if I was going to school in France, this would not even be a thing. Apparently the French only shower for special occasions. And you can really tell.

I could not adapt to that. Not at my age. I get the feeling that if I lived in France, I would have to live someplace way out of the way, where the trains are never crowded and there is lots of fresh air to be had at all times.

But lest we in North America get to feeling all high and mighty about not being like the smelly French, we should remind ourselves that by Dutch or Japanese standards, we’re all a bunch of filthy pigs.

Anyhow, the hygiene thing will be taken care of. The small talk before the intervention was more interesting, because I got to tell the head of the Writing Department, Michael Baser, about the problems I am having in my film group.

I told him how one person is doing all the jobs, we’re not hiring anyone, and how I didn’t feel like I was learning anything from the experience. He said he would talk to the teacher of the class about it. So that will presumably start something happening.

Not the way I would have preferred to handle the situation. I was working up the nerve to post something about it on Facebook. Just lay it all on the line : how I’m not happy with my limited role, how I didn’t feel like people were taking things seriously, about how I don’t feel like I am learning anything if we’re not casting or hiring or any of that.

If things go the way they are going now, I will end the class knowing no more than I knew going in about how to do a short film. And I want to make those so I can showcase my writing talent and show TV people what I can do.

One nap later…

However, because I did end up telling Baser all about my issues, that puts me in the awkward position of waiting for the hammer to drop on my group when I am the one who set it in motion in the first place.

Not that I think any punishment will happen. VFS doesn’t operate like that unless it has to. Presumably Baser will talk to Bob Woolsey, the instructor of my Production for Writers course, and Bob will talk to us, and hopefully things will be rejiggered so that we all get something to do and we’re actually doing things like hiring and managing and such.

If not, I may have accidentally screwed our group dynamic for good. Then again, we don’t have much of a group dynamic now anyhow. Part of what convinced me that I had to do something about the situation instead of suffering in silence is that I don’t think any of the other members of the group are super happy either. Our last meeting had all the joie de vie of a depression support group. I think we have stumbled into this situation with very good intentions and a plan that sounds good on paper, but that did not take into account things like morale, motivation, and most of all, that we are all supposed to be learning from the experience, and we aren’t learning anything.

It would be nice if we ended up hiring a few pros. I would feel a lot better if we had someone with a lot of experience on the team. Hiring a good director would be a great start, because honestly, this group needs an executive and yet none of us have any sort of standing to take over.

Theoretically, the person who wrote the script is in charge, and that’s the same person who wants to be the director, editor, sound person, lighting person, and damn near everything else. Plus we’ll be using her apartment.

But that person does not seem to me to be the right fit for director. The project needs someone to organize things, assign tasks, and most importantly of all, keep people fired up and excited about the project.

Instead, we have a diffident director with extremely low affect and who wants to do everything themselves, leaving little for the rest of us.

I would do the job myself if I thought I could get them to follow me. I would love to take on that role. I guess I would be the producer in that case. It was what I had planned for myself before reality set in.

I really feel like I was born to organize and lead.

I just lack the self-confidence to believe anyone would follow.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.