The End of the Page

36 for 36: A New List For A New Year

Admittedly, this is not my cat, but I have four at home and all of them would do this in a heartbeat.

Years ago a friend of mine told me about a productivity experiment. It is kind of like a “bucket list” except you don’t wait until you find out you’re going to die to write it up and you make one every year for the coming year starting on your birthday. The number of items on the list are equal to your new age. Yes, this means the list will get longer and longer each year, but the complexity and cost of each item on the list is totally up to you. You could decide to add one saying: “#5 – Walk more” or “#15 – Watch less TV” or “#34 – Dream about ponies” (how you control that last one is a mystery).

I’ve done this for a few years now with varying levels of success. My first year I made it through every item on my list, but this past year I fell a little bit off track. Numerous things along the way took charge of where my focus needed to be and it was all good things, but I ended with only 12 out of 35 from my list completed. I could start this year with a completely fresh list, but I decided to look over those unfinished items and decide which of those I wanted to keep shooting or as is or maybe adapt them a little to change them towards my current tastes.

Here’s what I was able to knock off the list last year:

• Write new TV spec script (will be submitting this next year)
• Catch one show at the Pantages (saw Avenue Q, fantastic show!)
• Book one writing assignment (landed one coverage gig, not quite what I was hoping for, but it technically counted since it was a paycheck)
• Go on two legit hikes (sore legs after each prove either they were legit or I am still really out of shape)
• Get iron/steamer (sounds silly but you’d be amazed how easy it is to forget how handy those are when you don’t have one)
• Consolidate wardrobe (it was just time to toss out all those button down shirts I no longer wore and various other pieces that haven’t come out of the darkness in years)
• Job front: Move up or move on (this was a strong desire of mine, but ended up being taken care of by my contract ending anyway)
• Don’t drink for one year (other than my wedding weekend, which I gave myself a personal furlough, I accomplished this task)
• Donate bone marrow (adapted this one slightly to “Register for Be The Match, bone marrow donation registry”, which is something everyone should do)
• Increase blog to 300 daily visits on average (a couple strong days helped this average and also counting from a very specific stat engine, but it was the same one I based the number off when I wrote the task, so it evens out)
• Finish reading 24 books (I’ll add the list of books at the end, for those voracious readers out there)
• Get dining room table (although this one was accomplished, we ended up not liking it as much and will be getting a new one in the new house. Still counts though.)

So that was the finished items off the old list. Here is the new list ready and set to go on 12/12 (that would be my birthday, for any exceedingly generous readers out there):

1) Exercise more (even as vague as this is, I still didn’t get it done last year, so laaaaazzzzzyyyyy)

2) Submit/self-publish first novel (I was hoping to get this done last year as well. I just need one more spit polish on it and I think we are ready to go.)

3) Bring more writers to The End of the Page (any budding, opinionated writers out there want to contribute? Leave a comment below or write me directly through the contact page.)

4) Get new tattoo (I just got the design in from my good buddy Brandon, so this will be happening in the near future)

5) Perfect one dish to cook (started this last year, my dish is Chicken Tikka Masala. I made it once so far, came out really well, but far from perfection, more attempts this year)

6) Go on cruise (happily this might coincide with long awaited honeymoon plans)

7) Establish better writing habit (all writers need one, I am in need even more so because I have so many damn projects)

8 ) Enroll in Yoga class (been wanting to do this for a long time. Going to wait until we are settled in the new house and see what classes are in the area.)

9) Send out more than 56 Thank You notes (I read an article about a guy who sent out one Thank You note to random people who affected his life each day for a full year. I tried to replicate this, but fell far short. So instead of jumping right back to the full 365, I just want to beat my total for last year)

10) Bring more books down from WA (I have a ton of books stored at my Uncle’s in WA and I really want my library to be fully together. Plus, he’s been wanting those gone for a long time too.)

11) Finish graphic novel issue #2 (yet another writing project in stasis that needs to be resurrected. It’s got alien ninjas y’all!!!)

