Thursday, July 22, 2010

Starting New Failed Prospects

This blog was originally intended to keep track of my head and practice in something I've always loved to do: write. It was practice that I definitely needed based on the syntax of that last sentence. But nevertheless, I proceeded to build my hopes too high and write a mostly intellectual blog with Yu-Hsuan. This led to the decision that I should only posts eloquent and entertaining enough to captivate. This inevitably led to procrastination and an eventual death to this blog, as we stopped having classes to force us to write about our ideas.

I have also started a wide variety of projects of things that I have wanted to do for quite some time. In 5th grade, I wrote an entire kid's book similar to Captain Underpants in the hopes of some day publishing the book and becoming rich so that my parent's could retire and be happy. I wrote the whole thing and was trying to figure out copyright law as a 10 year old before my dad told me how unlikely it would be that I would succeed. I immediately stopped dreaming.

When I tried to learn guitar, I played every day for an hour for three days. I learned 5 or 6 chords and a simple version of Blackbird. I now pick up the guitar every few months and practice the chords I know so that when I do gain some initiative backed by serious commitment I'll be three hours ahead of the game.

When I tried to learn Spanish, I started very motivated in the seventh grade so that I could one day have a conversation with my grandparents so that I could get to know my family a little better. Five years later I came away with a loose understanding of the language and a motivation to not visit my grandparents often.

The failures I can just keep on counting. But mostly, I've lived life with few regrets. Every mistake is an opportunity to live much more of life. But still I'd like to taste success. And I know that all that keeps me from it is my own lack of motivation. Maybe I'm afraid of not succeeding the way I hope I could. Maybe it's that having the dream lingering in front of me; maintaining the possibility that if at any moment I turned and decided to quit my job and start writing that it could happen is enough to abandon chasing it to only understand more failure.

But I don't want to live life knowing that it could have been better if I had only worked for something. I've always thought that my one virtue is commitment. And here I can't even commit to an idea for long enough. I am going to make a TV show. I've written a script for the first episode and I've gathered most of the actors. I will film and direct it and I will edit the shit out of it. I'll slave over it. Then I'll do it two or three more times and I'll send in the best ones to dozens of networks. I'll post some previews on the internet. I'll gather a fan base. I'll send e-mails and market the shit out of the show. And I will sell it to someone for something. And I will be able to live my life making this TV show for a short period. The moment I receive the news I will break down. I'll sit down and I'll start crying. I will finally know success as the way I define it for myself. I could be a famous litigator who reforms tort law in the United States to something reasonable that helps lower the cost of health insurance, protects property owners and allows for a more free and social presence. But I won't be satisfied until I am the modern day Daniel Webster who has folk lore written about his prowess in the court room and whose violent alcoholism is the only thing that stops him from being Commander in Chief. Success to me is to live as exactly what I want to be. And whether or not I am Daniel Webster, I want to entertain people. I want to make them laugh. I want to laugh.

A pathetic rambling, indeed.