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.

Love is a Battlefield

This was going to be the first time that I'd be meeting Bruce's girlfriend.

This was going to the first time that Bruce and his girlfriend would be meeting each other's parents.

Bruce's brothers were not going to be there.

You would think that Bruce would've given me the head's up about these things (like when he told me about the weather for the weekend), but other than knowing that I'd be meeting Christina, I had no idea what was in store for me once I touched down in Pittsburgh - it was kind of a rude awakening. I already knew it was going to be a fast paced weekend since I was in town for graduation, but if I had known the weekend was going to be this intense, I probably would've tried harder to fall asleep on my red eye flight than sitting through the abomination known as National Treasure.

I found out Bruce's brothers weren't in Pittsburgh as I got off the bus from the airport. He told me as I was being rushed pretty much straight to the ceremony. He didn't divulge the part about the families meeting until after the ceremony. I felt perpetually in a state of motion the entire day so I don't even think I really reacted when he told me. I felt like I was watching Black Hawk Down, where at the beginning, the view just gets dropped in the middle of battle with no backstory preceding it. Not to say that there punches thrown or people yelling at each other in this meeting of families, but to say things were a little tense would be a gross understatement. If Bruce's brothers had been there, it would've made things a lot more comfortable for me. I would've had friends to talk to, since I knew that Bruce was very preoccupied dealing with the anxiety of getting to know his girlfriend's parents. Bruce's brothers being there would've also made my presence seem normal, but since his siblings weren't there and his best friend from across the country was, it seemed a little odd, I suppose. (Insert Brokeback Mountain joke here).

While Bruce's brothers weren't present, Christina's siblings were. The oldest of Christina's siblings was her sister who I believe was 16. This gave me someone to talk to so I could distract myself from the scene at hand, but at the same time there was a new level of discomfort. It's not easy to make small talk at a lunch with a teenager you've just met when you're 22 and their whole family is at the table, but it sure beats having to be part of the other conversation. "Ryan, do you have any stories about Bruce?" "Yeah, he didn't tell me that this lunch was going to happen and this is super uncomfortable. That's the kind of stand up guy that he is."

Awkward conversations aside, it seemed like the families were getting along and there wasn't going to be any drama. That was, until, Bruce's nose started to bleed. While I'm positive that there was no judgment passed on Bruce for this (no one thought he had a cocaine addiction), I'm sure Bruce was freaking out by this unwelcome little event. Ever since Bruce was a child, when his nose would bleed, it wouldn't clot as quickly as most nose bleeds, so it's not like he could run to the bathroom for a few minutes and be fine. Obviously, Christina's parents weren't going to hold this against him, but when anyone is in the middle of a situation like this, anything that goes wrong will undoubtedly make them feel like the whole world is crumbling to the ground.

Fortunately that was the only hiccup that we encountered at lunch. The check came and parents from both sides playfully argued over who was going to foot the bill. It was a relatively tame argument compared to the ones that my mom and his mom would get into back when we were kids living in Minnesota. Those arguments would often spill into the parking lot with one mom trying to stuff mom into the other's pocket, purse, and whatnot. While those arguments were never heated, they were embarrassing and drew way too much attention to us. I took the gentle sparring over the bill at lunch as a positive sign that the two families liked each other.

I would be asked throughout the weekend how I thought things went. While I knew this weekend was going to be a momentous occasion for Bruce, I didn't know the half of it. I knew Bruce would be taking his first step into the "real world" that weekend but Bruce had plans to take a much bigger leap that weekend. Though Bruce did shed some blood, he survived, and now he can share this story about how ballsy he was at his college graduation. He's got a witness and he made a believer out of me.

My Very First Metal Show

When I was in 5th grade, I had to be lab partners with a guy named Colin. He was a bigger, taller kid who had red hair that wasn't quite wild enough to be a mullet. We didn't hang out during recess or at lunch but it's not like either of us were disgusted by our pairing, at least not until he told me that his favorite band was Metallica. Like the good Christian boy I was, I told him "I don't listen to devil worshipping music". Not that I listened to Christian music as a kid, but Metallica seemed to be the opposite of Kris Kross, and that's what I was listening to at the time, so Metallica and Colin had to be evil. After all, Colin did pour vinegar into his test vial of sugar to ensure that whoever his lab partner was, they wouldn't want to sneak a taste.

Little did I know that Kris Kross would not withstand the test of time and that Metallica was the horse to bet on, but fortunately Colin and I never kept in touch after I moved to San Diego so he can't point that out to me. He also can't make fun of me that my first metal show ever was just a couple of weeks ago, at the ripe age of 27 years old.

You might expect a fascinating story of how I went from "Metallica is satanic" to "I'm going to a metal show", but honestly it's not much of a story at all. In fact, I still don't like Metallica. I like two metal bands, Mastodon and Dethklok and Mastodon is considered "metal for people who don't like metal" while Dethklok is a cartoon, though their music is actually well respected by the metal community. (Dethklok consists of Metalocalypse creator Brandon Small - who went to the Berkelee School of Music, Steve Vai's bassist, Frank Zappa's guitarist and a drummer known as the "Atomic Clock.)

No one can really take credit for getting me into either of these two bands. No one made me listen to these bands in the car, or slipped me a burned CD. For Mastodon, it was the critical buzz and the fact that they had Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) sing on their song "Colony of Birchmen" on their album Blood Mountain. For Metalocalypse, I had been a fan of Brandon Small's previous (and super underrated) cartoon, Home Movies (remember I'm a film major), so checking out Metalocalypse was a no brainer for me. When I found out that both these bands were going tour together, it was clear to me that this was a sign to go see my very first metal show.

I found out about this show on a bus trip from Minneapolis to Chicago. Surprisingly this isn't the only concert I ended up getting tickets to on this trip (Jon Brion + Nels Cline = mind explosion). I didn't have wireless for my laptop on the bus, so I called Sherlan and he happily picked up the tickets for the metal show.

A couple of friends voiced their concern about my safety regarding this show. I didn't really think it was warranted since these two bands don't have a typical metal following. Sure, since they're metal bands, they'll have some metal fans, but they're also two bands that reach non-metal audiences, with Mastodon reaching the hipsters and Dethklok reaching cartoon-loving nerds. Of course, that didn't prepare me to see a guy wearing a Bathing Ape button down shirt when we got to the show. (Also we parked next to a car with a license plate that read M. Bison)

The show itself wasn't a disappointment, but I would say that it was pretty much the same as a regular concert except for the fact that kick drum is mic'ed to be intentionally ear drum shattering loud and that the bands take little break after a few songs from all the intense shredding and drum beating that they do. Also, the Dethklok soundcheck might've been the only soundcheck ever that has amused me, as their roadie went up to each mic and growled a monstrous "HEYYY!" into each mic before walking off stage. Check one two, one two, this surely was not.

There was a mosh pit, there was some crowd surfing, but all in all, it wouldn't be that different than going to a Foo Fighters show. There were no animal sacrifices or prayers to satan. Nothing was harmed during the concert (except in cartoon form, lots of things die in the world of Dethklok, including mermaids), but more importantly my ears weren't ringing and no one made me bleed with their spiked bracelets or whatnot. I know that while this was not a typical metal show, and that most shows aren't as violent and grotesque as I was led to believe as a child. So while I do feel bad for being so judgmental as a child, what happened happened and I can't change that, nor can Colin change the fact that he put vinegar in the sugar. Dick.