moodsmithmedia

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Why Kids Love Athletes and Elon Musk

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here. I want to explain why because I think it’s good to have a record given some of the things I’ve said here before about the nature of the universe and its impact, if any, on facilitating your innermost hopes and dreams. I’m excited to do that because a lot has changed since I was last here. Not long after my last post I took a job as a temp at Tesla, a consequence of a dire need to earn a living and stand on my own two feet as an adult. I had a girlfriend I wanted to marry and a lot of preparing to get older that I needed to do. Eventually that temp gig at Tesla turned into a real job which had the potential to change everything for me, though not in the ways I’d wanted for myself when I created this page. To reiterate my ambitions, the thing I’ve always wanted is to create, produce, and direct stories. With the exception of a very small team none of the employees at Tesla do any such thing. I was also not hired to work on that very small team. I was hired to test drive, sell, and deliver electric cars to customers. 

A hallmark of my time at Tesla is probably impatience. I started as a temp despite a decade of hospitality sales and management experience which I’d downplayed on my resume when I applied. I chose instead to highlight accomplishments I was more proud of and foolishly thought would be more respected by the hiring managers at Tesla. I was wrong, they did not respect that more. My resume told the story of an ambitious self-starter who had created a couple of very small video projects that nobody had ever heard of while waiting tables at a restaurant in small-town Georgia. The resume detailed my role in producing, directing, and editing my little docuseries, Respect the Light. I wrote a resume for who I wanted to be rather than who I was, a 10-year veteran of the restaurant business who’d worked at almost every level available in those four walls. There’s nothing wrong with working in the restaurant industry; the folks in the business deserve far more respect than they’re usually offered, but if I’m honest I never liked it much. On a whim in December 2018, I decided to leave that business for good to pursue a creative career that better matched the kind of person I saw myself as. 

That decision to leave the restaurant business ultimately led to the completion and release of Respect the Light. The problem was I wasn’t strategic or disciplined about the way I left the business. I hardly had any money saved to invest in myself or pay my bills while I sought the kind of work I wanted. I had no meaningful relationships in the film business to minimize the amount of time that search would take. I was gambling on myself without the confidence of a full wallet and eventually, predictably, I became desperate for any job that could get me on my feet. I took stock of what opportunities existed and created two lists: Film-Adjacent Work and Everything Else. I say film-adjacent because getting a job at an office like (at the time) Turner Broadcasting wasn’t going to get me the opportunities I was really looking for. No shade to the folks there but the job descriptions differ greatly from my ambitions (to create, produce, and direct stories). They’re not confused about how what they do differs from that and I assume reliable paychecks and health benefits ease their minds about that gap if they cared. It's genuinely enviable, especially at the time considering how badly I needed a job. I wasn’t accomplished or well connected enough for film opportunities to pan out in the time I needed so I reluctantly turned to my Everything Else list, at the top of which stood Tesla. 

The very first documentary project I produced covered the People’s Climate March in Washington D.C. the year after the 2016 election. For years, I’d wondered how I could positively impact the discussion on climate, particularly people’s choices. If I could just motivate folks to do the right thing, we might make a dent in solving the problem. It was making my little documentary at this protest that I realized anything resembling a real solution required much bigger thinking. At the time, government didn’t seem to be motivated to work on solutions that felt substantive to me so I wondered where else solutions could be sought. Meanwhile, there was Tesla aiming to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy." If I wasn’t going to be able to pursue my dreams of being employed as a filmmaker, then at least I could work on something noble. I had the customer-facing experience. I’m a big technology geek. I had no doubts this was a job that I could do, and do well. I used the resume that I created for my Film-Adjacent applications and applied for a job. I followed up with a hiring manager on LinkedIn because I KNEW that this was within my wheelhouse. That proactivity ended up paying off but because I undersold myself I’d need to prove that I was who I believed myself to be. I did and started full-time in January of 2020 and was awarded equity in the company, like all employees are. This was one of those right place, right time things because the value of the company took off like a rocket ship within a few months of my arrival. All of a sudden I was on my feet in a way I didn’t imagine was possible just a couple months prior. Despite all that progress I was pretty impatient about growing more still. 

