Taste the Icy Cucumber

Ahh, the botched audition, a time-honored tradition to which I am already growing too accustomed ... and my summer is off to a great start. If you give me a speaking role, usually I`m good to go, but when you`re like the guys tonight and you give me a camera on a tripod and say, "You are sports photographer," all you really get from me is a squinty look on my face while I madly swivel around hitting the (devastatingly silent) shutter button like I`m playing Diablo. What else could I do? How do you embellish that role? "I should have squinted harder. Or, less." Less is more, so they (mostly short guys) say. At tomorrow`s audition maybe I`ll just stand there and do nothing. Actually, tomorrow`s part is for -- wait for it, wait for it -- a baseball player again, and standing around in a baseball uniform has kept me alive for the past few months, so ... let`s just hope it doesn`t create any conflicts of interest. Actually, if you`ll forgive what is probably some kind of blogging faux pas (though I`ve done it before), I think I enunciated the situation pretty clearly today in this excerpt from one of the coolest emails I`ve ever written:

you know how every type of job you could possibly have always devolves into these damned Machiavellian games of politics and protocol, right? You know in Japan it`s like that TIMES A THOUSAND? The same applies for this thing I call a job, this business of going to auditions and mugging and shouting out slogans for the camera, which seems simple enough, until you take into account the fact that I`m registered with 3 different agencies, all of whom hate each other of course .. the problem arises when 2 agencies offer you the same job, and you have to pick one to go with and snub the other. It`s a problem because you can`t just tell the other company "oh, I`m busy that day," because they WILL see you at the audition, whether you`re with them or not. So you really have to basically tell one guy, "sorry, I`m going with the other guy," and then worry about how this will affect your relationship with the first guy. Christ, it`s an allegory for dating, only with dating you could then theoretically never see the first guy again. Not so here! The loser in this case in Company A, who got me the whole Mr. W___ [oh look, now I`m being all careful] thing all those months ago (but then cancelled all my jobs for the rest of the summer, so ... f#$% them), and I feel indebted to nonetheless. Tomorrow`s audition is for ... the part of a baseball player in some other commercial. So Company A gets all worried about it, since they think it`ll create a conflict of interest ("consumer confusion," they call it) with the Mr. W___ thing, even though that commercial has been off the air for months and I have no more events with [Corporation Z] -- he says I have some kind of "one year contract" with them but I didn`t sign shit and they`re not giving me any more gigs anyway -- is this boring to you? Too bad, I`m on a roll -- no time for proper punctuation -- and all day long he`s saying "please wait, we have to confirm with this guy, that guy, those other guys," and it`s all very Japanese and inefficient. Meanwhile Company B, whom I like exponentially better even though they have yet to get me an actual job, is just like, "yeah man, come on to the audition! Pay is ￥XXXXXX." To close this up, after "please wait a bit longer for response" message #5 or so from Company A, I said FOOK IT and responded to them with "please don`t worry about it anymore. I took the job from another agency," and then turned my phone on silent in preparation for the inevitable cacaphony of "what?? You can`t do that, we don`t know if it`s okay yet!!" calls from Company A, but ... eerily, no one has called yet. Unsettling!

Later I realized I had reponded to them at like 9:30PM, after they had inexplicably gone home. "You snooze = you lose," sure as I`m going to wake up in the morning to some frantic phone calls from Company A.

Anyway. Going to/bombing at auditions is only one part of my summer plan .. I mentioned it earlier but did not link to it with the enthusiasm I should have that I plan to read my ass off this summer, 7-year old at the public library-stylez, and I`m off to a pretty good start at that, as well. Sorry, PSP! I`ve got something like 55 hours logged on Gunpey-R and have yet to make it past level 17 more than once ... game has more than 40 levels. Time to draw a zigzagged, glowing line between "fun challenge" and "waste of precious life-hours." I did always justify rocking the PSP with excuses like "But I only play puzzle games! That means I`m thinking! Blarrgh! Argle!" but reading gives me less carpal tunnel in my thumbs, and in turn inspires me to write as opposed to throw things across the room, hence the 2 entries in 2 days, and more to probably come.

Summer Listening: I retract my earlier ho-hum assessment of the new QOTSA album "Era Vulgaris" and now demand that you all give it several listens, unless you hate things that are good. It grew on me to the point where I had to step back and force myself to stop listening to it over and over, lest I wear it out for myself in the first month. So, I grabbed the new Pig Destroyer (why are there 4 of them on that bio page, you might ask? They added a new guy to provide "noise." Because Pig Destroyer was not noisy enough until this) album as well, which I would recommend to approximately 2 of you. We`ll show those pigs! Now who`s the pig??

Bonus: Summer Dining: Bentou GO!



I used to think I hated bentou, but I realized that`s because if you`re eating bentou during work, as was usually the case, you`re probably eating it every day for at least a week straight, and it is probably one of those cold, day-old jawns from the convenience store. This one I got tailor-made! I was like, I want that コロッケ!!