Ugh

Today was a crummy day of trying to figure out car stuff. Completely crummy.

Diners, Dentists, and Dinner Parties

I got heckled outside my church for wearing my England jersey. Hey, I cheered for the US during the game Saturday. They're just both favourites. And I was living in England during the last world cup. Difficult to get an American jersey over there.

Firefighter Friend and I went to the diner last night. I figure I should probably get my fill of diners here in Jersey before I move back to Michigan where there's like one. In the whole state. I was talking to him about moving and I said something about being there for probably about two years, and he got this expression on his face.

"What?" I asked.

"You'll be back in six months," he answered.

FF is always a little bit snarky but still. What if I don't find a job? What if I run out of money? What if I lose my motivation and do nothing but watch movies and bake all day long (I'd be a great housewife for my roommates)? What happens if six months in I'm not making any progress?

I have plans (well, I have plans of plans) for the future, like at what point I'm going to throw in the towel, which career I would switch to if I had to, when I'm going to move to England. But I don't want that (except for the last one. I am going to move to England).

I realize that I haven't been writing about screenwriting a lot recently. And I've been procrastinating on a post about that for some time. It's because I haven't been writing a lot recently. But soon I'll have lots to say (or not say) about trying to find a job in the film industry, albeit if it is in Michigan.

And I think that's a little bit scary because, when it comes to writing, you do all this work on your own for years and years and some day maybe it all starts to work together, either in small spurts or sudden success. But when it comes to trying to find a crew job - it's not something that I'm going to be plugging away at in solitude. It's going to involve a lot of daily effort and hard work and a lot of risk. Which means the potential for a lot of failure.

Which means I'll have a lot of hilariously disastrous posts in the near future.

Out with the Old

One of the unspoken agreements between my parents and I when I moved back in was, I think, that I could live here rent free as long as when I moved out I did something about the gov't grade storage mess I have upstairs in the attic. To give you a picture of what a disaster zone it is up there, let me just say that for each time I have moved, I've put at least one box - usually more - in the attic --

The time we moved from one NJ house to another. The time I moved from Indiana to England. The time I redid my room after coming home from Michigan last summer. When I came back from camp. And the time I moved from Michigan back home. Those are the ones I remember. I have more stuff in the attic than I do in my room.

This weekend I started - not finished, just started - the long, arduous process of making that mess disappear. Or at least get it better organized. Going through boxes, redistributing, marking what's in each and, come July, where each should be. Still in the attic, in Michigan with me in my sublease, in Michigan in storage until I get my apartment in the fall. This is actually really difficult to do, not only because my thrifty family has instilled in me a gag-reflex to throwing out anything I might one day need or use, but because of the number of things that held sentimental value.

I'm a sentimental person. That doesn't really surprise anyone, does it? I went through boxes and boxes of things that held incredible importance for me at one time or another. I found my childhood jewelry box with a set of costume jewelry rings from Lord and Taylor that can only fit on my pinky now but were probably my most valued possession when I was eight. I have a box for high school yearbooks and awards and stories. Letters I received from when I was involved in the Adopt a Soldier project. Letters I never sent. A whole box of CDs (those I threw out pretty easily. Especially since mostly they were just empty cases of albums already on my computer). Fliers from the short film I was in at Michigan. The tiara I wore to the Winter Banquet my sophomore year in high school. My Miss America sash from England. The gnome air freshener my friend from camp sent me. Books, pictures, and boxes and boxes and boxes of notebooks. I'm starting to believe that I was never more prolific than I was between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

What to do with all this stuff?

"Digitize," my brother said. Except that doesn't work with most 3D objects.

I threw away a lot of it. Relatively. I mean, no matter what sort of emotional value it has, what good is it if it's going to spend most of its time in a box in the attic? Still, it was crazy difficult throwing some things away, even if they were as insubstantial as a piece of paper. I'm not the sum of my stuff, but my things certainly come from a part of me.

And it was overwhelming. But it was also sort of cool. Because I've lived a lot of places, and I've met a lot of people. And it's true that not all of those people are still in my life, but it's also true that I've been doused in an insane amount of love.

I threw out those magazines I discovered with interviews with Hayden Christensen. He's still hot, but they're about a decade old and they made me feel like a creep.