So, daily bloggin’. Bloggin’ every day. That’s quite a deal. I’ve been falling back on some funny (no, scratch that, hilarious) war stories from my TV and radio days, but I also blawg about other stuff too. That being said, I am in the middle of a job hunt right now, one that has taken so long that I might have better results if I switched to hunting Sasquatch instead.
I’d file a prospective employer looking at my blog before interviewing or hiring as an unlikely event, but then we do live in the day and age where some employers want you to hand over your Facebook password, don’t we? Which, by the way, is a load of crap – if you want to know what’s on my Facebook profile, send me a friend request. You’ll be able to see whatever I’m saying, mainly because I don’t use that whole “sort people into handy groups so you can still talk behind each others’ backs” function. This “wanting your password” jazz goes way beyond that. You don’t need to have the ability to delete/control what I say, because I’m not a Representative Of The Company 24/7, regardless of what you may think. Last I checked, this is still a free country, I’m still a private citizen, and I can say what I like so long as I’m not flying it under the flag of being a Representative Of The Company.
Okay, now that I’ve just erased all job prospects that I might’ve had for the remainder of my natural life, the thing about some of these recent stories that begs some explanation – especially those from the seemingly lawless wilderness that was my first TV job – is as follows: I was young, I was on my own for the first time, I didn’t have a family or the responsibility that goes with it, and I was working primarily around a bunch of guys who were in the same boat, or at least acting like it. That first TV gig wasn’t a complete sausage fest, but it was close. There were women who worked there – for whom I had the highest regard – who got really offended by some of the stuff that went on, in most cases rightly so. (On the flipside, there was one woman working there who was more of a perv than all of the male employees combined.)
In short: it was the ’90s, and I was in my early 20s. And there were consequences to some of this stuff, though I don’t go into that, because that kinda buzzkills the story, you know? These days I’m much more likely to hurry up, get the job done, not socialize and goof off so much, so I can go home and hang out with my family, and tell local kids to get off my local damn lawn.
And here’s the secret underlying the daily bloggin’, the book writing, and the daily updates to theLogBook.com: it’s fun, sure, but I’m also hoping that, at some point, there’s enough critical mass that the whole endeavour gains some lift under its wings and takes off, with me barely hanging onto the stick because I’ve been pushing it along all these years and had to jump into the cockpit at the last second or be left on the ground.
It’s about as likely as, say, someone saying “Well, we looked at your blog and came to the conclusion that you’re a lamentable excuse for a human being with too much time on your hands, so you’re not hired,” sure, but a much more desirable outcome. A guy’s gotta dream.
In the meantime, kick back and enjoy the ride. The stories I tell really happened. They’re funny, sometimes they’re educational (painfully so, in a few cases), and they’re true. I don’t write these stories from the perspective of being the hero of my own epic narrative. I’ve never believed in that approach. From a psychological standpoint, that’s quicksand; from a writing standpoint, it’s simply boring. (Don’t misinterpret the plethora of little TV and movie screen grabs, either – they’re there to make it funnier with some quick pop-culture-nerd shorthand, or to be even funnier than that by occasionally not fitting with the written words next to them.)
I do, however, believe in laughing at oneself and one’s own goofball antics, and I have taken part in some really goofy shit in my time on this planet of yours. No point in taking those chuckles to my grave. My kid things I’m about either discipline or old video games. There’s so much more to me than that, and the contents of my brain may shift during shipping, so let’s commit this stuff to a medium that may last longer than my brain, which is already out of warranty.
I change or simply omit names for a reason: if my blogging about stuff does me any harm, I’m determined to avoid allowing anyone else who was in the room come to harm as a result, whether it’s their career, their personal reputation, or what have you. Not even the folks who said or did stupid stuff. It was the ’90s and they were in their 20s too. Well, some of them. There was this one guy, you see…
Anyway, that’s what goes on here, and what the ground rules are. I rattled this off after getting an e-mail from a concerned friend who asked “Do you think you really ought to be writing about some of this stuff on your blog when you’re looking for a job?” The real question is: “Why am I still looking for a job when I could be writing stuff like this for a living?”
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