Insomniactor

It's no great revelation that every once in a while, I start thinking about giving up the acting business and getting a "real" job. I go through periods where money's tight and I envy the people with "real" lives, and I start thinking about packing it in.

Folding my tent, as it were, and building a house with a real foundation.

Lately, the idea's been on my mind a lot.

I've applied for a couple of permanent positions at The Velvet Prison™, a couple of which I think I'd really love. And I've been thinking about going back to school and getting a useless degree or two.

The problem, of course, is that despite the lack of work this year, despite the soul-sucking poverty, despite the rub-your-nose-in-it horrifying quality of watching the success of untalented others (yikes! And despite, apparently, my own increasingly bitter and envious outlook!), there's just nothing I'd love doing more than... this.

Go figure.

It's entirely possible that I desperately need a vacation.

A real vacation, I mean. Not a long weekend meeting the boyf's folks, or hanging out with my family in Pittsburgh, however incredibly delightful those things are.

I think I need to sit on a beach for a week with a couple books, no people, and the chance to just bake the crazy out of me.

I find myself coming closer and closer to crossing the line again and losing it on complete strangers. Especially the ones who, on exiting the subway, feel the need to slow down, turn on their phones and check for messages at the bottom of the exit stairs, thus causing a cascading pile-up of people behind them who want nothing more than to arrive at their fucking offices as some time reasonably close to the one at which they're expected.

Maybe I'm just turning into an old curmudgeon, but it seems me this problem has grown exponentially in the last couple of years, with the proliferation of cell phones and iPods. People are just in their own little worlds and don't seem to give a shit about the people with whom they have to share public spaces. I can't count the number of times I've been backed into, stepped on and shoulderd on the subway by people so caught up in their thumpy-thump iPod music that they couldn't even be bothered to be spatially aware.

And frankly, that's not the part that bothers me. I'm all about getting carried away with the music. But these fucking people don't even seem to care enough to think that an apology — or even a bashful look! — might be in order once they realized what they've done!

Fucking people.

I need a vacation.

Of course, the beach'll probably be overcrowded with assholes listening to iPods and chatting on cell phones.