I Am Now a Fully Armed and Operational Battle Station

January 29th, 2010Blog1 comment

Today’s the day, my little Droogs. The last day of the day job. After today I have one weekend where I’m FunEmployed — aka between careers — and then on Monday I’m officially on the clock as Joe Hollywood.

I cleaned out my office and found the following:

- Many, many old photographs of myself and my friends doing stupid, fun things
- My original 16 year old Drivers’ License
- Lots of old LCC stuff: Fliers, old programs, etc..
- CodeWarrior discs
- “Programming for the Newton”: Nostalgic considering Wednesday’s announcement
- Plastic aquarium plants
- A quarter-full bottle of Smirnoff

It was a pretty sweet and sad series of moments going through all my drawers. Everything was layered by eon in an archaeological fashion. I recycled a lot of old scripts and papers. TONS of old timesheets. I saved everything that needed to be saved, although it’s moments like these when you get a little paranoid about some special remembrance getting lost.

Everything’s wrapped up, documented, and ready to roll. I’m going to cruise back into the office a couple of times next week to pick up a few remainders and make sure the place is in good order before I leave for good. And maybe you’ll find me there every now and then, just checking in.

One of my agents asked me how I felt about the whole transition.

I told her I felt a little scared, but really excited. I almost feel like it’s not really happening. I still can’t believe people get paid to do this, but there it all is. I’ve said it before and I will say it when I wake up every morning from now on: I am so very lucky.

To all my friends that have already left their day jobs: I’m now a member of your club. My clubhouse is your clubhouse. I can come to WeHo or Hollywood or Studio City for lunch on a weekday, but don’t expect me to be out late — I’m still observing school days and their required hours.

My lawyer said, “Hey, so now you’re a full time writer. Feels good, right?”

I told him that I’ve essentially been a full time writer for years now; I just also had a full-time job. But now that the job’s gone I can go to 200%. Explore ideas that I didn’t have time to explore before, ramp up my productivity. Read even more than I do now. Holy shit, I can read more books!!

I think the best thing is that I have the time to try out some really crazy things. Take acting classes, cooking classes. If I need to be in New York for three weeks for rehearsal, I can just go. I could get into professional clowning.

Improv???

One thing I really don’t want to do is to give up programming. I sometimes wonder what things would have been like if my life had gone the other way; if it had, I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to give up writing. I would have always written little things in my spare time to amuse myself.

So now I’m going to write little programs in my spare time. Hell, I’m an iPhone developer. I didn’t have time to really get my hands dirty before, but now…

It’s time to go get that iPad dev kit.