My time as a student filmmaker

Preface

I took a nonfiction workshop this semester as a part of my Creative Writing curriculum. Going in, I didn't really think I'd like it. The first piece I submitted was a three-page, half-assed rant on my thoughts on cooking. I wasn't proud of it at all, and I didn't give myself enough time to write it.

My second piece was about seven pages, and was much more personal to me, and perhaps to all of you beautiful readers. It was about my time in high school, learning to make videos and films. I went into the workshop feeling confident, and I think I had a noticeably-more positive reaction from the class.

Some of the workshop critiques I got felt like matters of taste, preferences that I considered but brushed off as personal biases. Most of the critiques, though, were more objective, like including more characters, or explaining why the speaker even cares about the subject matter in the first place. I jotted them all down, and planned to tweak some sections to accommodate these more reasonable critiques.

Almost immediately in the revision process, I couldn't help but re-write entire sections in a new tone, or with a different message I wanted to push across. A lot of those "matters of taste" ended up influencing this new version, and I'm glad I wrote them down despite my initial hesitations. Attached here, you can read that initial version, if you'd like.

After finishing and skimming the updated version, I can see that it still needs work. But if you'd like to read it now, I hope that, even if it means nothing to you, you at least enjoy it:

Unfinished Script

Nobody says “Lights, cameras, action!” They say, “Oh crap, did you bring the SD card?”  You don’t shoot a short film, you re-schedule it for three weeks because you managed to forget the thirty assignments you have coming up. You keep re-scheduling and re-scheduling and suddenly you have midterms and one of the crew gets sick on the one day that worked for everyone and eventually you just have to give up and throw another project on the trash heap.

But before you even get to that point of production, you need to have a script. It could take weeks, months, even years to write a half-decent one. Sure, everyone around you seems to have it handled and is able to write something they’re happy with, but your script has to be just right; something that’ll make the time spent on it worth it when it blows everyone’s socks off. But it’ll end up with the others. Somewhere in the deep, murky pits of your hard drive floats a graveyard of untitled manuscripts and skits, each one somewhere between barely-started and almost-finished.

It can feel overwhelming at times, the number of upcoming and abandoned projects that weigh on your mind. But you’re in good company. The girl sitting next to you in class? She’s two days late on delivering her news segment, half-out of her mind and exhausted from editing until 2:00AM last night.

The feeling of companionship is pervasive here. You’re all just one part of a team. Nevermind the team’s collective state of being overwhelmed, or the fact that none of you have enough time between your schedules and deadlines to produce a piece of work that can be approximated anywhere close to the word ‘good’. You’re all in this together. And after a while, you’ll forget the wonder you felt the first time you mounted a camera on your shoulder and tracked a bird flying across the sky. You’ll start to blend into the beige of the walls, staring into them until you fall straight through, part of the very fabric of this room you can’t stand to be in.

For three years of high school, I spent most of my time there between those beige walls. I learned how to write a script, how to use a DSLR camera, how to wrap cables, how to edit a video, how to light a subject, and, alongside whatever the hell ‘chromakey’ means, countless other tidbits of esoteric wisdom that meant nothing to any of the friends or family I would moreso talk at than talk to in response to the obligatory “So, what have you been up to?”

I joined my school’s Television Production program not for these niche nuggets of wisdom, nor for three years of needless stress and sleepless nights; I did it because I was enraptured completely by the subject. I had never been interested in learning about anything at all until the day I picked up a professional camera.

A picture can tell a thousand-and-one words without making a single noise. The beauty of a sequence of frames telling an immersive story was something that never struck me until I tried to create one. The excitement you feel behind the camera as the slightest tilt of the camera changes a scene from dysfunctional to dynamic is electric; the little click of the puzzle pieces in your mind as you start layering shots and sounds in the editing room, each piece finally revealing that grander image, is so gratifying and addicting.

And it wasn’t just the learning aspect. Our Television Production program was an active participant in tons of competitions. I was already a competitive person, and almost as soon as I joined the program in my sophomore year, I signed up to compete at SkillsUSA, a three-leveled competition. I was itching to see how far I could make it if I pushed myself, if I learned everything I possibly could about cinematography and lighting and everything under the sun. Until I was assigned to a non-video competition. To Extemporaneous Speaking. That first year, I couldn’t even make it past the Regional level.

But I wouldn’t let myself give up from one failure. Over the first two years of my three-year stint, I’d spend countless hours of my free time learning, showing up to the Television Production classroom during my study hall so that my teacher would maybe think This guy knows what he’s doing. Television Production was a co-curricular, meaning you had to take the class to be a part of the club. Having just moved to a new city and school, constantly depressed and missing my old friends, I was anti-social and couldn’t figure out how to connect with my classmates. I gave up entirely on the club aspect and figured I’d be able to prove something to myself by honing my technical skills, hoping that being good at something would help me be recognized by the people around me.

One of my first attempts at this was at the beginning of my second year. I tried out for our more difficult competitions, STN. I had a good team during the tryout, and I was proud of what we made, but it was clear that there were better members of that team, and space was already limited. I think that failure is something that I internalize and use against myself, spawning feelings of inadequacy throughout my life. This instance, however, was the first time I can recall channeling those feelings into something else; an obsession.

I spent every study hall from that point going to the TV classroom and asking upperclassmen millions of questions, or following an unending stream of editing tutorials. Towards the end of that second year, when my time as a high school junior was coming to a close, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring one more time. I applied to be one of the two people in charge of the next year’s competition teams. One of the few friends I’d made in the program, Tai, said we’d make a good team if we both got the position. I didn’t think she meant it. Honestly, I didn’t know why she’d even said that to me; we’d hardly known each other, and she was miles ahead of me in experience and accolades. My career in our program’s competitions was a story of what not to do, if anything. I couldn't really figure out how I’d fit in that position, but I also didn’t see the harm applying. Shoot for the moon, I thought.

And then I hit the moon. I got the position.

I was in shock when I found out. I’d spent two years of my life mentally working myself to the bone to reach this place. To feel recognized. And I lived in that feeling for the rest of that school year. I was happy to see that Tai and I ended up getting the roles we wanted, and soon enough we were taking on some of the new responsibilities. The work was hard, but I felt accomplished and proud of myself.

