Corporate America

Enough talk about work. I have two days to decompress and do something significant. It depresses me to watch Eurhythmics videos, so much greatness, reminding me that I am not out there making things come true. Just watched the video “You Have Place a Chill in my Heart”, and it was the Californian desert and mountains of the Valley. Even a Ralphs grocery store. It is the first time I notice that they filmed that in L.A., and it fills me once again with energy.
And “I’d love to listen to Beethoven” and “I Need a Man” have always been my favorite videos ever, and great songs and words to back it up. These three videos are building a wonderful story, and I don’t tire of watching it. Is there a woman more powerful on the planet than Annie Lennox? I don’t think so.
God knows what we would talk about if I were to ever meet her. I fear I would disappoint. She is to me what Elvis or the Beatles can be to people from the older generation. And that they were British made me think they were reachable to me, but of course, they never were and will never be. I used to work in a café just under of where Dave Stewart lives, in Covent Gardens. Same building!
Genius in action, that song “1984 Sex Crime”, it is huge, it is the crossing in time of George Orwell genius work and one of the best songs and videos ever on the music side. Sometimes events can just reach perfection, and it is one of those times.
Wooah, killing me. I need to be doing that, I need to go down in history, I need to produce things, write things, write songs. Which brings me back to Leonardo. He can make it all come true, he can place me in a position to get my songs out, I need to concentrate on that as well.
I sent him all my potential songs, but he never had the time to read any of it. I can understand, it was 250 pages long, and that was only what I thought could do great songs. I could have sent him 1000 pages worth of songs. And yet, I am at zero on that point. I need to restart from the beginning. Sit down and write the perfect new songs that will revolutionize everything.
Even if I need to lose 2 stones and sing them myself with my French accent, even if I have to figure out his Roland piano synthesizer for him in the process. These pianos are such bad technology, even the instruction manuals don’t make sense. And compatibility and connectivity with computers leaves a lot to be desired.
I am now watching the R.E.M. videos from the DVD “Pop!”. Another string of well thought stuff. Killing me. Will I become someone thinking and talking more about creating things, than actually working at producing things?
I am all over the place now, and I am just a writer. Books, films, theatre, theoretical physics, TV, music, videos, conferences… and what else? If I had been as talented as two of my ex-boyfriends, and my best friend in Montreal, it would be even worse. I might have thought then that I had some future in painting, drawing, filming, gardening, landscape design, cooking, and many other creative stuff as well.
At least I am only talented in one domain, writing. Not my fault if it reaches so many different kinds of media. Just need to concentrate on what might have a huge impact. And at this time, I just don’t know from where it will first spill unto the world.
Yes, I am already recognized, yes, it is out there, yes I have fans from every corner of the world, but that is far from being enough. It is the world’s attention I need to catch. Change on a massive scale, that’s what I want. And less for me than for the impact that it may have, that it will have.
I have dreams of changing the world, you see. No small challenge. So don’t be surprised to read my politico-philosophical treaty one day about revolutionizing politics and justice. This has already been on my mind for over 15 years. I might just write a film script about it.
And being stuck in the South-West of America with Bush as President, is feeding me just the right thing. If the Republicans win the next elections, I’ll be ready to write the book about what not to do in politics and how the system has to change to prevent such corruption. Oh, I can see I am already ready. Just add it to the list of things I have to write tonight. I might get there eventually.
Time for another beer! I’ll definitely need it. Because somehow this will need all the inspiration in the world that I can get. I might as well open a pack of cigarette at the same time. And god knows, are they now selling these cans of oil from Texas ready to drink, shipped directly from the George Bush Airport? I will need a few of those too… a keg would do nicely, thank you very much.
I understood today what it is that I like about Los Angeles. It is that it does not appear to be a real world. It is like a computer game, a graphic adventure, the ones that I have been playing for years. It makes me feel like opening up my old CDs and live in those magnificent and sunny places with palm trees and orange trees, that I have been used to dream about to escape my terrible reality.
Los Angeles is that virtual world I have always been searching for. My freedom to a better world that, until now, only existed on my computer. I finally live in one of those paradises I have been dreaming about and living in virtually for many years.
I did not even think that orange, lemon and grapefruit trees really existed, and yet last night at Leonardo’s place, I picked up some juicy fruits from his garden. Unbelievable! Orange and lemon trees are something, but juicy grapefruits? Surely they are too heavy to grow on trees? I have them on my counter now, they smell good. I just cut into the lemon to put in my Budweiser, and dear me, it is a dream come true.
In the morning, on my way to work, I have been so not observant. It took me weeks to see my first orange tree. And now I have spotted over 12 trees bearing gorgeous oranges, lemons and grapefruits. It is amazing, something that you would only see in a virtual world in your own computer. With the weather to match it. No need to dream of a better world anymore, of better days, it is right there in your garden, on your way to work, on your lunch hour when you walk at the back of your office. In January and February no less. That tells it all.
