loosing respect for someone who inspires you so much is such a let down.  you’re on your own.  you’re always on your own.  you always will be.

must listen to:
mumford and sons – “roll away your stone”
andrew bird – “fake palindromes”

In March 2007, I packed up a car full of necessities and left Los Angeles to go live in Santa Barbara with my aunt, uncle and cousin. They had a guest room about one-hundred steep steps away from their quaint two-bedroom Mexican style villa that unfortunately burnt down in the Montecito fires this past Fall. I have always seen their houses as quaint, zen-like escapes that help me relax.  So, I moved into the guest room a few days after I left my internship at Warner Bros. Records.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next – I wasn’t sure if there was a future in filmmaking and wasn’t sure if I’d hear from them again.  It was an initiative – which my parents were hesitant to support – to leave my “past” behind, ask myself some questions and figure out what I really wanted to do.

The first night in the guest room was magical. I sat with my aunt Judy, who is a huge inspiration to me, and talked for hours. I’m not sure what about, but I remember sitting on the couch, ranting about music videos probably, and then shutting off the lights and using a flashlight to walk to my room (they lived at the very top of the mountain above Santa Barbara, so it was pitch black.) I finally escaped all burdens and created a space where I could be by myself. I sat down at the desk in the room, opened my laptop and sat there motionless. Then, I downloaded three new songs – of which I listened to on repeat. My cell phone didn’t ring a single time. Then, I registered for a journal account so I’d have a new place to story-tell. I woke up the next morning and wrote my first entry which I called “Suburban Revolution”.

The sun came up early this morning and forced me to come back to reality. I tossed and turned all night, but still managed to wake up quickly, completely restless. I didn’t move. I stared at the blank wall to my right and I was completely amused. I needed no image, no color, no texture on the wall to please my materialistic desires. I was finally content with myself. The wall was filled with still frames from moments that have been exciting for me over the last year. The sky was painted blue with the perfect cast of clouds. The Pacific is about one mile from my bedroom. My cell phone was on the other side of the bedroom. It started to vibrate. As my ringtone ascended, I was told that another day has just begun.

I often take my experiences for granted. Luckly, I religiously (shows how poorly religious I am) update my LiveJournal. With entries from the entire last three years, I am able to look back at my past. It’s always fun to look back at stupid things I posted last year. For some reason, grammatically incorrect sentences and unformulated thoughts we’re cool. Nevertheless, I still have those entries that can put a bold smile on my face and then make me extremely depressed in a matter of seconds. I tend to be great at making myself look very bipolar. It took time to realize that it wasn’t a bipolar personality that was being presented, but instead an incessantly changing lifestyle.

On June 14th, I posted an entry called “This Telephone Cord Is Going Somewhere Special”. In a paragraph style entry, I wrote about experiences, opportunities and changes that occurred up to the day that I decided to graduate a year early from high school. Most talked about friendships that do not exist any longer and business relationships that fell to the ground. But that is “change”, right? Little did I know that my telephone would cost me far into the three-digits every month simply because it was, in fact, going somewhere special.

Suddenly, I realized that the reason I was so content with myself that morning was simply because I have come so far, yet look open-eyed to a wide future. This is a story about a teenager turning eighteen. It’s breaking out into Los Angeles, meeting new friends and starting over that make it challenging. It’s going to college, working and living life to the fullest that make this life worth living. This is (to be extremely cliche) a new chapter in my book. What better way then to start a new blog and a new photo journal to document what comes at me in the near future.

This is the beginning of eighteen.

The original journal entry can be found here.