New Podcast, Who Dis? - a podcast by Jai//Em

Quick Notes and Links:

Check in: I miss streaming. A lot. Shout out to silver, jokes, devilspidey, alex, mafia, octavia, rafie, nicole, chara, mandy, artie, chocoboninja/ninjahappenings — everybody who participated. You all make me so happy.

But, podcasting is something I’ve really wanted to jump into. Michael Porter is an academic and business strategist who said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” I am reading a book about him called, Understanding Michael Porter, The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy. It goes into detail about businesses and how they can strategize their endeavors. In my case, streaming on Twitch was something I needed to stop doing (for now, not forever) so that I can focus on developing the other parts of Creative4evr that have priority.

Main Show: An About Me - Giving you some insight into who I am, what my background in creativity is. My hope is that you can connect with something I share about myself and that we can start to get to know one another. I would love to hear about your artsy younger self, what you have been doing to stay creative over the years when you’re not at work. Anything you want to tell me. Send an email to hello@creativ4evr.com, or reach out Twitter or Insta @Creative4evr.

Don’t forget to be creative this week. Even if you just think about it. Later.

Full Show Notes:

Hey, hi and hello! Welcome to Creative4evr. The podcast dedicated to keeping you forever inspired, forever motivated, forever creative, and forever YOU.  I am your host, Janet, a.k.a. Jai//Em, a.k.a. the voice inside your head, a.k.a. your biggest fan, and together we’re going to get some creative shit done.

First up! A quick check-in.

So the check in this week is that I miss streaming. A lot. So a little about that… I started live streaming on Twitch, which is a platform that allows people to hook their computers, or cameras, or mics up to the Twitch website in order to live broadcast whatever they are doing. I started doing this over a year ago. There is a section that allows anyone watching to send text messages that everyone can see, and the streamer can respond to those messages in real time. It’s fucking awesome. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you won’t ever be on, or near Twitch so don’t even worry about it. But I really enjoy doing it. People use the site to broadcast video games as they play them, and right now the Just Chatting section is blowing up, meaning that people are signing on and just talking to whoever shows up in chat about whatever they want.

I used Twitch to talk about being creative— shocker! I would live stream my writing and share art. I started out live editing my book, then started working on the fantasy book I am currently writing, and we always had sharing time where I read other peoples stories. So they would send to me and I’d pull it up for everyone to see. I’d read it out loud, then give a little feedback. It was awesome because it allowed me to read what other people were developing and it gave the writer a chance to hear their work out loud, to get feedback from me or other people in chat. Honestly it’s one of the coolest creative things I’ve ever been a part of. It’s everything I believe in— meeting other creatives, building relationships with them, sharing work and ideas, motivating each other, laughing and listening to music, hanging out with people that get your jokes. I love it so much and have been lucky enough to have a core group of people that show up. Shout out to silver, jokes, devilspidey, alex, mafia, octavia, rafie, nicole, chara, mandy, artie, chocoboninja/ninjahappenings — everybody who participated. You all make me so happy and I miss streaming so much.

But, podcasting is something I’ve really wanted to jump into, something I think I can get good at, and last year I struggled to get it going because I had too many creative things on my plate at once. Michael Porter is an academic and business strategist who said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” I am reading a book about him called, Understanding Michael Porter, The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy. It goes into detail about businesses and how they can strategize their endeavors. In this case, streaming on Twitch was something I needed to stop doing (for now, not forever) so that I can focus on developing the other parts of Creative4evr that have priority. As much as I love streaming, it was taking me away from writing. 1) It was changing how I write and making me less productive in that area, and 2) Streaming is time consuming. You do it for hours at a time— you don’t stream for 15 minutes, that’s not how it works. Also you can’t do anything else while you stream, and you have to do it in specific places. You need a strong internet connection, and a computer or device that can handle it. You might have a mic setup or lights, etc. so that the production value is good. That means you need to be in a specific space with dedicated internet.

