004. Love Letter to America

{photo from GOOD}

My politics may be progressive, but I love my often-flawed country. I think we too often cave to fear of the different, but that it's human nature, and as a country of immigrants, it's, unfortunately, easier to fall into traps of division. The inequality gap may be growing at an alarming rate, women may not make equal pay for equal work, homosexuals may not be able to serve honestly in our military or have marriage rights in most of the country, the poor may be unrepresented, the wealthy may own our elections, but my father was born into a poor farming family in Vietnam and my mom's family lost their store after the end of the war. Now I'm a graduate from a liberal arts college with ripe opportunities if I went searching. I can spend someone's month's salary on one coffee at an overpriced chain shop that has taken over the globe if I wanted. I can shout into the netherworld because of some magical electromagnetic something-or-other about whatever I wanted. I could say I hated this country and not fear repercussions (mostly).

I'm not disillusioned about our imperfections, but I love my country none-the-less.

Happy birthday, home and native land of mine.

003. Hobbies

I started this post before Coco tweeted this today, but I will take advantage of this coincidence.

Did people have more hobbies in earlier periods? Now, we have the conveniences of the internet to interact with other people, television to watch, we can even get our music without talking to a soul. Kids weren't sitting in front of the television or computer, so hobbies probably started younger. I played baseball, soccer, and did some ballet as a child, but nothing stuck (which I blame my parents, but I should take some of the blame - some advice parents, sometimes you just have to push through a stubborn phase and make your kids have a hobby). Now my hobbies include reading short and long form news articles, analyzing my favorite shows until it's dead and I don't want to think about them anymore, cutting out magazines and making collages, thrift shopping, listening to podcasts and music, following the craft of showrunning, and journaling/blogging. I also read books from time and time and watch movies. I don't 'game', though I'm not against it and I've been eyeing my sister's guitar in the living room, maybe I'll try to learn a few chords.

Keeping a record of all this is supposed to be motivate me to be more than words.

002. Remember to practice

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through." Ira Glass

Often, I feel like I'm disadvantaged because of my lack of experience and extracurricular. I've always been on the shy, introverted side of life, feeling more comfortable in my pajamas than in a cocktail dress (metaphorically, I love dressing up - maybe it would be more accurate to say I am more comfortable on my couch than in the club?). But I'm still young and still have changes, and I have good taste. Right?

This isn't about writing like I stated. It's about having a stream of conscious and continue to push to finding... something.

001. What I did on my summer vacation.

I think I want to write. I'm not particularly gifted with words and I never think it's good enough, which is why I barely update. I will start a post and then delete it because I feel like it's only partially fleshed out. I often stumble through conversations and come up with things I want to say at 3 o'clock in the morning trying to sleep instead of in the moment. These are things I hope other people go through, so I have a little hope.

I wrote my college essay about television as a form of storytelling, which might be a "duh" statement, but tv is often overlooked in media studies because of its start as merely long-form advertising. I prefer the television format over film because of length and ability for subtly. There's time to learn the characters and understand behavior, at least if done well.

One goal for the summer is to write a spec script. I have no idea how and it probably won't be good (or exist), but in case the career path I am eventually swept under doesn't fulfill my soul the way society tells me it's supposed to, I can try to be a tv writer. Also, I will try to write more in this little blog (but I want to change the name, again, because I have always been exceptionally fickle when it comes to user names - I changed my AOL name at least once every couple weeks as a child). I should 'practice' writing in public (regardless if anyone reads or not). I've been actively journaling since I was in fifth grade and went through a year or two of melodramatic poetry-writing in middle school as we all have, but my creativity has shrunk as my self-awareness (read: self-consciousness) has grown to insurmountable heights.

Inspiration for this post: Mindy Kaling quote (does anyone know the original source?), comedy showrunner rountable, Dan Harmon talks through season two of Community, WTF podcast, any number of process interviews floating around.

Edit: Have I mentioned my inconvenient habit of editing posts after I've published them? I do it often, even on Tumblr when no one will see the edited version because of the dashboard format, I will edit my commentary and tags constantly. Which is, I guess, to say I write/blog as a release for myself more than to be heard/read. But I wanted to clarify that I don't really know what I mean by "I want to write". I don't know what that entails for me, whether it be fiction, script, or journalism. I s'pose I just wanted to guide myself to vomit words more frequently because even though I don't feel quite proficient at it (even after four years of a liberal arts education), it does lift the weird little burdens my internal dialogue builds up.