When I was eighteen years old, I lived in a very old house just off 495 with my father. By the end of the summer, I had driven an hour away with a large portion of my things, and went to college. Seven years later, I'm living back in Lowell once again. A temporary condition, to be sure, but I can't help but feel as though I'm falling behind.
I've built up a bit of a bad habit of worrying if I'm moving fast enough. This summer gave me several opportunities to look a little deeper into the world of film, and it confirmed my suspicion that frankly, I've got some catching up to do. Or at least, I need to get better at planning things out. I'm still (perhaps naively) aiming to shoot my first real film this fall, based on a three-year old draft I wrote specifically to be simple and cheap to film. And later in the fall, I'm pitching a documentary that I honestly feel could be an enormous success if I have the right tools (and funds, and time) at my disposal. And I'm writing a draft for my next project after that.
That's all well and good, but I've been hitting an increasingly frustrating series of obstacles that are starting to wear me down. My last job was paying me little more than minimum wage, giving me a rapidly shrinking number of hours, and netting me less money than when I was on unemployment from the job before that. Three to four hundred dollars a month is not enough to get by on when I need to drive an hour to get there and have completely unpredictable hours week to week. So I'm back in the job hunt, and that's going... slowly.
Which is itself being hindered now by my car, whose engine has spontaneously decided it didn't like having oil in it anymore and simply... didn't. Gonna be hard to get to interviews if I don't have a vehicle, you see. Thankfully that's a least being taken care of, as of tonight. I just hope it's covered (the car has only been back on the road three months), or I'm in trouble.
I'm struggling to get used to living in someone else's house again. For the last five years, I'd been living in apartments in Worcester, and have had my own space that I could retreat to if need be. Add in that my father feels the need to be involved in every iota of what I'm doing, and I really don't have much in the way of genuine privacy except when he's asleep or at work.
Stress has been high, but there's been a great deal of good coming my way lately that I'm feeling incredibly lucky for, so it's not all bad news. But I need to keep this momentum going. As it is, I'm already going to be in Lowell even longer than I anticipated, and I want to move into the Boston area as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
I miss people, I feel isolated from a lot of my friends and their lives, and the only way I'm ever going to get anywhere in film is if I can be flexible and versatile enough with my time and money to actually get places and get things done. I'm making connections, at least (through an increasingly unlikely series of lucky circumstances), so there is definitely that. And I'm starting to get my writing mojo back (partly thanks to, bizarrely enough, a little prodding from Jane Espenson).
Gotta earn my fun. Gonna give 'em hell.
rickie-d
No comments:
Post a Comment