24 Years, Little Motivation

WARNING: The post that follows is somewhat more personal in nature than those usually found in this blog, and contains very few obscure movie or television quotes. Sorry if this bores you.

As of this past Saturday, July 2, I am now 24 years old. Yes, the mid-twenties are here, and I celebrated the old fashioned way: by being a groomsman in my oldest friend’s wedding. It was an exhausting weekend, full of driving all over the state and forgetting how to sleep, but at least there were fireworks basically every night.

I got some great gifts, including a couple of seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show from the family, and a retweet from one of my comedy idols of my review of his latest release. (I doubt he knew it was my birthday weekend when he retweeted, but I choose to categorize it as a gift anyway.)

In the two years since I graduated from college, I’m sad to say I’ve spent a lot of my time waiting around instead of doing things. Partially due to the nature of my job (raising money takes a long time), and partially out of laziness. Now, fortunately, my fundraising is almost done and I’ll be returning to Florida soon to work until the end of the year. But what about after that, when I’m left to my own devices again? I don’t want to just go back to waiting around. I’m sick of waiting. I need to actually get in the habit of creating.

I have hundreds of projects swimming around in my head, and my problem is I just don’t commit to any one of them for long enough to see it through, or in some cases, to even begin. Well, no more.

I often joke about the pointlessness of celebrating the New Year, including idly making resolutions only to break them in a month. While I think it makes a bit more sense to make a resolution for the year on your birthday–it’s a much more personal date, and a less arbitrary checkpoint in our planet’s race around the sun–it’s still almost impossible to stick to a goal for a whole year, especially a goal as vague as “do more things”.

So, I’m just going to focus on this next month, and I’m going to give myself more narrow, specific goals.

1. I will have my money raised for Florida by the end of the month. – I’m only $3000 away. I’ll get there. This is the month.

2. The Disney Vlogs will be completed, and the first one (at least) will be uploaded, by the end of the month. – The Disney Vlogs are a miniseries I shot last year in Florida where I reviewed the major parks of Walt Disney World. Yep, I reviewed a location. But it’s a location that exists for entertainment, so it makes sense to me.

The project was originally supposed to be just a simple goofing-off-at-Disney piece, like those Christmas Shopping videos I did, but my love for theme parks and the history of the attractions made it grow into something far beyond my control–a multi-part video series where I take a fairly detailed, somewhat snarky, but always affectionate look at each major park.

I edited the opening video about the Magic Kingdom a while ago, but it took much longer than I expected, so I decided not to release it until I had all the other parts finished, just so there wouldn’t be a long delay between episodes. And considering this project wasn’t a very high priority of mine, you can see why it’s been sitting on my hard drive for over a year now.

Well, that’s enough of that. Yes, I want this project to be something I’m proud of, but the longer it sits unfinished, the more time I’m devoting to a glorified vacation video instead of new, original projects. I’m finishing it up ASAP. I think the videos are pretty funny, and I hope you do, too.

3. I will write first-season outlines for two of the webseries ideas I’ve been toying with. – As mentioned, I have so many vague ideas that it’s hard to get myself to concentrate on one long enough to flesh it out. So I’m choosing two right now to start working on.

The first is a review series, but one where I would play a character with a story arc. Each episode would feature one movie review, and the review would tie into the events of the character’s life. Obviously, giving story arcs to review shows is nothing new, but this would be in a genre that I haven’t seen done before. I’m not going to reveal any specifics just yet, but I will say that it may seem like an unusual choice at first, but I think it has a lot of potential. My brother and I will be writing this show together, so this week we’ll start looking at potential movies for the first season, and figuring out how they can tie in with the character’s life.

The second is a sitcom about a college club. This is one I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The idea is based on the filmmaking club we started at my school, and how little we achieved during our meetings. (Of course, after we graduated, the club went on to do some pretty awesome things without us.) I already have some plot points in mind for this one; I just need to actually flesh out an outline and characters. I’m thinking of bringing someone else who was in the film club in as a co-writer, but I haven’t officially approached anyone yet.

Why am I telling you these things? Because if I don’t say it out loud (or in text), it’s not going to happen. When I keep my goals to myself, I’m not nearly as motivated to follow through on them as when I make a promise to somebody else. I need the internet to hold me accountable, so I’ll be providing you with updates about the progress of these projects.

In the meantime, I’ll have a review of the final chapter of Telltale’s Back to the Future game up in a few days. I’m also planning on doing a review of Brad Jones and Ryan Mitchelle’s “Paranoia”, just as soon as I get a chance to watch it again.

Here’s hoping that when my next birthday comes around, you’ll already have the chance to watch these projects, and many more.

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