Jobs I’ve Had

My Baby Stole My Confidence

the-dance-of-life

What if I told you that my one and a half year old son stole my confidence? What if I, a 32-year old woman, explained to you that my son grabbed the sense of self I’d gathered from my once-somewhat-assured hands and I don’t know where he put it or how to win it back?

You would laugh at me uneasily, smiling and raising your eyebrows at the invisible studio audience nearby, like, “IS SHE UNHINGED AND SHOULD I RUN AWAY NOW?”  

Stay, please, I’m kidding! I know that my lovely, willful, fascinating kid didn’t abscond with anything of mine, aside from several pennies and a grocery receipt for bananas. I’m not going to foist all that on any human being, least of all one who, with great sincerity, refers to sheep as baa baas. I may be a mess, but I am not a piece of shit.

I wish I could pretend that my career was chugging forward beautifully at age 30, when I got pregnant, but that upon birthing him, he ransacked everything, hijacked my dreams and my heart, and I am now stumbling through the detritus, blindly seeking a path, any path. While that part about the detritus is true, the rest is somebody else’s story. (read more…)

“I found something”

Oscar Shlemmer

Typical conversations about what makes work fun and teams cohesive tend to focus on novel environmental modifications. Think of all the times you’ve heard references to Google’s indoor slides, nap pods, and ping pong tables. Libraries, on the other hand, are known for being quiet, sedate, almost non-descript. But librarians make their own fun using an old-fashioned social construct: potlucks.

Librarians take potlucks very seriously, and generally the food is excellent. This, however, is a story of a potluck dish that went very wrong – and the hilarious efforts undertaken to spare the guilty party from ever knowing about it.

(read more…)

Imagining the Audience Naked Isn’t Helping! –Better Tips for Public Speaking

George_Caleb_Bingham_-_Stump_Speaking

For a high school video production class, I hosted a live TV segment that was broadcast on our local cable channel. I sat at a desk in our little makeshift news studio to report on a popular security guard at the school and his impact on students’ day-to-day lives. Other students adjusted the cameras and made sure the sound levels were right. At 10:30 am on the dot, we went live. I still vividly remember the feeling of getting the first few lines out coherently, and then…

NOTHING.

It felt like someone hit the eject button on my brain and everything emptied out instantaneously. (read more…)

Freedom from Expectation

Gustav_Klimt_046

I consider myself a creative person, but of all of the jobs I’ve had, I was most content working as an artist’s assistant realizing someone else’s vision.

It was the summer of 2001, which fell between my freshman and sophomore year of college, and I was home in New York City and living with my parents. I had largely avoided looking for a job but, through a former colleague, was offered one as a studio assistant to an artist named Miriam. She did Verre Eglomise, which is the process of gilding precious metals like gold and silver on the reverse side of glass, and etching in a design. My job, basically, was to trace Miriam’s designs by erasing the excess gilding until the pattern she had designed emerged. (read more…)

Albert Einstein, Bill Gates… and Me

A_man_standing_on_his_hands_from_a_lying_down_position._Photogravure_after_Eadweard_Muybridge,_1887_-_V0048688

In 7th grade, my parents told me I was adopted by my dad, meaning the man I knew as my dad up to that point was not my biological dad.  My reaction was to put in our VHS copy of Look Who’s Talking. Movies were a language for me from an early age. When Kirstie Alley softens her heart to John Travolta at the end and lets him essentially become the talking baby’s father, I realized that the dad I knew was my dad, and this new information actually didn’t matter at all.  It never upset me again.

The movie Goodwill Hunting came out in 1997 when I was a senior in high school—and it blew my mind.  As I remember it, I was the most charming guy in school and everyone — my fellow students, my teachers, the school’s administrators, local politicians– just adored me.  As we all know, memory is 100% accurate so you will have to take the previous sentence as concrete truth.   Goodwill Hunting was a Dead Poets Society drama bred with the crude comic stylings of a Kevin Smith movie.  It packed an emotional punch unlike anything I had experienced.  It reminded me of how connected to movies I was and how much I wanted to make them.

I will go off to a prestigious film school, I told myself, and I will take the movie-making world by storm!

Approximately three years later I dropped out of college. (read more…)