It is going to be hard to leave this place, I should really try harder to get my baby from London here. But how? America is so closed on itself, it is a miracle that I am here at all. My ex-Line Manager in London has tried all her life to move to America, and she never succeeded to this day.
I don’t think I can leave. It is anyway so much easier to stay. I was miserable in London, for over 10 years, I have to remember that. Oh please, I have written over 10 books on the subject, shouldn’t it be clear to me by now? I am in paradise, why can’t I see it? Why can’t I understand this?
I have nowhere else to go, I have reached my destination, my long search for the perfect sunny and virtual world, Los Angeles. Any moment now I will meet some virtual characters telling me some bollocks, and it will be my game to play, my choice to make, to go somewhere on the beach to find some old treasure buried there for millennia. I have a 100% score to reach, many magical objects to find, many virtual characters to talk to, many places to visit to find some clues, and solve the puzzles.
I have reached my ultimate destination. I cannot let love stop me, annihilate this dream come true. I just can’t. It’s over. My simple life in the Valley is what I have been looking for all my life. My little most expensive studio is just perfect. Not enough money to finish the month, but who cares? It is paradise.
So much to see, so much to get to know, standing in the Topanga Canyon is all I need to feel the inspiration coming in. The thousand different scenarios for the perfect story along Mulholland Drive, all the way to Malibu. That’s around the corner, how about that?
Santa Barbara a few miles down, even if I don’t have a car yet to reach it. Leonardo has, and will bring me there tomorrow. Not sure why he is dying to bring me there, I personally only want to reach the gate of Michael Jackson’s house. But perhaps he feel there is much more to inspire me there than MJ.
Mmh, the Sun in February, hitting so hard, the weird way those palm trees grow, the red bugs with some design on their carapace I observe at lunch time. I even saw an escargot today, this is just too much for my poor mind. Everything should be dead at the beginning of February, even I feel alive. Which is a first in my case.
Tomorrow I need to get lost in the mountains, a lake, Malibou Lake if necessary, but I’ll get lost believe me. I want to walk all over these mountains of the Californian desert. I want to disappear alone for one full day in the canyons. I don’t want to show up at work on Monday, I want to die there. And haunt the place forever and ever. That is my dream, and I might just reach it, as I am so close to that perfect video game graphic adventure world. Available on PC worldwide very soon! My PC-110 Sony DV camera will insure that, believe me.
I have never, never, ever, smell grapefruits and lemons like that before. What the hell are those distribution companies do to our fruits before they reach the grocery stores worldwide? Freeze them to death, until no smell or taste remain? I could live on grapefruits now, I tell you, and I might actually do just that, since the next Ralphs is one mile away from me.
No need to be idealistic anymore when you live in L.A., you can now turn to the frivolities of life, write mindless comedies… I might just do that. Life has finally reached perfection.
I knew it! Tears for Fears are British! I knew it! And yet, for a second there I was afraid they were from New Mexico. I could not have loved a band so much, if they had not been from the UK. I’m watching their greatest hits videos now, like I was ten years ago, and I’m glad they reunited. This is not mindless stuff, it is real. Already I have forgotten all about the Topanga Canyon. I’m back on track, with the virtual world far behind.
Disturbing nonetheless. That neither Roland or Curt could find success on their own, like Simon and Garfunkel never repeated their greatest songs on their own. Dear me, am I linked to Leonardo until I die? Even before we have any of our ideas out there? Is it possible that sometimes genius only exist when two great minds collide? But on their own cannot go anywhere? Why is that? Oh God!
Just spoke with Leonardo. He’s supposed to read the first batch of supposed songs I sent to him. Right now. And if he is inspired, his instructions are to write music, melody, whatever.
So I started to read what it is that he is supposed to read now. I had to stop on page 4, I was already crying more than I thought I could. How sad I have become. Some girl I know would say I’m a pussy. Somehow this should inspire me quite a poem. Maybe I should get on with it right now.
7 February 2006 (2)
A writing career is not compatible with a full time job in the corporate world
It is now the morning, just got up, it is 7h30. I woke up not knowing where I was, thinking it was Saturday, and then the reality hit me that it was only Tuesday and I had to go to work for another four days.
I could not stand the idea, I called in sick. A four day week is more what I can sustain in my life at the moment, with all the other projects I am working on, film scripts, blogs, other books I am writing, that conference business I want to start, etc.
In London it was easier to be sick, or to miss a day, or to work from home once in a while. Poor Americans, here it is impossible to miss a day even when you are sick. I will lose $250 for not going to work today, it is a lot of money, and I will suffer next month because of it. But it is well worth it.
