The Clock’s Move Freely
Let it first be said that I like this island. I like it a lot. I like my job, I like the people I work for/with and I certainly like the lifestyle. That should be fairly obvious given that I was meant to be here one week and the six month marker is now speeding toward me. Relentlessly. For some time now I’ve been grappling with whether or not I should stay longer or get back to traveling. At present the people I work for have offered to train me up as a dive master as well as put me through the extensive underwater photography course we’re launching—each of which usually cost about $900—for free and there are a number of potentially very very good things on the horizon for the company. There are articles on us and what my boss is doing coming out in a handful of diving magazines, one of which (Fathom) he shot the cover photo for. My boss has also been invited to Hawaii to help film a 3D IMAX film about the islands and there are whispers of a new contact in Zimbabwe who could help us sort out filming on the African Savannah. There are documentaries and television pilots scheduled to be shot in the coming months. Indeed it seems I may have stumbled into something pretty great, but if all this sounds a little too good to be true… that’s because it probably is.
The key word in that last paragraph was “potentially.” There are more “if”s, “but”s, “when”s and “maybe”s going on behind those descriptions to keep me from holding out any real hope of it actually going down, much less my being involved in it. I don’t think my luck stretches quite that far. Regardless I think I’d like to stick around a bit longer to see where things go. For the moment my job still consists of plugging away at our daily video work, but even that is not so simple. I work on commission here, meaning I get paid depending on how many dvds of my filming that I sell. I was out of the water for about a week with a cold that made diving impossible (equalization issues) and today on my first day back I nearly broke my foot on the side of a boat knocking me out of the water for yet another few days.
When I check my account balance I don’t look at it in terms of what I can buy or even cash really. I look at it like a clock; a countdown to uncertainty slowly ticking away. Sometimes I have a good week and it stops ticking entirely… sometimes, as now, it ticks faster. So to help stave off this temporal leak I’ve been thinking of other things I could do on the island and indeed I think there is a market for my particular skill set in graphic design and illustration. Of course there is a hitch. My boss does a lot of graphic design work for a wide variety of shops and people on the island. Any of the graphic work that comes into the shop goes directly to him; its “his thing” as it were. And as long as he can handle the load I won’t get any work in that area from within the company even though—to be uncharacteristically bold—I’m better at it. Going into direct competition with the guy I work for and expecting to retain a job isn’t the silliest idea I’ve had (when I was 5 I tried turning a robe into an invisibility cloak by tying a D battery to the waist strap), but it’s close. My hands are tied. The clock’s move freely.
I haven’t been this torn in a long while and as time and money grow shorter I grow more anxious over my indecision. I feel like good things could happen for me here eventually, but how far away “eventually” is, I have no idea. I could travel on and come back later, but there is no guarantee that I will find more work in the interim to save up the money to do so as I would like. A tricky situation, this. Were it a movie I would be expecting a deus ex machina any minute.
If only.
-Tyler
“Confusion never stops closing walls and ticking clocks”