One day, I

[misswallflower]

We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do… We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.

Adam Phillips, “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life” (via misswallflower)

[bubblesoul]

There are 4 kinds of people in this world:

1. Those who focus and succeed:

2. Those who get it wrong but won’t quit trying:

3. Those who have a natural talent:

4. And me:

[hitrecord]

“Dancer in the Dark handwritten by Izy”

[onedayi]

Cool

[queenodauniverse]

[erbpfilms]

everything & everything & everything is now on YouTube, if you haven’t seen it yet.

[firelordizumis]

shizuku tsukishima + outfits | requested by seohyyun

[onedayi]

Style Icon

[onedayi]

After finishing the first draft of the first full-length script that I’ve ever written, I took a 2-week break from writing and began to read books and just keep my mind off the story and my frustrations about it.  But towards the end of those two weeks, I began to think about why I was so eager to leave it behind, and why, for a while, I was considering abandoning it for good, even though I was very much in love with the characters (still am).

For a few days I began to point at myself - that I was a flake, that I have short attention span, and that I am always quick to put myself down.  But then I started thinking about the process and began to realize something - the material had begun to bore me. Not through any inherent fault of my own, but simply because the material followed this stringent structure that I imposed on it (for very noble reasons, I should say) and that I lost all excitement because I wanted the characters to follow the structure that I had meticulously plotted out.  I realized that maybe my characters were too punk for that, if that makes any sense.

So now I am planning out my revision with that in mind - going where my characters want to go, and then push them some more with insane possibilities. But, I still want to have to some sort of structure, and this Embryo structure that Dan Harmon (creator of Community - a genius, basically) uses seems like a good one to use as a guide. Let’s see how draft 2 goes.

[onedayi]

I am finished with the first draft of a full-length script.  It’s the first one I ever finished (the one I wrote during my stint at a major film studio here was just a sequence treatment), and perhaps the longest one I’ve committed to writing, after years of starting and subsequently abandoning writing projects for various shitty reasons such as a.) I don’t have time b.) it’s not even that good c.) I’m not a good writer, who am I kidding?  and many more self-defeating thoughts.  Just last week, I rediscovered four chapters of a writing project that I abandoned for some reason I can’t even remember and thought to myself, this isn’t half-bad. So the fact that I actually finished something and stuck with it for as long as I did, despite feeling inadequate and uninspired and frustrated throughout the whole writing process, should make me feel some sort of accomplishment, right?

Not really.

I finished a handwritten draft of the script on August 5, but only finished typing the whole script yesterday, August 23.  There’s just the matter of transcribing the handwritten draft, right? So why did it take me so long?  It’s because I have this magical ability to bring myself down - by attacking the very things I thought were clever/inspired/good in some way.  As I type, I keep hearing different variations on the word stupid in my head.  For a while, the thoughts became so insistent that I couldn’t even bring myself to read what I’d written before.

After writing the words “The End” yesterday, I only checked the page count (160pp, too long, I know) before saving and closing the file. I haven’t opened it again for fear of being confronted by my own incompetence.  I have not shown it to people.  I am tempted to chalk it up to experience and abandon it altogether, but I don’t really want to be that fearful person anymore.  I’m hoping, though, that in two weeks’ time, I will be ready to look at what I did, assess it and look for ways to improve it, and maybe, just maybe, give myself props for finishing something for a change.

[got-the-wright-stuff]

[onedayi]

I love this because Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg look giddy-proud of themselves and it looks so fun.

[deathbynumbers-x]

[onedayi]

I just have to write this down because I find it so funny.  

My parents drove me to the bus terminal and we were listening to the radio.  The requested song played: it was, I think, An Affair to Remember. My mother started talking about it being the theme song for a movie with Annette Benning and some actor she couldn’t remember. My father said he couldn’t remember the movie, so my mother began to tell it to him.

“Tapos nagplano silang magkita sa isang...ano bang tower yun? Yung sikat?”

