November 23, 2014

              I’m telling you, growing up is no walk in the damn park.

              I’m going to share an excerpt from something I wrote in the minutes just after purchasing my plane ticket to Seattle. I had just hung up with the guy who owned the film crew I met in Ecuador. In the back of a canoe in the middle of the rainforest, he had offered me a paid internship to learn video production in Seattle. I’ve never had any real experience in production. I was about to sign 8 years of my life away to the Army Guard. I had no idea where I was going with my life. But I get this offer and I can’t say no. That offer was more than a job or a next step: it was someone who believed in what I am capable of, and was willing to make the effort and take the risk to push me to my potential. When you meet someone like that, don’t let them go. So we’re on the phone, home from Ecuador, and I’m asking him the logistics of moving out to Seattle. “We have an office with a microwave and a couch,” he explained. “We can try and get you a gym membership so you have a place to shower, and we’ll pay you for your first project so you have enough money to get started.” I’m smiling at the reality of this situation. “That’s all we can guarantee. It won’t be easy, but something tells me you can handle that.” Hell yes I can handle that.

“If I’m going to pack up everything I have and move 3,000 miles away, I only need guaranteed security and guaranteed money to get me started,” I tell him.

“I can guarantee those things,” he says firmly. And with that, he gives me his credit card information so I can book the ticket.

“Is this what trust is?” I ask, shocked that he freely gave me such sensitive information already.

He responded: “If not now, then when?”

So I booked the ticket. I’d been home from Ecuador for 3 days. I booked the ticket for the following week.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had in that moment.

“August 19, 2014

Remember this moment. Remember the moment where you took a chance. You saw a brilliant shining light on the horizon, and you gathered your things, said your good-byes, and you stepped out in pursuit of it. It shone vaguely and glimmered so dramatically there were times when it was all but gone. But it shone, and you followed.

You just booked your ticket. Tomorrow, you will clean out the bedroom at your parents’ house. Next week, you will pack all of your belongings into a suitcase, and in eight days, you will hop on a one-way flight to the west coast to pursue the shining light on the horizon. You will sleep in an office, shower at a gym, and eat at the tables of the people who care about you.

And you will shine. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t be writing this right now.

And even if you don’t believe it, there’s no going back now.”

              I’m being all reflective because tomorrow I go home for Thanksgiving. It will be my first time home since moving here, and even though it’s only been 3 months, I’ve grown and learned and changed so much that it will feel like it has been much longer. And in honor of Thanksgiving, I’m grateful. I’m grateful to God for giving me the opportunity to achieve my dreams, and to my bosses for seeing potential in me and making sacrifices on their end to help me attain it, and to my parents for their sacrifice and ceaseless support, and to my sister and my friends who have remained connected to me even though we are thousands of miles away. I couldn’t have done it without any of them.

              And yes, I’m listening to the Gladiator soundtrack, so please excuse all these sentiments. Got me in my Honey Nut Feelios. 

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 1

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 1

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 2: Apartment Edition

November 3, 2014

            I have my own apartment now. It’s a terrible place with carpet stains, a view of barbed wire, kitchen cabinets off their hinges, and a faucet that drips a drip that is so constant it’s more like a stream of water, but the place is perfect in every way because it’s mine, and I love it. It’s quirky too. It has a one-butt kitchen so small that it should be in an RV. I like to think of it as adorable. And, we have a hallway. It sounds absurd, I know, but think about it. A house has hallways. A one-bedroom apartment, at least out here, doesn’t. It has a living room with doors off of it. When my new roomie Lauren and I opened the wooden door while touring the place and stepped onto the fluffy light blue 1960’s carpet, we stood in the hallway and mentally cancelled all of the other apartment tours that we had left on the agenda. We were home. We were standing in a hallway, and it felt like a home.

            Fast forward a week and I’m locked out of Jordan’s apartment, so I beg the landlord to let me move into my new apartment early. He complies, hallelujah. Lauren drives her beat-up Honda to Jordan’s apartment to pick me up. It’s loaded full with her stuff, and we make some space in the trunk for every single possession I have to call my own. It seems hopeless – I’ll admit my pessimism for the undertaking. This light blue Honda Accord that she got for $100 because the entire passenger side is T-boned in such a way that you can’t open the passenger door adds to the raw, uncut adventure that we’re having in the city of our dreams. I haven’t touched my clothes that are strewn across Jordan’s living room furniture, so I run in and throw them in some trash bags, grab my guitar, and we peace out. Can’t get a hold of the apartment manager, so there we are on the street corner with all of our possessions jammed in this piece of junk with wheels, sitting on her trunk smoking her E-cig, with nowhere to go. We grab some dude on the sidewalk and ask him to take a picture of us in this moment of uninhibited liberty and excessive idealism.

Can't you just smell the adolescent idealism?

            When we finally move in, it takes us about 10 minutes to unload our stuff. The apartment manager comes in and takes us through the place. His name’s Andrew. He strikes me as some washed-up ex-rock band guitarist who hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he’s pushing forty so he lives alone in an apartment building that he manages with his two senile pugs while binge-watching Seinfeld. “Call me anytime, day or night,” he reassures us, even though it’s become clear that it’d be easier to get a hold of Obama than to reach Andrew when we need him most. The three of us awkwardly sit in a circle on our stained light blue carpet and sign the lease. A whole year in one apartment. Cheapest rent in the area, though, that’s for sure. Probably because of the shitty carpet.

            We salvage some semblance of civilization by stacking up my vintage suitcases in the corner and then stacking my books on top of them next to a cool lamp. It’s the only thing remotely close to furniture we have in the whole place. Lauren and I sleep next to it on this paper thin matt that eats my vertebrae every night I sleep on it, but after 3 months in a tent and 2 months on a couch, I’m not complaining. And there’s no Wifi. It takes more self-discipline than I’m willing to admit to restrain myself from depleting my cell phone data plan streaming “Orange is the New Black” from my phone. Instead I just play a lot of guitar and read my latest author obsession, Kurt Vonnegut. Everyone should read Man Without A Country. Just read it.

            It’s an adventure. All of it. I just signed a one year lease, and I have no income at all right now. My internship ended and now I’m a free-lance video person. I’m meeting with the right people and I have some side jobs tutoring, so I’m not an entirely useless member of society, but it’s scary. Since starting this blog and posting on Facebook, I’ve gotten some messages from people that say what I’m doing is awesome, how life is so exciting, I’m living the dream or whatever, and I am. It’s awesome, and I love it. But don’t get me wrong – there’s a price to pay for this kind of life, and that price is security. I don’t know where my next paycheck will come from, but I know I’ll have a bill to pay in a month.

            I had a meeting the other day with a big name in the industry, a guy who introduced Bill Gates to Bono and inspired James Cameron to produce Avatar. We met over coffee to discuss where I could go from here in my career, and he gave me some really good advice that I’m taking with me: Jump, and then the net will come to catch you.

            So against all the logic I learned in college, I’m just… jumping.