Schmooze
My phone and email accounts have never been as busy the past year as they have been this month.

Ben, a member of my production team calls me. I’ve learned to just pick up the call instead of sending it to voicemail. Better to get it over and done with. Ben wants me to get the gang to come to some bowling fundraiser his church group is having. I tell him to just send a reminder, and if people can’t come, they can’t come. I can feel Ben having a hissy fit on the other end of the line. He spent the last month working as a script supervisor for our last film, the least some people could come out to his church fundraiser at a bowling alley. But it’s all about the filmmaking, I tell him. Give us a heads up when there’s a project coming up, maybe someone will call you. I hang up and don’t expect to talk with Ben anytime soon.

Anybody want to make a rump-shaker video? Sean calls me about a last minute project that happens to be a paying job. You see, it’s this music video with a song entitled, “Facebook Pro” and this guy decides to invite all his facebook friends to his home after his parent’s leave town. So original. I tell him to send the song to me. I send the email out with dollar signs and few of our group decide to work on the video. Me? I just want to be able to defend my fucking dissertation in January. I couldn’t give a shit.
So there’s a new Associate Dean in my department. Every two years now, there’s been a new Dean of the English department. The new dean happens to be a faculty member I’ve always been collegial with, so I shoot her an email about a quick meeting before the semester and we arrange for lunchtime on Friday. I’ll listen to her talk about the craziness since she’s been in charge and I’ll offer to help train the new department intern. I don’t want any turbulence for the next two years. The last thing I need at this time is a difficult supervisor. I have to make an effort beyond the morning coffee hallway greetings because I want to keep liking my job.

If I want to keep the things I love, I have to do things I hate. And by “things I hate” I mean always factoring in the “quid pro pro” in this new burgeoning network of facile, air-kissy, facebook relationship I’ve been thrown into since I’ve forged ahead in my quest to be a filmmaker. But I’ve noticed that this new world has seeped a bit into the other neatly categorized file folders of my life.

I send a self-deprecating email to my dissertation chair about how much vodka I had to drink just to produce the draft of the latest chapter. I’m juggling German philosophers in my project because that’s what my chair likes. I make sure my scholarly writing sprinkles words like “Erlebnis” and “Dasien” and “Bildung” in my bowl scholarly discourse so he will eat it and give me my birthright. If I can just see the finish line in sight, I can put up with it all.

And so, I have to learn schmoozing for the next few months. I have to somehow find a way to use what banal personality I have as a commodity in the bartering of human personality and desire. I’m becoming a better actress. A better director? No so much.