I’ve been putting off posting this for a while, or rather I suppose I should say that I’ve been postponing writing for a while – I’ll be damned if this isn’t just going to be an extraordinarily busy summer!
I know that there’s only so much time in the day, but it kinda sucks right now because after sleep and work and trying to find time to spend with Sara, any time left over to write or exercise or (gasp) work on the Just Laugh rebuild is pretty much nil at best. And it’s rough because I know she feels bad a lot because she thinks that she’s cutting into my time to do other stuff and I really don’t want her to feel that way because I love any and every minute that I can get with her, but sometimes she does get more brunt than she deserves simply because I can trim time away from her a lot easier than I could, say, from work…
And just between you and me, I think that’s a lot of my problem right now – I’m at a very dull point in my job right now where for some reason it’s just horrendously mundane for me to even make it through the day. I’ve lax’ed things up a bit to try to get out closer to my scheduled time without putting in so much overtime lately, but the bottom line is that simply put: I’m bored. I’m not being challenged, so my duties are purely routine at this point; the same workload problems continue to slack on by, so I’ve pretty much just come to look at them with tinted glasses because nothing seems to change; and ultimately, I don’t see any end in sight, so basically I’m forced to live with a nine-hour block of my day just void of anything other than time on the clock.
(…and I know, I know – there are certainly worse things that I could be doing for a living, but that’s another topic for another day…)
It’s kind of funny because it’s times like these when I start to fantasize back to the days of Just Laugh and wonder if we could ever bring it back again, or more. When the site was at its peak back in 2001 / 2002, I fondly remember having dreams nightly about the site getting just absolutely huge and becoming a household name – truly “Your Source for Humor on the Internet.” I invisioned skyrocketing talented writers and artists into new careers, donating huge sums of money to charities and somehow bringing HBO’s Comic Relief program back to life, and basically just living the high life doing what I could truly love doing – making people laugh and helping other people make people laugh. Comedy tours, celebrities, realizing true fame by finding a plush version of our ever-popular Just Laugh Pepper Monkey on a store shelf – so many possibilities for success…
Of course, I always wondered how those days could’ve been different if I’d had one or two other people on board with me that were just as passionate about the project as I was – staying up all night staring at code to get a feature online by deadline or brainstorming for our next interview. Trouble is, that kind of dedication, just short of a miracle anyways, takes money to support because like it or not, nobody else has that kind of time on their hands either. But if one didn’t actually have to punch a clock and spend 40+ hours a week earning rent money, you just might have a chance…
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately…a lot. It seems that whenever my job really gets me down, I start to get off on these drives about how I’d like to get my creative efforts to the point where I could focus on them full-time and count on them to pay the bills. I still honestly believe that there are some good concepts behind Just Laugh and the right people could make some money off of it – it’s just a matter of my being able to put the necessary time in to get it to that point…all the while keeping my job and my girlfriend in tact, too. Talk about a tough balancing act!
But still, they say that dreams are worth following for a reason, so if I really believe that there’s something to this one, I owe it to myself to continue persuing it. I don’t know where the time itself is supposed to come from, but I can attest myself that some of the most entertaining creative minds do their best work after they’ve already spent a full day’s work hammering out widgets to make ends meet while they follow their dreams. Nobody ever said it was easy, but then again, how many really good success stories ever began with the hero having it easy right off the bat, anyways?
First, though, I should probably get some sleep… 😛