I remember vividly something my teacher said during our last meeting of the year, something he’d noticed from years of teaching students in the exact same boat as us. “Summer changes people.”

I spent my summer doing a lot of introspection. I’d just been crushed during my second time competing at SkillsUSA; this time I couldn’t make it past the State level. I was struggling internally, both with a failing relationship and with the lingering omnipresence of my parents’ divorce, no longer recent but still constantly weighing on my mind. I was at a genuinely low point in my life, and I had nowhere to go but inside my head.

School came back. So did I, but different. “Changed”.

I tried to like my senior year, but I couldn’t. Those first two months, I had a panic attack every time I walked through the gates, and I’d skip first period or the entire day just to try and breathe.

And I tried to like my position in the club, but still I just couldn’t. My teacher wouldn’t let me do any work on STN with Tai, since I’d never been selected for the competition team. My sole focus was SkillsUSA. I hated every second of it.

After a while, those feelings started bleeding into my work in class. I worked on a livestream early in the year and completely snapped at the rest of the crew for technical issues that were nobody’s fault. I would bury myself in a pile of competition paperwork and logistics and leave the majority of our video assignments to my friend Mateo, whom I often worked with since we’d competed together the previous year. I always felt guilty throwing him the SD card and asking him to edit, but I never stopped doing it. Sometimes I’d take on more extracurricular work just so I’d have an excuse to distance myself even more from having to make videos. But I had already locked myself in by taking two TV Production classes.

Early into the year, it was time again for STN tryouts. I was now a senior. This would be my last chance to go to California and compete against the best schools in the country. I’d learned a lot since the previous tryout, and I felt confident that I had the skills to be picked. Just like my previous tryout, I had a good team, and so I knew I had to put more effort in to stand out. I walked away feeling proud of what my team produced and the amount of labor I put into it. That feeling trickled away over the coming days, as time drew on and my nerves seeped in. I didn’t want to bother Tai by asking if I made it in or not; by this point we were barely working together on anything.

About a week later, my teacher pulled me aside in class to talk.

“I’m very sensitive to the fact that you’re a senior and that this is your last chance to compete,” he said. “But the way you treat me and your classmates here is unacceptable. You need to do better.”

I didn’t really know how to respond. At the time, I sort of just moped and felt bad for myself. He told me that I wasn’t outright rejected from the team, and a week later I found out I finally made it. But whether or not I’d actually be going to California depended on if I could work on myself and how I treated others.

I don’t think I would’ve been able to change my behavior in that environment alone. I acted out because I was in mental anguish, stuck doing the things that made me miserable for yet another year. And the only reason why I didn’t continue being miserable, why I escaped the cycle of self-torment, was because of a random elective I chose.

If I could use only one word to describe the Media Studies teacher, it would be “eccentric”. She had a funny habit of, as soon as she went to the next slide of her PowerPoint, shouting “Don’t copy that down!” It was such a frequent occurrence that I started keeping a counter in my notebook of how many times she’d do it each class. She was very particular about us processing the information before writing any notes, and I think it spoke to her teaching style.

My TV Production teacher was someone who didn’t like his job. He was very clearly experienced in the field of media production, but didn’t really have the innate passion for teaching. Most of our club was student-run, and he took a very hands-off approach when it came to lessons in class. I thought he was fun to talk to, and I actually liked not having to sit through tedious lessons, but when he was stressed from his job, it was very clear in how he interacted with us. My Media Studies teacher was, as I said, very eccentric. You could tell that media studies was something she loved, and though she could be strict at times, she seemed to enjoy teaching it to her students. She was also much more particular with her lesson plans, and had us produce and study a variety of media forms beyond video content.

The change in energy and teaching style was something that I needed. I became disenamored with making videos because everyone around me, from the other students I worked with on assignments to the teacher, just seemed tired of it. Seeing someone who had not only been teaching and working in the media field, but still loved it after decades, was infectious.

I shared her class with Mateo, along with two of our friends from the TV club, Zach and Cody. Working with them throughout the year on different kinds of assignments, from doing case studies on magazine and video game publishers, to making a music video for a fictional band as part of a fake marketing campaign, started to revive the passion I first felt behind a camera. I was re-discovering the fun of creating something with my friends.

I made my way into the next semester with this mentality; I began to love video production again, and my work in both classes had been heavily improved. But spring semester brought new challenges my way.

I had already found out that I got accepted into my top choice of college. With that stress gone, my desire to do any kind of schoolwork went out the window. Unfortunately, every class I had was picking up as we headed into testing season. Even my Media Studies class began to stress me out; I had two months to work on writing, shooting, and editing a film opening, all the while blogging about my progress on said film opening, and at the end create another video discussing the creative and technical choices I took with it. In the midst of that, SkillsUSA Regionals were about to start, STN practices were ramping up, and a couple weeks before my film opening was due, I’d have to spend a week competing in California.

It was enough for me to just keep my head afloat in my non-media classes; I didn’t care about any of them, and my college acceptance wouldn’t be rescinded over a couple Bs. But I couldn’t let myself give up on something I spent years of my life pursuing. I threw myself into competitions and screenwriting, and in the ides of March I found myself at the bottom of the pile, drowning underneath the work. But I couldn’t stop; I’d already finalized my script for the film opening and my parents had given so much money for me to be able to compete.

By the time the plane landed in California, I was a stack of fried nerves. I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t want to compete, I wanted to roll up in my suitcase and fly back to Florida and get my first full night of sleep since the previous summer.

I spent so long dreaming of being there. Of hearing my school’s name called, the top of the podium revealed with the title of our short film, our director walking onstage to accept the first-place award as my teammates and I lost our voices screaming and crying.

The funny thing about dreaming is that you only observe the events. You don’t have the chance to look into your mind there and think, to know what you’re thinking in the moment. So when my dream came true and that scene unfolded, I never could have imagined that my first thought would be Okay, now I have to work on the shot list for Media Studies.

I never got the chance to sit and breathe after we won. When we flew back, it was spring break, and I was able to throw myself into my film opening. I wanted to feel accomplished, but the only thing on my mind was dread. I had a tight window before I had to leave town, and that window gave me just a single day to shoot my entire opening. I would have the help of Mateo and another friend of mine, Santi, for that one day, but otherwise every detail, from getting high-quality equipment to designing the set, was entirely on me.

