Couldn't sleep last night. Not sure why. The LS was taking down sky gods until later than I'd have liked, but 12:30 didn't seem an entirely unreasonable time for bed - I do it all the time even on school nights - but for some reason nothing was holding. The mind was just a little too active. Weird. I've been sleeping well recently, too... last night was weird. I maybe got a couple of hours but I was too fucked up for work because of it. Called in an "impromptu vacation" day.
Don't know how much longer I'll last at that fucking job. I had my CDR (career development resume) discussion with my boss last week, and told him flat-out that if there wasn't a plan in place to get me out of Paris, within the next nine months or so, that I would start "actively seeking other opportunities", which may not be the smartest thing to tell one's boss. But I'm past caring. I'm feeling a strong need to right my ship and my fucking job is acting as most of the misplaced ballast, so to speak. Like a constant weight that's making it so all I can do is tread water, when I know I'm a fucking good swimmer. I'd leave the company straight-up, but I know there aren't that many engineering jobs that I'd like as much as the one I had with this company before they transferred me to this hell-hole.
It's funny. I remember that I was finishing my second draft of "Wordplay" about three years ago, which was probably at the peak of my enjoyment of my job. I was well on my way to an embarrassingly good performance review, I was dating (much drama, much confusion, but quite a bit of fun), I was working out essentially every day, feeling in shape, able to run for several miles, thinking about taking up martial arts again. In that draft of my script, I added in a speech where Steven is talking to Kelly about his swap from an English major to math, and equated it with dying inside. How it felt like giving up; that he had abandoned his passions for pragmatism, and the not-so-hard-to-see subtext is that Samantha, his High School girlfriend that he's reunited with, represents that past, while Kelly represents the future.
I'm not a big fan of autobiography wrapped into fiction (even though
Chasing Amy is one of my all-time favorite movies) but I certainly felt like I was writing for myself when I wrote the line "somehow I've managed to stumble my way to a place where my life is really ... good."
Now I was never an English major, and never switched to math - electrical engineering from start to finish, with nary a thought that I was ever made to do anything but shove electrons from one place to another for a long and distinguished career, until my Senior Year, after a stint doing grunt work at a chemical plant (mowing lawns and shit) where I actually had fun, connected with my coworkers, and observed the engineers, who seemed stressed, overworked, and miserable. Then I remembered that I scored a 36 (perfect score) on the English portion of the ACT (only a 34 on the math portion; sometimes attention to detail isn't my strongest suit), and that by going into engineering, where most of the engineers scored in the 20's, if that, and where most of them don't know a past participle from a transitive verb (or, for that matter, that "there", "their", and "they're" aren't quite interchangable), I was dooming myself to a lifetime of not quite fitting in. Of course, not fitting in is nothing new to me. No big deal. No great loss.
But that line was still very much from me.
I posted the new, 3rd draft version of that scene to this blog a ways back. It's
here. I only just realized that that line's no longer in it.
