My First Blog

Being young and unemployed is frustrating. It's not frustrating because I'm broke or anything. It's the social pressure and not being able to identify myself as a functional part of an institution that compensates me with an element of integrity.

Here goes the paradox: the integrity comes from alleviating the social pressure and most jobs remain a loathed obstruction to happiness, yet somehow result in stabilization, which also affords peace of mind, even though the social pressure never fades. It's just mitigated.

If I operated under my own volition, the obvious choice would be to continue doing so. Pressures and obligations to follow along in set paths for the promises no longer considered viable today ("careers afford retirement") exploit a fear that trumps the logic that times have changed. Self-employment or business ownership is the new stabilizer(or more specifically accountability, ie. savings, networking, diversifying and property rights). So I'm going to pretend that evolving is a positive thing and put some faith into the notion.

Moving forward: I've always wanted to be a fiction writer, and a screen-writer and eventually a director; a fairly popular one too (or at least popular enough to have some disposable income so I can comfortably take care of a family). So there you have it: premise (broke), antagonist (more jobs), protagonist(dream of compensated creativity).

And how does a young man begin: by challenging his affection for time consuming, linear, self-perpetuating objectives that are always within reach; VIDEO GAMES. I want to point out that part of my appreciation is shared with a similar regard for film. I'm no trivia junky, I just like the feeling of being swept away from personal circumstance to witness a self-contained drama concluded to my benefit and those of the immediate community. Popcorn in the teeth, sour patch kids in the gums, cherry-coke, cold theaters and my eyes can't leave the screen and often I share this experience with a couple hundred others. No discomfort. It's a show and its filtering through us all.

When I watch behind-the-scenes footage, I tend to tear up.

What would make a small army of technicians and artists work 20 hours a day in crazy weather all over the world for 2-3 years just to entertain a crowd for 2 hours? Money? Yeah but you can make money and stabilize yourself with a city job. Really, we're talking about something beyond the fundamentals, aren't we?

In the 2nd season of The Office, there's an episode where two of the male leads share a look with each other over that feeling of intense displacement when in such close proximity to a romance that remains, painfully, out of reach. I know that feeling. I was young and it tore me up pretty good but years later I found, as my desires matured a little, that you could have that for a position in life too; that you could fall in love with the idea of doing something or being someone and this love graduates and intensifies as you start to recognize all of the challenges in your way. There's no antidote for it, and it never goes in reverse.

For those of us that are a little reserved, we have to get comfortable with the idea of passion. It can come out jerky if you're not used to it and maybe scare people off. You can spend all your energy one day and end up exhausted by the effort. It isn't till you hit that slow burn that life jumps into that juxtaposition of relevance and irrelevance, and you finally start making decisions for yourself because you can't deny it anymore.

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Current reads:
Visual Storytelling: The Art and Technique by Tony C. Caputo
The ABC's of Writing Winning Business Plans by Garrett Sutton, Esq.