Oh Rejoice, All Ye Faithful
All Ye Faithful, Rejoice!
For neither rain nor wind,
Nor darkness nor anxiety
Can keep long from you that
Which brings you great comfort.
All Ye Faithful, Rejoice!
And keep close watch, for you
Know neither the day, nor the hour
That the veil will lift and
A new journal entry will await!!
All Ye Faithful, Rejoice!
That day is at hand!
All Ye Faithful, Rejoice!
Good morning LancesWorld.com troopers. It's about 10 a.m. here on Tuesday morning, October 25. I've been keeping very busy working here in New York, which partially explains why I haven't been keeping the journal as current as I like to. Work days typically are no shorter than 15 hours, leaving me generally with only 9-10 hours before I have to be to work the next day, so as you can imagine, my time is spent almost entirely working or sleeping. But I've been enjoying the job. Now, don't mistake me, the job has an extreme stress level. Most of my job is to keep people from walking into our shot. For the most part, this means standing on busy New York City sidewalks and asking people to either stop and wait for about 5 minutes while we shoot or to walk a different direction. In New York, that is not easy. I have had more than one encounter with difficult people who have done such things as yell at me (a story which spread throughout the crew quite quickly, I might add) or run me straight over, nearly knocking me down. In part because of this level of stress, I have decided to leave New York at the end of this week. I decided that for the amount of money they are paying me, the level of stress is just not worth it. So I'm returning to Los Angeles where I can get paid about the same, have a lower cost of living, and work in less stressful conditions. To make the pot sweeter, the weather in LA is also better. So I will be leaving New York this Saturday and taking a few days in Salt Lake before I drive to Los Angeles.
Now, don't misunderstand me. It's not this job in particular that has caused me stress. As I understand it, basically every show is like this. The crew on Across the Universe is great. Everybody gets along and works well together. We've worked on some pretty cool shots, including a shot last week where we blew up a building. We didn't demolish it, just blew out the front of the building and set the whole thing on fire.
The weather here in New York has been typical to the Northeast. A few days that are sunny and nice, followed by miserable, rainy days. Today is such a day. In fact, I was supposed to work today, but because of the weather, they decided to go to the sound stage, where I don't work. This turns out to be a blessing, though, since I am totally not ready to leave on Saturday. So I will be spending the day getting ready to go. Then later on in the afternoon/evening, I will be getting together with Johnny who is in town from Harvard Law interviewing with some New York firms. I met up with him for dinner Sunday and last night, and hopefully we'll get together again tonight for a bit. Coincidentally, he is going to Los Angeles for interviews from about Nov. 2-6, which is right at the same time that I am going to be getting there. So we'll have seen each other in three major U.S. cities within a month (I visited him in Boston over Columbus Day weekend).
Well, I have a lot of preparing to do, but I didn't want to keep all of my faithful waiting much longer. Stay tuned for more updates...