12) Try surfing (for those who know me well, this will likely kill me, rendering the rest of the list sort of moot)

13) Go to Big Sur (everyone who’s ever been there swears it is one of the most beautiful places in the state, if not beyond. Gotta go.)

14) Donate blood (Actually, I will need to get this done before the tattoo is done, since they ban you for a year or two after getting one)

15) Take train trip to Santa Barbara Zoo (my wife has done this before and it just sounds neat)

16) Write one spoken word piece (I used to perform spoken word and there is a part of writer’s brain still clamoring for it)

17) Take another class (took a one-day cake baking class a few months ago, had tons of fun. I never want to stop learning new things.)

18) Get AT&T credit card under $3000 (could’ve done this in the past year, but all the money got pooled together to get home loan)

19) Reach 12 new states on my donation map (I have a world map and an United States map on my wall which I mark with small colored stickers for each place I donated to a local or focused charity. My goal is to reach the entire world someday. Just started this last year and I have 7 states and 5 countries so far. Tons to go.)

20) Try sculpting (no promises this will be anything more than a swirly mound of clay when it’s finished, but I’ve always wanted to try)

21) Begin learning to play my guitar (I’ve had an electric guitar for years, but never learned to play it. Need to look for a class this year to get me going on it.)

22) Go on one road trip (this is not counting the trip to Big Sur)

23) Put together book of paintings (I am also a painter and I want to collate a small book of what I have so far)

24) Try five new vegetables (if the surfing doesn’t kill me, this surely will)

25) Read 24 new books (had fun with this last year, kept me focused on always having a book going. Recommendations anyone?)

26) Conduct two interviews for the blog (done one so far, although I am still transcribing, which is a real time suck by yourself)

27) Find writer’s group – online or in person (should help with getting that writing habit nailed down as well, if you have any suggestions of good groups, please send along!)

28) Re-energize date night tradition (with all the other stuff I try to keep going in my creative life, I need to make sure I focus as well on my home life and married life)

29) Take part in 2012 Obama campaign (even though his first term has been far from perfect, I think he’s done better than most people think and is surely a better choice than the other options)

30) Retry 365 photo experiment (one photo a day for a year, it creates a really cool visual calendar of your past, I just didn’t keep up with it last year. I just got the iPhone 4S, so the improved camera on that will make this much easier.)

31) Get at least one paid writing opportunity (worked last year, hopefully that will work again. Wanna hire me?)

32) Open CafePress-type store for art/writing inspired items (anyone know of a better online store to use than CafePress?)

33) Go on three legit hikes (adding one to the total from last year)

34) Pick archery back up (use to go to the range twice a week, have my own Olympic bow and nice set of arrows, need to pick up the hobby again)

35) Reach bowling score of over 200 (my personal best is 187, not too far to go)

36) Spend more time with friends (like the one about date night, need to remember to focus on the social life as well, hopefully many of these can also be done with my friends, maybe they will want to work on their own lists!)

So there you have it. My next twelve months of goals. If this has inspired you to create your own list or you are already a practitioner of this nifty listing hobby, feel free to share yours here.

For those curious about the 24 books from this year, here they are:

Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead by Neil Strauss

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Full Dark – No Stars by Stephen King

The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy by Jeff Sharlet

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper

You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay

Angel River Falls by Thomas A. Morgan

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges

The Mark by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

The Fear by Peter Godwin

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Chasing Fire by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson by E. Jean Carroll

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived by Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan & Jeremy Salter

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile

A Digital Call to Arms (or Call to Bone, rather)

People fall in and out of your lives all the time. Friends you once saw everyday somehow find years going by without any contact at all. There’s no shame or blame in that, it’s just how life changes all the time. What matters are the experiences you have during those times and how they change your life going forward.

