File this under “What The Hell Were You Thinking?”
I heard (in a roundabout sort of way through Yuri) that a wise man once said “No bad idea ever started with ‘This may sound crazy, but…'”.
I thought I’d better get my thoughts out on this and in the process answer any questions that may come up.
There are a lot of little reasons that I quit my job. It’s not one of those “straw that broke the camel’s back” things, where someone yelled at me and I just snapped. The decision has been in my mind to quit this job for just about the entire 15 years that I’ve worked for the company. In the absence of a truly good reason to quit, I just never did!
My son is four, and lately he’s been shooting off about what he wants to be when he grows up. Being that age his decision changes almost daily, sometime within the breadth of a single sentence. Two days ago he said he wanted to be an astronaut… OR a garbage truck guy. Then he decided he might just do both, at the same time.
I (and my wife, hopefully? Sina?) tell him that he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up. I think we say that because that’s just what parents say, but also because we believe it to be true. The obvious logical conclusion he would draw from this is that Mommy and Daddy must be doing what they want to do, right? I mean, if you can be anything you want to be when you grow up then Daddy must be exactly what he wants to be. Why would he be anything different?
So there’s that. I’m not doing what I want to be doing, and I can’t think of a really solid reason to give Ronin as to why, were he to ask, which he will, because he’s smart and figures logical things out very quickly.
There’s also this: 15 years ago when I took this job I had no intention of having it for even one year. It just seemed like a good way to help me move to San Francisco.
Hehe, oops.
And there’s one more big thing, but this requires time-travel to the year 2015. Ronin will be 14 and will be asking me about my past, watching my old films and commercials and wondering (out loud) why I’m not an actor? He’ll probably ask something like “So what happened, did you try and it just didn’t work out?” What answer could I give to that? If I hadn’t quit my job then the answer would be “No, no I never really tried to make it as an actor. But dreams can come true son, I feel it in my bones!” Being 14, his response would probably be outward silence, but inward “What a loser, I don’t want to be like my Dad when I grow up.”
I’ve been teaching him that there’s nothing wrong with failure, failure is how we learn, failure is actually good, we learn more from failure than from immediate success. But how can that lesson jive with my never having just quit my dumb job and made a go of acting, and writing, and freelance work, and grip work, and whatever damn odd jobs I could get to keep my family afloat?
So for all of those reasons, I’ve quit my job. My last day for now is April 15th, so I’m still floating around there for the time being but I’m a bit of a lame duck. There you have it.
Oh, and there is actually one final, practical reason that fits nicely with my decision making process. As of May we no longer will need to pay for our son’s education, and as of June the car is paid off. That’s like $900 off the monthly tab right there, so what better time to jump into the deep end?
Thank you for reading, donations are accepted in the form of gift cards for toy stores, Target, Gymboree, Carter’s, and Amazon.com.
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