Marculations

I’m going down to Ft. Lauderdale at around 10am to look at a new apartment.

Another new apartment.

The whole moving around thing is getting pretty old. But I like it, I think. The actual process of moving is annoying, and the first few weeks of being in a new place are kinda scary, but overall, I prefer it this way. Full time jobs, with full time houses, full time relationships and full time lives are for suckers. Every day I do something different, and every so often I totally change things up. It’s what I wanted to do. When I get tired of it, that’ll be different. Right now, though, it’s all good.

The new place is apparently off of A1A, right across from the beach. That’s going to be pretty sweet. I’m looking forward to getting all moved in. I just wish we could move in before the middle of next month. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my stuff until then. Maybe we can swing it and stay in this place until then, who knows. I just don’t want to pay the bills for two places in one month. That puts a bit of a damper on the financial situation.

The short film I’ve been working on is still heavily in post-production. Terrifyingly so. That’s okay, though. I love working on tight deadlines. Really tight deadlines. Deadlines so tight, they’re like virgins you don’t know how you’ll ever meet them. I work best in that sort of a situation.

I want to push The Last Regret through pre-production (again) and get it done before I leave the area for two weeks. My leaving the area is also coinciding with another project spinning up, which is due in December. That one’s important, and its start date crashing head first into my departure leaves me wondering just who is going to direct it. Suddenly, things are getting hectic.

I’m going to do table reads for “The Last Regret” this weekend, time permitting. I love rushing into production with revision “zero” of a script. Seeing groups of people busting their ass and investing large amounts of time and effort to produce a script that was written in fifteen minutes, and then never revised, just brings an odd smile to my face. It’s quite possible I’m a sadist. (I often convince myself that I produced the original draft of “Selling The Faith”, but that’s not true. It was revised once, at the behest of a member of the crew. I like to forget that. I remember every time I watch the credits.)

It’s odd working with talent that doesn’t tactlessly second guess the direction. Not that they won’t have opinions, and interject them as they feel they should. That’s fine, I want that. It’s that they do it gracefully, and tactfully. Satisfying the directors ego, while still getting your opinion to matter, is not easy. It’s more of an art form. Some might say that the director should be less sensitive, less tempermental, and more open to all forms of input from cast and crew, regardless of any ego stoking. To that, I say, no fucking way I’ll think about it.

I live in Florida. Most of the people who read this do.

We know hurricanes. We don’t even call them hurricanes. We call them “storms.” I’m serious. Ask someone who’s from Florida about the “hurricane.” We’ll call it the “storm.” We can tell you the names of the big storms we’ve gone through, but not the small ones. We lose count. The different parts of Florida don’t even keep up on the storms that are hitting the other parts. I’m not originally from South Florida, but I moved here this year. When hurricane discussions would come up, I’d hear about Hurricane Charley. I didn’t know about it. I’d talk about Hurricane Opal and Hurricane Ivan. Noone here could recall any specifics on those. People from Northwest Florida will remember Hurricane Erin. People from South Florida probably couldn’t tell you about it.

The media coverage on hurricanes now is sickening.

Nobody cared before Katrina. Now, it’s popular to freak out.

Hurricanes that hit Florida weren’t a big deal anymore, because we actually know how to deal with a hurricane. We have to know. Our entire economy is based on tourism. We can’t have Florida storms getting dragged through the news for weeks and weeks as we struggle to clean up and get our act together, because it’ll lower our tourism revenue. We don’t have an income tax. We like it that way. We need tourism revenue to keep that going.

All that being said, when I refer to Florida being prepared for these storms, I am only referring to the government. The people are clueless. It’s because we just don’t care anymore. We’ll all run to the store like three hours before the damn thing hits and buy like six dozen triple-A batteries and a bottle of lighter fluid. We’ll put enough gas in our cars and in gas cans to last us through the rest of our lives, and we’ll duck tape plywood to the insides of our windows or something if the spirit moves us. Few native Floridians will actually leave. The people who do leave will spend the rest of their time before the storm hits on either I-10, I-75, I-4 or I-95. I don’t know the status of the Turnpike during these things, so you might look there for any stragglers.

Now that we’ve discussed how Floridians like myself react to these storms, let’s discuss the one that’s out there right now.

Chances are, when you went to bed, this storm was a cat. two. Well, good morning. It’s a five now. Wind speeds of 175 miles per hour. And it’s headed for South Florida. We haven’t had a nasty storm down here yet this year. We got Katrina, but it passed over as a cat. one.

I have overlayed several charts and added a few annotations to express my dismay upon looking at the situation a few moments ago. The graph is a composite of the projected path and the tropical update, with notes on the thoughts that ran through my head as I read each item.

Not that I’ll evacuate, given the situation. But it should prove to be very exciting.

Got to make sure the cameras are charged up.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you are struck with a brief insight into the larger picture.

People become so constrained by their self-imposed boundaries that they sometimes fail to realize, you can do pretty much anything you want. There are usually consequences, but ultimately, the sky is the limit.

I had several flashes of insight today.

The first one was, I can go anywhere. I don’t have a full time job. There’s nothing tying me to this place except the fact that I don’t want to leave. If I decided tomorrow to leave, I could do it. That’s a great feeling. Just knowing you can do something is almost as good as doing it.

The second was, you have to stand out. My generation was raised to celebrate mediocrity. Everybody is just as good as everybody else, we can all do anything we want and be just as good as anybody else, etc. It’s not true. People have natural talents, and talents should be championed and wielded proudly. But talent isn’t enough. The real trick is getting noticed. People can say to you all day long, you are talented, you should be doing this or that. It doesn’t matter. You have to prove it to the world at large. People have to know your name. Someone who’s only moderately good at what they do, but have a known name, will do much better than someone who is awesome, and unknown. Don’t sit around and wait to be discovered. Get out there and do it. Even in this internet age, it amazes me the trouble people won’t go to in order to be noticed.

Of course, the third flash of insight was, if you drink nothing but Pepsi all day, it leaves this weird burning and tingling taste behind after a while.