How to Live, or What the Future Looks Like at 25

When I was younger, the blueprint for life was simple. I imagined it to be something like this: school through to college, graduate, get a job, meet a girl, fall in love, get married, start a family. All of that was ahead of me, way in the distance. As is common with such a perspective, my measurements were skewed. I estimated -- rather reasonably, I thought -- I would have all of that taken care of somewhere between 25 and 28, maybe as late as 30 if I opted to pursue a graduate degree in between.

I don't remember when I discarded this blueprint. But when it went, it went quickly, with a scoff, and without a second glance. It wasn't just that I was changing, but that the times were. The combination of socioeconomic conditions forged by our parents' generations with a greater cultural acceptance for pursuing "life experiences" (sprinkled in with longer life expectancies) meant that kids my age -- who had grown up idealizing the aforementioned blueprint, who now found it grossly outdated -- had the luxury of time. We could explore, misstep, or delay all we wanted. And so we traded careers for jobs, plans for detours, and stability for transience. There would, after all, be time for Life later.

It's been written about abundantly (in this Times article that Google spit out, for example, albeit not the one I had read some time ago that I had been searching for), but the categorization and examination of this shifting dynamic among young people is always treated with a certain alienness. Its otherness is always at the forefront, and even as I recognized myself going through this larger realignment of attitude, reading about it somehow made it seem strange and perplexing. And so I began to wonder just what my outlook was becoming.

I do still want a career, but I am no longer in the hurry I once was to attain it. The idealism that colored much of my later teen years has metastasized into a kind of optimism about time -- a belief that deferral of certain career and life goals now does not mean being denied them in the future. There's been a subtle shift toward a certain kind of passivity -- a desire to be impacted, rather than impact. This isn't to say I've abandoned proactivity, but that I'm more focused on goals for what lessons and insights I can take from them, rather than on those that are based in my accomplishing something.

I say all this, but there's a slight hypocrisy in the fact that I'm still pursuing career goals. I have a small production company in Los Angeles that I run with three partners. Being in New York, I can never claim to be as involved as my two partners steering the ship in Los Angeles, but I am actively planning and scheming and working, for long-term goals of the company and, by extension, my career. But perhaps what I've been trying to say is that those career goals now find themselves being balanced by a healthy appetite for discovery, in ways completely unrelated to my career. I am lucky to be working in a creative field, because if I live a life of constant discovery, it stands to reason that I will become a better writer, a better thinker, a better dreamer.

And so I live in New York, because this is where I wanted to spend part of my 20s. It's a city rich with life, still distinctly American, but also incredibly different from the Southern California I grew up in. I lust after travel opportunities because I want to see new places, encounter strange things, and interact with something unspeakably foreign. I believe it will make me a fuller person. I read, I watch, I consume, because what I learn from strangers will undoubtedly inform how I empathize with the rest of the world. I aim to learn to do things -- from getting scuba-certified last year to a years-long dream I've had of learning how to work on a farm -- because coming from a humanities background, I am always seeking to balance my knowledge with things that exist outside of theory and interpretation.

This wasn't the life I thought I'd lead when I was a kid, but it's a life I'm thankful to be able to lead now. I wonder, if kids today will see us and think to emulate, and if they do, whether or not the shifting strata of ideas and expectations our society sits on will again dictate a change in pace by the time they are in their 20s.

I will be able to call myself a filmmaker without feeling completely fraudulent one day. But I am not in a particular rush to get to that day. I have other things I want to be as well. I think what it boils down to is a desire, perhaps youthfully naive, to continually have my perspective altered. After all, it is not just me that is changing, but the world around me, and what better way to understand a mutable world than through flickering lenses? As nice as stability sometimes sounds, it requires a commitment to a certain sedentary acceptance -- that this is how things are going to be -- that I'm not ready for yet. There will be a day when I will seek a steadier life, I have no doubt. But when that day comes, I want to be able to look back on a life of imbalance, composed of both indulgent days and meager months, all the while ravenous for newness. Discovery should never end; astonishment always pursued. For now, that means chasing my interests in a hundred different directions. For now, that is the blueprint.

Dreaming, Then and Again

Last week, in a hotel in Connecticut, I had one of those dreams that inexplicably finds a way to linger in your head, the trivialities of wakefulness failing to wash it away as the sun washes away the night.

The part I remember starts in a network of large cabins in a generic forest, where people I knew and some I didn't had been gathered. Each had been brought there from different home realities, realities where they had emerged as the main characters, the fullest and most heroic permutations of themselves. In other realities, they had died, or shrank from the glare of capital-D Destiny, and there they remained, uninvited to this mysterious place.

But something was wrong. A slumbering beast was awakened, perhaps out of necessity, and it set about cleansing this hub world. Those that were deemed unworthy by some unspecified criterion were turned to ash, not unlike what I had seen in recent ads for a movie about malevolent invisible aliens. Some shrugged as it happened, knowing that some place else, a different version of them was safe from this beast. The beast, slighted, changed tactics, now stopping people mid-disintegration, taking their feet but leaving the rest of them, screaming, terrified. The dream was suddenly very unhappy.

People fled, and in the ambitious geography of dreams, the woods turned into a vast harbor, where fleets upon fleets of boats and ships were moored. The group I was with -- left blurred and underdeveloped by my dreaming mind but likely composed of waking-life friends -- ran down the maze of piers, looking for an adequate boat, knowing we would be safe on the water as the world behind us crumbled away. Other groups in boats sped by, ignoring any calls for help. Somewhere in my sleeping mind, I rolled my eyes. This was turning into an apocalyptic cliche.

