I had it all planned out.  My blog would have begun: “I’m waiting to board my flight to Japan.”  On Tuesday, I found out I was “on avail” for a commercial that was to shoot in Japan.  I’ve never been to Japan. I would love to go to Japan. For those that don’t know what “on avail” means, it means that the casting people have checked with your agent as to your availability.  You haven’t been booked, but they’ve narrowed down the job to a few candidates.  So, for the last few days, I’ve been walking around thinking about Japan and how nice it would be to book a commercial before the end of the year, if only for tax purposes alone.  So, I was really excited when I found out that I was on avail.  My excitement wasn’t even dulled by the fact that they’d put an unusually high number of people on avail.  But I didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it. I only told a couple of people.  I didn’t even talk about it in code on Facebook.

Just about an hour ago, I was watching an episode of Sean Saves the World (which is really growing on me, by the way) and there was a point where it was revealed that Megan Hilty’s character had lived in Japan and my phone rang, I kid you not, at the moment she was speaking Japanese.  It was my agent calling.  “Well, you won’t be going to Japan.”  And then she told me that they’d cast someone else.  I think she sensed my disappointment and though she’s always been kind, she was just so sweet about the way she broke the news, I started crying after we’d said our goodbyes and hung up the phone.

And I lay on my couch, trying to go back to Sean Saves the World and that game of Candy Crush (don’t judge) I was playing, but I couldn’t.  I just lay on the couch being sad.  I thought about a conversation I’d had with someone recently where they were talking about someone as “an actor, but he never works.”  I try not to say things like that about people, I know how challenging this industry is, but the truth is I’m sure I’ve been described a million times as an actor who never works.  Or seldom works.  

I don’t really want to put too positive of a spin on this, just yet, because for the next few hours, I’m fully committed to feeling sorry for myself.  If you see me on Monday, and I’m still mopey, you can spray me with silly string, but for now, I just want to be sad.  That being said, it was nice to walk around for a few days, at work, while swimming, walking through the Asian section of Cost Plus, planning my next blog, all with the hope, belief even, that I was headed to Tokyo in a couple of days.  What’s the Japanese symbol for hope?  With luck, someday, I’ll find out.