I have been working like a dog for months, five days a week, the longest hours I have ever done, lots of overtime during the weekends, no holiday over Christmas to speak of. And meeting Leonardo for one day over the weekend, is like another day of work. So I always find myself in a situation where I have only one day to decompress and hence I end up not doing any work on my own projects.
And the thing is, I feel sick today. It is not the salad that I blamed to the girl I just spoke to at work, it is those Molson Canadian beers I bought yesterday. I do like the taste, but it always takes me a while to get use to Canadian beers after a long time passed without drinking any. I’ve got 24 of those things, not sure how I will go through them. My stomach better get use to it fast.
So, if I am to lose that much money today, I better make sure I use my time wisely. I will sleep this morning as long as I can. I won’t watch any Star Trek or TV, I will either work on my latest film script or my conference business. I will not be able to use that excuse that I don’t feel like it because I am too tired, that I’d rather just die on my bed doing nothing. Tuesday is too close to the weekend for that, I decompressed on Sunday.
Today I should be fine. Even if I am sick. God, I’m going back to bed. Perhaps today I should stay in bed all day, contemplate the ceiling for hours. Maybe read a few Sherlock Holmes stories. I think I would need a whole week off to decompress from all that I went through the last few months.
It is so nice to take a day off. I was awakened by two Mexicans who wanted to test the smoke detector and change the filters of the air conditioning. Good thing I was here, I don’t like to have people in my apartment as if this was a hotel. And I would have forgotten to turn the switch so they could come in in the first place. Though I’m sure they would have been able to get in anyway, as they did when it was time to take all my domestic appliances when I switched from fully furnished to semi-furnished at the end of my first month here.
I am still very tired. I might go to bed again. It is so nice to have a day off without the guilt. I cannot feel guilty if I am not getting paid. I feel I have the right to take a day off whenever I want if I am willing to lose money for it.
Money is not everything, and it is useless at any rate if you are working all the time and cannot enjoy it. But yeah, for the first time in my life I took a day off work when I could have gone in, and I don’t feel any guilt at all. It is a great feeling.
The thing is, sometimes you need a day off for your own mental or psychological stability. When you are so wired into all these similar days, and at some point cannot see the end of the tunnel, a way out. It is a lot of pressure on your mind, and your mind can be as sick as your body. And a day off is all is required sometimes to calm you down. Help you continue with this routine the next day. Because you feel you had a break, you changed your mind.
And it is a wonderful day! If I were not supposed to be sick, I might consider going for a swim. But it is too dangerous, my boss’ wife plays tennis here sometimes, she could see me, freak out and sack me instantly. I would not want that now, would I?
It is now 7h37 pm. I slept all day. Perhaps I was sick after all, huge headache, surely it cannot be the three Molson Canadian I drank yesterday. Could it be a lack of sleep? I slept a lot on Sunday, in fact I did very much then what I did today.
So there you are, I did nothing today, no writing whatsoever, even if for one minute there I thought I was going to work on my theoretical physics theories.
This just confirmed what I was saying, that working full time in conferences is something I cannot mix with anything else. I can only work my 40 hours, do my overtime when it is needed, and then forget everything else. Writing is something I cannot even do in my spare time, because that spare time is spent sleeping and decompressing, if not getting ready to go back to work the next day.
I hope there will be better times for my writing career, because it is just about to get back to zero for a while. Until such time when I can work on it full time. I fear sometimes that it might never happen. I am killing myself right now over this, my health is deteriorating. I have headaches, I am a zombie at work, I feel overworked and stressed. Working on my way out is something I simply don’t have the time for. And it is sad.
8 February 2006
Should I tell the truth to my boss? How I really feel?
Time to go back to work. It is 5h39 in the morning. Already I am in a panic state. And I have done nothing in my full day off apart from writing this blog. It is certainly not my most interesting entry either. If I had gone to work, crisis might have brought an interesting entry, but I’m glad that if any crisis was awaiting me yesterday, I skipped that altogether.
But now, crisis might be what awaits me. That conference I’m working on is late. I know my boss is counting the minutes I am working in the office, one day off must bring him to a state of shear horror. He’ll probably jump on me at the first opportunity and say: come in the office please. And then I better have a good explanation for not showing up yesterday.
Should I tell him the truth? That I just can’t stand the office anymore and the people in it? That I was dead tired of having him sitting in my back, observing me all day to see if I am working or not? That the voice of the Director alone was enough for me to throw up everywhere? And that now I work with the Senior Manager and it is getting worse because he sits with us, and therefore always knows when I am not working? And what about your little spy, the Black guy, always, always walking behind me looking at my computer screen.
Should I tell him that the thought of going back yesterday was just too much and that I would have preferred anything else but one more day with them calling everywhere to ask for money? I had enough! I needed a day off from all this! I needed a day off from you! I could not face seeing your face again, it’s making me sick. That’s why I took a day off. And I feel the same today, but I have come, so you should be grateful.
