Not knowing

Except for one very long eighteen month patch, I've worked since I was in school. I've done an awful lot of things in the last decade or so, and yet there's one question that always stumps me.

What do you do?

See it used to be really easy when I started off. I worked in MacDonalds. Simple. Then things got more complicated. I left to study law. One would think then I was just a student, but no, I was dabbling with the internet. I was working on staff on a web community and doing fairly well thank you. I was interviewing people, and writing and moderating the community. It brought nothing in the way of money but it was still a lot of work, and it did eventually bring me actual work. It started me off doing web design. It also kind of allowed me to branch out and start reviewing for a tech magazine. Yep, I was actually a writer. Sadly, I didn't have the foresight to use my own name. The problem became that I ended up just saying IT is what I did. Anything more just became a long winded conversation.

IT has been in the background now for quite a while. If ever I know that in a few months I'm gonna need some money I'll put the feelers out for work. That said since I started studying Drama and Writing, I've not really done all that much work as an IT tech. So I wouldn't call myself an IT guy any more. That just doesn't feel like my job.

Since I have discovered acting and theatre as something I loved doing, it's become even more difficult for me to tell people what my job actually is. I suppose that really it's because I really no longer have one. Sure, I do take on the odd former client or two as an IT consultant, but for the most part that's quite rare. During the summer of course, I was an actor. Seriously, for twelve weeks I was acting almost everyday. Of course it may have looked like three grown people playing and joking around with puppets, but it was work. It was. Honestly! It was work!

I don't feel like I can say that now though. The last paid acting job I had was, well it was way too long ago now. So long in fact I'm getting ansty over the lack of acting I've done. So, as you can see, I can't exactly call myself an actor. It's not really true. I spend most of my time not acting.

Maybe, just maybe this entire post is convincing me that I just ought to take the Dave Lister approach to the question 'Occupation?' and answer 'Bum'.