Now, everything else I want to do creatively, can be done anywhere I have a device. I can write on the train with my phone, or on the couch or at a coffee shop. Even podcasting, I could stop recording right now if I wanted to, and do something else. It’s not so simple with streaming. It’s live, you can’t just walk out of the room and eat a sandwich for 10 minutes and then come back. So yeah, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” and right now streaming is that thing. I know it’s the right choice, I know it’s not forever, I know that soon I will be able to do it again a couple times a month, but I’m sad about it. I miss that connection with the people that showed up. I miss not knowing what we are going to talk about that day. I miss going on tangents about music or flutes or whatever nonsense we got up to.

So yeah, because I miss streaming, I thought the show today could be an About Me. I want to share a little bit about myself so that we can start to form some creative relationships here with the podcast. So let’s do that. Hope you enjoy!

Main Show:

Alright, Today we are going to do an About Me. I wanted to do a little sharing, give you some insight into who I am, what my background in creativity is. My hope is that you can connect with something I share about myself and that we can start to get to know one another.

So, I was the kid that wrote in my journal, “To sing and dance forever…” I was also the kid that often scrawled the letters “NT,” across the pages of my journal. It stood for “no time,” because I was so busy and impatient at 11-years-old, that I didn’t think I had time to write out the actual words NO TIME. I was the kid that use to pretend to have an office job, something I regret to this day because it was accidental affirmation. But I loved it! It felt like such a grown up and serious thing to do, and I was a very serious child, with NT.

I was in piano, then quit, dance classes, then quit, pottery classes, quit. Basketball, volleyball, softball…I finally quit softball. Choir, drama club, photography and I did a brief stint a class called “Video,” where we basically made stop-motion claymation videos. I was the kid that knew she could be a lawyer, but preferred to be an actor playing a lawyer on TV. I never thought about next steps as a kid and teenager. My long-game didn’t exist, it never occurred to me WHY good grades were needed until I was looking to go to college and then I was like, well shit, I could have done better. And I applied to college thinking more about where I wanted to go once I left Texas rather than what place would be best for a career path. I was a junior when I home and told my mother I wanted to go to NYU to be an actor. My school had done a college fair and showed us a video in class about the school. I remember thinking, Hey that’s where Theo Huxtable went to school. I wanna go to New York! I’ll be an actor.

I was very lucky that I had people in my life that were like, Uh, then you need to prepare for that! Immediately the drama teacher had me looking for a monologue to work on for my audition. And my mother never sat me down and said, Why on earth would you spring this on us, now! We should have been financially prepping for this when you were a freshman! All this to say I was a very naive kid who always believed in magic. I thought shit just happened because you wanted it to. I was sheltered, I was privileged. And side note, we should all remember that privilege isn’t just about skin color, gender and money. It’s also about having choices. I did not grow up wealthy, but I had constant access to choices. The people in my life made sure of that, and that is privilege.

Alright, this college thing. My drama teacher and I decided on a piece from Christopher Durang’s play called Laughing Wild. It was a monologue where I played a woman who loses her shit in a grocery store over a can tuna fish. It was a genius choice because I had no range as an actor. Anything vulnerable and quiet I couldn’t do. I remember practicing this monologue all the time the summer before my senior year. I worked at a pizza place and my boss was a former New Yorker. He’d been giving me tips about New York the whole summer. That I should keep up with the flow of foot traffic on the street, because people walked fast. How to hail a cab, how to keep from getting mugged. All the things, and one day he was like, let’s see this monologue. And I was like, Um, no. And he countered, How are you gonna be an actor if you can’t just do it right now on the spot? I couldn’t argue with that so I did it. I guess he enjoyed it, I dunno. I just remember doing a monologue in the pizza show between customers. I also remember performing it for my mom at home, and I remember her just looking at me like, What in the hell is this?

