So today is the one year anniver­sary of the cre­ation of this site.  As I’ve men­tioned in my past posts, this site started off as a deal between Alex Guichet and I. I promised that I would start blog­ging, if Alex would train him­self to the point in which he could climb fences. One year later, I’m hold­ing my end of the bar­gain, but I have yet to see Alex climb a chain link fence. I like to think of this as a tes­ta­ment to my golden rule which sim­ply states “Always Deliver”.

Look­ing back, I started this site with a whole lot of neg­a­tiv­ity. My first offi­cial blog post was incred­i­bly pes­simistic, and my first few rants were sim­ply vul­gar. While I do find my highly neg­a­tive, satir­i­cal rants to be hilar­i­ous, I’m slightly dis­ap­pointed by the fact that I don’t wield the same kind of fire power any­more. It must be all the opti­mistic writ­ing for the school news­pa­per soft­en­ing me up. Regard­less, I think it’s pro­found look­ing back at my old posts, and sim­ply see­ing how my ideals and val­ues have evolved through­out this year. On one hand, some of my val­ues are still firmly in place, some I have sim­ply for­got­ten, while oth­ers have down­right changed.  Of course, this is noth­ing mind blow­ing, it’s what hap­pens in life as peo­ple mature, but it’s still kind of cool being able to track the pro­gres­sion of my maturity.

So how am I dif­fer­ent today than from who I was one year ago when I wrote my first posts for this blog? Well for one thing I’m not pissed off as hell at Alex’s neigh­bor for “dis­ap­pear­ing” after home­com­ing. I feel more com­fort­able with my life and my sur­round­ings, and I think I’m doing a much bet­ter job at bal­anc­ing out my life. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned how to do over this past year, it’s how to think crit­i­cally. Now I don’t mean that bull­shit term that is used to describe some­one that is smart. I mean actu­ally think­ing crit­i­cally, as in, con­stantly reflect­ing on my lifestyle, actions, and habits, in order to find my flaws and to hope­fully con­trol them. By doing this, I think I’ve grown to enjoy life in a much greater capac­ity. I feel free from most of the soci­etal lim­i­ta­tions that peo­ple meld to, and as a whole, I’m liv­ing life based on my own dreams and desires.

Of course, I still feel as if I haven’t accom­plished much in this past year. I wish I made more movies than I ended up mak­ing. I should be a way faster swim­mer in com­par­i­son to what I am now. Finally, I also wish that I was bet­ter at piano. How­ever, not being able to accom­plish these things has taught me an impor­tant les­son, and that is that the words “wish” and “should” need to be elim­i­nated from my vocab­u­lary.  I’ve learned that peo­ple will remem­ber and judge me based on what I accom­plished, not on what I wanted to accom­plish, and thus I need to be more engaged in the process of accom­plish­ing things. I sup­pose this all stems from dis­ci­pline, and that this dis­ci­pline will become more refined over time, but it’s still a lifest­lye that needs to be adapted.

Peo­ple often com­plain about how bad this past year was, with the eco­nomic reces­sion, the wars in the mid­dle east, swine flu, and the elect­ing of a black man as a pres­i­dent. But I per­son­ally think that this year was much bet­ter than peo­ple give it credit for. After all, it was in this year that the king of pop (who is sub­se­quently the king of child preda­tors), died only to have peo­ple super­fi­cially love him  post posthu­mously. That sin­gle occur­rence alone made this past year worth­while. To top it off, the world’s rich­est black man Tiger Woods, revealed him­self to be one of the world’s great­est “play­ers”. Not only did Woods sleep with at least a dozen or so girls, but he did so know­ing that he had a super model wife at a home, and a bil­lion dol­lars still in his pocket. It appears as if Tiger Wood’s only rival is Bill Clin­ton, who per­formed an equally impres­sive feat when he trav­eled to North Korea to hit on res­cue, the two Amer­i­can reporters that those com­mie bas­tards cap­tured. With all of this media drama, I sim­ply can’t fathom how peo­ple can com­plain about this past year. Isn’t mak­ing some­one famous and than ruth­lessly bring­ing about their even­tual demise the whole point of hav­ing celebrities?

