Mild Forms of Insanity

Mild forms of insanity are the only necessary components to remaining truly sane. For some, that means trying to do the impossible in an impossible amount of time.

In the past week I have taken on two part-time jobs. The first is as a lighting technician/designer at my old high school, doing work on several summer drama camps. In each of these camps, the director attempts to put on a semi-professional show in the space of a week. The first two shows were: a version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and a heavily edited version of Wicked, the musical. I should mention that these camps are for elementary and middle school students. And they both took place on the same week. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of work it takes to put a show together in a week, let alone doing it with bratty little kids. We just started moving into week two of the camp and the new show is Oliver, the Musical. The only saving grace on this one is that there is only one show in the week.

And if you think that's insane, my other job almost tops it. I was hired by a 95 year old, blind man as an assistant. My duties consist of organizing, making the office more accessible for my employer and helping him with his Magnum Opus. His work? It's a book the size of a dictionary on how to fix the world's problems. My employer in question is fairly cogent, being only senile enough to think that publishing the book is a reality he can achieve during this summer. I'm not saying he couldn't do it. He just won't do it while I'm here. There are literally 60 gigabytes of documentation to go though. Most of it is duplication and backups of the actual project but the files have been mislabeled and badly sorted for years now, making editing a pain the ass. I've dropped more than 40 hours into this thing and it's maybe 10% done. Maybe. But I will keep working on it, despite the futility, because my employer is paying me $13 an hour. For those of you doing the math, that's a little over $520 in a week. And that's me working around the theater gig.

Both of my employers obviously are just insane enough to attempt the impossible but I can't help loving helping them make the impossible, possible. Okay, so the book isn't going to get published anytime soon but the first two plays went pretty well, and I have a good feeling about Oliver.

In my free time (2.32 hours over the past 5 days) I started playing the game Wild ARMs 4. It's a typical RPG with a young hero and a damsel with the power to save or destroy the world in distress. But one of the minor characters said something that struck home. “Humans are frail creatures. The only way we can survive is to combine our strengths and give it all we've got.” Even though she was talking about the four member battle system, I can't help but think that there is something so true to that. We can't do the impossible alone, but if we work together, there is nothing that we can't accomplish.

Now I'm going to go wash my hands with acid for writing such sappy drivel.