I don’t know if it’s the fact that most of my days are filled with time-consuming activity (most of the time consumption comes from driving from place to place) or if I’ve finally lost my entire concept of time (more on that later) but as of yesterday, it’s been 2 months since I caught that one way.
It’s been an interesting month and an interesting past week. Being from Miami, I’m very familiar with heat and humidity… I mean, it’s hot 9 months out of the year coming from where I’m from.
But since moving to Los Angeles, in this past week I’ve seen temperatures that I’ve never seen in my life… I’m talking 3 digit numbers… I’m talking yesterday being 105 degrees.. One Oh Five… I felt like I was being punished just for leaving my house, and nothing I did could truly cool me down outside of standing directly in front of an industrial sized Air Conditioning Vent.
It’s a constant uphill battle against the bouts of homesickness but sometimes L.A. can make it too easy. The street parking hasn’t become any easier (still parking blocks away from my actual destination) and even the way people communicate is different. I’ve had two situations where I was offered services,to one of which I literally said “No Thank you” only for the person to continue to try to sell me their service.
As far as my signing with an Acting Management Company, which I discussed last week, it’s still a work in progress. They broke a lot of things down for me, including the one reoccurring theme in Los Angeles, which is the cost associated with just about everything. You got headshots? Well guess what, they’re not enough because the casting director wants to see all the different looks you can portray from your profile alone.. So now you have to pay for more pictures and THEN pay the website to upload them onto your profile. But it doesn’t stop there…
Let’s talk about the experience that you don’t have enough of because all of those student films that you’ve done don’t really count, but at the same time they’re better than nothing.. So to counter your lack of a padded resume, you can take casting director workshops, which, you guessed it, can cost a lot of money. I got home from that meeting and took a long look in the mirror:
So the next step in this acting journey of mine is to find ways to make extra cash, which led to me attempting to sign up with an extras casting company. I say “attempting” because had I not fallen victim to my oldest nemesis: My lack of doing things in a timely manner, I would’ve been telling a different story about how I succeeded in my attempt. Instead, I overestimated how long it was going to take me to complete what seemed like a simple task at the time and I ended up being “on time” for the casting but not as early as I wanted to be and not early enough to secure a spot for the casting.
My preparation time is something I’ve struggled with on many an occasion, and in most scenarios I end up falling into similar scenarios time and time again. I overestimate the time it takes to complete a task and end up struggling to complete the task in time later on.
Despite all things on my plate, I still had time to have some fun. First there was the celebration of two of my friend’s first full month in LA:
and I took a trip to Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens, where half the interesting animals were either sleeping or taking it easy inside of their little habitats. Still, it was fun exploring yet another part of this huge city, especially when it’s with one of the people I missed most. 😀
I can see this post is already running too long… so next week I’ll get into my first journey into the church of Scientology, and my attempts at getting the most stereotypical job in aspiring actor history…
