Tag Archives: home life

Korean Spa to Walla, and Dallas to Dallas, with a layover in the kitchen; and what I learned there.

30 Monday Dec 2013

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If I put together all the voice over that I did this year that wasn’t in a class, it would probably take three or four, maybe five days.  Maybe six, when counting email, the Web site, business cards, etc.  But the last professional thing I got done this year, before holidays and overeating killed all forward movement, was a walla session.  So I am doing stuff.

I just need to do more.

It’s been a hell of a year, huh?  I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been figuratively booted in the head at least once in the last 12 months, and plenty of us were still reeling from previous sucker punches from life.

I knew it would be trouble from the moment I decided to stop stage managing FOOTE NOTES through yet another extension. It sucked up my January and I really wanted to get going on my goals…  The problem immediately manifested as how was I doing to get anything done without any structure to my days.  To say nothing of the added chaos that comes with living with someone who is schizophrenic.

Though, the truth is I did start to get somewhere. And it started on my last day at FOOTE NOTES.  (The two one-acts were located in a small town outside of Dallas.)  After several good-bye whiskeys and hugs to the cast, I met M and we went to a spa in Koreatown.  I’d never been so I had a few minutes to get used to the idea that the “co-ed” section one wore the facility-provided uniform of t-shirt and shorts, making it look like a bus station overflowing with Korean tourists to Disneyland, and in the women-only section one wore only one’s birthday suit.

I’ll skip over the details – which I remember keenly – and get to what I’ve taken with me.  And it’s that I’m enough and there’s nothing really wrong with my body.  And if I change it’s just a change.  In the years to come I’m going to lose as much as I could possibly gain when it comes to physical looks, and the point of that is it doesn’t mean jack when I’m laying down on hot clay marbles and my mind is wandering while impossibly insane Korean TV shows are playing in the background.  From the tiny little naked girls chasing each other around to the old grannies pushing walkers and letting it all hang out, we’re all here.  It’s all good.

The last trip to Dallas was aboard DALLAS NON-STOP, stage managing with a tiny bit of voice over thrown in for shits and giggles. I’ve always loved theatre for the chance to see the world through different eyes and this was something new and different still.  It was all located in the Philippines and imagined and realized by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans… and as much as it reflexively touched on the realities of Filipino life and culture, it was situated so that it looked squarely back at America.  I found I was looking at my own country and my own (Western) culture through their eyes.  Quite a heady experience.

Layovers are such a pain in the ass.  Enough time to not know what to do with yourself, not enough time to really go find an adventure.  That’s what it felt like this summer.  True, I was hitting a patch of depression by late spring, so I was forced to get up and take care of things when my mom had surgery.  Nothing else was getting me to productivity.  But some two-three months of pretending to be mom, cooking and cleaning, etc, at the same time that mom was around being mom and no one else was helping it out…  It just put on pause any attempts to work for myself while I couldn’t do anything to get away and relax.

And at the end of all that? My sister moved in and I started sharing my bedroom with my niece.  Hey, I love these people, even my asshole schizophrenic brother, but this house is ready to pop.  I was staying up until the wee hours before simply from being nocturnal, but as I tried to rearrange my life so I could get life moving in a more productive direction, I was starting to make good on getting some decent sleep during the night.  Now I’m back to nearly fully nocturnal because it’s the only time I can hear myself think.  This is the hardest part.  Making the life I’m aiming for work while the place I live in is slightly completely crazy.

At the least I have awesome friends who are generous with their resources.  S let me crash at her house while I worked on DALLAS and on a few occasions I got some recording done there.  It maybe that I have to do all my recording there.  It’s still not a studio, but it’s far calmer than my house.

Those are just the places I landed.  Spots where my feet touched the ground and I saw clearly what I was trying to get done, whether I was close to or far from my goals.  I coasted over fitness & weight loss, sometimes going to the gym regularly, and sometimes taking a month or more off.  I skimmed some Japanese without serious demands that I improve and commit more to the long-term memory banks.  I’m trying not to get too frustrated about these.  They’re important to me but I can have only one No 1 goal.

