About Being Unemployed

Posted on by Drew Lanning

I’ll tell you one thing about not having a job: it’s pretty awesome. I know my wife and my son thought it was pretty awesome, but the flip-side to that is my landlord probably wasn’t so thrilled about it.

After doing the 7-Eleven Road Trip Rally, I quit my job of 15 years. It’s was scary, fun, and exciting all at the same time. It lasted for about 18 months, during which time I did another road trip with 7-Eleven, shot a web series, made a national commercial, and filled the rest of the time volunteering at my son’s school and just hanging out.

I wish I could say I did something truly memorable in those 18 months, like write a novel or a movie or learn to hang-glide or something, but the sad truth of the matter is that just didn’t happen. I booked a lot of work and generally became a better, more talented, more hire-able actor, but that’s about it.

So now I’m no longer unemployed, I’m back working for the same company that I quit so many months ago. They were gracious enough to give me a job that I actually like better than my old one, that pays a decent salary, and that gives me some creative freedom in how I get the job done (though it bores me to tears sometimes and generally makes me wish I had a handgun permit).

That said, working again isn’t all that bad. One thing I noticed immediately after jumping back into the labor pool is how much I’d missed talking to people besides the wife and son living at home. I mean my wife is great: smart, funny, unpredictable; but after spending your whole day with each other, what else is there to really talk about? And my son, who is now 6, doesn’t talk about much besides various schoolyard injustices that have been leveled against him.

So getting back in the mix with adults that spend more than 60 minutes outside of my presence any given week was a real pleasing shock to the system. Who are these people, I would think to myself. How do they have experiences that are so different from mine?. It was a real eye-opener.

As anyone who has been working for longer than a week knows, your short-term infatuation with your co-workers and their different lives that they lead, wears off rather quickly. Everybody is just as boring as everybody else, in their own peculiar way. It turns out that nobody else spent their time off learning how to hang-glide, either.

So what does this all mean? I’m not sure, despite the fact that I’m the jerk that’s been talking about it for the past 400 words. You could say the grass is always greener or some such horse manure, but unfortunately all I really think I learned from my time off was this: other than not having any money, being unemployed is pretty fucking great.

Where Have I Been?!

Posted on by Drew Lanning

So it’s been awhile since I posted anything on my blog, and for that I owe all twelve of you reading this an apology. I kid, I kid… I’m one of the twelve reading this, so it’s really only eleven people I owe an apology to.

Why has it been so long? I would blame Twitter and Facebook, and that might even be partially accurate, except for the fact that the real reason is simpler: I’m lazy. I post all the time to Twitter and Facebook, but guess what? I only post to Twitter and it automagically feeds my Facebook status. So I’ve set myself up in such a way that I only have a responsibility to post 140 characters or less and it populates to the two major networks of people that can reasonably be accused of giving a shit about what’s going on in my life. Pretty cool, huh?

So why the blog at all then? I’m not really sure. I guess for when you have something to talk about that’s more than 140 characters in importance? If you’ve read this far then you no doubt realized about 500 characters ago that I have nothing really that important to talk about so far, so why am I even writing this?

Because I promised myself that I would, and I keep my promises.

It’s not exactly a New Year’s Resolution, because those are dumb and I never really thought New Year’s was that important a holiday in the first place. You see, writing is something that I really, really enjoy but never actually do. It’s kind of like acting in that sense, only with writing there is one very important difference: you can do it whenever you want.

I can surely act whenever I want, but 99% of the time that amounts to acting very strange in a very public place, with people either not paying attention to you or actively avoiding you. With acting you are mostly subject to the whims and caprices of other people’s choices, other people that may or may not decide to use you in their project. Then once you do book a project you are at the mercy of the Scheduling Gods and have to come and go at their pleasure.

Writing is something that requires only your mind and some time, and that time can come whenever and wherever you decide it to. I’ve always liked that about writing, and it only took about 25 years for me to come back around to something I used to really, really love doing and start really making an effort to do it again.

