Entry 56: An Interview and a Non-Dream

I had a phone interview this morning for a job with a company in the States. My advisor set it up for me. It went well. I feel like it went “OK”, but generally I (and most everybody else) is a bit too negative with such things, so I’ll upgrade it to “well” (I’m not bumping it up to “great”). The company looks fantastic, and the work would be right in my wheelhouse. I did my best to demonstrate that I would be a good fit there. But…

Everybody has a big but,* and this time I have two. The first is that the company is located in an area where it would be unlikely/impossible for S to find work in her field and in an area we wouldn’t particularly want to live long-term (it’s in the South, that’s as specific as I want to get). The second is that they would prefer to hire somebody now.

Concerning the first but, the company seemed open to, at least considering, the idea of telecommuting, at least after some initial period. Maybe I could work onsite for a year or so and then work remotely. Concerning the latter, I can’t do too much about this. I’m honoring my contract here and then going to India until the beginning/middle of August. There isn’t much wiggle room here. In a follow up email, I indicated that, if hired, I would be willing to do whatever I could from Australia (reading documents, learning about the project I’d be working on, etc.) until I arrived back in the States, but that’s never ideal. Anyway, he said that he’d talk to his team leaders and get back to me. So, we shall see.

[I don't like big buts, and I cannot lie, you other brothers can't deny, that when a sitch comes by, with some itty-bitty doubt, and some things not worked out, you get solicitous!]

Changing topics, I came up with an idea for a bad sitcom, which is only worth mentioning because I did so completely in my sleep. Every now and then, I have these prolonged moments where I actually think in my sleep. It’s different from dreaming in the typical sense, because in my dreams nothing is logical or linear or particularly intelligible. In these non-dreams, I think normal thoughts like when I’m awake, but my ability to assess my thoughts is out of whack. I think everything is brilliant. Then when I wake up, I’m disappointed, because I realize it’s not brilliant at all. In fact, it’s terrible. Once I non-dreamed an entire stand-up comedy routine. I only remember one “joke”.

“It turns out Mary was robbing Peter to pay Paul… it broke up the band.”

Like I indicated, it’s not exactly Carlin-esque material.

Anyway, here’s my sitcom idea. The main character is a young wannabe hotshot financial wizard. I’ll call him Aziz, because I non-dreamed that he’d be played by comedian Aziz Ansari. Aziz is a big-business, big-money capitalist, but he’s likable (a la Jack Donaghy and Alex P. Keaton). He’s super arrogant, but he’s actually not very smart, even about finance. He doesn’t get this though and often gets in over his head, which will be the source of much hilarity.

The back story for Aziz is that fresh out of grad school he took a low-level job with a huge financial company. When his company got caught in an Enron-like accounting scandal, Aziz was duped into being the fall guy, even though he was just a peon in the company and had nothing to do with it. Now, he’s marred for life and un-hirable, so he has to rely on his wife to work while he stays at home to take care of their young twins (and they are cute!). The humor in the show comes from Aziz continually losing money in the stock market (much to his wife’s dismay!), and from his unconventional (yet oddly effective) parenting techniques. He's a real fish out of water trying to fit in with the stay-at-home-mom crowd!

Anyway, that’s the sitcom idea I non-dreamed. I wouldn’t watch it, but then again I don’t really like sitcoms. Even the ones I did once like (“30 Rock”, “The Office”) are getting bad and should probably just retire with dignity. “The Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family” are OK, but a lot of the time I can see the jokes on those shows coming from a mile away. Plus, I absolutely hate the laugh track on "The Big Bang Theory".

[The star of my sitcom.]

Actually, I was thinking that sitcoms are a lot like NFL running backs, in that they both have extremely short shelf-lives. It’s rare to get one that is good for many seasons. Also,they often go bad seemingly overnight, and they often run well past their primes (ahem… “The Simpsons”). The good ones usually have a solid, but not great rookie season, and then peak over the next two to three seasons. If you get six good seasons of out of a sitcom or a running back, it’s a successful career. Most of them don’t even last that long. Hmm… this seems like a good idea for a Bill Simmons-esque sports column: compare the careers of legendary running backs to those of classic sitcoms. (“Cheers would be Walter Payton, because…”)

In real sports news: March Madness! Although, it’s kind of depressing, because I can’t watch any of the games, and nobody cares about it here, so what’s the point? I didn't even fill out a bracket this year. I’ll follow it, but it’s just not the same.

In other sports news, my ultimate Frisbee team is a respectable 3-3. We played the top team this week and nearly beat them. We won the first game (you play 3 games to 5 points and whoever wins 2 or 3 games wins the match) 5-4, then nearly won the second game (and the match), but lost 4-5, and then we got crushed 1-5 in the last game. They just wore us down. It didn’t help that we only had one sub. I was too tired to play hard at the end, as was everybody else on our team. Anyway, it’s been fun so far.

Well, that about does it for this post.

*I took this line from “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”. I tried to find the clip on youtube, but was unable to do so. Instead, I’ll link to this painful clip of Pee-wee on “Monday Night Raw”. Apparently, this is what you end up doing when you’re a flash-in-the-pan star, get caught masturbating in an adult theater, and then go back to doing a character you’re too old to play by 25 years.

[I remember seeing this mugshot the summer I ended elementary school. Talk about innocence lost.]