Walla is a term for the chatter produced when a group of people in a sound booth fill in the background conversation for scenes on TV or movies.  I can’t get into detail about the ones I’ve done, but I can say it’s a fun exercise in semi-free form improv.  Anyhow, I like that someone thought of me and called me in.  Next up: getting someone to think of me and pay me to come in.

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The thing as it has been

17 Tuesday Sep 2013

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steak n' cabernet

In the latter half of this past June my mom had surgery on her shoulder. It effectively disabled her arm and even as the muscle has healed, at this point she still can’t lift anything of consequence, can’t move the arm quickly or with the full range of motion that the other still has. Early on it meant I was waiting on her, hand and foot, as she spent her days and nights largely on the recliner in the TV room. Now she’s back teaching her second grade class and I’m primarily on the hook for making sure dinner is ready at a reasonable time.

I think I worked out that moms get a raw deal compared to dads when I was all of 12 years old. They have to be the ones that shout “no!” when kids are naughty. They enforce TV, snacking, homework and bedtime rules. Etc… At least that was the case in the house I grew up in and carried across most households of my classmates. The only exceptions I knew of were when grandmothers did all the housework and disciplinary effort.

That’s pretty much the point when I decided that if I couldn’t be a dad then I didn’t want to be a parent. My dad’s pancakes were better than my mom’s. He made lunch over the summer (my mom was an office administrator then while my dad taught junior high geography and history), and it was usually Chef Boyardee raviolis with chopped up hot dogs. To the best of my recollection, he never – ever – made dinner. When we misbehaved my dad would complain to my mom.

All in all, the job of dad seemed way less stressful. And I was, even back then, able to note that it also meant it was easier to get along with him and have fun with him. Not so much with mom. Classmates always loved their dads and called them cool. Moms were not always hated, but commonly complained about.

It’s been over 20 years since I decided I didn’t want to be a mom. And being the substitute mom has done nothing but reinforce that. I already felt sympathy for my mom, and a little bit of frustration at her submission to her role. Now I’m actively aggravated at my adult siblings – and my dad – for taking her work for granted. They don’t support, they expect, and they are frequently rude about it all.

I’m fairly impatient with the whole process. As long as I’ve lived here my evenings have been almost totally random. I never knew quite when I was going to have to drop whatever I was doing to help with dinner, usually doing small chores. So getting in my way now when I’ve finally gotten around to cooking – and doing all the necessary prep and cleaning – typically gets a snarl out of me.

It’s not that it’s a big deal to do the chores, or even making dinner, it’s that as a night owl I’m often hitting my stride in terms of productivity in the evening. And also that as an adult, surrounded by adults, I expect the others will be able to either fend for themselves or leave me a cleaner kitchen. Cooking for myself or for several people doesn’t make the biggest difference, but I do have to do it at a common dinner time, rather than when I’m actually hungry.

Of course, friends have long known that left to my own devices I often forget to eat until I’m almost crippled by hunger pangs.

Anyway. I have more of my days to myself, but evenings are not mine. That goes from roughly 6pm till midnight, give or take cleaning the kitchen, and when the family finally settles down. Even when I’m not making dinner I still am expected to eat with everyone as well as praying the rosary later on at night. This isn’t a complaint, really, but it’s also not my favorite part about living here.

I like getting work done after midnight. The house is usually settled and quiet. But it can still be tough if the work is voice recording. That primarily has to do with the fact that my room is not great for recording. When I have recording to do, I try to get into my parent’s closet, the only walk-in in the house. Of course I can’t get in there in the middle of the night.

I frequently complain about sleeping. I really am resentful about the multi-hour pause I have to put on every single day. It’s hard for me to think about it any other way. I have a lot I want to do, I don’t have a lot of time every day for it, but I have to give over a solid eight hours for sleeping?! I’m not kidding. I wish I could skip it without any of the consequences.

So… this summer has been trying to fight for the time to do the work I want to do and doing the work that needs to be done and growling about circumstances that I can’t avoid.