Since the opportunities I was pursuing in New York fell through a few weeks ago, I’ve been shifting gears yet again and combing the country for job opportunities. Doing that has really gotten me to hone in on what it is that I can bring to the table for potential employers. It’s been a worthwhile process of self-analysis, but it’s also inadvertently spawned a totally improbable and impractical fantasy job/lifestyle which I’d like to detail the highlights of here.
I still have a really strong urge to travel. It’s been with me for several years and I’ve never really had the opportunity to indulge myself in it until I’m satiated. So I guess that is at the core of what follows. Basically, I’d like to keep doing what I’m doing with this website, but take it on the road. The way I imagine it working is that I would somehow acquire a small R/V and travel around the country, tracking down cool stories.
I guess it’s really only a hop, skip & a jump from Scooby Doo and the Mystery Machine. But instead of solving mysteries, I would find the hotspots, interview people, take photos and possibly footage to be compiled into a documentary at a later date. Then from first-hand on-site personal investigation and the anecdotal evidence I collect, I would put together articles and updates for my website, but also do feature-length articles for newspapers in the regions I’m exploring, along with pieces for national magazines. I could also collect these altogether and self-publish anthologies and travel books detailing my misadventures. I could also publish audio interviews, photos, videos, etc via my site and/or elsewhere.
I can almost see this hair-brained scheme working, but the biggest problem is not having a reliable source of income. Right now, I’m currently doing fairly well running my Google Ads - but it’s nowhere near enough to sustain full-time adventuring, gas, food & other expenses. I have two possible ideas on how to get over the hump as far as money goes though. And bear in mind that right now this is purely a fantasy, and I’m just sort of imagining out loud here. Anyway, I wonder if I could find grant money which would somehow cover part of the costs of this. I’m thinking something pertaining to folklore studies, Americana, possibly even interfaith religious dialogue, if I play my cards right. And then, what if I could find a corporate sponsor for the whole thing? I’d be more than happy to travel around in a free R/V with ads painted on the sides of it. I mean, who cares if it meant that I’d be able to live the dream, so to speak.
Even with all that though, it seems like it’d be pretty difficult to pull off. I think I’d still need a solid base of money to play around with. Which leads me back to getting a full-time job and just sucking it up for a few years. In any event, I just thought I’d share my latest improbable fantasy. If you’d like to share your dream job, I’d like to hear it. Or, if you have ideas and suggestions on how to make my fantasy less improbable, I’d also love to really have a way to make this a reality.
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22 Comments
That sounds sweet! That’s my new dream job.
Hey! No fair! Get your own dream job!
it becomes a matter of how long you can hold the dream in your mind`s eye while doing whatever it takes to keep yourself in position to take advantage of opportunity when it appears.
i just re-read the last paragraph and i realise that it encapsulates all the frustrations that i`ve experienced since i first realised that i had a chance to play pro soccer.
each breath we take and step we take moves us closer to the next thing. all the planning and manipulation we undertake in our macciavellian mode does nothing to sway us from that inevitability. i`ve just learned to enjoy the ride it`s self a little more as i`ve gotten older (according to the calendar) with that sense of optimism that says that i will become the media superster that i dream about becoming.
to reiterate, here are the rules of enjoying the ride;
1. smile.
2. look directly at others, expecting a smile in return.
3. feel free to scream fuck once in a while, just so the gods don`t get complacent.
4. bark at the moon (optional.)
5. when planning a career, make up a field of expertise, so that you can`t be challenged as incorrect or lack a sufficient depth of knowledge. (i heard that as a criticism today.)
6. make sure that you are getting enough oxygen to your brain on a regular basis.
7. do not jog. run. jogging is for pussies.
8. make your own #8.
I head that Harvard’s Divinity School has some project where they are trying to catalogue all the religious instituitions in the country, and they need people to take pictures and interview people at churches in kind of remote places. I believe there is some grant money issued to cover part of the expenses, and it sounds like it might be something you could use for your site as well.
