– life comes full round. I’m moving back down to San Diego this Saturday, after three years and change of living in Long Beach / Orange County and finally realizing myself as an adult. Mind you that I’m not moving back home, I’m just starting a different career down there that hopefully takes me closer to the goal of just being creative and happy as much as possible.
I felt stuck in San Diego for a long, long time. After high school, when so many of my friends were headed off to their dorm rooms in so many exciting faraway states and countries, I travelled all the way over to: Miramar Community College. The place is best described as an educational landfill for those students with just enough motivation to give you the mental equivalent of running in place, on a broken treadmill, made of straw. Yes, that’s just the kind of metaphor that a Miramar student would contrive.
Thankfully, with much coaxing and finagling, Miramar will eventually boot you out with an associates degree, which at long last gave me the ability to apply for a transfer to CSULB. Long Beach! A place full two hours away from my awkward years, and where I would be studying film production! I packed my bag (only girls need multiple bags!) and set out to grow myself up, and after these three years I can safely say that I did accomplish the following:
*Become financially independent from my parents.
*Find a girl and have a serious relationship. In retrospect this shouldn’t have really been a goal but I was nonetheless ecstatic when it happened.
*Make lots of friends and form a better identity for myself than ‘guy who fixes your computer for you’. This is 95% accomplished as I still mainly get phone calls for just that.
*Show off my awesome filmmaking skills and be revered by my fellow filmschool mates. This mostly happened, but filmschool politics and good ol’ greedy human nature prevented this from happening in the fantastic way that it did in my dreams, but my films are all liked by the people that I respect & care about, which in the end turns out to be the thing that I do care about more than winning a film festival.
The one thing that I set out to do which remains glaringly undone is figure out the direction for the rest of my twenties. I’ve found a place down in La Jolla near my new graphic design/programming/server building job, and I’m actually ecstatic as it’s much more project-oriented, as opposed to the ‘daily grind’ nature of my tech support job at Dreamhost. I feel like I’m starting new again and it feels really good to be pushing myself in an uncomfortable direction. If I had stayed at Dreamhost, I definitely would have been making good/very good money within a reasonable amount of time, but making this move cements my resolve to be a maker of things for as long as possible, be it a full length feature films or just some fancy pants website for a company whose business I’m not entirely sure of yet.
So here’s to life bringing me back to the place that I wanted to escape for so long, and me actually being glad of it. To abruptly ending my comfortable life being a videogamey nerd living in my sister’s house in Irvine, and riskily embracing a lower-paying, more mentally challenging job in a random Craigslist-discovered apartment within La Jolla, a part of San Diego that is still intensely unfamiliar and cold to me. Here’s to dangerous living!
November 20th, 2007 at 20-11-2007 @ 12:35 PM
hey, that’s my hippo! we miss you in irvine, but we’re still v. v. excited for you
November 20th, 2007 at 20-11-2007 @ 4:21 PM
i’ll look for your next posting in a year and a half
February 5th, 2008 at 05-02-2008 @ 8:43 PM
Hey, I have a recording of that hippo. Salutations, my friend. I was Googling around to see if you might have posted “SPLIT” somewhere and I found this fabulously designed website. I am amazed that you have blogs going back to 2001–the year I bought my first PC! I’m using it right now, in fact. My wife grew up in North County. I met her while going to Palomar College in San Marcos. La Jolla is a ritzy place, man, enjoy it!
May 22nd, 2009 at 22-05-2009 @ 12:55 PM
Your blog is very interresting for me, i will come back here..