So that pretty much starts here, with committing to writing every day. Now hold on, I didn’t say I would write on this blog every day, I have just committed to 500 words of writing per day. I do actually have a couple writing jobs that actually pay me money and take up my time and talents, and I fully intend for that writing to count towards my daily quota. And why not? Horribly produced corporate videos count as “real acting”, so why can’t blogging-for-hire count as writing?

I also fairly permanently seem to have stopped biting and/or picking my nails, so I figured if I can stop doing that, I can write 500 lousy words a day. Which appears to be what I’ve written here, 558 lousy words. Thanks for reading!

Leap Year Is Here!

Posted on by Drew Lanning

The web series to end all web series has finally debuted, and it is a doozy! We’re even featured on the home page of TVGuide.com! Well we were, really… really!

Anyway, see for yourself what critics around the world have called “the best web series sponsored by a small-business insurance company” by going to LeapYear.tv.

And don’t be all last decade about it, either. Sure you could bookmark that site and check back every week, but why not download it from iTunes or watch it on Hulu?

Oh… and you’re welcome.

Leap Into The Something

Posted on by Drew Lanning

I’m sitting on a transnational flight heading from San Francisco to New York City, to shoot for a few days on a web series project called Leap Year. Without getting into too much detail, it’s basically about some people who take the leap from the business world of steady employment and start their own businesses. The irony of this situation doesn’t escape me, but in case it somehow escapes you I will explain.

Almost a full year ago I was employed with a company that I had worked with for about 15 years. Thanks to 7-Eleven, HLG Films, and what some may call my own stupidity and short-sightedness, I quit that job and have been basically “unemployed” ever since. I’ve been getting work and making money off and on since then (thanks again to HLG Films, some random blogging assigments, and my unemployment insurance filling in the gaps between work), but for the most part I’ve been gradually getting used to the fact that I don’t go to work anymore.

If you’ve been working almost your entire adult life you may not understand this feeling, so let me do my best to explain it to you. You know that feeling you have when you wake up on Saturday (or whatever day starts your “weekend”)? That feeling of “Thank god I’m not working today!” tempered a bit with the thought that you actually have tons of shit to get done in just two short days off? You know that feeling on Sunday where you’re glad you’re not working but it’s kind of bittersweet because you know it’s a fleeting state of being, that you need to get to bed on time tonight because you’re due at work tomorrow morning?

Yeah, what I feel when I wake up in the morning is nothing like that at all.

See I don’t have a hard stop on my “weekend”, my weekend is every day. It took me some time to get used to that fact but it’s finally sunken in. I get work from time to time and have to show up on the set, and for the past few weeks I’ve been shooting almost non-stop, but those are the exceptions right now rather than the rule. It’s a glorious feeling knowing that every night when you lay your head down, the day you will wake up to is just as blank a slate as the day you just completed.

To be sure, I’m not working on a cure for cancer or planning to climb K2 or anything like that. My days are pretty mundane as far as that goes, but they’re fun and exciting to me and that’s all that really matters, right?

So almost a year ago I took a leap of faith that the assignment I was using as an excuse to quit my day job would not be the last one I was offered. So far that has worked out better than I think I was willing to admit that I thought it ever could, and I think it will continue to do so. Back then I said to myself (and even said out loud a couple of times) that I didn’t know if my grand crazy scheme would peter out in six months or a year, but if it did I would be happy with myself for just taking the chance and failing.

I haven’t yet had to settle for that compromise and at this point I’m confident that I never will, but no matter what happens, in the end I’ll always be satisfied that I took that chance and that leap. It’s a strange kind of leap, one where you just keep falling and falling and falling and never quite land, but it’s an exhilirating and exciting fall the whole way down. I just hope I make a me-shaped hole in the desert floor if I ever do crash to the ground, at least then I will have left my mark.

What’s Going On Here?

Posted on by Drew Lanning

Not much, really. I’ve changed my site, and my reel is mere seconds away from being completed. By seconds, I mean days, and by days I likely mean weeks. The point is, it’s in active development and I’ve seen a rough cut, and it’s looking great!

I’ve also paid some attention to my IMDB profile, so that’s worth taking a look at too. Tonight I’ll be updating the resume on there as well.

Thanks for stopping by, look for more changes soon to come.