No freakin way! Can you find me more info on that??
That sounds like a fantabulous dream-job. Myself? I’d love nothing more than to travel the English countryside and play piano in taverns for food and possibly a few pounds here and there for travel expenses and lodging. Fairly simple and feasible dream, I suppose, but I’m only a good pianist at the moment and I can only play by ear, so it just isn’t practical at the moment.
Oh, and composing simple melodies and tunes for videogames (particularly RPG’s) would be pretty amazing too.
Seriously, while you’re still young, no matter how you’re able to do it, travel. I’ve done a fair amount of it, and consider it among the best investments to self development I’ve ever made. Even more than seeing what’s cool out there, seeing what’s horrible has done more to making me appreciate the good in a town than most anything else.
Tim, you could start here:
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/index.html
Harvard has some interesting and innovative programs. Harvard is typically well funded to do just about anything/everything (of course with the usual Crimson baggage). However, the div school is one of the poorer of the schools (competing with the ed school for last place). Speaking of which, the ed school (or other education programs) might be a good place for you to look, if you can package your interests in the right way (i.e. work the epistemological angle, “how do we know what we know?”). You would definitely be an “interesting” enough candidate to get noticed.
In general, a phd program would give you (barely) enough funding to explore your research interests for awhile, plus some extra resources. But you’ll have to put up with 2-3 years of coursework first.
Maybe you could get a cable television channel like the Discovery Channel to sponsor your wanderings. You could do a weekly documentary show on the strange and ususual along with a big dose of conspiracy theory. You could be like an information age Kane from Kung Fu. In all seriousness, a television show that carries some of the information that you have on your website would be great and from the perspective of a television network it would be great beacuse it would be very inexpensive (by TV standards) to produce.
A friend of mine from the world of improvisational comedy works for the “Wierd” Company–they started out with a zine called Wierd New Jersey about ghosts and wierd ass stories from around New Jersey and now have put out “Wierd” books on a bevy of different states. He spent a year writing the “Wierd New York” book, which has just come out. I wonder if they have any job opportunities you might be able to undertake. Or, at the very least, it’s a good model for your idea and it might be worth your while to correspond with him, pick his brain a little bit, to help you clarify your new Pop Occulture On the Road idea more and turn it into actuality. Let me gno if you’d be interested in getting in touch with him.
4 things to get to your dream job:
-LOTS of Patience and Persistence
-Doing things that you can do already e.g.:hosting Podcast Interviews with interesting occultists
-write a book in a month or two intensive-helps to congeal your aims faster after the book is written
-Always ask yourself these questions:
“What would I like to have that I don’t currently have?”
“If I had that what would that give me that I don’t have?”
dude, you just need to cast a spell– burn a green candle or two, summon a magickal servitor, you know. duh.
heh, seriously, tho’, i used to really want to do this project where i’d basically drive around collecting peoples’ stories. my idea was to have a set-up where i’d basically let people tell whatever kind of story they wanted, and archive it all, so that if aliens ever came to earth after we went extinct, there’d be this amazing archive of oral history. it was going ton be called the ‘lost horizon’ project, after the book of that title, in which a group of monks in tibet create a sanctuary for all of human knowledge so that when civilization collapsed, our music & literature & philosophy wouldn’t.
so, i got some people together and actually had a couple of meetings about this, but the people with whom i was involved essentially decided it would be a logistical nightmare and it fizzled out. when that happened, i gave up on the idea, ’cause i figured if my friends weren’t into it, it probably wouldn’t get enough support in general.
but now, of course, someone is doing just that:
http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/storyprojectarchives.html
so that’s my advice: don’t listen to your stupid friends who tell you how untenable your ingenious idea is.
so that’s my advice: don’t listen to your stupid friends who tell you how untenable your ingenious idea is.
Word!!! Every time I’ve had a good idea on what to do with my life, I couldn’t keep it to myself. Then it got shot down.
