By Anthony Meindl | Posted March 5, 2014, 10 a.m.

Pilot season. How do you survive it?

What do you do when you test for multiple roles but dont end up getting any of them? What do you do when you see your friends going out for weekly auditions and you havent heard from your reps in weeks? What do you do when you get bad feedback on an auditionand therefore no opportunity to testwhen you thought you hit it out of the park?

Breathe.

Getting through pilot season requires the actor to not get caught up in the energy and frenetic pace in which agents, managers, casting directors are often forced to work. Even though everyone else is stressed out, feeling the pressure, and having to deliver, doesnt mean you have to.

What if you just practiced some mindfulness and remembered these few simple points:

1. Everyone is doing the best they can with the chaos of having to have everything done yesterday. From agents to managers to casting directorseveryone is trying to find the right talent for the right role. Sometimes that might be you and many, many times it wont. Its not personal.

2. Remember that pilot season is a few short months. What does or doesnt happen in those months doesnt mean youre doomed to be unemployed the rest of your life, or that youre a terrible actor. Its a tiny window of your life as an artist. You didnt let only the first three years of your life define you as a person, so why would you let a couple months do so now? Dont let this moment now define everything you are and everything youre capable of. (Everything is ultimately about the now, but its not about your judgment of it and what you think it should be.)

3. Allow yourself to be human. Youre not a robot. That means sometimes youre going to be awesome in the room and sometimes you might just tank.

4. Be patient. Sometimes the thing you think you want is really not the best thing for you. Let things evolve as they naturally will, not as you force them. Besides forcing something never works.

More here:
How to Survive Pilot Season Without Having a Nervous Breakdown

by Ted Tuvera Posted on 03/05/2014 11:15 PM |Updated 03/06/2014 2:15 PM

As a kid, I grew up with a dream of serving God and my country. I'm now 18 and I'm branded as a rebel."

Priesthood has always been perceived as a rather radical path among young wits I grew up with. My peers had always been for their American dreams of engineering, accountancy, commerce, education for such are deemed ventures on future financial stability and security. Looking back now, perhaps, my college course on journalism is not a sure job choice.

The former was an aspiration that sprouted from the noble lives of Francis and Augustine, who were heroes to me when I was in the critical stage of high school. Their mere mortal perfection led me to that idealism of fulfilling Matthew 6:24 to its most literal sense: I even fantasized a more highfaluting step on the religious vow of poverty.

Quarters before graduation, I became open to a lot of (what I now declare as) bourgeois liberalism that made me, in the spirit of maturity, see life in different perspectives: new-age religion or theosophy, the political satires of Lourd de Veyra, the blasphemous art of Mideo Cruz, the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll music of Guns n Roses, Noli and Fili, nudity as a form of art, and a lot more of counter-culture. I ended up critical on religion, thus, ending my saintly deeds with the Church.

In the same period, I became acquainted with activists. Yes, the leftists. This acquaintance motivated the shift of my childhood radicalism in favor of the peoples struggle. The reality of how peasants are brutally terrorized in the countryside, on how the workers are facing the dreadful working conditions despite hazardous jobs, and, why, despite the hard work they do, are they poor while landlords and big capitalists are very rich? And a more critical inquiry: why, despite the Philippines rich natural resources, are the masses still in poverty?

Stop. Look. Listen. They are just reminders of what young people today do not care about for the contrary worship of popular, mainstream culture. Dispel the brainwashing conspiracies, such basic realities that are now graded as propagandas must be an injury-causing slap for those who enjoy the comforts of a blindfolded society.

We do not need to argue ideologies on basically observing the unequal military and economic relations of the US and the Philippines. Why are they allowed to sail along some of our vast seas while local fisher folks are not? Why are big foreign companies encouraged to invest widely in the Philippines because of raw material resources that are very much available and on the contrary why is it that there is no national industry of our own? Why is it that there is no auto industry in the Philippines despite the engineering geniuses and raw materials present in the Philippines? Sure enough, we are not a bobo people.

One with the masses

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On being Catholic and leftist