The Year That Was...

The sixth year of the "aught" decade is come and gone (including "aught-zero," that is), and with it I have crested 27 years of life on this Earth. So what did '05 hold in the palm of its hand? Here's a rough rundown, by general area of my life...

WORK:

I began and concluded '05 as an employee of Cliff Schwarz Music Production. It was an up & down year for the company, but through it all I've learned a great deal (both technically and about "the industry"), cut 2 music videos (my first, since Spice never collaborated on that "Summary Chart" video back in '97), and a bunch of commercials that actually made air (imagine that!). Plus, I received my first-ever official screen credit... as a segment editor on "Nick At Nite's Search For The Funniest Mom In America." Yes, that was an actual show, and they're actually doing another one.

[Check out Grandiose Video for samples of my work this year.]

CREATIVE:

If '05 can be branded with a specific attribute (i.e. 2003 was a reading year, 2004 was a music year, etc), I'd say '05 was my personal creativity year.

Besides working in a creative "career," I drove myself nearly(?) batshit with a host of personal creative projects. It's a chore to keep track of the thousands of pictures I took this year (stay tuned for The Faves, coming soon!), and in May I founded NOTHING TERRIBLY GRANDIOSE, ostensibly as a means to catalogue and post my favorite snaps. I spent a lot of time playing music with two bands, the sadly dormant RJ115 and my two-man collective with Ben, which after grueling months of poring over various names we have taken to calling... uh... Ben & Joe. I had a hand in some extra-curricular video projects, one of which led me to choreograph an entire martial arts battle scene in an upcoming short, Dilated.

So, a great amount of mental energy (not to mention a great deal of sleep) was expended in making all these creative things co-exist. Yes, it's exhausting. Some of it still is.

KARATE:

And speaking of that fight scene in Dilated, what would 2005 have been without my involvement in Eng's Karate? Martial arts has become the primary inhabitant of my thoughts for much of this year, ESPECIALLY the last three months.

Over the course of the year, I have learned so much as a yellow belt*, and I'm close to advancing to orange. Last month at our class dinner, I was surprised and humbled to receive the Karate Kat of the Year Award for 2005. It's an inspiration for me to keep fighting harder and harder, win more battles and get stronger every single day. For the rest of my life.

[* - Roundhouse kick photo courtesy of Mishel Hassidim]

ROMANCE

Oy. Just thinking about my dating life this past year is exhausting. I ended the year single, like I began it, with a veritable soap opera in between. It's best to avoid too much detail, but suffice it to say the year was nicely eventful at times, and infuriatingly boring at others. Feast or famine, they say. I'm going into '06 with a clearer mind.


So, those were the areas of 2005 where life was most active. In terms of my everyday life, there were some other new elements that came into play this year. In January I fulfilled a longtime ambition by purchasing a fishtank. My fish are the first true pets I've cared for solo, and the year has been been fraught with both birth and death, joy and heartache. The current lineup features Dawkins, Neon, and Chompers. Let's pause for a moment to remember those lost in '05:

Neil. Crazy. Other Neon. That Guppy I Never Named. All of Neil's Children. The Phantom. Akers. And Dylan (pronounced, ironically enough, "die-lonn").

I satisfied another ambition in August with my first foray into camping. I spent 6 days camping and hiking, mainly at Baxter State Park in Maine. I can't even begin to describe how much I enjoyed camping, how much the experience came at exactly the right time. For the only time all year, for one glimmering moment sitting on a mountain overlooking total stillness, I heard my mind finally be quiet.

AND, the latest daily obsession: chess. After years of owning (and never using) the gorgeous, hand-crafted chess table made by my grandfather, I'm finally learning the game. Chess has hit me at the perfect time too... Not only is it mentally challenging me in a way I haven't experienced in years, I find the focus required to play is similar to that I use in Karate. They're perfect companions to occupy my every spare thought.

So, with the demise of aught-five, what does aught-six have in store for me?

I'm not a "resolution" kind of guy. They're equally too committal and too non-committal, too constricting and yet too easy to break. They're wasted on me. So I'm removing the tag (and hopefully the stigma) and rather focusing on broad areas for the year. The specifics will arise on their own, and I'll deal with them when they do.

Job-wise, I'm thinking '06 will be the year to move on from Cliff's. Things are going well overall, and some cool stuff could be on the immediate horizon (i.e. a possible company name-change, and hopefully a new batch of music videos where the songs don't suck), but I'm coming up on two years, and if I should find something else to pay the bills and appeal to me creatively... well, that could be a nice change. All the same, I'll be focusing on learning other editing platforms (namely Final Cut, which could lead to freelancing) and becoming a better editor overall.

Both Karate and chess will continue unabated. For chess, I don't have a specific goal other than to keep learning and developing as a player. I'll probably employ an increasingly academic approach (Chess For Dummies gave me a solid foundation for study... more books are sure to follow). And Karate... I'm learning to focus less on specific belt rank and more on the training itself. If I simply live and train, the belt ranks will come in their own time. My long-term goal is to be a black belt, and I wholly plan to follow through with it. No matter how long it takes. The path of the ninja is not an easy road.

Creatively speaking, Ben and I are starting the year with a bang. We're returning to the stage at Kenny's Castaways with our good friend Pomranz, under the name Drug Fun Rage Ghost. It will either be a free-for-all of wonderful cacophony, or we'll implode entirely. We should also complete Colleagues, a short video we began in the summer of '05.

And 2006 will hold at least one more camping trip.

So 2005 has come and gone. I'm a wiser man for it.





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