Prove your worth

With new technologies and the intertubes, everybody and their grandma seems to think that they can be stars by grabbing a cellphone and shooting their antics and putting it out on Youtube. Sure, you'll get a chance to get stranger's responses, and with a bit of luck, you might go viral, at which point you'll have stopped being relevant.

Now if you want to know the gritty behind the scenes of film making, check out the blog for Conversion, the film that Kate MacDonald wrote (and acted in!) and Dominic Marceau directed... and financed out of their own damn pocket. It turns out that it takes more that a few fancy megapixels and some snazzy Apple app to make a movie a reality.

This is not about Google Maps

So buckle up and read it, ya crazy kids!

If the water's frothing, its probably rapids

I haven't really ever had a smooth sailing life. There's always all sorts of things in your way, some intentional, others circumstantial, that pose a hazard to the path of your lifeboat, as it were.

Now enough with the cute imagery and on with the concrete.

Since my summer vacation, there's been all sorts of things happening: not getting paid, losing jobs, waiting for the powers that be to help, nasty neighborhoods, asswad neighbors, rough financial situations, medical conditions, deaths, adoptions, and the wonderful lifestyle experiment called "getting by."

I'm not so much talking about excuses for things not getting done, but the consequences of making choices. If I make the choice of improving my existence, then its likely that something's gonna give somewhere. Some of those choice may well impact others, some very close indeed, in a negative way, for a variety of reasons. We all have our own weight to bear.

After some due considerations, we've decided that we were adopting a rescue cat, which turned out to be two, which also turned out to be adults, because fuck babies. Now, due to our mindset, we went for "trouble cases", specifically we adopted a pair that came from a hoarder ceisure. Cats in who come from that sorts of environments have certain issues and may be somewhat problematic on the socialization side of things.

And thus our first weekend with the new tenants began. The girl is a sweetheart, a cute little thing barely over four pounds ( and yet she's the eldest of our felines) with a respiratory problem that will stay with her all of her life. The boy, while somewhat skinny for a Persian, is of much stronger built and only recently spayed, which is problematic when introduced into an existing dynamic of two large males.

Fur flew. The Maine Coon, is not happy about the new pensioners and is quite vocal about his distaste. He also refuses to deal with them at this point, requiring a certain level of supervision and isolation. This situation, combined with some fairly tight financial woes prevents us from having something of a social life for a while. My return to customer service, putting me in constant contact with the general public all day does not encourage me to interact even more when I'm off work, and my partner's recent unemployment has the added benefit of making a tight financial regimen necessary.

To our friend's woe.

I haven't had to sail such precarious water for so long, it takes some getting used to, and with any luck a few good nights of sleep. It does allow us to catch up a little with our mounting pile of movies that were acquired but not yet previewed.

There is a price for everything, and responsibility requires some sacrifices. I can only count myself lucky that we have cats and not children; we'll never have to deal with having to drive them to soccer practice.

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There are events that may not leave much of a mark; verbal abuse has very little visible impact for instance. And then there are events that, by all logic, should leave terrible marks. Being hit in the head with a truck door would, by all order of logic, leave a lasting impression on the receiver. It would certainly be hard to think that it couldn't

And yet, besides the obvious scars, I have little aftereffects of that event. Well, little physical traces anyways. There are consequences, just not the kind that most people expect.

For instance, there was no sudden interest in religion, renewed belief in God, or spiritual discovery. I did not succumb to some sort of massive life questioning where my path is reset and a new direction is taken, one possibly more aligned with people's expectations.

There was certainly an renewal in spiritual pursuit, just like there was a renewed dedication of artistic endeavour, and certainly a new understanding of what had to be done for my goals to be achieved. It had dawned on me just how much time got wasted, some of it due to external circumstances, some of it due to self-limitation.

In my artistic pursuits, I have decided a while back that I should control my destiny as much as possible; while the concept of self-publishing or micro labels is certainly not new, or financially rewarding, I figured that if I was going to do this, I should do my utmost to do it on my own, to be the captain and pilot of my own ship.

Or tank

I took the step of registering a domain name a year ago, with the optic of getting a website up and running withing a few months; as per many of my projects, it has not come to pass yet. Now that I have reached the renewal time, it became obvious that if I made the choice to continue, then I should make damn sure that something should come out of it, good or bad.

The endgame is to bring the project to its conclusion, not just give it a shot and give up halfway through. I have spent far too much time on the abstract, while not doing any of the actual work. That the first sketch will be bad and amateurish, I fully expect; I now have to welcome it, so that I can learn and grow from this experience and develop new skills or understanding.

I have the will, I have a direction. Now, I just have to grab a machete and hack my way.

Onward and forward.