It’s 1:00 pm as I start to type, not hungry yet for lunch. I never get hungry for lunch when I’m thinking and writing. Lunch will come later.
I trod out the words on a large-flat screen monitor I’ve set up on my old art-table, pulled from under a pile of canvases and picture frames in my old room.
I’ve set-up in the front room of my mom’s house in Suisun California. The desk is near the middle of the room, with most space in front of it, lit with golden light through large drapes. The front grass is mostly dead, mowed for the first time in months. The house is quiet and it’s my first time here without my abuelita (grandma) alive and around to constantly insist on me eating every 15 minutes.
I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to write in the middle of an open room, but now I feel like a security guard at his little desk in the front hall of the National Air and Space Museum, with planes and space-capsules to look at.
I’m back home for the summer from teaching video production in Canada, and it’s been so long since I spent more than 5 days straight in California. I feel alien and at home at the same time.
I’m a 6 year-old boy dressed up in his father’s business suit sitting in a meeting full of executives, hoping they won’t ask me any questions. But I guess I have enough gall to show up to the meeting and toss in my 2 cents, even to correct the VP to my right when he declares that the economy won’t bounce back. After all, you’re only 6 once.
After a pause, and recognition of my need for some food, I realize that this summer is going to be the most different part of my last 4 years, even though in those years I lived in Canada and spent a spell in China, Hong Kong Romania and Germany, between doing other things like record CD’s, play and write music with incredible musicians and friends, and become a college teacher and digital filmmaker.
It’s like I’m at the movies and the opening credits are finishing, and the first character’s are about to be presented, and I couldn’t be more excited, though I have no reason why.
My visa for next year got rejected, because my new boss changed my Position Profile, that outlined how I do more filmmaking then film teaching. I remember that I need to finish my application for Canadian Residency, and I think of how it’s been a week since I cracked open my Bible, and if there was a time to seek God, it is now.
I get stuck thinking of all the things and updates I should write to you all, and they will come. I could start by saying that this last year I asked myself what I should be doing to further myself and in December I applied foolishly (and hastily) to the Academy of Art University for a Masters in Fine Arts for Motion Pictures and Television. I was surprised to get accepted, and started full-time in January on-line (they have the best online stuff I’ve ever seen..but then again they teach web-designers now don’t they… so they should)
So from January till mid-May, I worked from 8 to 5 or 6, and went home and did school from 6 till sleep, and had no weekends or friends. Now I’m on my paid vacation from my job (which I might not get to do next year) and in the middle of my first week doing School on-campus in San Francisco, thinking of how I’m glad I only have to commute 2 days a week.
And now I really should eat, and talk to God about this life I’m trusting him with.