For two and a half years, I performed at - in some cases above - the level of some of my most tenured peers while having to assertively advocate for myself to be promoted and compensated at the value that I brought to my teams. Looking back, it’s pretty clear to me that my impatience stemmed from a personal frustration that I had to sing for my supper at the first place company on my Everything Else list. My greatest ambitions for myself, all my hopes and dreams, didn’t lie at this company. I worked to approach the situation with humility at first but at the end of the day Tesla is still a very large company that moves fast when, and only when, it suits its own interests. I didn’t have a name, I had an employee number. And every day I spent there was a day away from the things that really inspire me. One day the rationale the company gave me for my stagnation stopped sounding like excuses and started sounding like opportunity. If not here, then where? Another electric car company? Some startup that might one day grow explosively like Tesla had? Then it occurred to me. If I could do whatever I wanted, what would I do? Well…what do I want? The answer to that question was reflexive. I want to create, produce, and direct stories. Well, why can’t I do that? My financial circumstances had changed radically since I started at Tesla. I’d sought out a mentorship with a showrunner, trying to prepare for a day when I’d leave for my real ambitions. I could gamble on myself again and this time I no longer needed Everything Else.

But what are the odds? Tesla almost didn’t hire me. I literally had to audition. I started in January 2020 when the value of the company was $117B and it’s gone ~10x since then. COVID shut the world down two months after I started so it’s easy to imagine that had I gotten an offer at that time instead, it could’ve been rescinded. I saw that happen to people. Don’t get me wrong, I worked really hard for every single thing I accomplished at Tesla but I have to honor the role luck has played here too. I now find myself in a position I’d previously failed to create for myself when I’d last quit my job. I now own a home and have significant resources available to afford me the time to reimagine my life. There’s a security to having a 9 to 5 that I’ll miss. Having health insurance afforded by an employer is dope. Paid time off is a cool concept that I knew so little about after years in the restaurant business. I’m sure that the life of a freelance filmmaker is going to result in times when I badly miss having a reliable, steady paycheck. The real upside though is the lifestyle. It’s always been difficult for me to find the energy or emotional bandwidth to commit to writing a story that I’ll then have to go find the time to produce. What’s exciting about this opportunity I’ve managed to manufacture is that I can be intentional about how I use my time. The way freelance filmmakers are compensated has caused me to radically rethink my relationship to an employer. Every day, I'm selling 8 hours of my time at a rate that's less generous than I'd like. Every day is another day I've fought down the exhaustion and frustration of selling my time before I can bring myself to my own ambitions. If I can. Often I've not.

I think a lot about this scene in the 2009 Jason Reitman film “Up in the Air” starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. Both Clooney and Kendrick’s characters are employed by a firm who companies outsource their downsizing efforts to. Clooney’s been in the business for a long time and has an old-school approach to doing things. Kendrick’s character is a young newcomer who is ambitious but doesn’t have the advantage of Clooney’s experience. In one scene, they both sit down to terminate a character played by JK Simmons. He’s not taking his termination well and mentions how he won’t be able to afford his daughter’s asthma medication. Kendrick’s character mentions, with good intention but poor taste, that children going through hardship are more likely to apply themselves academically as a method of coping. Simmons is incensed and Clooney responds in a way that feels apt in the context of this post:

How much did they first pay me to give up on my dreams? $19.20/ hour. As I come to the end of my tenure at Tesla I earn quite a bit more now but I couldn't have known that I would when I started. It took so little to give up because I was eager to. I wanted to pay my bills. But when was I going to stop and go back to do what makes me happy? Well the truth is, I actually really enjoy my work at Tesla. Despite how transferable the skills are with the ones I got from a decade in restaurants, I really believe Tesla's work to be important for the future of the world. Were it not for me constantly having to beg to grow while watching others be invited to do so I may not have considered this question until much later. My answer? If someone is going to fight this hard for something it better be precisely the thing they want. As it turns out, a Sales, Service and Delivery position at Tesla is not precisely that thing, or even remotely that thing.