When the day came, I was frenetic; my on-set anger issues had returned. I spent most of the shoot lost in my head, taking control of the camera and the shots as much as possible, even though I had two friends who were far more skilled than me there to help. I relapsed.

The next day, I flew out of state to New Orleans. It was just me and my dad on the trip, and I tried to undo the knot sitting in my gut, but every time we settled in early for the night or took a few hours between tourist spots, I could just feel the unedited footage staring in the back of my mind, the unfinished CGI I needed to work on boring a hole through my eyes with its searing gaze.

I came back from the trip, anything but rested. I spent long nights at my desk, line editing and compositing and coloring, and throughout the process I had to extinguish a hundred fires that flared up. I was so far out of my depth. It was April 2nd, 11:58PM when I finally submitted my film opening. I was finally done. April 3rd, 12:00AM. Happy birthday to me.

The rest of my school year was hectic, but I made it through the hurricane. In late April, I had to make a music video for my TV Production final, and I had finally made it past SkillsUSA States and was going to the National level. Sadly, Nationals was in the summer, so even though I was glad to have made it, I had already graduated and wanted time and space away from TV. That affected the quality of my work, and my team didn’t end up winning.

I was sad to have lost, but for the first time in a long time, I was able to take a break from filmmaking and video production.

Currently, that break is a year-and-a-half old.

I’ve barely touched a camera since then. I think it scares me. I’m not the most self-aware or spiritually whole person nowadays, but I feel confident in saying I’ve grown away from being content with snapping at people over a stupid video project. I don’t want to let myself go anywhere near being that person again, and in my head I can’t help but lump the camera and that feeling together.

But I have nagging thoughts sometimes. That it’d be different this time around. That I’m more mature now, and that I don’t value my self-worth based on the quality of what I can produce anymore. I want to do it again. It certainly could be different this time around. But I’m not a kid in high school shooting oddball videos with his friends anymore. There’s higher expectations for how a production is run now, and I’m scared that the person I am now would have been perfect at keeping up then, that it’s too late for me to start over.

Yet that’s unreasonable. I can’t possibly improve my relationship with filmmaking without, in some way, approaching filmmaking again. I believe that the basis of my fears is a lack of understanding. I spent years misunderstanding myself and how I sought to compensate for my own issues through seeking achievements and recognition, how I mistreated my friends and colleagues. Realizing this has felt like the first step back into a world I left behind. A world that’s changed and moved on without me, that could maybe feel different if I look through new eyes.

My only goal now is to keep moving forward, one little step at a time, through that world. And I hope that on this journey, somewhere in the future, I can re-discover the spark I once had.

New goal in life: Become a househusband

Trigger Warning: Opening a b*ok and reading it

At the time of writing this, it's the tail-end of Thanksgiving break, I haven't done any assignments in three weeks, and I'd rather be put in the Clockwork Orange eye machine than open a single Word document.

First off, I want to open a public request to incarcerate whoever the hell made Microsoft Word and Google Docs. You give people this program they have to stare at all day to work or write or whatever, and you make it insane asylum-white? And there's not even a goddamn Better Canvas equivalent for Word or Google, the best you can get is dark mode or something. I hate it.

While my motivation to return to the asylum-white writing software of Doom and Despair is currently sub-zero, I've been working on bringing my constant media consumption habits back to books. Working at a bookstore is, to no one's surprise, a great way to get back into reading; highly recommend. I get discounts on physical books and there's a website we have access to that lets us get advanced copies for certain books, and while most are just random slop for the slop gods, there's (so far) two that I've read and enjoyed. 

The first one, which lowkey I haven't finished yet but still recommend, is The Girl With a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean (Releases May 5th). I'm like halfway through and so far I'm meandering between a 3.5/4 out of 5 stars. It's good for the most part, but the dialogue between the protagonist and the antagonist is so corny and exposition dump-y. I also think they revealed the antagonist way too early, but I guess I haven't read enough to say whether or not it still paces well or if there's another shoe to drop.

The second book, The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang (April 21), was a good read imo. I thought it was just generally solid for the most part; I'd recommend it mainly for fans of linguistics (like myself) and fans of freaky-deaky goobers (not like myself), and since I was only one of those two things, I just couldn't get myself fully into it. It's a sci-fi where the creatures are non-humanoid and just weird, hence the freaky-deaky goobers part, but the plot twist at the climax was genuinely not something I expected and, in my opinion, was pretty fire, so I bumped it up in my review.

I felt bad for the author when I logged it on Storygraph; I was the only review for like a month, and I left a stupid review because I generally don't write seriously on review apps. There's one other review now, though, and I'll just let you play spot-the-difference between the two.

People who take media analysis too seriously piss me off crazy style (ignore the fact that this started as a media studies blog); at least the people who beat subtext to death. Idk though, you tell me if I'm wrong for thinking that.

Gonna speedrun some other, already-published works I've been reading recently, starting with Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, which I liked but wished Janie was more present as a character in the Jody section. Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon gets so much hype for its worldbuilding and politics but the entire East section is half the length of West and generally irrelevant until you're like halfway through; it's just an alright fantasy trilogy compressed into one book. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler was good, but Lauren's stream of consciousness was pissing me offffff; just get to the point bro. And lastly I just finished reading The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, which is good and takes some interesting routes with how it tells the story, but idk I just haven't felt the book connect me to anywhere in its setting aside from the Junma. Fun fact, one of the people in that book's acknowledgements is teaching my fiction workshop next semester. I didn't even know my university had game like that fr.

I just don't get a lot of chances to
use this reaction image I'm sorry

The last book, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, has become one of my new favorites and is one of a few books that make me pause and think about how I write and tell stories. 

It's written as an oral tradition; though where, for example, Their Eyes Were Watching God goes down an oral tradition route of just talking to your friends about your life, A Wizard of Earthsea emulates a legend or an epic's oral tradition. It's a hundred percent a turn-off for a lot of people; there's barely any dialogue, and not everyone wants to read mainly prose for 200+ pages, but for me I enjoyed her writing style. The story takes place in Earthsea, an archipelago, and while there's so many different islands mentioned, we actually don't get a lot of fixation or interest on any one island in particular. Part of me kind of hates that and wants to Le Guin to expound on the worldbuilding, but simultaneously another part of me gets this sense of wanderlust from this massive, diverse archipelago.

