Jobless-ish

I'm unemployed at the moment and feel this is the best time to take advantage of the spare time to write! Besides, it's good training for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in October. I figure I start with mere few hundred words a day and build up to the 1600 words I'll need to be writing by then. Wish me luck!

It's a little depressing looking at my home page for MySpace at the moment. I only have one friend according to the site... I like too think that in the real world this is not the case - and that I have at least a couple more. For example our pet rat Herman who is currently chewing through his new hammock. I'm not sure why he does this as it will only result in him falling out of his warm little nest one day, but he seems keen on doing so and I don't want to hold him back.

Outside it's a sunny blue sky day and it's still an ice box in our house. I'm curled up in front of our little space heater and I'm strongly considering turning it up to full sun (which I believe is the highest setting). I've had a quick look at the jobs on Arts Hub, called about a stage management gig and have been advised that I'll get a call this evening. Aside from that I've received nothing in the mail, both electronic and regular, that is of note. Unless you include the electricity bill, but I'm hoping to ignore that until after I've done my tax return and actually have money again.

I'm not totallly unemployed. I'm volunteering at MIFF at the moment which has been great fun so far. This is their last week though and tonight's my last night but hopefully this stage management gig will go ahead. Failing that I'm looking at some lighting op jobs and hopefully my letter of offer for the venue officer job I got offered last week will arrive in the near future. I'm always a little unsure how often to follow up on paperwork for a job. After all I want to give the impression of enthusiasm and organisation while not appearing to be desperate or harrassing them. It's a fine line I think.

Aside from the lack of funds I'm actually enjoying the lack of work. I've finished more books in the last week than I have in the last six months - which is a big thing for me. I usually read at least one book a week even during busy weeks.

I'd like to note that production week on a show does not count as a busy week. In fact I don't actually include it as a week in my time as I disappear from the world as we know it and don't surface again for the duration of the "week".

At the moment I'm trying a different approach to job hunting. While it's a little idealistic, hopefully this will avoid me being sucked back into the call centre world (a.k.a my personal "Hotel California"). After 11 months of work in a call centre I feel like part of my soul has died. Perhaps that is exagerating. It's more like part of my soul/spirit has taken industrial action until I made the decision to fully commit my time to employment in the arts where I want to be. I think I've managed to negotiate with myself that I may need to go into some casual soul-sucking work again just to get past the whole rent problem but nothing permanent if I can help it.

I'm also going back to study through Open Learning and I'm looking forward to the intellectual challenge of that. It's been a couple of years since I've really studied and I'm actually a little nervous about starting again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I'll be using parts of my brain that have been dormant for a while.

Okay, enough procrastination for now. I'm off to read. Mmmm... good book and a nice warm bed.