A Mirror Floating in Water

In light of some things that have happened recently in my life, I have begun to deeply contemplate what I'm going to do with my time here on earth. Now this is not the first time I've thought about the future, not by a long shot. I seem to always go through phases in which I feel so dedicated to some interest or passion, that I am convinced that I will do it for the rest of my life. I've grown older now and have lost that naivety.

Hell, I've always wanted to be a writer. I remember getting a little short story of mine getting published in the school paper when I was eight. It was about a dream that I had had in which my bed was a time-machine. I remember quite particuarly (even more than the story itself) that I had visualized the story into a film. I had fancied myself starring as the main character, and I even had a sense of the camera-angles.

What's funny, I've always looked at my life as a book or movie. I can't even take a walk without thinking about writing about the walk, or thinking about myself thinking about the walk, and all of these endless meta-thoughts upon meta-thought. Why don't I just tell my brain to shut up and just experience the freaking thing?

I remember how when I was a child, I despised going to church and usually let my imagination run-off into crafting stories with in my minds eye. I would pretend that my eyes where a camera and that there were invisible actors everywhere, doing what my mind told them to. My mom would often complain of how my eyes wandered everywhere.


I find it quite intriguing the amount of different things I've wanted to be in life. I started out wanting to be an astronaut. I had a poster of Neil Armstrong on my wall for years, and I oppsessed over the history of NASA and had a ton of toy space ships. That lasted for almost my whole childhood, until I had reached fifth grade and came up with the odd notion that I wanted to be a rapper (I kid you not! ). But that didn't last long and I had begun to see myself as a proffesional skateboarder. So throughout my pre-teen years I had pushed a piece of plywood with wheels around and fell on my *** one-hundred times, until I eventually grew out of it. Then came music. I was extremely passionate about hard rock and heavy metal, and the more I disvoered new bands, the more heavier they grew. I even picked up the guitar and found myself to be quite good at it. I remember putting on an Iron Maiden or Metallica cd and playing along to the whole album (that is, the songs that I could play).

Then there came a time when I was about thirteen in which I had dropped all forms of social contact and began reading. I had somehow discovered the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and found him intruiging. I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and made it a goal of mine to understand it. Soon, I discovered the wonders of literature through James Joyce and William Shakespeare and a whole world was opened up to me. I find it rather embarressing looking back, but I remember attempting to mimcik Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique in some of my very early and premature writings.

From the base of philosophy, I had discovered a whole world of academia. I became fascinated with history, then astronomy, then physics, then math. I would spent hours at a time staring at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in complete awe. I fancied myself as being one of the people who would solve all of Hilbert's 23 problems or to find a solution to the Unified Field Theory. I taught myself geometry and trig over the summer before my enterance into high school and won a free telescope so that I could sit outside and spend hours luring over visible stars and planets.

Eventually I returned to literature and have been there ever since. With that, I had developed a deeper appretiation of cinema and started seeking out more obscure independent and foriegn directors (having been raised my whole life watching Hitchcock and Lean, I was quite familiar with the medium). Eventually I found myself inspired by revolutionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellini, and I started shooting my own short films on a flimsy camcorder.

From then on I developed an impulsive addiction to creating things on film, and used the camera as a means of expressing thoughts and emotions when writing couldn't do it. I remember being so inspired by Kubrick's dedication and perfectionism, that I began to take the hobby very seriously.

I suppose cinema is the most perfect intigration of talents: There's writing, there's photography, there's music, so many things which are combined into one in a film, that it seems almost ideal for one who is in constant tervestigation between being a writer and a photographer.

Who knows, maybe my mind will change again in a couple of years. All I know is that every day when I look at myself in the mirror everyday, I see a flash in my mind of myself as the director of a film, hovering over the camera, pointing and guiding the actors through my world.


Stanley Kubrick