The Wandering Monkey

Today I am going to work at a new job, potentially. It's a part time
sales position for a company with which I have been loosely associated
for some time. It's an expat-oriented web portal for the city of
Shanghai, and they have several corresponding businesses. They also do
event planning, custom logo printing (on shirts and such), and of course
sell advertising space on their website.
I feel a little apprehensive but I'm going to get my head together. I'm
going to have a nice lunch, and a nice coffee, and go into work.
Incidentally, swing dancing is actually taking off rather well right
now. We have a crisis of confidence from our Sunday venue, which could
potentially derail our efforts, however. We're finally getting 40-60
people per night, but based on the historical bad performance the venue
management has decided to cancel swing and go to a salsa night, which
most everyone believes will be a failure. They already have salsa at
that venue Wed, Thur, Fri, and Sat. No one's going to want to go again
on another day. Plus, there is a competitor holding a very successful
salsa event just one block away on that very night!
I am hoping we keep the venue, and I am appealing to the management to
be reasonable. We have one more night scheduled there, which is next
Sunday, after which we don't have another option to go yet. Even if we
found another place, we'd lose 50% of our people almost immediately
since there is a lot of 'word of mouth' publicity about our swing night.
So, I'm ready to go now. Wish me luck.
_j

Today and for the last few days I have been hanging out with a friend of
mine from America. I have not seen him in almost 10 years, when we
worked together in Los Angeles as a computer game company out there. He
came in town to check out a business opportunity, but we've had a chance
to hang out all day today. Plus, he also came to the swing dancing
class Sunday night.

Today we spent the day going about Shanghai and seeing the miscellaneous
sights and sounds. Had dinner with my girlfriend, then off back to
home. I talked to him about my life, and what I've been up to, teaching
swing dancing in Shanghai. (This last month has gone pretty well,
thanks to a few lucky breaks and some new marketing ideas I've come up
with. So, I keep dancing for one more month then.)

Once the day of seeing the sights was over, my friend and I headed back
home and I showed him the video of the movie I was in, The White
Countess. He'd never heard of it, as most people have not. But it was
a cool thing to see, a quality production with big stars in which you
appear. Then I showed him the TV show which featured me in a 30 minute
special, in which I do the Peking Opera dance. He was impressed by it.

I told him that at the time of making all these things, I was fully
feeling like I would be pursuing a career in the entertainment
industry. My initial successes came quite fast, and though it was not
easy, I pulled it off in a combination of acceptable skill and good,
intelligent planning. But all of the entertainment projects after this
became much harder to arrange, and much less satisfying, and eventually
I lost interest and faith in the idea. I told my friend that there was
a time I felt my 'mojo' was simply pulsing, and I was filled with energy
and enthusiasm. That's been very tempered now. I've gone through
periods where I wanted to quit the whole project, too, but I didn't.

Right now I am relatively energetic and enthusiastic about the swing
project. I'm not doing any other distracting projects; I'm just working
on swing. And I've recently had a marketing idea which is giving me a
good way to reach new students of the right demographic. I'm training a
new assistant instructor, and I'm able to keep active in several events
per week now.

I've found a bit of balance, I'd say. Not in the boundless optimism
(and accompanying poor decision making) nor the boundless pessimism, but
the 'right' perception. I'm trying to find just the right approach to
the problems, and address the most important and difficult items facing
us. A few more months I'll be able to keep doing this full-time. About
180 days, give or take. So I'm going to try to make them count.

Will keep updated,
-J