If you could do anything...

...what would you do? I feel like this is a fairly common question for people; it's used as a check-your-heart exercise to see if you're pursuing what really matters to you, and as the days of my grant rush towards their termination point, I find myself mulling it over, to somewhat surprising results.

If I could do anything in the world, what would I do? I would be an actress.

Depending on how long you've known me (or if you know me at all), you may know that when I was growing up, acting was my thing. At age 5, my mom tells me, I memorized the lead part's lines in a church musical--before the auditions. Not surprisingly, since I was 5, I lost that particular part to a 12-year-old, but it did little to dampen my desire. From age 5 till age 18, my happiest moments were on stage. Church musicals, a middle-school Shakespeare troupe, a variety of plays and musicals in high school; I couldn't get enough.

Then college hit, bringing with it the realization that, in the real world, you just don't have enough time to act when your hours are eaten up working to pay for tuition, room, and board, and throwing yourself entirely into your studies and preparing yourself for the real world. In the real world, there are very few successful actors; without the perfect cocktail of superhuman talent, beauty, and connections, most would-be actors spend the vast majority of their lives waiting tables. I knew that going into college, and I'm an optimist only up to the point where my in-bred pragmatism comes into play. So, my last performance was 5 years ago.

And, truth be told, I mourn for it. Whenever I go to a play, I ache to be, not just sitting in the audience, but up on the stage. So much of myself comes from my years in the theater: my ability to project my voice when needed (I've refused microphone usage this entire year), my silent footsteps (born from years of creeping around backstage as I wait for an entrance cue), my deep love of Shakespeare. I find myself thinking about the fact that I'm the right age now to play the ingenue roles; I find myself thinking that my lifelong frustration with looking younger than I am would come in handy now if I ever wanted to audition for the role of a teenager; I find myself daydreaming, in short, that I could do this. I long to return to theater.

But, again, pragmatism prevails. Ironically, though, it prevails on a sliding scale. What would I most like to do? Act. Do I think that would actually work out for me? No. What would I next most like to do? Write. Do I think that would actually work out for me? Possibly, but let's throw in a contingency plan just in case. What would I next most like to do? Edit. Do I think that would actually work out for me? Yes, I think it just might. If I work at it hard enough.

But here's the flaw in my logic: editing jobs are still incredibly hard to come by. Publishing, indeed, was cited by the New York Times (in this excellent article) as one of the stereotypical so-called "lottery industries"--fields with any number of applicants clamoring for a shot at a very few spots doing the job they love. Publishing was listed right alongside acting, with the only difference being that those who make it as actors get paid more. Well gee, that's encouraging.

But this is not a post informing you of my new intention to run off to LA or NYC to try to make it big as an actor. (Though, ironically, I may be headed to NYC to do the same thing as an editor.) Because, regardless of my love for it, the reasons that I shelved it as an ambition still hold. I have no delusions of grandeur there, much as I wish I did. I picked writing, and editing, because I think I have a comparatively better shot there of doing something I still love, and getting paid for it--if not as much as others monetarily, at least in the knowledge that I'm doing something I love. Even if that something isn't the thing I love the most.

In the meantime, I'm going to start looking into community theaters. Because if you love doing something, why should not getting paid for doing it stop you?

Timing

Today, I read an article (sorry, it's only an abstract online unless you're a subscriber...) in the most recent issue of The New Yorker about Christian Marclay, an artist who created a 24-hour video collage illustrating each minute with a visual and audio reference taken from different movies. He called it "The Clock." It was a colossal work, and one the results of which I'd love to see in person.

And the point--or rather one of the points--of the work was to draw the viewer's attention to how much attention we give to time; to reverse the standard tendency to lose track of time in the watching of a movie and to rather accentuate precisely how much time you have irrevocably lost from watching. In explaining this, the author of the article mentions that, ordinarily, people look at a clock in order to bind themselves more closely to an ironclad schedule; the act of looking at a clock, he says, is often accompanied by worry and apprehension.

I found this particularly telling as a descriptor of my day today. While I looked at the clock significantly less than on a usual day--it was a Sunday, after all, so I had no ironclad schedule to adhere to--I have rarely been more aware of the absolute and stringent rule of time, and timing, over my life.

I wrote a few days ago about the choices I face in my life going forward; what I failed to mention, though, was the absolute and unknowable time lines that guide each choice. Today, I felt the full weight of these. I spent several hours perusing various job boards, drooling over the eight or so positions currently open for which I may actually be qualified, yet with the full knowledge that I can't apply for them. (To make myself feel better I amped up my resume, but it's just not the same if it's still just stored on you computer.)

I know, logically, that four months is far too long to expect anyone to keep a job for me. I know that looking at jobs now will do little more than depress me that all the great jobs I see now will never be mine because they will be long filled by the time I can apply. Yet I can't shake the time-illogical sense that I should still look, now, just in case. Sigh.

Then there's the issue of travel. I'm looking at taking a little trip before heading back to America in July, and I've been monitoring flight prices for a few weeks now, hoping they'll go down around the (supposedly) magical 2-month-out point. Instead, I checked today to discover that the heretofore frontrunner in cheapness had sold out, apparently leaving me with an unaffordable $700USD hike in prices. Talk about discouraging.

I later found more flights that are at least in the same arena as my previous low price, but I'm now stuck in an unknowable conundrum of timing: should I buy now, and so avoid the possibility of more sell-outs, or hold out in expectations that prices will drop? I don't know, and have no way of knowing, yet if I make the wrong choice, I may find myself unable to afford the journey. Again, sigh.

Whether we pay attention to it or not, time rules our lives. And somehow, even on the day that I give it least heed, timing rules mine. I can watch the second hand move or smash the clock and look away, but either way, my life is being eaten by it as surely as those of the movie-goers in "The Clock." Now the question is what to do with my time until the minute hand moves forward to the next scene.

Possibilities

In a little over four months, I will no longer be living in Taiwan. July 11 is my official departure date; I'll be boarding a plane here in Kaohsiung at 9pm and, through the magic of airplanes and time zones, arriving back home just before midnight on the same day. And I've processed that, to the extent that I can this far in advance. What I haven't processed, however, is that I have no idea what I'm going back to--or even where.

Now, my first few weeks are covered: home with my wonderful family who I haven't seen in a year. I'll also be catching up with all the friends I haven't seen in ages, which will certainly include at least one trip to Seattle. But after that? A giant looming question mark with the terrifying label of "unemployed."

That's not the goal, of course. The goal is to get a job, preferably before I even board the plane at this end. But where? The more I think about it, the more I realize the possibilities are truly endless. Seattle? New York? London? Redding? Each of these places holds at least one very good reason I should move/move back there; each involves a unique process by which I should proceed; each of them is, in its own way, terrifying.

Really, the very prospect of choosing is terrifying.

Of course, the real choice will be wherever I get a job. But now, four months out, before it's really feasible to ask any company to wait for me, all I can do is stew in the terrifying state of uncertainty which is choice.