Ha, I was just thinking this morning about what I could do to earn money and not have to rely on working full time on someone else’s payroll. Ideally I’d like to get paid to do creative things. I decided I should brainstorm a whole list of ideas of things I could do for money; maybe no one thing would be enough to sustain me, but a whole bunch of little things could (e.g., writing, teaching violin lessons, maybe getting paid for an Internet radio show?, translating, assembling furniture, etc. etc. etc.)
If only it were that simple. I right now only have 1 year of undergraduate under my belt - and from an art school no less. Shit, I gained more college credit in highschool doing AP coursework.
Hebrides, yeah I’ve seen those Weird New Jersey Books. I would like to get in contact with this person. Great reference. They were in the back of my mind as well - along with Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods.
Well my problem is that people are telling me to do it, but I don’t know how.
i can remember this really wierd day, back in high school, where we all filed into a room with a career councellor and she interviewed us one by one. she asked me what i wanted to be and, inside i thought, i was hoping you could tell me, being the career councellor and all. but sadly, they expected me to have the answers. i guess we just have to find out for ourselves. so much for high school.
starting to see why ken wilber`s image is the most important thing he`s got?
it’s all good, but i like the tv angle. here’s my .02: any occult tv i’ve seen is based either on evoking hysterical fear in contestants (fear, scariest places on earth), or using technology and materialist skepticism to “prove” something (ghost hunters). but it’s all the same tired “haunted house” shit, framed as “fear vs rationality.” fuck all that.
i want an open-ended occult show that will look at anything, and be truly open-minded about it. i want to see a tool interview, “black magic babies”, and some teenagers showing off their local spook spot in the same show. i want irrationality and enthusiasm (that’s why i’m here). i want jung, vallee, keel, fort, pkd, the old “occult potluck”.
fuck, why isn’t there a jung/vallee show already? that’d be nuts cos it’d have ufos and ghosts but using jungian psychology as the frame. like, are we being punk’d by god? or is it the djinn? or valis?
“is it real?”
“well that’s really not the point. what’s the story?”
“are you serious? i can’t tell.”
“good.”
sort of like “morgan spurlock meets the mothman”
you’re an intellectual, but you’re also a hard-assed occult investigator. you talk to the people, you get your hands dirty, eat the cookies, spend the night to see for yourself, and cuss a lot.
money in the bank, dude. you just need to find your “bank” and punk em. hell, try mtv, i reckon they’ll have another go if you brand it right. people are hanging for it.
please mtv, pimp my ghost!
(in the absence of money, just do it anyway. the “self-made man” story always sells. all you need is a camcorder and a journal, and maybe a van and a laptop if you want to be all fancy about it. it’ll work out. back yourself.)
Carlos, I think you’re totally right on. The story is all there based on how im already approaching it, and the niche that this would be satisfying is totally different from how any tv shows, etc cover this stuff right now. I’m going to seriously figure out how to pitch this idea somewhere. But in the meantime, I’m simply going to start doing it. The “Messages from Beyond” blog addition will be my first step in showing that there is a big interest, and proving to the powers that be that i have a sufficient “platform” to stand on.
Heh, more proof that higher education only ruins great minds! I was under the impression that you had a Bachelor’s, but whatever… I love your site and read it often.
The TV thing would be awesome if you can get hooked up. But if not you could definitely get yourself into academia if you wanted (i.e. if you could tolerate the BS). I’m not necessarily advocating it unless you need it before people will listen to you, but I’m encouraging you if you decide that it’s something you want/need.
Oh, and while I’m on the subject, my fantasy motorhome will also have a nice Bookhouse Boys logo on the back
http://www.cenedra.com/twinpeaks/Episode19/pic40.jpg
I’m gonna try to re-create this in Illustrator in the next couple days.
I think an alt publishing house like Disinfo or Feral house would be wise to sponsor you. Your work is right up their alley.
Oh cool, I didn’t even know about Feral House. Thanks!
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