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Showing posts from 2011

Trump card

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but even if I haven’t, I most definitely will be saying it many times in the future. This is the frustrating fact that everything in life happens at the same time. Hey Life, I have an idea. Instead of handing me twenty things to do at once, why not spread it out a little bit? Give me a few, important, manageable tasks and opportunities now, and then a few more later. You could have given me some back in January when I was pulling my hair out because nothing was happening and I felt like I was going nowhere. What’s that, you say? It’s not how you work? Fine then, I shall be tearing my hair out for different reasons. I shake my fist at you, Life.   Let me attempt to summarise my last two months, not in chronological order but in ... Jonological order, I suppose. Firstly, I enjoy my current day job as a bartender. I work in an excellent atmosphere, and it’s nice to have a permanent full-time job and be slowly climbing out of debt. I’ve had to learn

Looking for a job is soul-crushing.

When people ask me what I'm doing nowadays, my current standard response is something along the lines of me attempting to balance my acting career with my day job. This is in a sense true – I mean, I'm not lying to myself – but for a while the problem with that statement is that I didn't really have either one of those things: an acting career or a day job. The waitering thing didn’t work out (ask me later) and for a while I had nothing on the cards acting-wise. This is unbelievably stressful and really panicked me for a long time. Thankfully I have been cast in a promising show and can spend my creative energy that way, and ideally looking for a job can take a back seat while I focus on acting for the next couple of weeks. Except I can’t. Or at least I won’t be able to until I am actually balancing the two. The process of finding a new job is in and of itself a stressful task, never mind the fact that I would prefer to find something that is flexible with my acting aspira

Not out of the woods yet

It always seems that my busy-ness comes in waves. I can have nothing on my plate for weeks at a time when all I do is worry about how I'm going to afford to pay my bills next month, and then suddenly have five things going on at once, and feel stressed about pulling myself in many directions simultaneously. This would be normal for most people, but, with my inability to properly manage my time, I instead go through phases of freak out: when I'm stuck at home, I panic because I'm not working, and when I'm so busy working I panic because I feel I'm not getting enough stuff done at home. ("Work" here applies to both acting jobs and the day job.) Currently I am very busy. I don't usually undertake student films anymore, but I agreed to one recently because it's only one day of filming, and it sounds like it would look good on a showreel. Some actors forget that when you do a student film, it is being produced by students, and I completely understand 

Things that keep me up at night

It's 5am here now, and I can't manage to fall back asleep and I don't know why. What to do, what to do? I know, I'll post something in my new blog. That's logical, right? The past couple of days I've actually gotten quite a few random sparks of ingenuity (rare I know) and inspiration concerning interesting things to write about. I've forgotten them all now. Sorry. I'll try to be more focused in the future (though to be honest I wouldn't suggest placing your bets - focus is not one of my strong suits). (Side note: I've written this in bed and on my iPhone, and I have a love/hate relationship with Apple's predictive text software, and upon proofreading this blog I found the previous sentence had said, "focus is not one of my string suits." I wish I had a string suit.) So, I'm still a novice at this blogging thing, so bear with me, but I think I'll just say what's on my mind. Welcome to the twisted world of Jon Marx'

I'll stop pretending this isn't a New Year's resolution.

I don’t typically make New Year’s resolutions. I kind of hate them. I could go on for paragraph after paragraph about how they only set people up for failure, and how a calendar is merely a human construct, but instead I have to stop pretending that I’m not making a New Year’s resolution and admit that I have. (Also, I don’t want to start this blog by being overly negative and turn away potential readers.) Although I wouldn’t like to admit it, I’ve made a New Year’s resolution. I’m going to start a blog and commit to it at least twice a week. I have a number of goals with it: I will document my efforts at establishing my career as a professional actor in London . I will use it to organise my thoughts in a coherent manner, and hopefully I won’t be so scatterbrained. I also want to get back into writing, since I like doing it, and seem to find too many excuses or distractions and avoid it. I think if I start a blog then at least I’m writing something and will eventually form a daily ha