Tuesday, September 25, 2012

I'm Building An Island In My Mind

Last night as I lay in bed, sleep not coming for the second or third night in a row, I decided to stretch my imagination and begin to build an ideal landscape of a small island in my mind. I started with it's geographical coordinates, somewhere in the central Pacific Ocean, South of the Equator. Then I laid out it's shape and topography, 5 points like a star, with one high plateau, a mountain peak and a harbor. I was soon asleep.

I've also begun doing exercises to lucid dream. I don't think I believed that lucid dreaming was really possible - controlling yourself in your dreams, until I did it for the first time a few weeks ago. In my dream I bounded down the street as if the Earth had the gravity of the moon, and I ate onion rings. I felt great when I woke up.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Sensory Overload

It's hard to believe that I'm almost thirty and still learning the basic ways that my brain works. For example, I thought that I was an extrovert most of my life. It was only in the last two years that I realized that not only am I introverted, but I'm on the more extreme side of the scale. Today, I'm sitting in my apartment, in the dark,  catching up on YouTube videos, listening to sermons and now writing this blog post. It's almost 5pm, I haven't seen a soul and I may go the rest of the day without leaving the house. Even the few phone calls I had today felt like a chore. The reason for this agoraphobic day is that last night, I went out to a speakeasy Cuban club and got sensory overloaded. And I had a good time! But to turn on that social side of myself, in such a focused way, I feel like my batteries have been emptied and now I have to recharge today. I'm still learning what this means for myself and how to best act with this knowledge. I don't wish that I was an extrovert. I like these alone days. I like socializing too. It's just a balance.

(Written very stream-of-conscious, just to get the fingers moving.)

Monday, August 27, 2012

New Posts

I've started writing again, professionally this time. I'm having no trouble getting words on the page, but I know that writing is like a muscle, it gets out of shape and it needs to be exercised. I'm going to start writing here again, because it's so easy. I like the blogger platform. If you're subscribed and you have any interest at all, feel free to read. I'm just writing stream of consciousness for the most part, laying my thoughts out on the table, looking over them and picking and choosing the best ideas to keep and work on.

The first thing that comes to mind this morning is juicing. I've been a daily coffee drinker since 2003 when I started training for a marathon, taking 19 hours of class and driving an hour to and from an internship every day. I somehow got through 20 years of life without the need for a daily intake of caffeine and yet for the last 10 years, I haven't been able to imagine a day without it. A few days ago, I finally bought a juicer and went to various grocery stores and picked up a whole slew of produce: Apples, oranges, kiwi, blueberry, strawberry, carrots, ginger, kale-oh-so-much-kale, peaches, watermelon and I picked some lemons off the tree in my front yard. And I've juiced three times a day since then. This morning, I made both a juice and a strong cup of coffee. In front of me, is the finished juice and the half finished coffee. I'm not saying that I'm giving up coffee, but my body is telling me that I don't need it when I've had the nutrients in the juice. Also, the juice tastes way better.

I bought the Sharper Image juicer at Fry's for $75:


I feel amazing.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

20,000 Miles and 3 Months In a Suitcase

Either I've just lost all motivation to blog, or I'm busier than I've ever been in my life. I try to only Tweet anymore when I have something really interesting or poignant to say and I've switched my daily picture output to Instagram (user: antonseim). Tomorrow I start 30 straight days of production on two different reality shows. I'll have 9 days in the country to tie up loose ends and then I'm off to England (then 4 other countries). There's a lot going on right now, but I don't really feel the need to share all the details. Maybe I just don't have all the details sorted out in my mind just yet.

On a totally different note, I've got to learn how to do my own web-development. The time has come for me to move past WordPress and learn to design my own web-sites.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Life Update, 28 September 2011

I miss my old blog. When I first began blogging in 2005, while working at the now non-existent commercial post-production company that was my first job out of college, I was very afraid of putting my full name on the internet. My concern was that I was going to become a successful director one day and I didn't want anyone to be able to search back 5, 10 years prior, to see the immature, unrefined place where I began. But I've long abandoned that idea in favor of absolute transparency.

My mind has been racing lately and I haven't had much of a venue for expressing myself without injecting my thoughts into other people's lives the way that social media like Twitter and Facebook status-ing work. Writing here, people who are interested can seek out this information if they want it - so I've decided to start blogging again.

Blogging is a very general term. It's become a critical medium, or a venue for amateur opinion editorialism. But that's not what this is going to be - at least not for a while. These posts are personal revelations, rants and introspections. I just need to get the flurry of thoughts swirling around in my head down in concrete form so that I can organize the current mental chaos in my brain.

When I was 19, I completely changed my lifestyle and life-desires and it marks the time I really began to pursue my goals with absolute focus. At the end of this year, it will have been ten years since I started on that path. While there have been some great surprises along the way, a wealth of experiences, travel and relationships that I am deeply grateful for, I also feel like I've failed to live up to my own expectation of where I hoped I would end up at 29, when I was 19. So I've got seven months to set things straight.

My immediate goals are pretty simple. To finish my first film and get it into a few major film festivals, to finish my second film in half the time it took to complete the first one, and to finish the draft of my first book, a travel memoir recounting the best stories from 47 countries and 12 months of mostly solo trips around the world. And I'm going to blog through the process.

*I still haven't stopped taking pictures every single day for my visual diary, it was just too tedious to download and post them every day. I'll work the best ones in as I blog.