Fat Girl Productions

I was pretty upset the other day that I have my MFA and have to ask "Would you like a bag?" several times a day.

I almost said, "Screw this, I'm outta here." But the new iphone is coming out and I want that discount baby. I NEEDS it.

Then two freelance gigs came in and I realized that Apple is nothing more than a paycheck until something seriously better comes along. Now I enjoy work more, because it's a job and not a career.

I'm doing a website or two for a woman I met there and Canaan's mom's friends had me edit a TV pilot for them. The show is based on The Midlife Gals. www.midlifegals.blogspot.com

It's really funny and if it gets picked up, I would certainly have a full time editing gig. That would be nice. So when I hear more, I'll post more.

The honeymoon was awesome. We spent 2 weeks in Belize. You can see photos and read our blog entries from the trip at web.mac.com/brittandjeffroth

Ok, apparently some people DO read this blog.

I'm shocked. All the comments I get for this are viagra related...and not the kind where it's like, "Dude, wanna take some viagra, put on masks and umbros, and stick fight in shoal creek park pretending we're wizards?" That would be an awesome comment.

Thanks for reading.

I guess I don't update this one a lot because I want it to have a more professional feel than something I pop on to write about how much I hate not having a beverage filled all the way to the top of the cup. (They do it in Japan so the drink won't spill and it drove me nuts, 2 years later I'm still finding myself having issues with it.) Anyway, since at least one person was curious here goes:

I moved to Austin and the trip was great. I made it in 12 hours. I was speeding once I hit Texas because it was night and I was on a dirt road and I had to pee. I flew past a cop going 20 over and he pulled me over. When he asked me what the rush was, I said, “For the last 30 minutes I have been debating whether or not to speed or just pee off the side of the road. So far, I had been speeding.” He laughed and said, “Ok, just make a right up here and you can pee wherever you want. Just try not to go so fast okay?” I said I would be safer. I peed into the thick black night off the side of the road and I just couldn’t help thinking about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I lived through it and will always have a special place in my heart for the cops of New Summerfield.

I spent my week in Austin living on an air mattress with no food except peanut butter and beef jerky, because Britt, my fiance, was coming with all of our stuff in a week. I spent most of my time drinking and house shopping with my friend Canaan. But Britt moved in and things settled down.

A few weeks later we got married, on March 22 at Laguna Gloria. I sang two songs and we had a lot of fun. We are now on our honeymoon in Belize. Since I wanted to keep this more on the professional side, you can check out my personal life with Britt at web.mac.com/brittandjeffroth. That has a lot of photos and blog entries from our adventures down here and will definitely be updated more than Fat Girl.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

Today I officially leave Atlanta for Austin. Britt is having lasic eye surgery and I feel bad leaving, but her Mom is here to help her pack the rest of the house so at least someone will be here to take care of her.

I also found out we were approved for our rental house, so we now have a 4 bedroom 2 bathroom place on a cliff in East Austin that overlooks the city.

Things are going well and we're definitely on an up swing right now. I got no complaints.

I only have a few more days left before I leave on Saturday and I'm a little sad to go. I did get a full time transfer to Austin's Barton Creek Store. I start February 9th, but I am moving there a week before that to get the house stuff all settled. Britt and the dogs are coming a few days after me.

To celebrate my last day at Northpoint, a group of my coworkers took me to a drag show at a gay bar. I had way too much to drink which snuck up on me, to the point where the concrete snuck up on me. Ehh, it's just another funny story to tell at my funeral. I believe life is worth living, live it for the story.

Perhaps I'll have a page titled "Stories for my Wake," where I regale you with stories that should never die.

Well, I didn't get the trivia job.

That ok. Over the last couple days I've been thinking about how much I like Apple and how much I would miss it. Yes, I certainly won't miss the assholes that come in and treat you like you're less than a human just because you asked them if you needed help (that happened the other day and I went in the back and flew off the handle...you would have thought I asked the girl to rape and murder her whole family...yes I'm still a little pissed about it). Aside from dealing with stolen credit cards, people who complain that we don't have the iPhone cases they want and the rare customer who comes in "just to see if we have PC software" then is upset that we don't sell it, I generally like what I do. Of course there are people that I wouldn't mind never working with/talking to ever again, but they are one person in the grand scheme of things. And I refuse to let them ruin my total experience. Apple is, by far, the greatest company I have worked for to date. The things I have learned there I will certainly bring with me to other jobs. Except the discount. And it hurts everytime I think about it.

I currently live in Atlanta right now and have been working for Apple since October.

I moved to Atlanta because I thought I would have a job at Radical Axis, an animation studio here that does a lot of the Adult Swim shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They also did Comedy Central's Freakshow, which really built up the studio. '07 came and they put a bunch of people on hiatus in the spring when I moved up here. That made me last in the pecking order.

I waited and waited for them to hire me, kind of stupid I know but I had a bunch of friends that worked there so I thought I had an in. After a few months and a cheesesteak delivery job, I started selling ad space in a new hispanic yellow page book called, Seccion Amarilla. It's a great book but nobody wants to advertise with them because they are new. That lasted about two weeks before I left because it wasn't really what I wanted to do, and they would have let me go if I didn't sell anything soon and I didn't want to be fired from a company my Dad made (Seccion Amarilla L.L.C. an American spin off of the Seccion Amarilla which dominates a lot of central America).

I decided I would rather do Motion Graphics instead of Animation, because I only really wanted to lip sync that characters anyway. It's a tiny niche, but I'm good at it. Unfortunately it's way too small of a niche for Atlanta. I applied to a great company called R!OT and that interview and decision process lasted 6 weeks. They ended up going with their intern (who had the same skill level as me) just because he interned there and I didn't. I wasn't too upset. They made the right call. If I interned somewhere and didn't get a job offer I would have been super pissed.

It was at that point that Britt, my fiance who moved to Hotlanta against her will, decided to move back to Austin. She hadn't heard back from Pink Magazine and that was the last straw. The next day we were planning our move when Pink called and said she got the job.

Crap.

Now I had to find a job here. I called a bunch of other Motion Graphics houses and they weren't hiring. The job market here sucks. I applied to Apple and thought, what the hell, I know it's retail but I love their stuff. I couldn't believe I got hired. I didn't feel too comfortable talking shop about processor speed and video cards, but I definitely got better at it.

Britt doesn't enjoy working at Pink because it's not a healthy environment and I'll leave it at that. We're getting married in March and have to move out of this house in April so we decided to leave earlier. I think we might be out of here by March 1st. I can transfer with Apple (although technically I have to quit then re-apply to another store because of the way retail is and how many people do they need etc). I randomly applied to something Britt forwarded me through UT Access, Texas' Alumni job posting site. Red 5 Games was calling for trivia writers and I applied. I asked if I was overqualified because I had my Masters of Fine Arts in Animation. They said no. (I had been turned down before because of that reason...which is why I'm not a glass blowing apprentice). I sent in my stuff on Sunday, they called me and had a first interview on Thursday and by Friday afternoon (literally 26 hours later) they sent me a test to see how I write trivia questions. I love writing and its what I do best, so I thought it would be worth applying for and it has been so far.

I was against Austin when I lived there because I had a super unhealthy relationship that lasted way too long and everything about West Campus and Downtown reminded me of her and bad times. When I went there in October I loved it. It felt like home. I just got back this morning from another 4 day excursion of wedding stuff and that only solidified my desire to be there. So I know I owed this site a serious update.

I have to bounce because I still have a few more questions to write for Red 5 but I will let you know what's going on for sure.

And we're back, thanks to Nitesh. The rest of this will hopefully be up shortly.