Resolutions and bucket lists

It's so nice that I hold no stock in New Years Resolutions, it makes it much easier that the couple I didn't really instantiate but thought about have already been broken.  A pal of mine posted of MYFACE that he had gone to the gym everyday for a year, I have yet to be since the start of the new year.  Also yesterday I was so caught up in the hurly burly of my Quixotic pursuit of my bucket list that I did not make it back to the BLOG to entertain you all, my dear imagined readers.

I had not heard the term "Bucket List" before the film of the same name came out a couple of years ago, a film I have not so much avoided as just ignored.  Once I had learned of the concept I spent some active time trying to forget about it.  You get like that, actively denying, when you are in transition from youth to age and have a bad heart.

"I'm not old, I'm not old" goes the mantra, repeated like a metronome as you time the next beat of your damaged heart.

Now though I am being more realistic about it, there ARE things I want to see/do before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  None of them involve base jumping (I mean jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with a parachute is bad enough, climbing to a really high place to jump...yeah right), some involve travel, all involve cameras.

From the outside of my skin it looks like I don't do much other than work, Pier gets on me about.  Friends in the past have done the same.  Jeff was possibly one of the few people who understood why I am the why I am.  Set aside the "adult onset autism" that causes me to ccocoonin front of my computer and you will find that I simply love what I do.  That is not to say though that what I am doing is what I really WANT to do and that is where the perversity of my bucket list comes into lay.  A lot of people have told me...

"When you are laying on your deathbed your last thoughts won't be I WISH I HAD WORKED MORE!'

...very true.  In my case, however, it will be more like...

"...I wish I had done better work!"

When I set my feet on that road that Bilbo was so afraid of I wanted to make movies, specifically I wanted to be a cinematographer. The trouble is that once it was time for me to go off to college there was no money for me to film school, real film school. I was also distracted by the adventure that was club racing and I went down that road for a few months/years.  When I went back to school though it was to study video (something new at that time) and film.  I got distracted by the lure of graphic design (something I have alway had a knack for) and a steady paycheck. Still I made a couple of shot films and the love was always there.

That was the way it went, distraction after distraction happened and the money was never there for the tools to do the task.  Computer graphics was a link back to the world of film, a train I almost caught, but in the end it all remained just outside the reach of my extended fingers.  Once Nicholas came along, well when yo are a Dad your priorities change (up to and including commuting 5 hours a day).

The anxiety of last year though set me to thinking that life is too short and if I want to do tis, now is the time. Additionally we live in an AMAZING time for geeks like me, the tools to do film quality work are 1/10000th of what they used to cost and the distribution avenues are many and varied. It give me motivation to go to the gym, 'cause I want to live to see what is next.

GOtta go, need to get outta the BLOG and back into After Effects.