Haven’t Had The Mental Energy To Write

It’s been a few weeks since I last made an entry.   I can’t seem to gather my thoughts.   I got my friends SUV and all went well switching ownership.  With safety check,  new licence plates, ownership tranfer, and taxes  (they tax on the value of the vehicle) it cost me $747.00.   Not bad for a new to me vehicle!!!     I’ve also been really busy with teaching and getting this pit bull tv job organized.   We were on set one day last week from 7:30pm until 4:30am!    The tv job is stressful.  They keep changing their minds about things.

Money has been a little more abundant recently too.  This past couple of months I haven’t had the same panic about making ends meet.   I’m starting to stress out a little now though because the bank balance is going down and no new money is coming in right now. 

Our trauma group just ended and my private sessions are week on / week off right now as Sean has vacation days.   It’s going to be a rough month without consistent therapy.   Keeping it together for more than 7 days at a time.

 

July 1^st/2021

And we are still in a pandemic.   Who thought it would last this long?   I’m feeling really out of sorts tonight.   Things have been going well lately.   Money was good.  Not short.  Catching up on bills.  Working on 2 film projects, as well as teaching.   The pit bull job is challenging.  They keep changing things.  And they don’t seem to car too much for the welfare of the dog  (based on what they keep asking us for).  It’s a very violent show.  I was included in two zoom production meetings yesterday and today, and they’ve triggered this funk I’m feeling tonight.    They are so arrogant and dismissive.   And they are pushing the envelope with what we will and will not allow the dog to do.   Just dealing with them has triggered all my core belief gremlins.  Everything is raw and right at the surface.   I feel incompetent.  Insecure.  And while I was feeding the dogs tonight a feeling of  wanting to end it all swept over me.   A feeling of ‘there’s nothing in this life for me’.   It’s too late now for me to know happiness or love.   I look around me and my house is a disaster.   Is this my life?   No one to share it with.  Never to be loved.  Working and not making enough money to survive.   Never good enough.  Always something goes wrong  (new car is now making weird sounds).   Good things happen and are wiped out by the bad.   The bad outweighs the good.   I guess it was too much to expect the good to last.   It’s like I don’t deserve to be happy, so when happiness is within reach, the world finds a way to sabotage it.

 

And  The Funk Continues ……..

I'm still in the same funk today as I was feeling yesterday.   I think I'm tired and overextended.  Both of these film jobs keep coming back and asking for things we can't give them.  For example, can all the dogs be barking and going crazy lunging at animal control officers as they try to take them out of crates..  They didn't ask us for our background dogs to be aggressive, so the dogs we brought we're just normal dogs who may or may not bark in their crates.  But now for the next scenes they want them barking and aggressing and these dogs don't do that.   So now I have to look at continuity and whether or not we can sub out a couple of dogs and bring in a couple that can be cued to lunge at their owners who are playing the animal control officers.   I'm not really confident that this can be done and unfortunately production doesn't seem to have a good grasp on what's possible.  The other dog job wants a friendly farm dog who goes psycho towards a person that he believes is a bad person.   We've got our contender dog barking on cue and we've got him tugging on a chair because the script says the lady picks up a chair and there's a push and pull between dog and person.   They like this dog but they keep asking over and over again can he be more vicious and of course the answer is no, this is who he is.   This is the barking that he does and how he does it,  and this is how he's doing the tugging of the chair.   Now today they've called and said can he be acting like he's trying to go through the chair to get to the person behind it.   They asked if he was trained to the sleeve .. the bite works sleeve… so that a person could be standing behind the chair with the sleeve and he would go crazy barking at the sleeve.   But he is not a bite work trained dog so once again the answer is no, he will not aggress towards the sleeve.. At best we can get him too lunge forward towards a ball or a tug rope that is being held behind the chair .   Whether or not that will look aggressive enough I don't know.  The guy said today that they like this dog and that's why they keep coming back and forth with us about him,  but they do have other options that they are considering if this dog can't pull off the the attacking scenes.   I felt sort of under attack like being given an ultimatum which maybe I was being given..   But there's no point in threatening me with giving the job to someone else or making me feel pressure to produce what I can’t.  We’ve shown them what the dog can do and I feel that now we are in a take it or leave it situation.   We cannot make the dog look vicious because he's not an aggressive dog.   This job almost needs two dogs one dog to play the friendly easygoing family dog that’s safe to be around all cast and crew, and a second dog that is aggression trained to do all the  lunging biting scary looking stuff.    But most dogs trained for bite work and aggression work are not breeds that also read as the friendly family dog.  It's the demand for the aggression and the aggressive behavior that is what's making both of these jobs very demanding.   The fellow today made a comment about if the dog doesn’t do what they want, it makes him look bad.   Ya dude … me too!   That’s why I won’t promise something that can’t be done.   It feels like coercion when people give ultimatums and make comments about me making them look bad.   I’m feeling pressured to come up with a miracle of some kind.  I feel like I’m not being listened to.   I say this is what we can do and they want more, and what they want is unrealistic given the time constraints to train specifics and ….. whenever training a new behaviour we absolutely cannot ‘guarantee’ it’s reliability.   Until it’s trained and proofed we can’t make any promises.

I feel really spent.   I just feel like crying.