Indulgence

from lily pad to lily pad

Robert Service
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out... it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

With very little sleep, I trod on through the days jumping from one job to the next. I feel like some little frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad and it seems endless but I want to get to the other side of the river, get to the other side of the shore; the other side of the river bank. I could swim, I suppose but there's just so much danger lurking underneath the surface of the water, stuff you can't see. It's dangerous. Sometimes I do swim, some lily pads are farther apart and I can't get there by jumping.

I can exhaust this little analogy till its worn out and incongruent but I don't want to. I don't want to be a little frog in a very huge river. I want to get to the other side, find the princess who is going to kiss me and turn me into the prince that I can be. I'm tired. I'm really tied right now but I know, in the end, this will all be worth it. I'm learning so much and I'm building up an impressive resume and maybe, hopefully, one day, it will all amount to something.

I wonder if that's all that frogs think of? Will I amount to something?

In a way, I had too many starts and stops. I started writing back in high school, writing for the local comic industry. In college, I moved on to writing on an internet website that catered to youth interests. Eventually, I started writing for magazines and newspapers and the like. Non-stop working, writing, ever since I was in high school. Right after college, though, I started working in the academe. I was in the administration, working as a coordinator for the Student Publication's Office and then later, found myself teaching which I loved. But new policies stopped my post-graduate education since I was no longer eligible for a tuition fee discount. Without it, it was easy for them to kick me out when I had this fight with the Department Chair at the time.

From there I moved to advertising but I didn't last for long. I followed with freelance writing -- writing for magazines and getting these writing jobs for PR stuff, ad copy and script writing for live events and the like. It wasn't a particularly good period in my life; I was barely making out fine and I was doing this until I got into television.

Along the way, modeling and acting reared its head but never really took a dominant stand in my life. It was too late, I suppose. And I am too self-conscious, too self-aware to be an effective performer. It would take so much work to get rid of all that self-consciousness and I honestly don't have the time to start from scratch.

I was working so hard in making sure I would be nothing like my father; that I would excel in a field away from his. Writing may be close to film but there was still some distance. At the time, I wanted to be a writer of books, novels, poems and the like. Had I known that I would end up wanting to direct films just like my Dad, I would have started earlier. A lot of people I work with are younger than I and have been in the business longer. A lot of people I work with took up Mass Communications or Film and have an actual academic background and some technical knowledge in what we do. I have none, learning everything as I go along since my major was Literature and Creative Writing.

I'm not saying that I'm winging it or anything like that; I do know a lot of theory but it is all self-taught, self-studied. I continue to train myself now but if only I had known that this is where I'd end up, I wouldn't have bothered trying so hard to be different, to stay away from the world that I felt belonged to my Father; and for a time, my brother Datu who had plans of becoming a director.

But no regrets. That would be such a big mistake now and it will only hold me back. I'm good in other things and see the whole industry and the process in a different way and I think that's good. If anything, I have a great hold of narrative structure and that makes me different. More than anything, I'm a story-teller more than I am a film-maker. There is a big difference there. That might make me different, give me some level of originality. I hope it measures up in the long run.

Bounce-bounce, hop-hop; I'm a little frog jumping from one pad to the next, took the long route to where I am finally going to end up. There's no real sense in going back now, not when I've been through so much.

I don't know why I ended up talking about these things. I had no plans for this entry and decided to go into it freestyle. And I ended up writing some sort of resume and talking about what it is that I hope to be eventually good at; to what I want my life to mean.

And what is it that is at the other side of the river? I want to be a conduit for art -- let it flow through me, filter through me and find expression with the medium that I am good at. It will be stories -- whether in a book or a film or, hopefully, music. I want art to be my contribution to this world.

posted by wanggo @ 6:58 PM