I met Matt Lewis a long time back through a mutual friend and I was instantly impressed. He has a certain way about him that draws attention the moment he enters the room. Maybe it’s his wicked sense of humor, maybe it’s his wicked sense of intelligence, maybe he’s just wicked (in the Northeastern complimentary sense of the word). Either way, he was always cool to me and along the way he called me up and offered me an editing gig that his company was too busy to wrap up at the time. I jumped at the chance and through that gig I met a now longtime friend, Jon Cohn, who went onto create the Mutineer Theatre Company, of which I am a proud member. I would not have gotten to know any of the great people in that group or had the opportunities that stem from it without that single phone call from Matt. When those moments of serendipity happen, you sometimes wish you could pay them back and very rarely does an opportunity of such importance come about.

But that time has most certainly come.

Matt has been in the hospital for a number of weeks with a rare condition known as Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH). The treatment thus far is regular blood transfusions, but the cure only stems from a bone marrow transplant. Finding a match is not always as easy as grabbing up a family member, so making those chances stronger is critically important and here is how everyone reading this can help:

Be The Match: You can go to this website and register yourself as a donor. I know many people are still under the false impression that donating bone marrow happens like it did on TV while I was growing up (crazy needles being jabbed into spinal cords, holy crap…OW), but thankfully times and technology has very much changed and improved over the years. Here are the two current methods of donating:

PSBC Donation: This is a non-surgical procedure where they harvest blood-forming cells. Basically they give you small injections for a few days prior to donation to increase the presence of those cells in your blood stream. You can feel mild headaches and some soreness for a few days prior to donating. Then they hook your arm up to a machine which removes your blood (like normal blood donation) and filters out the blood-forming cells, putting the filtered blood right back in through the other arm. Most people are back to normal state in 1-2 days.

Marrow Donation: This is a surgical procedure. While the person is under, the doctor removes marrow from the back of the pelvic bone. Some soreness can remain for a couple days to a week after, but people are generally back to normal state in 2-7 days.

You can order free mouth swab registry kits from the Be The Match website and add yourself to a growing number of donors waiting for the chance, like this one, to really make an impact in someone’s life. I have already gotten my kit and it is going back in the mail to them tomorrow. If you are at all interested, please register as soon as you can. It can take up to two months to get a donor fully into the system, so time is of the essence.

You can also donate blood, as mentioned in this other article about Matt and his condition over at Tubefilter:

1. Head to a local blood bank (The American Red Cross has a good resource page) and ask to donate under Matt Lewis’ name. You’ll need to mention his date of birth (11/4/1979) and that he is at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Los Angeles. By donating one pint of blood in his name, it frees up one pint that can be given to him for much-needed blood transfusions.

I encourage you to do one, both or even just send a couple bucks to either of these organizations.

Thanks for reading.

Mutineer Theatre Company

The mission of Mutineer Theatre Company is to create, develop, and produce diverse original material through an explorative and experimental collaborative effort. We are committed to working in a manner that places reverence on the voice of the artist, in whatever medium, to celebrate the work in a unified vision, discipline, and regard.

(Not only that, I’m a member of the company too! Self-promotion rocks!)

[Click on the picture to check out their website]

Friendship: The Suicide Lane on the Highway of Life

Before you get all worried about this being some morbid post where the ails and angers of life gets splayed out to the sound of keyboard strokes tapped by Hot Topic blackened fingernails, relax, this isn’t going that direction. The title actually comes from an early moment about seven years ago when I first moved to California and someone pointed out that daring middle lane in certain roads where both directions of traffic are legal, usually meant for left turns off the road, but commonly used for passing people we randomly decide don’t deserve to be traveled behind. As I first laid rubber to the road here I was astounded that more people didn’t just plow into each other in the lane so aptly dubbed “the suicide lane”, but some little piece of that evolutionary survival instinct must keep us from multiple head-on collisions every day.

So how does that connect to Friendship? What a good question! Here’s my answer. Friendship is a give and take relationship. You get out of it what you put in. If the friendship is solid and you call someone everyday to check in on them or just talk, you can very well expect that they will call you as well and think of you first when they need/want someone to talk to. On the flip side, if you put no effort in to keep in touch or show people that you still think about them, you can equally expect they will let you slip from their minds as well. It is the emotional equivalent of the one-lane/two-way street.

