Mortuaries and Film Sets
So the last couple of weeks have been wild and exciting.
Here it goes.
I finally landed a job interview at a place that agreed to pay decently for design/video work. I went through a couple interview sessions, graduating along until I was neck ‘n neck with one other person for the spot. Long story short, I didn’t get the job. But that’s okay, because the interview process made me realize that my true life-dreams can happen apart from working there; a mortuary.
“Graphic design and video work at a mortuary? Where death, sorrow, and sad families reside twenty-four seven?!,” you ask.
Yes. The job requirements involved the following:
- Designing memorial cards with photos of the deceased
- Help design marketing materials for billboards
- Video tape/edit memorial services
I didn’t know there was a market for such things, specifically creating DVDs of funerals.
Sidenote: I feel unusually careful about using usual dry/dark remarks about this situation, because the people who interviewed me seemed like rad down-to-earth people, and I risk this blog being discovered. How? They asked me for the URLs of sites I created.
I’d like to keep it real, however. Allow me to proceed with as much tact as possible.
A sad, yet rather pleasant, truth is, I’ve never been to a funeral service. I have a good-size extended family, and in all my 27 years, I’ve only had one family death; my Mom’s dad, when I was 8. My life has been relatively free of tragedy. It’s quite a thing to be grateful for. The strange irony is this: In the past I’ve been surrounded by dead bodies in the school cadaver lab, handling entrails and dismembered limbs, even a severed head cut straight down the middle like a cantaloupe, all for the sake of art.
It’s not that I don’t have death experience, just a lack of funeral experience. So, the job requirements were going to be quite a new adventure for me. I would have had to get used to consulting families about which super-hero should be photoshopped onto their deceased child’s memorial program. While I was up for it, because hey-it-was-a-job, the interviewers must have smelled something on me that revealed I was a little bit more interested in an autonomous approach to creative endeavors.
They used an interview technique to dig out my true values. So it was like psycho-therapy. At least that’s how I imagine successful psychotherapy to be; a system of questions that require you to look at the answers you already have for yourself. They pulled out what I really want to be doing in five years, and absolutely none of it had to do with working a 9-to-5 job in the funeral industry.
The day I got the email that said they gave the job to the other guy, I was as accepting as a Hindu monk. I contemplated the 5-year question, and started to obsessively write down some goals for myself. Immediately I began to see action-packed results and take steps toward the new groove. This was in complete opposition to the familiar, “I need job now, so I go git one.” Instead, it was “I am going to get a job THERE.”
As of now, I don’t have a steady job. Still work at the concert venue sometimes. But… more recently, as Albuquerque is gradually becoming a little Hollywood, I got to work on set for a day as an extra for a T.V. show. Coincidentally, I was also invited to a party with the cast/crew of the same show. Despite the new-guy awkwardness that happens in these situations, the whole experience and unfolding of events was an eye opener. And it all has to do with this little quote I discovered:
Fifty percent of the battle ends when you make up your mind.