I do have some gratitude to express. First to my parents, who are an excellent support system and set a super high floor on how far I could fall whenever I tried to do anything. Including the last time I quit my job. I'm also grateful for my wife, who has the confidence in me to believe that this big scary thing is the kind of thing worth doing. As a creative, she may one day feel motivated to take a leap like this and I hope to have built something substantive enough to be able to return the favor to her. Last, to Tesla and the team of leaders I worked with there. I do not apologize for being persistent and impatient about my desire to grow. I was worthy of every single thing I was asking for and never asked for anything I didn't earn. But I am grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of something so big and important. I'm grateful for the means I've accumulated to be able to take this step in my life and for the skills I've onboarded from working alongside the team there.

I mentioned that Stanley Kubrick quote in the last post I wrote here two years ago, the one about the universe's indifference. Despite that indifference it somehow has all but conspired in creating a path for me to get the things I've always wanted. I'm still not a spooky guy. But when things seem to work out so well that they could be spooky? Take advantage. They didn't need to work out that way. Or maybe...

[moodsmithmedia]

Lies, the Universe & Mad Men

In this short lived blog I’ve lied to you. Our relationship just started and I’m already out here telling you mistruths...I owe you an apology. It wasn’t a malicious one, but the size of the lie was monumental. This outright falsehood has become engrained into our culture and belief system without any evidence supporting it, like a religion or other dogmatic belief system. Worse yet, there’s probably more evidence against it that people blindly ignore to avoid the cold, decidedly inconvenient truth (I believe in climate change but in this instance there’s no pun intended). So before anything else let me say I’m sorry. I’ve never wanted to be the kind of person who tells these kinds of lies, certainly not to myself. So here goes...

The universe doesn’t conspire to grant wishes. It doesn’t value spunk. It doesn’t reward the consistent. This seems overwhelmingly negative but it shouldn’t be. The universe does a lot of things! It’s constantly creating fusion reactors that churn out the very atoms of which you’re made. Those atoms come together to form the air you breathe, the mountains you might climb, the brushstrokes of a masterpiece that moves you to tears and the blood that blushes the skin of your loved one’s face when you say just the right thing. That’s not even close to a fraction of it. Anything that you could possibly observe, so much of which is absurdly beautiful, is a process of or within the universe. But what the universe doesn’t do is consider your feelings or desires. It just doesn’t happen. And you should stop thinking that it does. And you should stop filling people with the false hope that it will.

Think about the sheer complexity and time that it takes for all of existence to allow for a set of circumstances to randomly play out. If you’re still thinking that the universe has an interest in your success, your concept of it is still too small and self interested. The observable universe is so big it would take light 13+ BILLION years to cross from one side of the universe to the next. Let’s say there’s an intelligent civilization at one edge of the universe. If they broadcasted a message from their end of the universe to a different civilization on the other side of it, the second civilization wouldn’t receive that message for billions of years. Billions of years! For comparison, humanity is only a couple hundred thousand years old. “They say you die twice, once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time.” Anyone around when that message was sent could have lived and died twice, thousands of times over before that message was received.

Civilization. Ours is massive and getting bigger. At the time of this writing there are about 7.7 billion of us and there’s speculation that we could top 11 billion by the end of the century. All of us, on one planet with finite resources and an economic system built on the concept of infinite growth. There’s got to be competing interests that necessitate a “loser”. 

Have you ever watched the Olympics? The Men’s 100m is one of the most fascinating sporting events. It’s not simply a display of strength, there’s an artistry required to lower your times past a certain threshold. But before each race, as the competitors get into their blocks, each one of them genuflects. This has never not confused me. Seriously. I get it. But only one person can win! I think the most generous interpretation of it is that they’re all praying for the best race they have within themselves. I can understand and relate to the idea of being the best version of yourself regardless of the outcome. But who competes without the desire to win? Don’t we actually think that competition without that “killer instinct” to win is just a prerequisite for losing?