The last thing I love about the book isn't actually from the book, but rather the afterword. Le Guin talks about what she did and why, and while I skimmed through most of it, towards the end she talks about why she designed Earthsea to be a land of relative peace. She talks about war as almost a disingenuous cop-out (my interpretation of her words) for fantasy writers to create conflict within their stories. She doesn't outright diss anyone, and in fact praises Tolkien and some other dude I forgot for their stories which deal with these wars of good and evil; what she does instead is mention that conflict appears in many different ways, and that fantasy almost uses war as a crutch.

I wouldn't write a war novel, as someone who's never experienced, researched, or spoken to survivors of war. If I wrote a fiction piece, the conflict would most likely be about something other than war. If I wrote a non-fiction, the conflict would be something more personal to my life. But if I wrote a fantasy or science fiction piece? Maybe it's just me, but while I've written a warless fantasy story before, I don't have that same taboo for the subject on account of my lack of experience.

For me personally, it would feel wrong to write about a real war without knowing almost everything about said war. It would feel wrong to write a fiction novel about a non-existent war that happens on our Earth, because I wouldn't be able to infuse it with enough nuance to make it seem A) realistic and B) not some tear-baiting slop some kid threw together for funsies. But when I think about writing a war in Fantasyland, I don't really have those same hesitations, and after really thinking about Le Guin's afterword I realized it's probably because I just don't care.

Like I've been watching the Lord of the Rings movies recently, about to start the third one, and I just can't help but think Who gives a shit?

Andy Serkis has had such a career

Lord of the Rings and a lot of other fantasy just feels so removed from reality for so many reasons. The difference in time period, the clear distinctions between good and evil; even just the elements of fantasy like dragons and magic and whatever. It's fun to detatch yourself from the real world and imagine Fantasyland for a bit, but none of these elements of war in my childhood favorites like Eragon or the last couple books in the Percy Jackson, or even a recent favorite like Dune, really stick with me because they sort of just use war as part of the spectacle that Fantasyland creates; it doesn't connect to my human emotions. I can see it as an interesting plot device or something, but when Main Character loses Third-Favorite Friend who was also Somewhat-Beloved Side Character's love interest as a result of some holy crusade, it doesn't feel like a genuine attempt to connect to the deep despair and pain you feel when you read about the actual atrocities of actual war.

Does the kid's series Percy Jackson need to emulate war crimes that happened in real life? Probably not. But did it also need to lead to a final Mega-battle against the evil forces of Kronos? Also probably not.

I feel like the only time I've read a war plot in fantasy that's stuck with me, not for how it just affected the characters or the world, but for how it affected me and my emotions, was in The Poppy War, where one of the cities is described exactly as the Nanjing Massacre happened in real life. To write a war plot in fantasy that feels genuine, I feel like you need to use it not to motivate your characters, but to make your audience feel sonder for each and every life that's affected, each life that could have been yours if you lived in this world. Lord of the Rings is cool and I get why people rock with the movies and the Good vs. Evil themes, but to me I just think of it as a spectacle. I care about the Fellowship (sort of), and I want them to win, but the war just seems like a thing that's gotta happen, and not an event that will affect Middle Earth for years to come.

War, to Le Guin, just isn't a place she wanted to go to in her writing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'll never write a fantasy or science fiction war plot myself, but her words do make me think about how I might want to use conflict more to connect with something deeply human than as a spectacle.

TLDR; good book.

I will gain a thousand Letterboxd followers.

I am so sorry to anyone who's ever asked me what movies I like only to watch me immediately pull up my Letterboxd. No I do not have a top 5. No I do not remember any movies I like until I go through my reviews. No I am not original. Yes I deserve happiness too.

I don't really know what happened, I've pretty much never been a movie guy ever in my life, but downloading Letterboxd is like ingesting a brain slug that tells you to be unfunny on the Internet. I just can't help it.

I've had multiple conversations with people about what books and movies I like, and a lot of them start with people saying I love to hate or I'm a snob. I think it's fair enough; I'm the type who barely gives anything a five star rating and I'm one of those chumps who are like well it was objectively good but I don't like it because and yada yada. But also now that I think about it...who gives a gaf?

I also just don't really watch a lot of movies or read a ton of books. A lot of the times when I've logged a movie in the past year, it's been something I watched because it's the only thing me and my friends agreed on or I just wanted to spend time with people and we just happened to watch that movie. Half the books on my Storygraph are novels I had to read for literature class that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise.

I'm starting to realize that I'm less inclined to like a piece of media if someone tells me I have to consume it.

I didn't really enjoy any of the books I read for my literature class this semester. Some were good, but I wouldn't pick any of them up in a bookstore. I also had a decent streak where I felt like I never watched a movie willingly. Chump mentality I guess.

I've been trying to watch more things I'm actually interested in recently, and while there's always some exceptions (Sweeney Todd you will burn in hell) I think I've had a good run of watching movies I enjoy. 

I ended up watching the whole Now You See Me trilogy recently and I truly cannot decide if I love them or hate them. That's not really related to anything else I just wanted to mention it.

I've also been reading more books for personal enjoyment, and I just want to say that whoever came up with Don't judge a book by its cover is a moron. I think you should judge a book a solid 40% by its cover; cool, creative people don't slap lame-o covers on their books! And 99% of the time when you see a fiction, romance, or fantasy book where the cover is a photo of an actual real-life person instead of a drawing/art; it's probably garbage. Real photos of non-people are an edge case.

Last thing I'm just very proud of my Frankenstein review

I am going to become Head Coach of the Miami Heat

One of the greatest decisions of my life was getting into basketball, I love NBA brainrot so much. Just a couple of pearls of insight and wisdom as I leave you to ruminate on this blog post: The Heat becoming a power-of-friendship team and somehow winning games when Herro and Bam were out was such an unexpected development. Like omg we might beat the play-in allegations this year. Free James Harden from the Unction, blow up the Pelicans' training facility, and put Wemby on steroids and Celsius. Happy Holidays.

Cooking, Dungeons & Dragons, YouTube, and Life

hey. (said spiderverse-ly)

The first draft of this blog post was written in late June (it is now early September) and I really can't help but see how different my writing is right now. If you were to read the original draft you would have assumed I picked up a drug addiction or two (or three) since my last post. Pleased to say that I have not!

