I am the worst when it comes to this | 790
Diary of an artist, Saturday, September 8, 2018
# 790 (countdown)
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Woke up 5:45 am. Much too late (my alarm clock was set on 3:30).
Little tired. Went to bed a little bit to late last night.
Yesterday I had a small episode in a Polish television medical drama series, broadcast since 1999. It says in Wikipedia that this series is the longest-running weekly primetime drama on Polish TV and one of the longest-running medical dramas in the world.
Couldn’t recall the real name of the actress who played one of the main characters and whom I addressed in this episode. Other people on the set called her Marta, but it wasn’t good enough a hint for someone like me. That’s not unusual for me. I generally have a huge problem with names. Apart from my family, if it’s not someone I got to know and befriended in school or during my university years, chances that I will be able to recall this person’s name are really small.
I’m much better at remembering faces, but I am terrible at remembering names. I know the names of a small bunch of Polish actors (the famous ones) but that’s all. Same with foreign actors (here the number might be just a little bit higher, but still — no denying I’m bad at names). My wife always wonders and laughs how I can not know such things.
Wonder what the world without names would look like. How would we go about communicating with each other. I guess that’s how it must have been in the beginning of us mankind. That’s also how it is between very small children, I guess. They need to come up to the person they want to address with their request. And if they want something they grab it.
I like the idea that I’m discovering this whole new world. The world of movies and movie making. I have a chance to get to know the whole culture. The people who take care of the technical aspects of movie production, the directors and their assistants, the production managers, the actors, the background actors.
It’s too early for me to say anything, but I’ve got this feeling that this world is much closer to me as a person than the world of lawyers, of which I was part of for so many years.
There is a lot of cussing on the sets. Most people are rather easy going, although there are exceptions to this rule (if there is a rule you can be sure there’re also exceptions to this rule).
What I like the most about my current situation is the fact that I’m discovering new ways of making some money to survive. And, by my own assessment, I’m doing fine taking into account that I’m this early in this process.
I’m no longer just a lawyer. Apart from the fact that I hated the world of lawyers, I also hated the idea that I am only this one thing. It bothered me. I don’t know if it bothered me when I still was a lawyer (guess not). Guess it changed for me when I decided that I will not be a lawyer anymore. This decision opened my eyes to this limitedness of my options. I started to ask myself and ponder what my job would be if suddenly nobody needed a lawyer. If a war broke out and if they asked me what I can do apart from being a lawyer. I wondered what would my greatest assets be and in what ways I could be helpful.
Certainly there are people I like a lot among lawyers (my colleagues). Guess it’s the culture/ they as a separate group I couldn’t stand. And if you swim in it long enough I guess there is no escaping soaking it up to some degree at least.
This gives me some reassurance that wherever I will go, or however my situation will change, or whatever will happen to the profession I’d picked, there will be a way to survive somehow. And that’s a very nice feeling. I guess I’m beginning to understand what Seth Godin meant by saying that playing it safe is the riskiest thing of all.
I guess I used too much of the word ‘guess’ in this entry.
Reading (since my last diary entry):
Fromm Essays: Fromm Essays: The Concept of Mental Health (20 min, on scribd app).
On Writing by Charles Bukowski (20 min, on scribd app).
Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr (20 min, on scribd app).
What Shall We Do? by Leo Tolstoy (20 min, on scribd app).
Audiobooks (since my last diary entry):
Post office by Charles Bukowski (20 min, on scribd app).
Music for this writing session: Chopin (on spotify)

