Chicken Little Recipe

Is anyone else sick of hearing how the sky is falling?

Maybe I'm just listening to too many shows south of the border. Maybe all this doom and gloom is just suppose to be the ugly friend standing beside the morally uplifting speeches on President Obama. Maybe it's just a case of fiscal bleeding is just easier for leading the headlines. At any rate, it's something that just seems like a perpetual hole that everyone with a microphone is helping to dig into.

Call me a rebel or idealist, but I like to see this time as an amazing opportunity. The bubble of sorts is deflated and the over-inflated prices are mellowed. I will say that I am touched by the lack of jobs in my industry, at the moment, but it is also very normal for this time of year to be quiet and the prospect of diversifying my income base gets me excited every morning.

If a lot of people start to see this as a desperate time that can only mean that value for the dollar will increase. I see it wearing on the faces of the over-connected middle-class around me and I'm sure that just weathering this time with the right mindset will definitely have me coming out on top.

"Don't worry about the things you have no control over and if you have control over them, don't worry and do something about it."

Scheduling Life

I always use to think that scheduling your life was so rigid and uncreative. As it turns out, it's actually very freeing. Freeing in the true term of FREEDOM, you make it, you get to stick to it or not, but you know that the positive, productive, and growing side of you feeds off that stick-to-it nature, while that destructive, lazy side fights to take away that momentum and keep you comfortably dissatisfied. 

If I hadn't said it in prior posts, I'm on the P90X system at the moment. I'll be the first to admit that keeping the motivation for such an intense training regime has been tough. I've missed a few days but I have the resolve to complete the course cause I've found enough why's to get out of this fat suit and back into the shape I recognized myself. The hardest part I've found isn't even the workouts that really do a number on every fiber in my body, but getting off the couch or chair and pulling out the mat and weights to actually throw the DVD on. 

I'm sure that regardless of which exercise program you're on, it's the follow-through that makes you see the results. With this program, it works you so hard it's actually impossible not to expect results just from getting though workout-after-workout even if you don't do as many reps as the insane group on the television. 

In the past year I've really learned the value of finding a mentor. You can't really push yourself consistantly without knowing there's an external force expecting results. They don't have to be mind-blowing results either, just a constant push forward. That's actually what I'm liking about the message boards and this guy Tom  who's already completed the 90 day challenge and has the results I'm wanting. Even if it's not an in person mentoring, I can at least email him and get  some pointers from someone who's gone through the trials and knows the mental challenges of seeing the program to completion. 

Being the new year, I've also started to put my schedule into portable forms with syncing my iPhone with the laptop. As much as I love my planner, my phone is almost always at my hip and I really can't escape it. The biggest challenge for me is to actually sit down and chunk out time for writing. This use to be an arbitrary task and I'd do at any spare moment I had. The problem with that is when you're tired and unfocused the television or Wii usually seemed to win out to the keyboard. By chunking an actual time, I have no excuses and have a soft goal for how many pages I want to achieve in this time. My writing mentor Gordon, always told me that this is a business that measures it's winners in years of longevity. 

Alright, calling it a very early evening! 

Be great to each other!

Hypersomnia Irritability

The last two days have really been polar-opposites in the way that I've felt but also in the way that at the end of the day the productivity which has ensued. 

Two days ago, I found myself "in state"; things were flying off the finger-tips and I was able to cross off about a dozen to-do's. Part of that was I was out of the apartment for quite some time and I was sitting in balance when I was getting almost ten pages of script written. 

Then I stayed up late. Although I feel mostly like myself in the late hours I find that the following day lags, and by the end of the day, like tonight, I feel like I've wasted time and more importantly another day of MY life.

I've had a hard time with follow-through. Now I'm not sure if it's just that I haven't put much meaning into my deadlines or that the amount of errands and tasks I mentally build-up for myself become so monstrous that I feel paralyzed. 

I hate working for someone else yet I don't feel like I know how to garner new business. I have the skills to produce and tell a story through media skills but have been so entrenched in the old-school methods of unionized shows that I feel stuck and must relearn new ways to go about blazing my own path.

Tonight, I'm making a change. 

Tonight, I'm finding my own hope.

Tonight, I'm going to bed early (well, relatively)

The last two days have really been polar-opposites in the way that I've felt but also in the way that I've 

Balance and Disease

So, I'm finally feeling like my body's in some sort of order. I booked an early appointment at the chiropractor and for the first time in months I'm feeling some sort of progressive change in this ear-ache that has become more nagging then a distant relative. It really made me aware that ease and the flip-side of it, disease, are just that. If you're not letting the pathways in your body work at the ultimate efficiency then something as simple as a ear-ache can literally give unbalance to life.

Part of the challenge in finding a great chiropractor is in the details. I'm not one for the ones who go on rants about how the evil drug companies are spoiling lives and that drugs just mask the underlying "magic" that's in our nervous system. As much as I am a fan of magicians, when I have a pounding headache and can't get adjusted at the moment, I'm going to pop a pill for temporary relief.

The other part in the challenge is finding a practicioner who doesn't have a billion and a half gadgets to show you print out after print out of why I'm not feeling well. I know I'm not feeling well, something feels out. I don't need a spectro-diapameter print-out to show why.

My chiropractor is fantastic! She doesn't use any of the aforementioned, just some good old hand pressure and a massage "Thumper" to relax the muscles prior to the adjustment.

I highly recommend her to anyone.

Insurance and Contract Work

Insurance is fantastic when it works! You always hear that it's always something you should get just incase something devistating happens. Well, I had my last contract in November and have been on the hunt ever since. One of the blessings of working a crew position on a show is that there is the Employment Benefits that are available to you if the next project isn't a go or some political maneuvering finds you without employment unexpentantly.

So, hoping to catch a second break with the credit card payments, I call and enquire about the Payment Protection insurance to pay my premiums until I'm a working man once again. Well, I never recieved the certificate for the coverage (mistake #1 on their part) but the challenging part I find is that in said certificate there is a clause that states they will not approve the claim if the insuree is in a contract type of employment.

So, I'm probably going to sell blood on the weekend...anyone up to go on a roadtrip?

Right into It

Like the birth of anything in our society a name takes on such reverence and, well, identity. I see this as a outlet to let the gallery in my head fume and expose those ideas, rants, salutations, and reflection from my life. The best part about it is that I feel by sharing myself I'm still even involved in the community even if it's by speaking in this one sided narrative. So, I encourage you all to respond, quip, oppose, and find the humor in this crazy part of my life.

I thought of doing a big introduction, but I already know who I am at this point and I'm interested to see how it's all going to evolve in the coming months and years. 2009 earmarks a very large change in my life and I'm starting to believe emotionally that a life worth living is worth recording.