(Then they planned to meet on top of this...which tower is it? The popular one?”)

I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear what my father had to say so I stayed quiet.  He interrupted her as she began to think out loud.

“Sears Tower. Sa Chicago ba yan? Yan yung pinakamataas na tower noon!”

(”Sears Tower.  Is that (movie based) in Chicago?  That used to be the tallest tower before!”)

My mother shook her head. “New York,” she said.

“Ah, World Trade Center!”

I just laughed so hard upon hearing that. Why in the world would he assume that?

[onedayi]

Let’s do a comparative analysis of my Saturday and Sunday this past weekend.

Or perhaps, let us not.  Let me just say this - sure, socializing can be fun (even when you have nothing in common with the people you’re hanging out with and they can’t understand your silly sense of humor).  However, watching a very satisfying movie is so much more invigorating to the soul.

I gave up on catching those free foreign films that a cinema would regularly screen every year because of the long lines.  But this year, I decided I would make an effort, simply because the hours I have spent alone inside my room far outnumber the hours I spend talking to people personally.  I spent a whole weekend not talking to a single person - in fact, I think I’ve had numerous weekends like that.  While I suppose I could survive with that, I do admit I miss my friends.

So I finally met up with friends yesterday, watched one silly film (I slept through the first one, sorry), ate bad food, and camped out for three hours to watch the last show - a Japanese coming of age movie with the English title, Wood Job! You can just Google the premise of the movie, but it is one of those movies that sounds totally typical in theory but fantastic in execution.  We could not stop raving about it after.  I found myself saying that it’s a good example of a very satisfying film.  As someone who watches a movie closely, I knew the tropes used, I knew where the plot was going, but this did not impede my enjoyment of the movie.  Knowing that the movie was working with a very well-known structure actually made me appreciate it even more.

Why, though?  Shouldn’t I be going for more avant-garde movies that push me to rethink my ideas about life?  I do believe there are merits to genre-busting movies that make you question everything you believe in life, but I love a movie that uses genre conventions to serve the story and make it flourish.  Sometimes, experimental bullshit can blow your mind, but it cannot really put it back together with a real, clear thought process.  And that feels like a cop-out to me.  It’s like the storyteller just gave up and said, “well, I don’t know what I really believe in, so I’m just going to leave it hanging here.”  I’m not saying I want every film I watch to be feel-good, but perhaps it’s better to bother people with a statement, and not with a question.  

[daeum]

[onedayi]

Fashion aspiration

everyday tee 

20,500원

[jellythingy]

[onedayi]

Giggling at this “cosplay”

[onedayi]

I’m at work right now, but my mind is elsewhere again - as always.  But I think the good thing is it isn’t on any existential bullshit.  It’s about this script I’ve been working almost every night after work for the past few months.

Here’s the deal: I’ve been writing my first full-length screenplay since...April this year, I think? But the story has been brewing in my head since last year.  The idea was to write a coming of age script with a cast of characters who would run away for different reasons and wind up in the same place.  It seemed simple enough, and a fun enough concept to play around with - but since I write mostly plotless character-driven narratives, it has proven to be a challenge.  Early on, while I was conceptualizing and finishing the storyline, I decided to follow the Syd Field 3-act structure to help me with plotting.  You know, Normal World, Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Midpoint, Plot Point 2, Climax, Denouement, that kind of thing.

Ideally, this structure would help you clock in at 30 pages/minutes for Act 1, 60 pages/minutes for Act 2, and 30 pages/minutes for Act 3 - basically your standard-length movie.   That was what I was ideally going for. I diligently worked on my story.  What I did was this: after I worked on the storyline, I decided to work on the story of each character separately in prose form.  This was my “outline”.  And then after finishing this odd prose/outline, I took the scenes, arranged them so that the stories would simultaneously be happening in the script, and then proceeded to translate the prose scenes into actual sequences.