On a lighter note, I feel blessed to have devel­oped such great friend­ships this past year. My friends have truly become like fam­ily to me, and I owe a great deal of my liveli­hood to them. When­ever I want to make a movie, they’re the first ones to vol­un­teer, and they always give their best efforts in the process. When hang­ing out, they’re pleas­ant, fun, and enjoy­able to be with. In gen­eral, there’s vir­tu­ally no drama, back­stab­bing, or other bull­shit that comes between us, and that’s what I think the mark of true friend­ship is. Obvi­ously, I could go on and on about all of the won­der­ful expe­ri­ences that I’ve had with my friends this past year, but I would just like to high­light a sin­gle friend of mine and that is Melissa Costa.

Like most of my friend­ships, I don’t really know how my friend­ship with Melissa started. I knew her in my fresh­man sci­ence class, but we didn’t actu­ally get to know each other until that dark period in my life when I was involved with a quincenera. Since then, Melissa and I have forged a very strong and reward­ing friend­ship. Whereas most of the woman in my life are com­pletely crazy, Melissa comes with just a tad bit less crazi­ness mak­ing her my last bea­con of hope for females. Of course, Melissa is still pretty crazy, and not in the good way. She thought it would be cute to change up her hair so that it looked bad, she Oreo cook­ied my car for no real rea­son, and then she per­formed the worst of offenses by steal­ing my rice krispies one day. Obvi­ously, I was a lit­tle peeved off at Melissa for giv­ing in to her infe­rior fem­i­nine ways, but she has now found her place and is  repent­ing for these past trans­gres­sions by mak­ing me pies.  What sets Melissa apart from most peo­ple is the fact that she’s a gen­uine friend. Most peo­ple have super­fi­cial friend­ships which work great when things are going well in life, but they often col­lapse when a lit­tle com­mit­ment or ded­i­ca­tion is required. My expe­ri­ence has been the com­plete oppo­site with Melissa. I can eas­ily come off as a picky, arro­gant jerk and thus I often give Melissa  a ton of crap. If you couldn’t tell by all of her “pranks”, she gives me a ton of crap too. Yet, despite the fact that we reveal our flaws to each other, we are still able to laugh and enjoy being friends with one another, which is what I value most in a person.

So what lies for me in the future? Well there’s a lot of things that I am look­ing for­ward to in this com­ing year. First and fore­most, I’m still try­ing to enjoy my last five or so months of high school. I still have a lot to accom­plish with swim­ming, jour­nal­ism, aca­d­e­mic decathlon, and just gen­eral school­work, and it’s a shame that my time in high school is com­ing to an end.  After high school comes col­lege, in which I hope to major in Film. I have already been accepted to Cal State North­ridge, and San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, both schools with some solid film pro­grams, and hope­fully I’ll get accepted into more great film schools come March. I’ve decided that I never want to live a life that is dic­tated by a 9–5 job for some cor­po­ra­tion. Instead, a life that is com­pa­ra­ble to that of a free lancer sounds more appeal­ing to me.  For­tu­nately, the film indus­try offers this kind of  lifestyle, and even if I don’t get into film and end up tak­ing over my dad’s com­pany, I will still be able to live this kind of lifestyle. My major goal in life as of now, is to sim­ply live it by doing things that make me a bet­ter per­son. I want to take com­plete respon­si­bil­ity for my actions so that way I will never have any­one else to blame if I find myself in tough times. What I really want, is to live life inde­pen­dently from the soci­etal bur­dens and sheep-like men­tal­ity which I feel dimin­ish the eter­nal fire of the human spirit.  Of course, want­ing and achiev­ing are two com­pletely dif­fer­ent things, and I will have a lot in store for me this upcom­ing year. But with this blog, we’ll at least be able to see how it all pans out.