An Update for the New Year
A common refrain heard among people in my age group:
“Wow, 2008, damn I’m old.”
Which isn’t necessarily true or false, but it illustrates the mindset of those of us approaching our thirties. We start to question who we are and what we’ve accomplished. For the majority of us – not much. We probably landed a decent paying job, starting saving for retirement, moved closer to marriage. Maybe we’ve found a career track we can stick with, or a city to live in that suits our tastes. For those lucky ones (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it), they might have gotten engaged or even married. But for the rest of us still muddling around in what is supposed to be the prime of our lives, a sort of paralysis sets in. The older we get, the more we define ourselves by the things we haven’t accomplished. And that is precisely what is expressed when we say, “Damn I’m old.”
Normally at the end of each year, I like to do some retrospective introspection. More often that not, I end up depressed. This year, I didn’t spend too much time thinking back on my life. Some of it sucked, some of it was great. I did get to travel all over the world, mostly thanks to my sister and her three wedding ceremonies – one at home, one in Pittsburgh, and one in Taiwan. I went to Hawaii with good friends and ran a half marathon. However, I spent most of last year at work, and between falling asleep at my desk, taking two-hour lunch breaks, and damaging my liver with weekly binge drinking, it felt like a giant waste of time. Originally, I had planned on quitting work and traveling abroad for a couple months before starting film school. Before I could commit career suicide, my former boss presented me the opportunity to continue working remotely while attending school. This would provide me the means to eat and live, something I had grown accustomed to. The most practical choice was to take the offer. After I accepted, I started to look back on my past three years of work differently. I had grown as close as family with some of my coworkers, honed my basketball game in lunchtime pickup games twice a week, and improved my people skills, slightly. I was also able to start this blog, which in turn helped me get into film school, and hopefully that will enable me to devote the rest of my life to exploring LA and the world. But in the meantime, since I couldn’t quit work before school started, I would only have one week of vacation to travel.
So in the beginning of December, I traveled to Belize with a group of high school friends. I will post the recap of our adventures in the following posts. It was one of the best vacations in my young life. Unfortunately, I feel just as mentally unprepared and even more financially unstable for film school than ever before.
Due to the fact that I will be working and attending school full-time, I don’t know if I will have the time to find contributors for 30 Day LA in the coming years. In all honesty, the success of the project resided more in the experiences of the individual contributors than what happened to be recorded in these pages. I am happy that they were able to take part in 30 Day LA, as much as I am grateful for the readers that happened to wander by. I grew up a lot during my initial month on this project, but it opened my eyes to how much more time and experience I had ahead of me.
One of the core reasons why I sometimes find myself disappointed with the direction of my life is my lack of focus. Consistency has never been my strong suit. However, as with every New Year, a foolish resolution is in order. For 2008, I resolve to become more consistent and focused. So for my first attempt at consistency, I will keep alive my tradition over the past two years of saying peace out to the year.
Peace out 2007. Will youthful wisdom find us all in 2008.