Unambitious

Here and LA, there's always the running gag that your waiter, your barista, your genius bar genius, your whoever, is an aspiring actor. Okay, well that part is pretty much true. The joke is that they'll try and slip you their headshot and resume with the menu or the screenplay they're working on with your latte. Know someone? Then they'd like to know you.

On the one hand, it's a simple thing called networking. You're in a show and one of your castmates has an agent? Why shouldn't you be trying to get a meeting with them? Isn't that just your own wasted opportunity if you serve Max Weinberg his lunch and don't let it be known that his quirky, hilarious server also has three years of classes with the Groundlings?

Through my job as Muppet sales monkey for FAO Schwarz, I've been on tv and in The New York Times more than for my acting. Any time CBS or NBC or NY1 or other groupings of letters come in to shoot some promo, I could be trying to chat with the crews coming in, getting to know them, making friends...networking. A gal I know may be able to join SAG soon through her gig as a background regular on Gossip Girl, which she got after befriending a receptionist at the casting office. I don't know how it works.

That's the thing, though, I'm not too sure I want to know how it works. I HATE networking. I hate the idea of it. I hate the idea of pushing myself into anyone's face. I hate the idea of being the retail jerk who wants everyone to know she really wants to be doing something else. Angling for more screen opportunity at work would not only just feel pathetic and obnoxious, it would only serve to prove two other points: not only am I apparently not getting any acting work, I'm also incapable of doing my day job wholeheartedly! I'd be none of the things I claim or want to be!

This is one of the things that bothered me most about LA, not a single person will even talk to you unless you seem like you can do something for them. It's less blatantly shallow here, but still I can't help but feel that being great isn't going to get me anywhere if I trust other people to figure out for themselves that I'm great. I can't just be great, suddenly I have to tell everyone that I'm great? Doesn't that just tell everyone that I have massive ego problems and self-delusions of grandeur, and that I am to be avoided at all costs, completely unrelated to whatever talent I may possess? I'm Chinese, goddammit, I don't tell people I'm great even if I secretly think I'm the bee's knees. This goes against the very nature of my being. But then, in the American capitalist Oprah spirit of things, I can't expect anything worth having to just be handed to me. How do I expect to get anything I may deserve in life if I'm not prepared to perform the simple task of asking for it?