Also in the past few months I've made the choice to stop cursing, so the amount of expletives was sort of mind-boggling to read. It's been a very, very hard process to get myself to not use curse words, and I'm not gonna lie and say I don't slip up from time to time, but I more or less don't say anything past "hell".

I don't really mind other people cursing, nor do I really think it's the end of the world if I myself do, but I just found myself using curse words wayyyyy too much. I just feel like it's helped me put more thought into what I say, and better articulate the way I feel about something.

Anyways who cares about all that, I've got gibberish to spew.

I LOVE STARTING HOUSE FIRES

My kitchen post-house fire

One of the major changes between this year of uni and last year is that I now live off-campus, away from the unfathomable hell of living in the same room with a man who smells like unwashed booty mixed with the scent of a drunk person's piss swimming through the Hudson River. I instead am the proud father (roommate) of three beautiful cherubs (my roommates) who are insanely chill, and who I knew ahead of time. I feel like that one Overwatch meme where the angel lady shows up and takes someone to heaven.

Beyond the newfound joys of fatherhood, I now have the kitchen space and time to get back to cooking. Not to sound like a loser who enjoys life or anything, but there are very, very few things in this world that bring me as much joy as cooking for my loved ones.

Almost made me cry

There's just something about the blood, sweat, and tears (and as I'm now discovering, cost) of cooking that pulls me in like nothing else. And before you ask, yes, all of those bodily fluids end up in my dishes. I've spent so long making absolute garbage; the first time I ever tried to make my own dish, I put diced apples in pre-made pasta and sauce and was so ashamed by the result that I left the food-filled pot on the stove overnight and my dad yelled at me.

I think if it was always for myself I never would've liked cooking. It was only in the pursuit of a genuine reaction from my family when I cooked for them that I continued practicing. I didn't want a meager smile that said "this tastes like Jiminy Cricket took a dump and died in your pan but I love you and have to lie about it"; I wanted the real thing (the real thing being a meager smile that said "this is great but I'm not doing the dishes for you").

Sometimes I feel like it's hard to get a genuine response. I always find an issue with what I cook, and there will be occasions where I ask my roommates or family to give me honest feedback; whether out of concern for my feelings, appreciation for the simple fact that I cooked for them, or a lack of cooking knowledge, I usually end up with a vague "it's good!"

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I occasionally feel reassured by the comment, but I just can't stop the nagging desire to get better. I don't wanna be good, I wanna throw down in the kitchen with somebody's abuelita.

There's so much complexity to flavor that I'm only now really starting to understand. For example, I made some ranch on a whim earlier today, and couldn't quite realize what I found it lacking in. And because I'm a pretentious English major, I'm gonna analogize this with a writing scenario.

You write a sentence: "The dog went into the house."

From this sentence, we have a simple scene. We know who, what, and where. In a similar sense, the ranch I made was discernibly ranch, but it was mid. This sentence is mid. You suck at writing bro. I want to imagine more details. I want to add enhance the taste and add background flavors.

You change the sentence a bit: "The dog ran into its house." I change the flavor profile a bit. I add in some garlic and onion powder, some salt, a little MSG, and some herbs.

I understand the story a bit better. The dog is moving quickly for some reason, and this house is its home. I've started to pick up on some of the background flavors, but there's just not enough depth.

You go even further. "The dog scurried into its home." The word "scurried" changes the mood of the sentence. To me, "scurried" implies some fear, like the dog is fleeing or hiding. I consider adding dijon mustard into the dressing. It would give it a pleasant tang and a subtle kick. But the consistency would thicken the ranch too much.

You try another possibility. "The dog bolted into its home." That new word adds so much excitement and freneticism into the sentence; maybe I can add some vinegar for more acidity and sharpness, but it just doesn't have that nostalgic flavor I love at restaurants.

Being an idiot, I lowkey explained this idea in a way that made it harder to understand, but to the three brain cells left in my head that aren't occupied with the phrase "gurt fingle", this is how I see cooking. Every new combination adds another layer of flavor, in the same way that swapping out one word can completely change the emotion of a sentence.

But that's what I love about food, not cooking; new tastes are a pleasing experience. Cooking, the act of making food, is, to me, not about me getting to experience that final taste. It's about the joy in my friends' faces when they've had a long day and get to have a home-cooked meal, even when they're hundreds of miles from home. I don't pursue a better end product so that I can have a 10% better eating experience, I want to cook better so that I get to see surprise and warmth in my favorite people's expressions.

lowkey feel like that last paragraph contradicts the entire section of me wanting to get better at cooking but tbh who give a gaf, it's my blog.

I'm a nerd. Dweeb, even.

I really don't know where or how it started but in the past nine months I picked up a DnD obsession.

My first interaction with DnD was when I was like fourteen; I played like a session or two with these guys I knew online, and was pissed when my edgy-as-hell character couldn't do like twenty billion damage in one turn and missed every single attack roll.

At some point last school year, I got a YouTube short on my feed of Make Some Noise, an improv-based game show produced by the independent media company Dropout (shoutout my goats, yall should check them out frfr). Again, I have like three regular brain cells left so I was instantly captivated by the shorts, and after a while I started watching some of their free full episodes, though there were only a handful.

Scrolling through their YouTube channel to fill the dopamine-shaped hole in my soul, I found dozens and dozens of hours of free content of one of their other shows: Dimension 20.

To briefly summarize the niche information of the online DnD community in my brain that maybe twelve people worldwide care about, there are tons shows, videos, and podcasts filmed and uploaded about DnD; the ones where people are just playing the game are referred to as actualplay, and Dimension 20 (henceforth D20) is one of those.

I truly cannot explain how much this stupid (endearingly) show changed my life. I have always loved reading and writing. I have always loved games. I don't know how it took me so long to find DnD, which is like both of those ideas if you combined them and then hid them behind the threat of incomprehensible levels of bullying.

The main Game Master (I am not saying Dungeon Master), or GM, of the show, Brennan Lee Mulligan, is one of my favorite storytellers and writers of all time. While I feel like sometimes his style can be a bit more comedic than I'd personally like, I have never seen the talents of improvisation and storytelling be married in such an engaging and captivating way than what he does for his campaigns and characters.

