Echo

The saddest news this week is that Thode is moving Nerd Island to NY for a year. I still refuse to believe it’s true, and still have a couple of weeks to believe it’s not true. She claims she’s only going for a year and I secretly fear that it’s going to be more than a year. I just hope she comes back.

I talked to Rie on Sunday and she said that Eric, her husband, is looking for positions in hospitals on the west coast, mainly Seattle and Portland. I’m sure he’ll be looking into Ann Arbor, too, since he did most of his work there, and he’ll have a good shot at a position there, but it would be amazing to have them on the west coast and only a short flight away. I love Seattle and I’ve never been to Portland, but I feel like it would be a place I would really like. I just want them closer. That flight to Michigan is long, but I remember how devastated I was when she decided to move to NY for a few years. I was really worried she’d stay there. I think I’m worried about good friends living in NY because 1. It’s far. 2. It scares me and therefore, it makes me worry about the safety of my friends. I think I watched too many films set in dark alleys in NY when I was a kid.

We went fishing in the ocean this weekend and I caught a big grouper. Of course, no one has to believe me since I neglected to take any pictures, but we did eat the heck out of that thing…Reggie took half and cooked it in a wine-garlic sauce, and I braised my half in a Szechuan garlic sauce spicy enough to knock your nuts in the dirt. Brian was in Austin for the weekend so we did naughty things like, clean the counters, organize mail and watch the Roomba vacuum its way around the house.

Last week while I was having lunch at a cafe, I watched this uniformed cop, who had been eating at the table next to me, go up to this Persian girl who was really young, about 19-20 years old. He was about 40-something, lanky, bald, and kind of rough looking. She looked like a model in that she was tall, thin, and had one of those unconventional haircuts with straight hair down to below her ears and straight bangs right at her eyebrows. She was eating alone and he goes up to her and says, “I have to ask you..are you Italian?” She’s thrown off and shy. She says, no, she’s from France but she’s Persian. At first I thought, maybe he was just curious for cultural reasons (at least I hoped) but then he pushed on, telling her that she was really beautiful and asking her if she lived around here (that was when things started to get creepy). She was polite and vague, saying she worked in the area. Then he asked her where. She said, a restaurant, and then he asked her which one, making it clear he was digging for information. She told him and he said, oh yeah, I’ve driven by and have always wanted to go in. Is it good? At this point, he’s full on leaning over her and his hand is on my chair, to my chagrin. I look around for the cop he had been sitting with to figure out why this guy wasn’t reeling his slimy partner in, but the guy was gone..I figured, they had planned it out beforehand. So he says to her, “well, now I should definitely come in and try it out sometime.” She’s smiling really uncomfortably and says, oh yeah, let me give you the restaurant’s card. So she goes into her wallet to get it, and then he goes into his wallet and pulls out HIS card. They exchange cards and he says, “Call me if you need anything,” then leaves.

Okay, I don’t know what it was that creeped me out so much about this…that he was a uniformed cop hitting on a girl, or that he was an old uniform cop hitting on a really young girl so aggressively it made her uncomfortable. She held her smile and her eyes watching him intensely until he exited before she put the card under her plate and continued eating. She didn’t take it with her when she left. Her awkwardness while he plumbed for where he could find her made me feel really uncomfortable, like I was watching a predator. I really hate guys who use their power to try to seduce young girls whether they welcome that attention or not, and it felt even more slimy because it was a uniformed cop.

On a better note, we went to a club whose theme was Prom Night. We got all dressed up in our prom worse (me in a $3 pink thrift store dress and a can’s worth of AquaNet), and boogied down to…80’s music. Which was weird since when it was my prom, it was 90’s music. Where was Vanilla Ice and Boyz II Men and All 4 One? Yeah, that music was bad, but it would have made it AUTHENTIC. Speaking of, I heard Vanilla Ice is trying to make a comeback…by remixing his only song, Ice Ice Baby.

And by the way, the film is done. We finished the DVDs on Friday, and got everything in in time for Sundance.

Hmm…just saw this guy I used to date. I think he turned 30 this year. I wonder if, when he came out to LA to be an actor or whatever he felt he wanted to pursue that held the key to his fulfillment, if being a manager at Banana Republic at the age of 30 was a part of those plans. I highly doubt it.

I wonder how it is we get sidetracked from our lofty plans of youth that in truth, aren’t really lofty when time and time again, people throughout history have proven that no personal goal is necessarily too lofty or too ridiculous. I wonder at what point it starts, when that feeling in the back of your head starts tingling, taking over a larger and larger space in your head while you try to convince yourself that it’s a temporary situation. I wonder at what point, is the destiny set, that your life becomes completely stagnant even though there are superficial signs of movement. I think it’s the point when you give up, when you convince yourself you didn’t want those dreams in the first place.

Whenever I’ve had a job that I hated, I think the turning point when I decided I was going to quit and felt okay about it was when I could wake up one morning, see myself refusing to get up and go to work, and making peace with that feeling. You call in sick that day, to give yourself sometime to see if another part of you fights back and demands that you hang on. When you’ve convinced ever once of yourself that you are willing to take the consequences of quitting, you make the final, external decision.

I think it’s hard for us to declare a rejection of our dreams by saying bluntly, I will not be a dancer; I will not be a writer; I will not be rich and powerful; I will not find someone I truly love, etc. and be okay with that statement and all it implies. Because what we’re most afraid of admitting is, I’m afraid to be a dance, I’m afraid to be a writer, I’m afraid to pursue being rich and powerful, I’m afraid to find someone I truly love, etc. Instead, with each day, we let these dreams slide further and further away, until they look sillier and more far-fetched to us than our actual realities. Even if you’re talented and have won many awards (ie received validation for the pursuit of a dream), you let other realities seep in that prevent you from a true, focused pursuit until the original pursuit seems to hold no weight in actual reality. When we don’t pursue what we really want, I think we kill ourselves little by little each day, until later on down the line, when the window of opportunity has closed, we’re bitter at ourselves or the world for pidgeon-holing ourselves in a reality we don’t want.

I don’t think I wanted to be a director of marketing at a tech firm at 28. But on the other hand, I recognize that it pays me really good money that allows me to finance my filmmaking, in hopes that these initial efforts will attract financiers for the feature projects I want to work on. I also recognize I have to be patient. But on the other hand, I also recognize that at any point, if the money becomes so comfortable that the job becomes an excuse for me to avoid my creative work, that I have to be strong enough to admit I’m off track and force myself to face my fears. I think everyone has a strong reason for why they are afraid to pursue their dreams, and those rea
sons are universal, yet personal and unique to each individual. Some people spend their lives fighting other people’s demons as an excuse to keep from confronting their own, which are the very things standing in front of their path towards their own fulfillment. And I think those people end up blaming other people or lashing out at the external world for what they deep down know is their own weakness and their own fear of their own personal journey. It’s a good way to drown yourself, battling fake demons while the real ones pull you down. I think the key to avoiding bitterness later on in life, the key to a future predicament of realizing deep down that you created your own unwanted reality that your stuck with, is to really think about what you want, who you want to be and where you want to go, and stay focused on it. If you find yourself making excuses, figure out if they are out of practicality and prudence, or fear and then deal with them accordingly. I’ve found that whether your right or wrong, and life is set up for all of us to make plenty of mistakes in order to learn, it’s that forward momentum towards something you really want no matter if your current situation is difficult or not that is what leads to fulfillment and leads to a better sense of peace in your own custom reality. Whatever the universe gives us or tries to teach us, I really believe that we all have a strong hand in making our own beds.