The 5 Year Plan

In college, I had a friend tell me about how they and their significant other had this huge plan on how they were going to support each other through med school and law school respectively, and get married when it was all said and done. I'm a hopeless romantic, but I gave this elaborate and convoluted plan a 0% chance of success. There're just too many variables and too many things change over a 5-10 year block of time, especially in anyone's 20s. About a year later, my friend's grand plan came to a halt when their relationship ended.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out for my friend. I didn't gloat that I was right. In fact, I used to think I had things all figured out. I thought I would be writing and director films/TV shows by the age of 25. So if anyone was naive about how life worked, it was obviously me more than anyone else. So perhaps, while my friends were settling down and getting married, I veered off course and toiled in oblivion for a while. I didn't have a plan on how to be a responsible working adult, but perhaps life had it all figured out for me.

2006 was a terrible year where I was emotionally gutted like a fish at the beginning of the year. I eventually recovered and surprisingly found myself in a relationship near the end of the year. I started my ascent from starving artist to someone who didn't necessarily have to live from paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. At this point, I thought "okay, end of story. We live happily ever after. The end." Unfortunately this was not to be.

We ended our relationship a year later and 48 hours after that, I was out of a job. Earlier in the year, I had a falling out with a friend who I was supposed to move in with, but he ditched me and I had to scramble to find a place to live. Finding a new roommate worked out in the end, in a way, I felt like I was basically back at square one. I wouldn't say I hit rock bottom, was able to keep it together more or less. It felt like 2007 was a reboot year. The progress in 2006 wasn't going to cut it, so I needed to wipe everything clean. I didn't like my job nor was I happy in the relationship, so there wasn't a whole lot of regret, just bad timing.

That is probably why I felt like 2008 zipped by really fast. It was a year of getting a new job (actually 2 part time jobs), and spending a lot of time in LA with friends. I definitely started to distance myself from the city of Irvine even though I lived and worked there. I started shifting from screenplay writing to writing short stories and having friend read these stories via a blog. It was a year where I rarely found time to catch my breath as everything around me was changing and was changing fast. It was definitely a year of transition. It was also the year my friend advised me to start finding an outlet for my creative projects. Apparently, having a direction in life is important. Why that took me so long to figure out, I have no idea.

So 2009 finally rolled around and there's a little story about how I went to go watch a couple kids from my church do a theater production of The Music Man and how I spent the rest of the year starting a blog and doing a show in said theater with the aforementioned children acting as my assistants (more accurately, acting as my assistants). I spent months stressing out and practicing and I think it's safe to say that my show was a success. I didn't sell the place out, but I had a decent size crowd and the response was overwhelmingly positive. People have asked me if there's a chance that I'll be doing a second show or if I'll be recording my music any time soon, so I feel like I have some direction of what I'll be doing creatively. I wouldn't say that doors have necessarily opened, but it seems like I've been given support to continue down the current path.

After investing so much time into the show, I'm glad that it turned out the way it did. Though now that the show is over, I'm kind of wondering "what's next?" The past four years have been a crazy wild ride and I would've never guessed I'd be doing a show in a theater in Brea. I feel like 2009 has been a year of laying down groundwork and setting things up for the rest of my life. It's been exciting and scary, and I feel like it's really crept up on me. 2010 feels like it's going to be a big year, whether it means blowing things up and rebooting again or perhaps I'll finally move onto bigger and better things. All I know is that I've spent the last few years growing up into a responsible adult and no matter how the next year turns out, no one can really take that away from me, reboot or not.