I've watched an egregious amount of that show. I don't even wanna estimate the amount of time.

As a stupid idiot creative writing major who barely has the self-motivation to write for class, DnD is a really incredible training ground. It requires a lot of preparation if you're writing your own campaign (you can use pre-made ones, or "modules" instead), but not nearly to the extent that a full-length story would require, because you build the story with your players.

One of the main things I didn't understand when I watched D20 or another show called Critical Role is that these are shows. They're professionally run and produced by people with years, if not decades of experience in GM'ing, acting, filming, etc.

The biggest mistake I made when I first GM'ed was that I didn't consider who my players were; my friends. My friends are mainly STEM majors who don't care about intricate narratives. They don't want to have a super intricate background that fits perfectly into the storyline and gives potential character arcs to explore. They just want to play DnD.

And that's perfectly fine! As annoyed as I was for those first two sessions I ran (we stopped afterwards because scheduling is hard), I've realized I was putting too much of an expectation on my players to want to interact with and create the world with me. The way I rationalized it to myself is that players are like cats; I have to let the world exist as it is and let them approach it in a way that's comfortable with them.

I've yet to start the new campaign I've been writing, mainly because I'm too lazy to actually finish it. But hey if you ever want to lose respect for me, just ask and I will gladly talk about it until my mouth falls off.

"she bobby on my james til i blast" - pharrell i think

I've been wanting to start a YouTube channel for like a year now. There's like a 50% chance in video production that you develop stockholm syndrome and end up liking making videos; I rolled the wrong 50%.

I'm currently in the process of making a video following my attempts to lock in at the gym over the course of ten(-ish) weeks. So far the only things I've filmed are "progress" videos where I stand in my bathroom with insane bedhead and do little poses to flex my muscles once a week. I have some vague goals for myself like doing multiple pull-ups or doing a handstand, but those seem very distant. For now I've just been enjoying going to the gym with my roommates and eating healthier.

brief side-tangent

I get a lot of cooking content and a lot of gym content in my algorithms, so naturally there's some overlap. Some of the saddest, most kitchencels-coded slop I've ever seen in my life has come from some shredded dude talking about his "high-protein meal prep" that's just cottage cheese mixed with ground turkey, two micrograms of salt, and a drop of yearning for more. 

I go to the gym so I can feel healthy and be more fit, not because I want to look super lean or super huge. I can admit that I'm kinda looking down at these people who have the right to go to the gym for whatever reason or goal they want... but also it's lowkey warranted?

So many of these recipes I see have like twenty pounds of meat and carbs and then like one singular slice of zucchini. What the hell are we doing here. I'll be watching a Jeff Nippard video and then he shares his diet of gruel and protein powder and I just get this wave of ennui.

Two of these are literally slop

I try to keep a vague track of the number of calories I intake, but my main goal throughout the week is to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, alongside all the carbs and protein I have to grow muscles. I like to meal prep by preparing some ingredients a certain way, like oven-roasting potatoes and zucchini, cooking some onions and leftover pepper I have before adding it to a can of beans I bought, making some lean burger patties or marinating chicken. I also try to keep some raw vegetables and fruits on hand for when I just need a little snack or get lazy and want to add some nutrients to my sandwich.

Again, I'm well-aware that this is entirely self-righteous and condescending, but I see so many people go to the gym and start eating like they sinned in their past life and were ordained to never again experience flavor. Unless you're trying to become a bodybuilder or an athlete (or maybe you just really want some abs, idk man it's your life), I think that the diet promoted in fitness content is really not conducive to your quality of life.

Anyways

Another idea I have for a video is (surprise) DnD-related. I'm working on a campaign right now, and for the sake of myself as a new GM and my friends as new players, I'm keeping the actual plotline minimal so they can choose their own path and the mechanics to a minimum so they can just learn how to play DnD.

For this video, though, I had the idea that it might be cool to record myself developing the worldbuilding, plotline, and mechanics. 

I don't want to go into detail on those elements, on the off-chance I lock in for long enough to actually make the video, but in DnD there are ways for characters to come back to life once dead, the difficulty of which really just varies by GM or by campaign. For this campaign, I was thinking of how strange it must be to be an NPC in Dark Souls or Elden Ring and just see this player character die over and over and over again to a boss (or those goddamned dogs), until eventually they win.

I want death in this campaign to have both benefits and consequences; on one hand, you might come back stronger, and have an easier time in encounters, but new mechanics for combat and narratives might also affect you.

This is just a tentative idea in terms of the mechanics, as I haven't really put much thought into it since I'm still working on something else, but I think it'd be a fun video.

It's just really hard to make video content. I'm very fortunate that I slogged through the process of developing the skills necessary to do so, but the combination of the time it takes, the lack of resources, and my albeit-improving body dysmorphia just makes it so daunting.

Real G's move in silence like Gabagool

It feels very surreal to look back at pictures or writings from high school and realize that only a little over a year ago I was barely crossing the finish line of my senior year (worst year of my life) wondering if life would be better in college.

Yes.

I really love the independence I have going to school in a new part of the state. I am infinitely thankful to my parents and family for the financial support I receive that allow me to go to school here and not have to worry about making ends meet, but I really am at my emotional lowest when I'm living with my family. It's not anyone's fault--I just love the feeling of space and freedom I have now.

I'm currently working as a dishwasher and am in the process of interviewing for a second job at my favorite local bookstore in town. I try to cook dinner for myself, my roommates, and some friends once a week, and I take fifteen credit hours a semester. I've signed up to try out for the tech crew at my uni's sporting events, and I'm planning to take road trips to St. Augustine and New Orleans.

Two years ago, I was sitting in bed praying that moving out would be the cure to all my stress and that my university of choice would be beautiful and amazing and heal my soul (lord knows I wasn't gonna make that drive just to tour it).

Some of that happened. Some.

I think that I'm the happiest I've ever been, and that the people I'm with and the place I'm at, both literally and metaphorically, have been some of the best things to happen to me.

penis

obligatory cop-out post (GAHHHHHHHH)

I don't really have anything to say right now. Life is pretty chill, I'm tired as hell, I want to play basketball. Nothing new. At this point this blog is like my estranged child whose life I pop into once a month with a "what's up" text, so I've completely given up on trying to make regular uploads.

