I ran out of space in my head...the net seemed vast enough so I decided to lump it all here.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Excorsising the Ghost: Send Your Inner Critic Packing...Quickly

This must be the best piece of advice that i've heard in months:

"It is the job of the first draft to be written. Not to be brilliant, not even to be good, but to be written."

It's from a screenwriter named David Anaxagoras...really, that's his name. (Yes, it's the name of the wizard from The Wizard's Apprentice)

It's really...wow. Thank God for that line, because I am going nuts writing my first draft. I've turned that story so many times in my head that I feel like my brain is going to come out of my nose in a fried pieces of mush.

The demand that i've been putting to myself to be so brilliantly perfect is driving me up the wall.

I have this thing with doing things spectacularly the first time--not good, not pretty good, but fucking nova.

It doesn't matter whether it be sports or cooking, I go into it thinking I will bloody revolutionize this thing on my first try even if it kills me.

And it's killing me right now.

I think, what I need, is just to get my story out of my head. I think of it every moment of the day. When I shower. When I eat. Before I sleep. First thing when I wake up. When I take a shit. It's like having a fucking boyfriend.

So all goes to taking those few words out to the page. My script writing is software is already loaded, now all I need is the fucking script that goes with it.

Time to hammer and polish some drafts.

Monday, May 30, 2005

That Thing You Do

I hate being left out of the loop.

My friend Karen and I were talking business the other day when she brought this up. It's something that's true but not immediately obervable in my behavior.

If it's a work situation, I like being in control. In the instances that i've had to work in a group, i've found myself placed in an executive position.

Sure, it doesn't always happen. There are times when other people are more qualified to lead, or you're much better off as a follower.

But I hate being left out.

Which is probably why I like writing, it gives me complete control of an environment, even if it's not real.

I like working in a group for a movie, simply because I can see the results. I know that if I do something this way, I can immediately see something happening that way. It won't take me long to do see it.

I wonder how I would have done with that marshmallow test?

Pinoy kids have the fear of God put into them, so when an adult tells him not to eat something, then he won't eat it. He'll throw a tantrum, he'll cry, he'll do something annoying, but he'll wait until the adult comes back and tells him he can eat it.

It doesn't matter that he'll get two mallows in the end, the only thing running in his mind will be "I eat this right now, and he'll come back and whup me"

Violent, maybe primitive, but it works.

Sure, it skews the result of that mallow test, but what the hey, right? Those who were impatient as a kid are still impatient when they grow up and those patient still wait. The only difference is that Pinoy kids won't eat them because some unknowing adult tells them that a manananaggal (a really fugly version of a vampire) will come eat him.

That's Pinoy Discipline for you.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Nuts

Amazing what job dissatisfaction can do to ones psyche.

I am on the verge of growing nuts. I am earning (or technically earning) a lot of money in this job, but I still loathe it to pieces.

My mind feels like it's being sucked into a wormhole of stupidty and frustration. The funny part is, I know exactly what to do with it, I'm just fucking guilty to move.

I hate having to inconvenience people. Someone once stepped on my toe and bled for a good fifteen minutes but I still didn't say anything because I didn't want to cause a fuss at the party. Just the way I am.

But really, this is ridiculous. I don't care how much I earn now, I feel like it's either go nuts or get out of this job. It's ridiculous. It's not worth it.

Friday, May 20, 2005

Self Destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

It's all set. I'm counting down the days when I have to bail from this job because it's driving me nuts.

Thus, after hoarding the necessary amount of cash I will be taking the frightening but exciting leap into filmmaking full time, this time with my parents blessings.

All I need now is time and the money in my bank account.

I'm pretty surprised at how things are turning out this year. I totally expected to stay in this "cushy" job for close to a year. But things are happening at work that is making things a bit difficult for me.

So today, after I finish the first draft of my treatment, I am off to do some screen tests for my first pet project.

Really. I can't wait.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

3 Month Asylum

Curse the fact that I go crazy in any job I don't like after just three months!!!

Some things I figured out which is really shitty:

1) I top out at 90 days in any job that I don't like. Granted, everyone fuckass hates to go to work, but there's a difference between "having problems at work" and "hating the work itself". I happen to be on the latter.

2) Shitty bosses. I have problems dealing with authority to begin with. It was my former boss (and thank God she's still my former boss) who remarked that I was probably one of those people who were born never to be an employee. I think it was her way of saying I had problems with authority, but through the years I could never seem to rectify that. Mainly because out of five jobs, four of my bosses suddenly sprouted fangs and turned into SHIT.

3. Paycuts and low -paygrade. I've been in a high paying job, then a low paying job. I don't think it makes much difference. If you truly don't like what it is that you do, you just...you fucking hate it. Sorry. There is no compensation. If you're ultimate goal at the moment is to shape your career...then you have to be there. They could pay me a hundred right now and i'd stay just a month at the frigging job just to get the hundred. And have I mentioned that my high paying job just got me a 50% paycut?

It pisses me off that I have such a short attention span. But what I can't deal with right now is all this stress.

Everyone can put up with their job because they have this tangible goal: wanna buy a house, wanna buy a car. Need the money to pay my bills, have to put my kids to school.