As of today, I am still in Act 1 - by my calculations, I will be finishing it this Friday if I am diligent enough.  I usually do not write on weekends, but for the past two weeks, I wrote, which is great because now I can’t go to sleep without writing at least one scene. I have yet to plot out Act 2, and yet I’m already on page 60.

Yes, 60.

While I don’t want to let that bother me, it still does.  Aside from the fact that I seem to be hitting a wall and thinking, “Ugh, that scene is horrible” each time I finish a scene, the page count has been bothering me.  What am I doing wrong?  Why can’t I get this right?  I know, deep down, that I should just keep going.  I should just keep writing until I finish it and then think about how to improve it after.  But...and I hate ellipsis - it’s truly painful.  All I can do right now is to keep going despite all these discouraging things going on in my head.  I am, indeed, my own worst critic (and I’ve had a client say to my face, “Why is the copy so bad?” - so you can just imagine all the bullshit I subject myself to in my head).  

I will say this, though: this writing process has been an eye-opening experience for me.  I’ve learned more about myself the past few weeks than I have in years.  It’s been painful, sure, but if it’s not writing, something else will cause me pain, so, I guess I better just crawl through this and hopefully it will be worth the trouble in the long run.

[onedayi]

I often try to imagine myself devoid of any creative impulses.  I resort to this whenever I feel insufficient in this field I’ve chosen, which happens on an hourly basis on my worst days, I think. I try to imagine how peaceful it would be not to have any invisible critic just looking over my shoulder, judging the sentences I choose to write down, smirking at my choice of words, snorting at millisecond moments of pride I do have with a newly finished work, and shaking his head in pity whenever I attempt to aim a little higher.  How amazing life would’ve been if I could just look at my job as a job, and I wouldn’t feel like I’m selling out every second for doing something that doesn’t really mean anything other than a means to earn money.  I would like to read stories, hear music, and watch films without wishing to be a part of them - they would just be a peripheral part of my world, and not things that I would aspire to.

Having any kind of creative impulse is painful, and oftentimes I feel like no one really chooses it in the beginning. Because if I could really choose, I wouldn’t choose this path. Life is miserable enough without it.  But feeling a creative impusle and then choosing to ignore it, even more so.  I’ve tried for years with no success.  

[onedayi]

I’d like to be honest for a few seconds here.

As much as I’ve been truly preoccupied by my day job and what I consider my real job (despite not getting paid a single cent for it) every second of every day, I have to admit, I’m feeling terribly, terribly lonely.

I am not averse to notions of romance. Just that, like many people, I try to be above it, while also secretly being overwhelmed by it.  Nowadays, I am not sure if my act of secluding myself to work exclusively on my story right after work is just a convenient excuse not to let my actual miserable state take over my whole life.  I have not had a lot of experience in the romantic area - and what little experience I had was fairly traumatizing.  I am mostly over it - I can remember that ordeal and just slightly grimace at what has become just a part of my narrative, a plot point if you will.  And now I am at the point wherein I feel like the universe owes me another shot.

But of course, just like with everything else, it doesn’t.

I have never been one of those people who can just easily find...not really love, but perhaps instantaneous mutual attraction with another person.  I no longer despair about this as I used to.  But sometimes, it feels like I want to be thinking about someone else, and I want to take comfort in the idea that someone else might be wondering about me.  I want to make someone wonder so much about me that they’d be bothered enough to ask.

Is it bad that I want to cause someone anxiety, that that is my idea of romance? Maybe.

I just wanted to be honest - and admit that these things do bother me.  Oftentimes I get these tiny pangs of loneliness throughout the day.  I’m not sure that this state of mind is the right time for me to look for love - or whatever passes for it in this day and age, but I just wanted to be honest. Not for anyone reading this (as I’m sure this isn’t that widely read at all), but for myself.

And with that, I leave you with this passage from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes.

“Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulsive to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.  Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to depreciate love, I persist: “I know, I know, but all the same...”