Imagine there are civilizations all throughout the cosmos with resource distribution complexity issues roughly equal to our own. Can you really imagine that the universe is out here taking a particular interest in each individual, securing them the things they truly want? That’s just not practical. So instead we imagine that the universe is only doing this service for the people who “truly want something”. But the universe is constantly doing, indiscriminately. This very second the ocean is reclaiming the island nation of the Maldives. Their buildings, their economy, their way of life. Depending on whether or not there is another country or group of countries willing to have them, the ocean could potentially reclaim the people of the Maldives too. Clearly the culture of the Maldives hasn’t sufficiently valued not drowning in its list of things they truly want.

What do you truly want? Is it money? Cars? Women? Is it something more wholesome, like children? A career that fulfills you? A person to see you for who you are and still accept you? What about something that seems more fundamental? Not passing away painfully in some natural disaster or terrorist attack? A life free of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse? To be unburdened by addiction or to have the will power to triumph over it? Or is it simply a job that you don’t particularly want but desperately need in order to earn a living for yourself and your family? The questions should bear out the point, but for the sake of being explicit it simply isn’t possible that the people these things don’t work out for didn’t want it enough. Looking at it the opposite way makes it even more clear. Things work out all the time for people who are indifferent to those opportunities. And it fosters some kind of morbid elitism to really believe that.

Paulo Coelho wrote an inspiring piece of fiction and people treat it as if he wrote a modern bible illuminating the path toward a purposeful life for those who make themselves available to it. The Alchemist got endorsements from celebrities, like Oprah, claiming they connected with the spirit of intention in the development of their careers. They speak to the truth of how the universe works when you want something badly enough. This is deeply offensive to the legacy of artists who weren’t sufficiently appreciated in their time and had to die to be taken seriously. Johann Sebastian Bach wasn’t recognized as a composer while he was alive, instead only viewed as a competent organist. The author of Moby Dick only earned $10,000 from his writing over the course of his life. Van Gogh killed himself, a consequence of mental illness and depression over a lack of success.

So I lied to you but really I lied to me. I, in good faith, regurgitated lies told to me in good faith. Different from the televangelists asking for your rent money for tithes so they can purchase mansions and private jets, I wasn’t encouraged to purchase The Alchemist for a percentage of my monthly income to witness my dreams come true. It was given to me. Gifted to me, at a dark time in my life in the hopes that it would spark belief in myself at a time when I needed it. But the principal message of the book is a fantasy. The universe doesn’t know my name, doesn’t value my ambitions and will move on, business as usual, if you or I, died in the street cold and alone. That only became more clear as the dark time that I received The Alchemist in only got darker. How badly I want what I want matters only to me and a bit less so to those that love me but, fairly, have their own ambitions to be weary of.

This talk of dark times reminds me about another stunning fact about the universe worth pondering. The standard mode of existence in the universe is actually dark and cold. It just happens to be the case that the laws of physics, at this particular moment in the life of the universe, facilitate the creation of stars which warm and illuminate incalculably large swaths of the heavens. 

Paulo Coelho’s book took the onus of facilitating your destiny out of your hands and into the hands of a nameless, faceless, benevolent space fairy. While beautiful fiction, this is just an outright diffusion of responsibility. But there is a truth to be told about the universe. It not warm and fuzzy. It won’t make you feel taken care of. It might frighten you, depending on your openness to being challenged. As I write this, I’m not feeling particularly open to challenge. But it returns control of the ride that is your life from a figment of Coelho’s imagination to you, an undeniably real person. Make of it what you will...

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with that indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” - Stanley Kubrick

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An ‘Atypical’ Piece of Television

Warning! Spoilers for all three seasons of Netflix’s Atypical ahead.

I’m a mixed kid. I don’t mean that I’m bi-racial though. I spent time in both public and private school which is a mix I think is worth reflecting on. I spent half of elementary school at a public school and then the other half of elementary and all of middle school at a private, Catholic school, before returning to the public education system. Before I went to private school I signed up to be in the Boy Scouts and met a young man named Matt. He and I would never become friends, but we’d spend much of the next several years together camping and doing...scouting activities. He’d consistently test the limits of my patience. As it turned out, at that age I didn’t have much patience. They say teenaged girls are mean...boys aren't much different. I suppose we’re just quicker to accept shittiness when it comes from a person with an X and Y chromosome. Matt was a remarkable kid because he was autistic, which made him a fairly difficult person to know. Or at least that’s what I called logic at the time told me. It wasn’t until about 12 years later when a show on Netflix showed me the complexity of the situation I barely understood.