My goal is to make it into films...but i'm not into films. I think it's time that I hoard my money and make that leap into the uber low, no pay realm of Production Assistant.

Oh well, here goes, right?

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Scrambled Eggs

Whoever wished to be stuck between two jobs is crazy, especially when you happen to love one more than the other, and that "other" happens to be the one that makes money.

My brain is slowly turning into Jell-O. I have double deadlines right now, and have no idea on how to get around it. I'm going crazy.

I had one of the worse weeks of my life. I feel somewhat lucky that I work from home, otherwise I could have met all sorts of misfortunes had I stepped outside.

At this point, it wouldn't be unlikely for me to cross the street and get hit by a fucking scooter that will give me amnesia.

But it's a Sunday, I am trying to finish up my Monday deadlines, and hoping that tomorrow will be better.

For my dayjob, I am compiling a list of speakers for our seminars.

I always thought that they were a great, inspiring lot, but right now I am just sick of them. What I once thought were guru's just turned out to be a bunch of businessmen, where they have a product, and you are the sucker that has to buy it from them.

They have publicists, and PR sheets, sell books and CDs and have websites with streaming video's. They have headshots and some have specialized stationary emails that just annoy me.

Maybe it's just the work that has soured me towards them, but one more motivational speaker out of two thousand is just one speaker too many.

And strange how some of them can be so snooty in email, especially when they teach stuff like "Tact and Diplomacy in everyday communication."

Monday, May 02, 2005

Aren't You Supposed to be Busy?

Despite the now full fledged cold and cough, I managed to wake up at my early hour of 11am and call Karen, one of the producers and soon to be actor in our wonderful movie enterprise.

Of course she signed up, it's her movie. But as director, I felt like I needed to cajole her a little more into loving her part as an actress. After all, like JP, she can act, she's just shy about it.

I don't know why, but a large part of my friends are "Actors". I don't mean wonderful theater actors who can replicate human emotion at the drop of a hat, but creative people who don't seem to mind others watching their ornery. In fact, they love it. They'll not only be honest about their rants, but they'll give you gut wrenching emotions at pivotal moments while giving you good blocking too.

And Karen is one of those.

It took a long time. Not as long as the seven hours it took for me to losen up JP, but long enough when two people on the phone are both sick to the gills and half doped from cold medication.

Before calling her, I had this dream that I had already called her up and had given her the idea to the whole movie. I thought it was real.

Of course, in my dream, I was also living in some apartment in an area that i've never seen, on the way to a wedding of someone I have never met but I am supposed to be closely related to, but was worried as hell because I had to pitch a movie to Karen, whom I had talked to the night before (this part is real).

Right before we were about to leave for the ceremony, Karen drops by the apartment, bitching about the fact that she was sick, and late, and she wanted to kill her doctor because he made her search all around town for this one special flu shot (in a yucky, puss yellow color) only to be told that he had prescribed her the wrong thing.

It was a lot to take in, especially when you passed out earlier in the dawn before you could start some work on your day job because of a migraine.

Dreams are supposed to be my way of escaping from reality, right?

Anyway, when I woke up and realized that all that work was for naught and I had to call the real Karen with my hair sticking out and with a cough ridden bedroom sexy voice, I realized that I had a very full day ahead of me.

I have two jobs to work on, which I seemed to have procrastinated all through the weekend, and later on just got too sick to start with.

For some reason, I can never really do work that I don't like when the whether is hot. It kills me. And when I do, the computer shuts down because I need another fan to cool my AMD chipset, and when I get it rebooted a some 15 minutes later, the cold meds would have hit and I need to shut down in order to reboot myself.

It a vicious cycle of laziness and slacker persistence (now there's an oxymoron)

So here I am, having just finished reading my film book and getting all set to work, when suddenly my brain feels like it's all been shoved at the back of my head and my ears feel like i'm underwater.

I have mountain of things to do, but no viable braincells to do them.

The funny part is, it's only when my brains are limping in gray mode do I get this urge to blog and write. It's like the remaining cells get creative just to prove that they can survive.

And good luck to them, because the rest of me is shutting down with this heat.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Workin' It

I just hired my first actor yesterday and it felt awesome.

Of course it was my friend JP but it still felt great. He mainly signed on as a favor for a friend and was terrified of disappointing me. He kept telling me over and over that he didn't have any acting experience, but I told him that he was going to do fine.

The emotions that I require from him were already close to the surface, coupled with the fact that we were very good friends, so it would be easier for me to give him directions.

He was reluctant at first, so even though he'd signed the release forms, we talked more about the work that we were about to do. After giving him a description of the scene and what I required of him, I asked him for his opinion, noting several signposts to his emotions.

It took seven hours of talking, but I finally loosened him up in order to get the confidence to play the role.

By the time we left, he looked like this matinee idol who just couldn't wait to get to work. He's excited about the project, but is fuck assed enthusiastic that he would also get to choose the music for the scene he's going to be in.

We spent the whole day at the Petron gas stations mini stop, hydrating ourselves with caffeine and munching on a can of Pringles chips, but it was great.

It finally felt real, when he signed that contract. Just two weeks ago, Laarni and I were making plans about the production company, and setting up projects, and found ourselves booked until next year. Well, hopefully.