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.

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” – Albert Einstein

“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future.  I live now.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” - John Lennon

I picked up my sister from the airport today. I haven’t seen her for a while. I was finally able to give her the DVD that I got her for Christmas, a movie called Chaos Theory with Ryan Reynolds. She has a thing for Ryan Reynolds because he’s “cute” and “funny”… This time, however, he plays quite an unremarkable square, and this movie was a little less funny than a usual Ryan Reynolds flick, having intense dramatic dilemmas, cry scenes, etc.

This movie does contain a theme that is held by some of my favorite movies of all time; the character experiences a revelation, epiphany, or paradigm shift, that throws his mundane reality out of wack, sometimes painful, but resulting in an awakening. Sort of like:

Fight Club

Vanilla Sky

American Beauty

Office Space

There’s something subconsciously appealing to becoming a person with nothing left to lose. I think it’s a collapse we’re all afraid to experience, whether or not we expect the resulting outcome of rebirth and liberation. Lust for comfort suffocates the soul. The world knows by now that there are a wide array of minds and personality types encapsulated in each human being, yet we are put through a mediocre school system that indirectly teaches that uniqueness is unacceptable, and that having a goal to live a banal domestic life amongst a 40-hours-per-week office job is 100% acceptable.

Of course there are apparent downsides to not following the professional corporate work approach. Money can be hard to come by. But what I’ve observed is that money has ways of flying out the door, no matter how much you’re making, and money has ways of coming, no matter what you’re doing.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making plans.” -John Lennon

This is a video where a 14-year-old snagged an interview from John Lennon in his hotel room almost 40 years ago.