‘Atypical’ is a Netflix Original Series about a high school senior named Sam and how his high functioning autism affects the lives of those around him in profound ways. There are a number of things about this show that stand out. Michael Rapaport turns in a performance I’d have never guessed he was capable of, no disrespect intended. He’s not particularly nuanced, but neither is his character. He’s a simple guy in an exceptionally complicated situation. But some things are simple. Sam is his son and he’s going to have his back no matter what. This is just one example of a multitude of ways that Atypical shows how much heart is at the center of its story.

Just entering its third season, Atypical is far from a perfect show. Or even a particularly well produced one. Jennifer Jason Leigh is profoundly strange in her role as Sam’s mom Elsa.  In the third season Sam’s sister, Casey, is revealed to be atypical in her own way as she begins to realize that her sexuality is far more complex than she’d realized. In what I imagine is an effort to reflect the reality of how people actually come to terms with their sexuality that storyline moves slowly. Like...geological timescale slow. And then once it’s clear what’s happening the season briskly wraps up. Sam’s best friend Zahid is a caricature of a caricature. And just when you think they’re going to make him a real boy things get even more ridiculous. Virtually every misgiving though is forgiven because at the center of this story is something genuinely heartwarming. 

Atypical portrays Sam in a light that is both pitiable and enviable. I’m happy to live my life without the burden of having emotional outbursts in public. I’m sad for Sam and people like him that this is something he has to deal with. Simultaneously, I deeply envy the ways Sam can be truthful with people. If something is stupid, he says so. If something is wrong, he lets you know. It’s almost as though there’s something wrong with us neurotypicals for behaving in ways that we KNOW are inauthentic. Quick aside, I learned from the show that neurotypical is how you refer to folks who aren’t burdened with autism or some other intellectual disability. The word is neurotypical. Not neuronormal. What even is normal?

The show opens with a bully picking on a young woman and promptly being punched in the face for it. Scene after scene you find characters who are indifferent to the adverse consequences of doing right by the “disadvantaged”. These situations had a pretty profound effect on me because there were situations where I wish someone would’ve had my back. More importantly though, and much more common for me, were situations where I wish I’d had someone’s back. I’ve grown to be much more empathetic than a younger me seemed to have the capacity for, mostly an expression of youth angst and insecurity. Easy to say now that I’m an adult who’s never in as robust a social setting as a high school. The show makes it a point to address insecurity, infidelity, friendship and authenticity through a perspective that I hadn’t experienced in, what feels like a long time: innocence. 

Quick aside: I took a break from writing this to go to the grocery to restock my depleted kitchen. I was walking past the butcher section oogling over meat products I mostly don’t eat anymore, but deeply miss. There was a gentleman with a son who was (and I mean nothing untoward when I say this) clearly not neurotypical. At the youngest he was 18. I stepped aside and pulled my cart away so that they could pass by me. The area was a bit congested and I wasn’t in a rush. The father thanked me and walked by first and his son approached me with his hand up to give me a high five. Was he saying thank you? Was he just being nice? Was he doing it to every person he walked by in the store? I don’t know. But look at that. The way the world works these days, before any interaction we subconsciously consider the racial, gender and political identities (among other factors) of the people we come across. This young man was unburdened by the fact that I’m African American, heterosexual, liberal...but felt compelled to connect with me. For all the things we say we value and have learned to value...how can neurotypicals claim to be normal?

In both public and private school I dealt with what we now call bullying through furrowed brows. In private school some of that bullying was delivered by the very people my parent’s tuition money was paying to educate me along with my peers. The remorse and sympathy we feel for the bullied today, while an awesome development in culture, simply wasn’t in stock when I dealt with it. That said, I look back with some resentment, mostly toward myself rather than those who imposed upon me, because I consider myself neurotypical. I should have championed other bullied people. Instead I did something far more cowardly and attempted to replicate my abusers in the hope they’d have me. Shock of the millennium: they didn’t. It took a long time for me to realize how flawed my thinking was, and when I did...I overcompensated for it. 

