Hopeful

I want to go back to the trees.

I want to go back to the forest I knew.

I want to lie on my back and look up through the birches and see the sunlight shivering back down on my face.

I want to return to my home. I want to feel lake effect snow. I want a simpler life, with a house and a garden and someone who loves me.

I'm tired of my home being taken away. I'm tired of having no place left to go. I just want to go home to the forest that loves me. I'm not sorry I left, but I hope I'm welcome back.

I dare not hope that my dreams will come true, that things will work out well and peaceful and fine. It makes me cry harder to think of a life where happiness happens to someone like me.

It's so easily taken away.

Behold the Turtle.

When I signed up with my bank they charged a monthly fee for overdraft protection, which I thought was bullshit. In lieu of paying six dollars monthly I got in the good habit of checking my account online once every couple of days, figuring if something ever did go wrong the chance of a thirty dollar fee was better than having to pay seventy-two dollars annually guaranteed. The other day I logged in and suddenly I wasn't so sure.

Oops. I overdrafted my checking account because I accidentally scheduled a bill payment a day earlier than I ought to have. The bank charged me thirty bucks. Later that day I deposited money to cover the bill (not knowing it had already been drawn from my account), then because of the fee and because I made my deposit after 5:00 (my budget is tight right now) the account overdrafted again when my other bills went through the next morning. The bank charged me another thirty bucks. When I went to monitor my account I was shocked and upset to see $60 in bank fees! The first time was my mistake, I admit it, but the second time would never have happened without the first fee! Distraught, I called my bank's India office to ask if they could refund the second charge. The nice lady actually refunded ALL the fees and also informed me that overdraft protection no longer comes with a monthly fee, now they only charge if you actually go over. So we got me all signed up and protectified.

The point is that I got sixty bucks back by calling in and asking for thirty. All I had to do was make a tiny effort and show some initiative and not only did I get what I wanted, I got double!

It doesn't always work out to double but I'm finding that the "Just do it" method is the one that has given me the greatest success in my endeavors, whereas trying to take smaller steps to slowly build toward what I want has gotten me diddly. Wanna move to New York City? Don't move somewhere else first just to try your luck at city living, just effing move to New York City. Wanna work in the movies? Don't do other stuff for ten years while you put yourself through film school, just go work in the movies. It's time to apply this principle again, because I'm getting restless with PA life.

I have come to call this way the Bell Method, after the UPM on my current job explained that he became a production manager by just doing it rather than by working his way up the chain. Working with a gaggle of production executives (from the L.A. based company that funded the show) who are barely older than me, his point really hit home. Why resign myself to years of toiling away collecting set days to become an A.D. when ultimately I want to go further than that? If I want to produce a movie, why can't I just produce one?

The first roadblock that pops into my head is money. I don't have the money. Where would I get the money? How do I convince people to trust me with a bucketful of money (yes, I know, don't overdraft my bank account--but that was an isolated incident, I swear!)? How do I distribute the money? How do I make people think I already know the answers to all these questions??

The second roadblock is content. This one is a little easier for me, since I work with dozens of aspiring screenwriters. My daily grind is chock full of people like me who have talents and knacks and know-how but lack opportunity. Nobody, I have come to realize, is going to give any of us an opportunity unless we're supremely lucky. So why not create one out of the resources available to us? If you build it, they will come.

The third roadblock is the nagging insecurity that tells me I have no business trying to make a movie. Who do I think I am, Barbara Broccoli? I don't have the training or preparation. I don't have years of industry knowledge, I have one year of working in production offices and doing other odd jobs on film sets. I have never had a cost report meeting. I've never asked anyone for more than a couple hundred bucks. I've never been responsible for someone else's paycheck. And even if I get past that stuff, so what if I make some dinky little movie? What does it prove to have a DVD Of some video you put together with some friends? What production values can I really expect to achieve that anyone will actually give it a second thought?

Well you don't know unless you try, right? There are people who made it happen who had never set foot on a set before they made their first feature. If they can do it, why not me? And if I try, what's the most I could lose if I fail? Money? I barely have any to lose. Pride? I'm better off without it. Time? Better than losing time any other way. Respect? I respect failures far more than those who lack the mettle to try.

The turtle only makes progress when he sticks his neck out. It's time to be a brave turtle. It's time to try and get somewhere I'd like to be.

kyle the girl
(on iPhone)

Dehydration and The Bridge

Running in Prospect Park today was a-freakin'-mazing! It's gorgeous outside, and it seemed like all of Brooklyn was milling around in the sunshine or laying in the grass or riding bikes or strolling.

It started out as a great run; I'd already eaten, I'd sucked down a glass of water right before I left the apartment, and with the great springtime weather I felt good and strong. But after a long night of drinking and a long morning brunch at Bristen's with the girls (read: coffee consumption en masse), one glass of water just did not cut it. At about the three mile mark I hit a wall of dehydration. I felt like a cicada shell, all shrively and desiccated. It was kinda gross, and I just literally could not continue. I managed to walk about a quarter mile until I found a water fountain, where I drank and splashed so much I may as well have been a bird in a birdbath. People stared, but I was refreshed! Fresh fresh fresh!

Revitalized, I continued on, though still a bit dehydrated. And suddenly I remembered the bridge. I think maybe I've mentioned it before, but it bubbled up to the forefront of my brain today.

Please consider this Big Idea #2, although this idea has been floating amporphously around in my head for several years.

East of Cleveland, nearby to where I grew up, there is a large, beautiful park called the North Chagrin Reservation. By large, I mean upwards of 2,000 acres. I really like going to that park whenever I go back to Cleveland to visit my family; somehow I feel like it reconnects me with my childhood. During the two months I stayed in Cleveland between leaving New Orleans and coming to New York I spent a lot of time running the trails at North Chagrin and used that as my time to meditate on my dad and to talk to him. It was there that I started the process of coming to terms with having lived most of my life without him and began really confronting my feelings of loss.

I don't really know as much about him as I wish I did, but I do know that he loved the outdoors and nature. And I know that the time I feel closest to him is when I'm in the woods by myself, rather than the few times I've gone to the large, impersonal cemetery where he's buried. And one day the idea popped into my head, that I want to build a bridge in the park for him.

Today, as I was running in a different park, the idea developed more. I realized that the bridge wouldn't be as much for him as it would be for me. It would be a place I could go and really feel connected to him and my feelings about him, and where I could talk to him quietly and miss him without any anger or fear...not that I can't do that anywhere, but this place would be really special to me.

And then I thought maybe it wouldn't be just for me, but also for anyone who's lost a parent. I thought maybe it could be a place that reminds people that it's okay to miss someone, or be a place where other people feel like they can talk out loud to someone who isn't there... And maybe it could be a place where Salty and Mrp can take Peanut and tell him about his Grandpa Steve.

So I want to build a bridge. I don't know how to start. I don't know where to get the money. I don't have any idea where I'll get the time to do it. But I want to at least try... And maybe it won't happen, but maybe it will. If I don't try, I'll never know.

Why someone ought to give me lots of money

If I were to name a fancy bar I'd call it Sultana...because I rule.

It would have a vintage Middle Eastern feel, with oriental rugs and silk tasseled drapes and such.

I'd have nightly belly dance shows in which I would employ my friends.

I would serve chocolate covered dates and grape leaves and hummus along with the $15 specialty cocktails. The latter would of course be devised by great mixologists and each one would invoke the spirit of a different country along the silk road; Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, India, China...

We'd eat a lot of pomegranate seeds and figs. There would be a hookah room in the back. It would be awesome.