This post will really just be a dump for two things I wrote recently, one being a poem and the other a short story. Neither are really that great, and I haven't had the time nor effort to go back and tweak either, but I want to get in the habit of being open to critiques. As always, feel free to text me if you want to comment on anything. Also I have a bad habit of not caring enough to actually think of what to name my works, so if you have any title suggestions let me know.

Delusions (Poem)

Fruit (Story)

I think my next blog post is going to be about cooking; I've been wanting to rant about that shit for so long now. At the end of the school year, so around late April/early May, I'll most likely repeat the "writing analysis" shit I did at the end of last semester with the works I've written this semester. So. Looking to the future and whatnot.

Bye.

balling out my gourd

 

Coming up as a wee lad, my general fitness was, how do you say, a sporadic shitshow.

When I was in the early grades of elementary school, I was a really skinny kid who did a lot of outdoor activities. It was the one time in my life where I was consistently tan (and yes, I can tan (thank you Cuba)), and I played a few sports.

getting humbled was a canon event

My first athletic pursuit was basketball. I played in one of the i9 Sports leagues, and I only did it once, seeing as I had NO FUCKING IDEA HOW TO PLAY.

I have a very vivid memory of my team's coach explaining to us the five positions: Point Guard (PG), Shooting Guard (SG), Small Forward (SF), Power Forward (PF), and Center (C). I remember this very clearly because it was one of the first times in my life where I've thought "What is bro yapping about". I don't think I made a single point my whole run with that team, because for some reason nobody ever thought to tell me how to actually shoot the ball. I can recall only one other moment from that experience, which is walking to the car in tears because I sucked ASSSSSSS and only passed it to our one good player.

Fun times.

After I quit basketball, my parents started having me do a different sport; football. For those of you who don't know, a funny little thing about i9 Sports is that the coaches are all parents. And my dad, being a man who loves football, ended up as my coach for the vast majority of teams I played on.

I don't think it's anywhere near an exaggeration to say that the only reason I had the position I did, Quarterback, was because of pure nepotism.

There were only two cases where I wasn't the QB. The first time was when my cousin Dominic joined the team. Now that man could throw. He was a much better QB than me, and was also faster and stronger, so I really just took the L on that one. Unfortunately for him, he was born a Cuban man, an ethnic group upon which God has placed a height limit of 5'10", so I don't think he plays football anymore.

The other time was when a FREAK OF NATURE joined our team. I don't know what the hell they fed that kid, but it must've been straight horse steroids and tren. I think he was like a year or so older than me, but DAMN that boy was tall. He was really good at catching and running too, so when I cried to my dad about being taken off QB he still had something to do. I don't remember that guy's name at all, but I would not be shocked to find out he's gone D1 or pro by now.

My football days were longer than those of basketball, but were still pretty short-lived. I hated football (and still do, what a fucking boring-ass-boof-ass excuse of a sport) and getting up early every Saturday was miserable.

Even though I hated it, I think I would have stuck with sports if it weren't for one thing: Roblox.

The Downfall

Around first grade, my best friend at the time (who is a punk ass b-word but that's a story for another time) introduced me to video games, and I think it'd be fair to say that the trajectory of my life went straight downhill since then. I would spend an ungodly amount of time online everyday playing games, spending so much time on my computer that I can't really play games for fun nowadays, because after a while I just feel like I'm wasting my life.

Elementary

So that was my main motivator to quit sports. And over the next few years, I started gaining a lot more weight. I don't really know if I was overweight or something like that, but over time
, especially around middle school, the shape of my body became a point of self-hatred for me, and sometimes I'd hurt myself out of frustration. For most of my life at this point, I was a really skinny kid, and growing up we're taught that being as skinny as possible is the ultimate goal of health and beauty, so seeing my body change rapidly was a lot for me.

But anywho! I had a friend at the time who was also a bit chubby going into middle school, but over the summer completely 180'ed and became much leaner. It was through him that I first became familiar with the idea of working out. He used this app, I believe it was called 30 Day Fitness Challenge or something like that, and seeing how well it worked for him, I went ahead and downloaded it.

Middle

I made that shit like a 5-day fitness challenge. After the first rest day it gave me, I completely forgot about it, and spent the next two years of middle school occasionally re-downloading it, maybe keeping up for a few days, maybe even a week if I was really committed. But it just never stuck.

Halfway through eighth grade, I switched from Nova Middle School (the public one, I did not go to that fuckass private school) to Florida Virtual School. Funny coinkydink, I switched to FLVS like two months before every school in the country went online because of COVID. Hooray!

To say that COVID was a very odd time in my life would be an understatement, but also it was like that for everyone so I'm really just preaching to the choir. But in terms of my physical appearance, boy oh boy did that completely change. I'm not sure if I dropped a lot of weight so much as I just started going through puberty, but at any rate I was a lot thinner and started feeling better about my health. I would like to now make the point that I realize skinny does not equal healthy nor attractive, but at the time that was how I saw it for myself.

Anyways, I spent the first few months of quarantine at home, slowly slimming down, until around the start of high school I looked like a shitty Pokemon evolution of myself.

About halfway through the school year, I started taking Taekwondo classes at a place near my house (I was still living in Tamarac at the time), and this was really my first taste of a fitness journey. I would go to class about four times a week, and I would genuinely tweak out on days where I couldn't go, so after a while I started working out at home. By working out, I really just mean core exercises. It was a really bad fitness regiment, but it paid off; I had relatively strong abdominal muscles for years. They weren't prominent, but they were definitely there!

I kept doing Taekwondo until the end of June. Firstly, the people at the studio started getting pretty lax with their masks. There was also a girl named Angel who would kick the living shit out of everyone, even if you were told to make light contact. Thankfully for me, I am apparently very bony and hurt to make physical contact with, so after a while she threw softer kicks. But my breaking point at this studio was when they started re-hiring staff. Up until this point, it had just been Master Anthony teaching classes, but then they brought back this other guy to help out, and oh my GODDDD he was a fucking prick. I only had him once, but it was enough for me. He was so strict and uptight, and when Angel and I were sparring, he got on my ass multiple times for making too much contact. Mind you, I'M FIGHTING FOR MY FUCKING LIFE AGAINST THIS BOOTLEG AMAZON WHO'S TRYING TO CRACK MY STERNUM.

