VALENTINE'S DAY IS CANCELLED, or Why I'm Kind of Creepily Secretive Sometimes

Well, I'm a day late but thankfully not a dollar short!

ba dum - ch

Wednesdays are going to wind up being my busiest RLJ days this semester, so I'm really going to have to commit to writing these posts in advance if I want to stick to my Wednesday post dates. I mean, I could always just change the day I post my blogs, but I'm a huge fan of self imposed, arbitrary due dates, so I very likely will defy all logic and continue with the day I set up for no real reason about two years ago. Wahey!

This post is going to be relatively brief and more than a little scattered as that's largely how I still feel. I'm enjoying my new job thus far, but the transplant nature of it and the amount of running around before it all began still has me slightly sideways. Most of my activities have surrounded getting work things in order and preparing for classes with new books and new buildings and etc etc etc, so I haven't had a lot of brain space to focus on creative stuff.

Which - in relation to the over-dramatic title - is why I've decided to scrap the Valentine's Day film project I brought up in my retrospective blog.

You know, the one with 10,000 pictures that was about ten pages too long. Yeah, that one.

The script itself is mostly finished, but several solid reasons have convinced me that I ultimately would not be able to pull together the film into a product that would genuinely make me happy. This annoys me more than it should, to be honest. It's not that I've never scrapped a project before - the debris of my forgotten, abandoned, or postponed projects covers all surfaces available to me. No, the reason I'm annoyed with myself is because I talked about it before it was actually happening, and I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Granted, it was a glancing reference, barely anything at all, but still. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.

Normally, I don't actually tell more than a very small, specific number of people when I begin working on my various projects until I definitely have something to show. It's my weird superstition - I feel like if I tell people about the weird ideas I've got, the stakes suddenly get too high. There's a pressure of awareness, and my brain just tends to go the other way. If I don't tell people about what I'm working on or my assorted plans, then it's entirely my own problem. Sometimes this gets me in trouble, such as, like, two months ago when I forgot to tell quite a few people that I got a new job and moved three hours away again. But with projects, I find in general that they work a lot better the fewer people I tell. That's why I'm so private about planning, too, and generally ask that nobody involved in my stuff posts anything before we're actually doing the thing.

I know, it's weird. And I know that occasionally I contradict myself, but overall I sometimes feel like I'm allergic to specifics. Often when I have a script, I don't even tell anyone involved that I'm working on it. It's all quiet on the western front until randomly out of the blue I just drop it on them. Part of it probably is some dumb idea of jinxing myself, and part of it is because I change my mind a lot when making stuff, but I also believe in that whole thing where if we talk about something and get approval for it, that confuses our brains because we stop telling the difference between theoretical accomplishment and actual accomplishment. Imagination is a great thing, but you have to actually do something with it. Otherwise, it really doesn't mean anything. I'm not saying that we should never share anything with anyone - I regularly leave voicemails on Tina's phone while she's at work to shout about one dumb idea after another - but the internet in particular is bad with this because we can get instant feedback for something that has not happened and possibly never will.

All of this kind of got stuck in my head because I had the brief idea of writing this post about a costume I want to make for C2E2, but when I decided yesterday to cancel the Valentine's Day film, I decided it was best to just... not. I let my expectations show too much by announcing it before it was certain. Like I said, I know what I want the V film to look like, I know what I want to have happen, but there was a bunch of stuff that needed to have been taken care of by now that just wasn't. Honestly, I'd assumed that it was going to be much easier to put together than it wound up being. I got overconfident, and I should know better than to assume by now. Who doesn't know what happens when you assume?

That's right, it means that you "take for granted or without proof."

Thanks, Dictionary.com.