I don’t know that she loved it, but she flew with me up to NY just before Christmas during my senior year. I’m sitting outside the black box theater waiting to go in and I hear through the door that the kid in front of me is doing the same goddamn monologue. In my head I’m like, Oh well, at least I got to come to NY. This is over. But I went in there, scream shouted my monologue, I am sure I looked crazy and deranged because I felt crazy and deranged, and then I sat down for the interview. God only knows what I said, but whatever it was, they accepted me Early Decision to Tisch. I got the letter 2 weeks later, right after Christmas, 3 months into my senior year of high school. Talk about senioritis. You couldn’t get me to focus on anything but my exit from Texas. I quit softball that year, I smoked pot for the first time that year, I am sure I was a pain in the ass.

Once I got to college….okay. I was in the closet half the time, out of the closet have the time, depressed the entire time. Doubting every single instinct I had. I suffered from big fish, little pond to little fish, big pond. I was there to be an actor, but I minored in Computer Science. I had to drop that minor when I failed Calculus. I changed my focus at Tisch to a director, then I was gonna be a playwright. I also drank like a fish. Big or small, whatever size the pond was, I drank a lot. And I was also having the time of my life somehow. I dunno. I was wild. 

My professional career as a creative: I moved to Los Angeles the second I graduated. I was 21. I can’t give you the list of every single place I worked, because we don’t have time, but the highlights are: I went from working at Ikea and Virgin Mega Store to working at a production company that distributed soft-core porn, to a major film studio where I was the assistant to a producer on 2 films, all before I was 25-years-old. I spent my late twenties temping at studios and production companies before working at another major studio on the marketing side. And after I came back to NY in 2015 I worked for a bit at Tisch/NYU, which was kinda wild and full-circle because that is where I had the “depressed time of my life” as a student. And after year of that then I moved back to entertainment, working in TV for a bit, and now I’m in tech, which is funny because I failed Calculus and dropped my Comp Sci minor. I have always written in my spare time, and I have one long ago published poem, 2 plays I do not like anymore, and a completed YA novel that I am trying to decide what I want to do with. Right now I don’t like it so much. And I am not saying it’s not a good book, I think it’s good, I just don’t like it. It’s like a person to me and I am having a fight with my book.

My career has been interesting, and terrible, and weird, and boring, and challenging, and great. All the things that happen when you care about what you do. I have been very lucky so far, and my goals moving forward are to do the creative things that scare me. This podcast is one of them, streaming on Twitch was one of them. I really do wanna publish something, I just gotta decide what that’s gonna be. I’ve got big, big ideas about Creative4evr and what I can do with it as a brand. I am very excited to challenge myself. With 2020 being the start of a new decade I think it’s the perfect time to make this shit happen for myself.

Now, there will be opportunities for me to chat about some of the things I learned while in different creative spaces. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate on something, let me know, I am happy to do so if I can. I’m not gonna do any shit-talking or gossip, that’s not the tone of this show, although I will do an episode about working at that company that was distributing soft-core porn DVDs, because there are some valuable life lessons in that story about job hunting.

So yeah, now you have very basic info about me and my background. I’m not famous, I’m not a published author yet, I’m not a household name. I’ve done a variety of creative things, worked in prestigious offices with fancy people, and have been able to dip my toe into more creative spaces than most. But at the end of the day, I am like the majority of creative people out there in the world. I work a day job, and do my artist thing on the side…hard. And I do this because it suits me. I’m obsessed with creativity. It keeps me getting up in the morning. It has always made me happy, it’s who I am.

So I hope this can be our starting off point for getting to know each other as creatives, and I would love to hear from you, hear about your artsy younger self, what you have been doing to stay creative over the years when you’re not at work. Anything you want to tell me. Send an email to hello@creativ4evr.com, or reach out Twitter or Insta @Creative4evr.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again— the secret to being creative, is surround yourself with creative people. So let’s do that, let’s share, let’s go on our creative journeys together. Do this artist thing together. 

Don’t forget to be creative this week. Even if you just think about it. Later.
     

Further episodes of Creative4evr Podcast

Further podcasts by Jai//Em

Website of Jai//Em