Trying To Find The Inbetween

And just like that, the past few months have rolled by, uneven and unexpected. My time in LA the first four weeks of January was the longest I'd stayed in one place since mid-October, but it somehow still tasted of transience. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy my time there along with everything that was accomplished -- on the contrary, it was a welcome reprieve from the cold, and the changes in scenery and seasons have been nothing if not fruitful. All the same, these past few months in general have been an exercise in upheaval.

Bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles isn't unmanageable, but it does grow taxing when done every two weeks for a three month stretch. You lose your anchor to that sense of home you spent so long establishing in a new city. And to return to the city you've called home for almost your entire life, only to find that it's changed in small but innumerable ways (a renovated street here, a closed-down shop there), only adds to the sense of disorientation and displacement. You lose the comfort of old routines, and the looming deadline of another plane ride across the country keeps you always just slightly on edge, unconsciously preparing yourself for another shake up. As a result, you never feel settled, rushing yourself one moment, reluctant to start anything the next. It's an odd position to feel yourself occupying, and it's admittedly exhausting. But at the end of the day, all you can do is shut up and get your shit done.

And so I have, and while I don't have any answers for how these next few months will turn out, at least for now, I am back. And I expect I will be back again. And so on.

As for what was done and what was seen:

This is what Christmas Eve in Southern California looks like. Also, that tree no longer stands in front of my house. The rain took it down.

Once and future home.

The main reason we were home for so long was to do a corporate video for Skechers. This is early on in the month, when we were location scouting in Mt. Baldy. Ruing how hard it was to find snow. In January. Yeah, I know.

Shooting in front of our new bluescreen.

 Final delivery at the Manhattan Beach Marriott, just last week.

Part of why LA is so awesome is that on the same week we went romping through the snow, we also hit the open ocean to do some diving. Sunrise to sunset, two Sundays in a row. I am officially scuba certified (and you can be, too!).

All geared up. At this point I put my phone away until the end of the day, so all I have is a bunch of pictures of sunsets.

It was a good trip home. And now I'm also home.

...Yeah, I haven't quite figured it out either. Just keep rolling.

Motion.

Another Step Forward

Happy New Year, everybody!

[On a somewhat lengthy side note -- It's now time to start writing "11" at the end of all your dates. Does anybody else ever wonder which of the years past they've had to write the most amount of dates for? Probably sometime in high school, I figure, when I had to write the date for as many as six periods' worth of homework assignments and notes in the top right corner of every new sheet of paper (assuming I was taking notes or doing my homework. I think I still was for most of those years. Gold star for me). You know what I'm talking about, that little square-ish region at the top of the page where the sheet's not lined yet, bracketed on the right by the end of the page and on the left by the faint imprint of the red margin line from the other side of the sheet (and on another side note, did anybody else hate how a bunch of stores sold 8" by 10 1/2" packs of lined paper instead of the standard 8 1/2" by 11"? Ended up with a bunch of kids running around with inordinately small sheets of paper. I hated that). Anyway, I probably wrote out a lot 01s or 02s in my day (03 and 04 probably got a lot less love, seeing as how senior year very quickly turned into an exercise in doing as little work as possible). I guess college probably gave a few years some pretty good runs, too, but not nearly at the same volume as those early high school years. 09 probably got the least love, seeing as how I wasn't doing anything remotely academic or even resembling writing that year. I'm pretty sure I touched a pen or pencil no more than 50 times that year. I do feel like I wrote "10" a decent amount for various checks, contracts, and assorted business-related paraphernalia this past year, though. Anyway, I probably think about this every year around this time (it usually starts with me wondering how long it'll take to get used to writing the new year's last two digits, then how long it took me to get used to writing the last year's digits, and which digits was I most accustomed to writing, anyway?) and, incredibly stupid as it may be, it's yet another reason why I wish someone would invent a StatTracker for real life already. I need to know these answers! Along with how many beers I've drunken, what my lifetime shooting percentage is, how many gallons of water I've drunken, how many Albertacos burritos I've eaten, what food I've eaten the most, how many miles I've ever walked, how many miles I've ever driven, and a plethora of other assorted, random, and generally unspectacular trivia from my life.]

Well, there's nothing like a good long ramble to get the year started off right. I hope everybody had a good time last night, and that the 364 nights before it weren't too shabby either. 2010 certainly treated me well, occasional warts and all. Somebody asked me recently if I had any regrets about the past year, and the truth is, as differently as a lot of decisions could have gone, I'm happy with the choices I've made. The results may not have always been expected or even desired (a certain late night involving a flooded shower comes to mind), but the stories and experiences that grew out of them have been invaluable. And besides, life is as much about enjoying your successes as it is living with your mistakes. Both help make you, hopefully, into a fuller person. And that's something I won't ever regret. In any case, I've had far more good times than not this year, so I bid 2010 a very fond goodbye.

Here's to another year of putting one foot in front of the other and seeing where that takes us.