Or else I’ll do like the other girl did last Friday, leave you at one minute’s notice. In fact she is the one who has encouraged me to take a day off. If this job is just too much for her, despite the fact that she was quite strong and intelligent, than it is by no mean an easy or nice job. And one day off won’t kill anyone, and might prevent me from reaching the point she reached when she decided just like that, that she had enough.
And then, I think they hired another guy, and one good look at him told me that this guy was not right, that he would never last a day. And he did not. I have not seen him after that. They are so bad at choosing the right employees. And their main problem, compared with London, is that there are no other conference companies in town, and so no one has any experience in this job. Not a clue about what it means. And so, they get that job, they thank God for the money, and then realize that it is the Devil that sent them there. And once they understand their misery, poof!, they’re gone.
I don’t see what they could do to correct the problem. Choose their employees better I guess for a start. People who are desperate enough to keep their job, if they have a house, cars, kids, whatever. Or suffer from discrimination and can’t find a job somewhere else. If I start my own business one day, I will be facing that exact problem. But I don’t want to think about that right now. I’ll take a bath, I’ll eat something, I’ll try not to be late for once, and I’ll go and face the music.
The work day is over now. It is becoming alarming how I just cannot stand the office anymore, and especially the Director who now supervises me contacting those sponsors, while he does not understand that dealing with the speakers and the brochure is already taking a lot of my time.
I showed a lot of impatience, especially when he asked me in his office at 30 seconds notice to discuss the sponsorship situation. Well, I needed to print my files first, and I told him quite rudely. I had 130 calls to make today, sales cold calling calls, and I did less than 20, because I had to deal with the speakers first.
He came to me in the afternoon, three hours later, while there was lunch in between, to ask me how many calls I’d made. Well, five. He was not happy, and he said: don’t bother calling them, it is too late now! And then he realized that my calls were not for the East coast, but the West coast, and he kind of wanted to apologize, and he came around to speak to Isabella, trying to be nice, and I just left the office for 10 minutes, hoping he would be gone by the time I came back. I think he got the message loud and clear.
I am beyond caring now. If they wish to sack me, fine, I don’t care. I am seriously considering letting them know in exactly 20 days that I am out of here one month later, at the same time that I will tell the apartment people that I am not renewing my rent at the end of March.
It is very tempting to leave the company in 20 days, and remain here for one more month just writing and getting ready to start my own conference business. At least, when I will make a call to a potential sponsor, I will get the $7,000 all for myself, to be reinvested in my future events, my own company.
It is ridiculous, at the moment I am the producer, the marketer, the salesman, the sponsorship guy, the list finder, brochure designer, everything! The only thing I am not doing is emailing the people in the database or finding the contact details of the lists I find. And emailing the database would only take me a minute, so in the end, I’m doing everything. I might as well do it for myself.
Well, I don’t know if I could make more than $60,000 a year if I were to produce my own events, especially in the first few years, but I think it is worth the risk.
I will lose Los Angeles forever, but I have to be realistic. Nothing will happen here, I never even had the courage to try to meet people apart from Leonardo. And that might be it, all there is to it. Maybe he was the only person I needed to meet and eventually it will bear fruits.
In the meantime, I don’t think I would have understood that I could start my own business without coming to L.A. This is something they taught me, convinced me that it was time for me to take the plunge, and for that I should be grateful, and this trip of a few months here will not be in vain.
I am ready to go back to London in two months time, but not to get my old job back, but to start my own business. And that is exciting. The only question remaining is, should I play it safe and produce those same corporate events charging twice less than my competitors? Or should I go for not much money, the risky world of paranormal? Maybe I can do both?
God, and then it will be to decide which events to choose from, if I am about to do this for money instead of for fun. Telecoms? Pharmaceutical? Should I try to identify domains that have not yet been exploited? That will take forever… a lot of market research indeed. And every time I would hop into another field, that would mean hours of research for database building and identifying sponsors. The truth is that I would feel much safer with a good loan and hiring people to do the dirty work. But I have to start slowly, doing everything myself, without any loans.
It is not going to be easy with that financial company overlooking all my money entries and expenses, because of my bankruptcy. They will have a heart attack when I tell them that I am leaving my job. They certainly did when I told them I was leaving for Los Angeles. Only the fact that my salary was much higher dampened their crisis. How am I going to do this? I don’t know. But I have to, somehow.
Oh dear, I would need a real miracle now to prevent me from going back to London and keep me in Los Angeles. A real one. And I don’t see what could happen in the next 20 days to change that, well, in the next 50 days to be more precise. The thing is, I love Los Angeles, I would love to remain longer. But not at the price of a job from hell. What a failure! Nothing new here!