I’ve deserved to have been punched in the face more than I have in my life (once). I was sucker punched at a bar in a college town for sticking up for a friend who was socially awkward. I hated how he was being treated and didn’t want to see him go out like that. Call it karmic retribution for all the times I hadn’t stood up for myself but more importantly for the people who needed it more than I had, like Matt. 

When Todd Phillips ‘Joker’ came out earlier this year the backlash was vicious. “It’s an incel instruction manual!” shouted the morons who knew nothing about the minutiae of the film because it hadn’t been released yet. They attempted to boycott, never mind that their ignorance almost certainly helped propel the Warner Bros. film to one of the most historic and profitable runs in the history of cinema. The thing Joker does best that those too closed minded to have seen the film wouldn’t know, is it begs the question: “Do we treat each other in a fashion that encourages evil?” There’s no question that in some instances evil may be a consequence of mental illness or hormonal imbalance of some sort. But sometimes, just the propensity for evil is fertilized by an awful attitude by people who are too self interested to realize the ways they tread on the well being of others. And there’s something necessarily wrong with seeing the intellectually disabled as potential criminals with an excuse for their bad behavior. That young man at the grocery store lead with love in his heart in an interaction with a stranger. And it’s probably far more common than we care to admit that his endearing positivity be rejected on the basis that he’s different. We should all be so lucky to be just a bit atypical.

[moodsmithmedia]

Oh the weather outside...

When I was a kid I really, really, loved the first Max Payne game. I found out about it from a guy that I went to (I guess it must’ve been) middle school with. Other folks, high off of the hype of The Matrix found “Bullet Time” was the pièce de résistance of the game. Not me. I didn’t even see The Matrix for the first time until...at least 2005 (at the advisement of my production partner - Greg Kerrick. Every time I think about how long I’ve known him it really throws me.) For me, by far the coolest aspect of Max Payne was the presentation of the storyline. At that age I didn’t really know what Film Noir was, but as the game opened on a snowy, dark, winter in Manhattan (a place I’ve still never been - Get off my back. I’ve been to China, Australia, several parts of The United States and  wasn’t even born in this country.) somehow I just knew what I was dealing with stylistically. The snow didn’t simply represent a meteorological phenomenon. The inner turmoil and torture that our hero was dealing with had somehow manifested in the very sky under which he stood. Max’s inner struggle was his setting. His painful past bearing down on an entire city from up above.

It was a brisk 21 degrees a few mornings ago here. Not nearly what Manhattan was dealing with as the first Max Payne’s storyline commenced. My circumstances aren’t nearly Max’s, thankfully. As the holidays approach I’m consistently reminded of the ways I can be a bit of a grinch in relation to my family. My folks are the Hallmark movie type. Hallmark movies make me sick. My dad joked around with me the other day and said “If they asked you to direct a Hallmark movie you wouldn’t do it?!?!” Rashielle laughed and said I wouldn’t. She knows me well. I wouldn’t be able to look my heroes in the face if I ever saw them. Not that it isn’t honest work. A year ago I worked in a restaurant. But a year ago I left that restaurant because I was tired of doing work that felt empty and miserable. I just have to imagine making a Hallmark movie...watching all of the (admittedly) super attractive white faces delivering wooden and hollow performances like some kind of floating shelf you buy at Target...I dunno. Maybe I’m just an elitist.

That said, the bar by which I measure how miserable something that I do to earn a living is steadily lowering. I’m not Fincher, or Nolan, or Scorsese, or Sorkin, or Lindelof, or any other perennially successful talent. I don’t think I’ll ever be. Like...Stephen King. How the fuck does that guy have so many bestsellers? Seriously. He’s written more garbage than I’ve written...at all. And most of my writing has been garbage and he wrote Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. I’ll spare you a list of remarkable titles that I’m sure you already know.