Added to this fun ride on the relationship road is the possibility that you and your friend might be driving different cars, traveling at different speeds or lastly, heading to different destinations. What’s to be done now? Truth be told, everyone is headed in different directions, but we can have very similar ways of driving there. That is the secret to being on the same road together, how do you drive your car/truck/Vespa/Segway? (does anyone know someone who actually owns one of these) There needs to a shared respect of the road and of the other people on it, but if someone starts flipping U-turns in the middle of the intersection or just plain ignoring those amazingly loud “drunk bumps” on the side of the road, maybe it is time to stop taking that road on the way to your personal destination. All that happens in those cases is you get slowed down, taken off course and sometimes redirected completely. The goal in friendships is to find those people that not only seem to be heading your way, but their driving style actually helps you even more. They might leave a nice tailwind for you to slide into or they could be clearing the way ahead, showing you all the possibilities that lie before you. Also, they know when to let their foot off the gas and let you move into the pole position, blocking for them instead of the other way around. Give-and-Take. What a novel philosophy.

So maybe it’s time to sit back and look at the road in front of you. Who’s on it? Where are they going and how do they plan on getting there? Is this particular road trip the one you need to be on? Trust me, if you even been on intensely long car rides, you know the importance of choosing the right passengers.

Safe and pleasant trips to you all. I’m packing Pop-Tarts and Pop music for mine.

One Day for Another: It’s Never to Late

I don’t know the words to express how I feel right now, but as a writer words are all I have, so I’m going to  do my best to find some of the right ones. A dear, close friend of mine was already going through a tough time in her life when things drastically went from bad to worse to unimaginable. The horrors she was put through are nothing short of inhuman and the pressure of dealing with them felt insurmountable. There is no way for me to look through her eyes in this situation, no way for me to even begin to empathize, no way to know how hard it was to reach out and ask for help.

There are things in this life that no one is meant to deal with. Pressures and emotions heightened to such extents leaving normal human capabilities far behind. So what are people supposed to do then? Do they have to become superhuman? Do they have to make themselves more than everyone else just to stay afloat in a life proving once and again to be unfair towards them? I wish I could say no, I wish I could say that people could just take a deep breath and things will suddenly be alright, but ignoring that type of pain is comparable to standing on train tracks and ignoring the rumbling getting louder beneath your feet. We all need to step up in those moments and do anything we can to help deal with this unequal reality, not just the victims, but those people close to them as well. The hands of the victim need to unwrap from around themselves, where they desperately try to hold themselves together, and reach out for the arms, hands, shoulders and chests all ready and willing to share in whatever small piece of the burden available to them. I’ve spent my share of time locked up in my room, hiding from the light, hiding from the outside world, only in the hopes that someone would come looking for me, but the responsibility is on both sides. We need to learn to reach out so we can in turn teach others how to reach back.

I realize that this might seem a tad vague, which is intentional because those details are her story to tell or not tell, not mine. What I hope for, what I wrote this entry for is to remind everyone out there to take a moment today, tomorrow, every day to think about those close to you. Think about someone you haven’t spoken to in a while and drop them a line, just remind them you’re out there and that you care. Just that small offering of an ear to listen or a shoulder to lean on can mean the difference between seeing the light and walking towards it. And for those people who might be reading this and are on the other side of the equation, don’t wait one more second to reach out and ask for help. There are people who care about you, people who know and love you, even people who have never met you, they are all ready and willing to drop it all to be there for you when you need it. If you find your circle of friends and family not as strong or responsive as you hoped, don’t despair, there are so many others on call at that very moment. Please follow this link to the Find Help section of To Write Love on Her Arms. This list is only the tip of the iceberg of support services and hotlines. These people are here for you. You are never alone and it is never, ever too late.