hello new year.

I'm sitting at work right now. In a cold office. And for some reason, someone put black screens over the windows. I still open the blinds and peer out into the darkness that is today. I can still hear the traffic, but the... and it is in this moment that the writer realizes she forgot to take her Wellbutrin this morning.

In this cold office I'm working on a video about alligator snapping turtles. Turtles that can weigh over 150 pounds, and might be able to bite your fingers off. Ever had turtle soup in the South? More than likely you were eating alligator snapping turtle soup. Now they're protected. Because it's only until we lose something precious that we scramble to protect it. Then we protect it so much that the population explodes (alligators...). Wildlife population is kind of like a teenager.


Should I go to graduate school? I want to study film, as I've never had "proper" training. Yet, my job is to film and edit film. I'm learning from a guy who has worked as a location specialist for Steven Spielberg and been an assistant director for a film starring Peter Fonda. Last week I logged in fourteen hours kayaking and filming on the Steinhatchee river. I filmed an Oregon retired couple beginning their journey of paddling down the western coast of Florida. I shot a panoramic view of coast meets marsh meets southern brush. The landscape looked like a desolate Dali painting, and I might have seen the green flash of the sun as it set past the distant shrimp boats.

For some reason I feel like I have to make a decision soon. Start studying for the GRE, get a good score even though I've failed miserably and on multiple occasions at passing a standardized test. I haven't had a math class in three years. It's only the semester before I graduated from FSU that I realized I didn't want to be a writer. All those years of locking myself in my room when I lived with my mom, watching foreign and independent films, and I thought I wanted to be a writer? Well, I got the locking myself in my room part right.

My mother would take me to a video rental store called Flix. The owner's name was Chuck. He was lean, tan, and had long dark hair. But I think he was fifty or something...maybe forty? I was a teenager, so everyone over the age of twenty-five looked old. I'd say, what new foreign films do you have today Chuck? And he'd say, no new ones, but here is one you haven't seen. Or he'd say, have you seen this one? It's a classic. And I'd watch them in my room with my shrimp and broccoli from the next door Chinese takeout restaurant, and laugh, and cry and think about how much I'd love to make a movie. Yet, I studied creative writing. (Chuck caught wind of the video rental store demise early and packed up, moved to Hawaii and retired.)

Luckily writing and film aren't distant cousins. So I still have a chance in the film industry. But this family from Cologne, Germany just contacted me and wants me to come Au pair for them for a year starting in August. This sounds like an amazing opportunity. So, I have a lot of thinking to do.