Ira Glass’ quote about taste comes to mind. I know I have it. And unless the folks working on Hallmark movies are working under pseudonym it’s clear that not everyone does. I wonder how many people capable of greatness are never put themselves in a position to be. There’s a tragedy about that. It’s Shakespearean...to me at least. But the plot of Othello always struck me as a Young and the Restless subplot. I’m kidding. But soap operas...if ever there was an example of the depths to which human taste can sink. You could take a pit stop at the bottom of the Mariana Trench on your way to wherever the surrendered souls of soap opera teams lies. 

Maybe I poke fun out of a relentless self-pity. The most successful year of my life is ending in the most spectacular failure. You know what people who work on soaps and Hallmark movies don’t worry about? Not being gainfully employed. Who knows if it ever even occurred to them to worry about being good? Me? I fear both.

“I don’t know about angels, but it’s fear that gives you wings.” - Max Payne

[moodsmithmedia]

This time, it’s for me.

Over the years I’ve started so many blogs with the intent of trying to build a space or presence online. Each effort, while earnest, eventually fell apart because the aspirations of those projects weren’t personal. I was creating with the intent of building an audience rather than creating for my own personal expression. That changes now though...

This one is for me. I honestly don’t know that I’ll ever proactively push the material I write here. I’m not hiding it either. My portfolio website now links out to this page. But really, I’m creating it because I want to take advantage of the opportunity to get my ideas and thoughts out of my mind and into the world and writing has always been the easiest way for me to do that.

This year has been the most incredible year for me. In so many ways it’s been dream fulfillment after dream fulfillment. I produced, directed and released, to positive reception, a docuseries to Amazon Prime Video. I mentored with Climate Reality twice and served as MC at one of their trainings. I got to introduce Al Gore to the stage for 1200 people there. It’s been amazing. And it all comes after a knee jerk reaction at the end of last year when I suddenly quit my job in the restaurant business (an industry that sustained me financially for nearly a decade, but also sucked every ounce of joy out of my life). The swing has been radical to say the least.

When I served as MC at the Climate Reality training virtually everybody at the event recognized me as one of the leaders there. It was a recognition I’d never experienced before. But I realized that I knew the opposite of that experience intimately. In the decade I spent working in hospitality I noticed that when you’re waiting tables people hardly recognize your personhood. Rather, you’re the object of their service and the entirety of your existence is to do their bidding. This isn’t universally true...but it’s true enough. This year was the first year of my life in which the majority of my experience of other people involved being recognized for my talents and value, which I knew all along I’d possessed. 

It’s not been perfect, nothing is, but it’s been pleasant to create a project that has brought joy to people. The respect that project has earned me from the people that know of it truly warms my heart. That said, I did quit my job and I did it 2 days before Christmas no less. I gave notice, I’m not an asshole...at least not the kind of asshole that leaves a job without notice during the holidays. But when I left I didn’t think I’d make it to March without the bottom falling out. March came and left...and we were still rocking. I shot real estate photography for cheap to start building clientele. Picked up two great clients for  video and that got me to the end of September...when the bottom fell out.

I found a job opportunity in New York that seemed perfect for my experience with a company whose work I genuinely admire. There were ways that I knew I was more than capable of delivering, and opportunities to learn and broaden my skillset that I was excited for. Things didn’t work out and part of the reason it seems was that the hiring managers found me to be overqualified for the position. That’s a novel experience for me and a tough one given I’d have been happy to pick up trash on their set if they’d have paid me to do it. Not because I need the money but because I consider the work they do to be really important. That said, the hiring managers were more than fair to me and I appreciated their willingness to keep me up to date on the status of my application.

Given where I’m at I read The Alchemist this week under the advisement of my girlfriend and identified with the shepherd’s desire to get back to his sheep at the end of the first part of the book. But the talk of how the universe conspires to grant people their deepest wishes is infectious to me. I try to bring that energy to the stories I tell. But I do that because I want other people to feel like there’s magic in the world because incredible things are possible...but I wouldn’t say they’re guaranteed. I’ve actually long believed that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our feelings and desires. My life has at least sort of played out like that. But maybe I’m wrong. I’m certainly open to it...

So here’s to a place to write and get my frustrations, ambitions, joys and sorrows out. And to listening to your heart, because according to Paulo Coelho, it can’t betray me.