So yeah, I quit.

But while I stopped doing Taekwondo, I actually managed to stick with my workouts. At least, until I started going to school in-person again. That shit really curb-stomped my energy. I didn't really do much in regards to physical activity for the rest of high school, except for a brief stint at a new Taekwondo place in Weston. After a while, though, I was kinda sick of it, and was really only going because there was a girl I thought was pretty, and that's not worth spending a monthly fee on.

Again, not much else happened for the rest of high school. I did a little workout here and there, got some pumps, some gains, you know how it is. But now we reach the reason I wrote this post.

Imagine I also put the peter griffin basketball image here

I love basketball. I really don't know where it came from; if you remember my earlier days in this sport, me and the ball had beef.

There wasn't any specific moment that got me into basketball, but little things over the course of months. In junior year of high school, I was out at a pizza place (called Sicilian Oven, highly recommend) with my dad, and they were playing the Eastern Conference Finals of the Heat vs. Celtics. As a self-proclaimed Celtics hater, I'm glad this was what initiated me into basketball.

After that, I started getting a little bit of basketball content on my Instagram and YouTube feeds, and after engaging with them they started taking over my home page. I thought it would be another random phase, or maybe an on-and-off interest, but over the next year I just kept watching basketball videos. It wasn't like I was actually watching games, but I was watching videos about players, coaches, drama, etc.

What drove me to start actually paying attention to the regular season games was the 2024 playoffs; I was at a birthday dinner for my friend Shreya at Yard House, and straight in front of me they were playing one of the Mavericks vs. Timberwolves games. I loosely followed the rest of the playoffs, generally rooting for the Mavs, and was sorely disappointed by the Finals (I refuse to acknowledge who won). But for the rest of the summer, I kept watching basketball videos and following stuff that happened during the offseason, and when it came time for me to start at university, the basketball brainrot finally got through to me.

My GOAT Shreya

gym bro era

I moved in on August 17th, and a week later was the first time I tried playing basketball at the on-campus gym. It's become an addiction since then.

I wanted to be consistent in the gym when I started here, and the only reason I've been able to achieve that is because of basketball. It's so much fun to me, and I'm genuinely at the point where my workout regiment revolves around what I want to get better at on the court. I started going to the gym to feel better about my physical appearance, and while it's still a motivator, basketball has completely overtaken that reason.

I know a lot of people who are the "Ughhhh I need to work out" type but don't really have a goal nor idea where to start. So I, an unqualified buffoon, feel that if talking about my experience in fitness and what I've learned might help even just one person, I'd be happy with that.

So now, some advice.

STRETCH. Muscle soreness is completely manageable if you stretch the muscles you're about to activate in your exercises. When I get to the gym, the first thing I do is head to the "yoga studio" area and stretch every muscle. If I'm playing basketball, I'll start with my toes/feet (idgaf if you think it's weird, I'm not walking around with a sore big toe), then stretch my ankles in every direction, then do calves, inner thighs, and hamstrings. I spend the most time on my hamstrings, but then I move on to the hips, glutes (to any dudes reading this I promise it is not gay to stretch/work out your glutes grow up), and from there I start moving to the upper body. I'll start with the obliques and lower back (which is my favorite stretch by far), then do abs, upper back, triceps, fingers, wrists, and forearms. After that I'll do biceps and pecs, then finish with shoulders.

When you type it out it looks like a lot, but this takes me 5-10 minutes depending on how lazy I am. Is it necessary to stretch every muscle? Not necessarily. If you're just doing bicep exercises, it doesn't make much sense to stretch your glutes, but if you're playing a sport it would make sense to go more full-body. I just like to stretch everything anyways; it's a good way to wake your body up and stretching consistently is really good for your body as you age. 

You're also supposed to stretch after working out, but I am extremely lazy after I finish, so I'll just try to stretch the specific muscle groups I just worked out. I do not have the effort to do a full-body stretch again.

My next piece of advice: DIET. I say "diet" in the general sense, not just eat less to get skinny. It's important to have a reason for working out, and the diet will depend on your goals. For example, I'm currently trying to lose fat and get to 155-160 pounds (I am about 165 right now). My reason for doing this is to be more agile and quicker when I play basketball, since my physique is naturally kind of stocky.

I'm trying to eat less calories, but also I don't eat enough protein, so I'm trying to shoot for 90g/100g of protein on days I work out to maintain and develop my muscles. The hardest part of the diet is eating right; I love cooking but I hate using my dorm's communal kitchen, so I used to buy a lot of pre-made stuff. The amount of sodium in them is so high, so I cut those out of my diet and try to incorporate a lot more unprocessed shit, like zero sugar yogurt and granola (my new favorite snack). Processed carbs are like crack for me, so trying to stop eating candy and ice cream and all that is really tough. 

But hey, I'm trying! I think the most important part is making a conscious effort to eat a little bit better every day. Not everyone needs a crazy change in their diet, but listening to my body makes me feel better about myself, physically and mentally. Also, eat your vitamins!

The last thing I'd say, and unfortunately this won't be capitalized and bolded because I don't feel like it, is to have fun!

Sounds a bit corny, but like I said earlier, the only reason I go to the gym at this point is because I love basketball. It's the most fun I have at the gym, and I probably would've quit if I was still going just to "look better". My current gym schedule is wake up at 7AM to play basketball (I'd get there around 7:30), and I'll usually leave around 9:30-10:30 depending on my classes. Last semester I would finish basketball an hour early so I could spend an hour or so lifting weights, but by the end of the semester I stopped doing weight training because doing all that in the span of three hours is suicide-inducing.

So now I do basketball in the mornings and lift weights after I finish classes, generally around 6PM. I also have Ensure protein shakes that I drink as soon as I get home from the gym (anabolic window or whatever the fuck). It sounds like a lot, but I do basketball because I have fun, I stretch because I enjoy being flexible and like the long-term benefits, I try to do exercises I don't hate (FUCK RDLs), and I am working on enjoying dieting. 

2 months in jim vs. 4 months in jim

Almost been six months, need to take a progress pic soon. I think that's all I have to say in terms of my fitness journey. It was a lot of yap, but I like talking about it, though, so. Cope.