We found a boat. It was a good size, sturdy, but we panicked at the absence of fresh water aboard it. We searched and searched as we drifted by numerous empty boats, passed over by other refugees due to some unrevealed shortcoming. And then we found one covered by a blue plastic tarp, filled with 5-gallon jugs of Sparkletts and 24-packs of Poland Spring bottled water, a twisted liquid Costco at the edge of the sea in the middle of my slumbering mind. We took what we needed and left the rest for others, determined not to succumb to the kind of reckless inhumanity we'd seen in too many movies and read in too many books. We pushed off and headed for deeper waters, worried, scared, but hopeful for a future in the end of the world.


I woke up shivering, having left my arms and shoulders out of the covers, exposed to the Connecticut winter that had snuck in throughout the night.

Weird, I remember thinking, I can still recall it. Dreams usually slipped away from me as the circuits in my brain blinked awake. But this one hung around, leaving a strand for me to grasp onto if I so chose. Offering to let me have it.

I reached out and took hold of it, if only because I could. And maybe if I could hold on to this one, I could hold on to others yet to come.

Another Night in Billyburg

On Saturday night, I made my way to Williamsburg a little after midnight. One of my brother's friends from college, who I had met in the days when Roy would recruit me to work on the sets of his student films, was there celebrating her first birthday as a New Yorker. We met up with her and her assembled potluck of friends and friends-of-friends at the unapologetically-named Trash Bar, where late night karaoke in a back room was promised.

In keeping with the forcefully indifferent griminess that is a keystone of Williamsburg hipster culture, the bar was dark and sticky, and the familiar pungency of peat swirled with potentially imagined traces of piss and unwashed hair. Behind a heavily graffitied but otherwise unlabeled door downstairs, a pool of liquid gathered in a poorly-lit corner of the bathroom. Band stickers and fliers covered the walls by the entrance to the bar, and it was here that we chatted with Annelise, catching each other up on the little and big ways our lives had changed since we last saw each other, a year ago at Swingers in Los Angeles. She introduced us to her boyfriend Dennis, and we remarked how none of us had ever crossed paths with him before, even though he had apparently gone to school with Roy and Annelise, a year behind them in the film program. A band played in the back room, holding it hostage from the increasingly restless crowd waiting for 1 o'clock, when karaoke was designated to begin.

Though I can't say I know her well, Annelise always struck me as someone who could effortlessly step into and blend with the larger tableaux of Brooklyn. And so it seems she has, her sarcastic wit and blase-yet-charmed self-awareness swaying comfortably in a chamois-colored dress and ironically-unironic tiara as she spontaneously climbed on stage later in the night to pantomime some guy's rendition of some song (the night, and the drinks, took the other details). Earlier, the KJ (which, I only just learned, is a thing) had introduced her while insisting she was celebrating her 21st birthday, perhaps a result of his third or fourth drink and her pretty, pixie-like affect. She sang TLC's "Unpretty," which I remember being rather fond of when FanMail first came out in 8th grade.

Karaoke's a funny thing to witness. An unspoken contract is inexplicably struck between complete strangers in dark places as long as alcohol, a stage, and a microphone are provided. Terrible, shrill warbling is tolerated, song choice is quietly judged but openly accepted, and people are mostly enthusiastic. In the back room of a place called Trash Bar, in Williamsburg, in the early hours of morning, the usual strangeness of karaoke remains, although not without its own twist of flavor.

Towards the beginning of the night, a white girl with dreads stumbled on stage and repeatedly asked "What the fuck?" during the parts she didn't know, but gave an otherwise stirring take on Erykah Badu's "Call Tyrone." Dennis, clad in a skinny red tie, sneakers, and black-framed glasses, led the crowd in an energetic sing-along of Usher's "Love In This Club," and gamely rapped the second half of Young Jeezy's verse a capella when the machine cut off early. Later, as the KJ danced and sang to his second Prince song of the night, the girl with the dreads got on stage and danced up to him from behind, reached around, and grabbed a handful of his jeans. "That's my dick!" the KJ narrated with a smile, helpful, bemused. Three girls -- one of them may have been Annelise -- belted out some Dusty Springfield. A youngish black man opted for a very competent rendition of The Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way," a song that was huge in its time but also one I never suspected would have any lasting impact. The way the whole room knew all the words and made valiant attempts at the high notes, however, seems to prove me wrong. Suburban kids who grew up in the 90's just have certain bonds you can't anticipate.

The night ended with two girls, puzzlingly barefoot and clad in matching maroon dresses, gyrating and slithering and folding themselves onto the floor of the stage as they moaned out, appropriately enough, their take on "The Dope Show." If they even knew the rest of the room was there -- some mystified, some singing along, all inebriated -- I'll never know. After the lights came up, they quietly stepped off stage, put their shoes and coats back on, and shuffled toward the front of the bar with the rest of the crowd. As we stepped out from behind the curtain divider, the thick smell of gasoline filled the air. Someone had ridden a motorcycle into the middle of the bar. Nobody really thought twice about it; nobody asks those kinds of questions at 4 AM in a bar called Trash. We brushed past and spilled out onto the street, each pocket of revelers laughing amongst themselves, each excited about something going on in their own lives, each calling out goodbyes as they walked toward whatever that something was.