Astronaut applications

This is something I wrote for a scholarship application while I was just finishing up film school (we got scholarships for after we matriculated.  I know, it didn't make much sense to me then, either).  Anyway, I found this on my computer, and it's something that helps to remind me that, no matter how difficult the path may be or how discouraging it might get, there is only one thing that I can imagine myself doing for the rest of my life.

Perspective

I took a cab to my friend's apartment the other day, and I had no idea what address to give to the cab driver (I never do.  It's one of the side effects of the Age of Smartphones: forgetting addresses, forgetting phone numbers and brain cancer).  He was clearly agitated with me until we finally figured out where I needed to go, and then he apologized.

"It's one of those days," he said.  It was an oddly defeated note to escape this large, stocky, bald-headed man in his 40s, a man who looked like he could probably bend a steel girder by merely glaring at it.

love is love

If, by one simple act, you could bring happiness and celebration to millions of people at no cost to yourself, would you do it?

The New Yorker

Every so often, my roommates and I wonder whether we look like New Yorkers yet.  After all, we've lived in this city for nearly a year.  In that time, we've conquered the worst winter here in two decades, and we're well on our way to coasting through what I'm told is a relatively mild New York summer (and I'm reminded constantly of how mild this summer is when I still complain about the humidity or the thunderstorms and people tell me about how much worse "last year" was, as though I care).

Capturing the Mississippi

I am sometimes dismayed to learn that some things I count on as constants are not necessarily so.  Like Polaris being eternally set as the North Star, the June Gloom blanketing the skies of Los Angeles during the month of June, and Pixar inerrantly producing near-perfect films (well done, Cars 2).  Neither is something like the course of the Mississippi River as reliably fixed as I had thought.  It turns out that every thousand years or so since the end of the ice age, the Mississippi River overflows its riverbanks and stakes out a new course to the Gulf of Mexico.  And, according to a book I just read (don't ask me why I chose a book on this topic, I really couldn't tell you), the Mississippi is long overdue for a course change.

Multiple Personality

One day during my high school senior English class, my classmates and I had been assigned to groups for some kind of class project.  I was paired with one of my good friends and a couple of acquaintances (I went to a rather small school, so none of my classmates were strangers).  I was constantly joking around, as I am wont to do.  It's a carefully developed defense mechanism, a way of deflecting attention away from my insecurities and uncertainties, of which, I admit, I have many.

As we had finished the project, one of my group members, a girl I'll call Ellie, turned to me and said, "You know, before this project, I didn't think you had a personality."

Doodle I

I sometimes have a lot of time on my hands. I doodle.  This doodle is the result.  This took me about three weeks to doodle, adding a bit here and there while I was sitting on hold on the phone at work, watching TV at my apartment, reading books on tape (I still consider that reading.  It's reading through my ears) or just daydreaming.

Spring Fever

As April is wrapping up – I’m not sure how, as it seems to have only just begun – one part of life in New York that I’ve come to appreciate considerably better here than I did in California is the relief that comes with Spring.

On Life and LOST

I may be nearly a year behind, but a few weeks ago, I finally finished watching LOST.  I’ll admit it, I teared up at the end (during the final episode, appropriately titled, “The End”) as I realized that my 121-episode journey with these characters was coming to a close.

I don't have to mention that it's not just a superb, even groundbreaking, television series – though that is certainly true – but it's also a particularly apt show for this point in my life.  At its most basic, LOST features a collection of broken men and women who, by stumbling onto (some might say “careening uncontrollably into”) the island, must confront their flaws – the broken psyche whose repair they’ve ignored amidst the drudgery of everyday life.  The island is the place that they go to become better, more complete people.  The island is where they might realize more fully their potential.

Furry Pretty Things

I have decided that the unbearable cold of the Northeast makes you wear things that anywhere else, you wouldn’t be caught dead in. Only weather that drops into the single digits several times a month can cause you to look at a fox or a rabbit gallivanting through Central Park and think, “That’s cute, but you know what would be even better? If I were wearing it as a coat.”

On the F

Now that I’ve moved to New York, I go to bookstores a lot — they’re like libraries, but without all the poor people. I go to bookstores a lot because, in New York, when you’re riding on the subway or walking down the street or taking the elevator up to your office, you’re not supposed to talk to people. Why? Because, I can only assume, then the terrorists win. There are a few exceptions, like a time when I was on the 6 train and a disheveled man walked into the car and, after the doors had closed and we were shuttling on our way, started to pace up and down the train and explain, quite loudly, how he was going to kill all of us.

None of my fellow passengers batted an eye.  Apparently, this was a rather common occurrence.

Homesickness

With only a few days before I left New York to celebrate Christmas in California, homesickness hit me quite suddenly. It's a disconcerting feeling, and I can’t exactly explain where I’m homesick for: I haven’t lived with my family in the Bay Area since I graduated high school, and, despite living in Los Angeles for the last five years, I never really considered it “home”.

I have an odd connection with the places I’ve lived. In high school, I wanted nothing more than to move as far away from the Bay Area as I could after I graduated. I couldn't really think of a reason why, except that I wanted something new, something exciting. And, in a stroke of self-delusion that even Bill O'Reilly would envy, I convinced myself of something that I knew to be very much untrue: that I disliked the Bay Area. So for college, I settled on Los Angeles as being a sufficient distance from home.