Basically, all artistic progress is currently on pause.

My family's here for a week - three weeks, depending on the family member. While they're here, I'm pretty much constantly hunting. Job hunting, car hunting, basically just trying my life in order down here.

It's not going well.

Funny how there's economy cars for sale everywhere until you're looking. Less funny is how there's no jobs available. Anywhere. Ever. I mean, that's not entirely true. There are jobs, but they're not -jobs- so much as low-quality careers. The ones that seem like jobs (server at restaurant, clerk at retail, ETC.) all want someone with experience, if the ads are to believed... Although it seems from the times I've been at a lead at the same time as a female applicant that my years of experience with transferable customer service skills and drive are trumped by nice breasts.

Before everyone gets on my case about this, I know that women have a rough time in the workplace for this reason too. I recognize that they are also being discriminated against in this case by being objectified and valued for their appearance instead of skills, and will have trouble being taking seriously outside of low-level jobs. My point isn't that I'm being hurt on the entry level for being male, it's that this system hurts everyone regardless of gender. Furthermore, I'm not simply being judgmental when they may have had years and years of experience. I overheard their interviews. I've been right next to them. Most had no transferable experience, haven't tried to find work in some two-odd years just because they didn't feel like it, and had an inflexible schedule, but still got a better response than me.

It's frustrating for me now, and it will be frustrating for them in the future.

I digress. I'm thinking of investing in bartending classes. They only take about a week, and would pay for themselves in no time, if all the 'bartender needed' postings I've seen while looking for a job are to be believed. It's a thought.

In the meantime, we've seen a couple films here when I'm not ruthlessly pursuing leads. I'll be brief about them here and now.

ParaNorman - This film was excellent. I just loved everything about the film. The sound design is brilliant. The visual style is unique and very fun to watch. The post-credits stinger is how they should be; not plot necessary, but still really interesting and very much worth waiting to see. The plot is slightly standard at times, but completely its own at others, and generally kind of resonated with me. The humour is well-timed and clever. I recommend this film to pretty much everyone.

Hunger Games (film) - I know a lot of people have probably already seen this, but still, I like adding my two-cents. So, when reading the book, I thought that there would be no way a film could possibly do it justice. Not because it was on an amazingly high pedestal or anything (although the first one really is quite well-handled in my humble opinion. The subsequent books not so much, but still...). The reason is that the books were all handled in the first person and highly focused on the main character's personal strife and her impressions of other characters. One of the most interesting things about it to me was how she continually imprinted her own shortcomings and flaws onto other characters, and I just didn't think they could do that with a film without adding some hokey narrator. I was... well, I was half-right. A lot of those sort of deep impressions weren't really able to be conveyed. On the other hand, a lot of other first-person elements were inserted that I thought were very clever and well-handled. All-in-all, I'm impressed with how well they did manage to give the film the feel of the book. It's not perfect, but it was better than expected.

Well, back to the hunt.

Cheers, everyone.

EDIT/UPDATE: I have gotten a car. It was a bit more than I'd wanted to pay for one, but it's a much better car than I was expecting, and a deal at the price. Perhaps my luck is starting to turn around. :)