Crossroads

OK, well I think it's high time that I stopped pretending that I haven't let this blog fall into a condition that resembles your average 1977 Ford Pinto.

A big part of it is that I became accustomed to blogging during work, and now a good part of my workday is now filled with, shockingly enough, work. The other problem is that I have become much more apolitical over the last year. That is partially due to the fact that it's just hard to get excited when the party in power either does nothing or waters down the few good ideas they do have till they're effectively nothing while you disagree with pretty much everything that the other party wants to do. And after working and spending time with Christy and Anabelle, in the few hours of truly free time I do have generally the last thing I feel like doing is getting myself riled up about something I have very very little control over. I still try to keep myself informed, but I just don't have the motivation that I did. I prefer the escapism of sports, movies, books, and video games.

All of which has left me pondering the question "if I'm not going to write opinion pieces, what am I going to write about?" My wife's blog does a fantastic job of capturing our family life, and I don't really see a lot of value in writing about every trivial non-event that happens to me in an average week (one of the main reasons I'm still not on Facebook). I contemplated just throwing in the towel and calling it a day and letting the fat lady sing and all sorts of other cliches too. I may very well end up doing that, but I decided I'd try something else first.

One of the main reasons I started this back in 2006 was that writing was always something I enjoyed, but it saddened me that I just hadn't done a whole lot of it since high school. I look back and I'm a bit amazed at myself that I wrote 3 screenplays before I was 19. None of them were what I'd call good but still, that's 3 more than most people and 3 more than I've done since. In fact, I've started on about half a dozen screenplays or books since then only to put them aside and never pick them up again. I had thought that by starting to write again here that it would give me some momentum in that arena as well. In fact it has had the opposite effect; for the most part I've gotten my writing "fix" here and haven't felt compelled to do anymore outside of this.

So now I've decided that it's time to align the projects. The closest I've come to completing one of my major undertakings was a story I came up with about 4 years ago that was somewhat inspired by watching Superman 2. I have written about 40 pages of it and actually had a pretty good outline of where I wanted to go with it. Then about a year ago I had a soul-crushing experience where I was lying in bed one night watching TV and saw a trailer for Megamind. My story is a bit different but the set-up is the same - it's about what would happen if the supervillain actually beat the hero and took over the world. On the one hand I was disheartened because one of my main motivations for writing it was that it had never really been done and now it has. On the other hand it was at least a little gratifying to see some other people thought that an idea I had come up with was a good idea too.

In any case, I've decided that I want to finish this story if for no other reason than to just complete a writing project for the first time in 12 years. And even though the set-up is largely the same I think it's sufficiently different from Megamind that it can stand on its own. So here's what I'm going to do; starting next week I'm going to use this blog to publish weekly installments so that hopefully within 6 months I'll have the whole thing finished and out there. I'm hopeful that having some kind of weekly "deadline" will give me the motivation I need to finally finish this.

I'm hopeful that some of you will still continue to follow me in my repurposed blog, as above all I want to improve my writing and it would be invaluable for me to hear about what you like and don't so I can help figure out what's working, what isn't, and what I need to work on. But I certainly understand if reading amateur short fiction is not something you have much interest in, and let's face it I'm doing this mainly for me anyway.

So that's where we are. Wish me luck and I'll post the first installment sometime next week.

Tis The Season

For sure the most depressing thing about the holiday season ending every year is the fact that, if you live in Chicago, you can look forward to at least two more months of frigid weather and grey days. But for me and my peers there is another beast waiting to pounce just after the New Year: tax season. Fortunately, I don't have one of those jobs where you basically live at the office from Jan to April. I do, however, get to be the guy that is in charge providing all our internal documentation to those individuals who do live at the office for those 4 months. In addition, since I've become a CPA I have become the one-stop shop for tax advice and/or preparation for many of my friends and family. I'm happy to help out and even happier when I get some paying work thrown in, but it does make for a pretty hectic couple of months. This year, in addition to our own personal taxes (which were more complicated than usual due to us having rental income and expenses for the first time) I also got to do personal taxes for two uncles, my uncle's business, my friend's partnership, and another friend's corporation. Today at lunch I mailed the last envelopes off to the IRS so as of now I can officially stop thinking about the IRS. That is, of course, until one of you pop up in the comments with "I have a question about my taxes . . ."

So even though it's not exactly current anymore I do feel compelled to make a comment or two about the Oscars. As promised by me last year, I watched exactly 4.7 seconds of the Oscars (the time it took for me to get up off my couch and walk to the PS3 to put Mass Effect 2 in). As I played my PS3 I had the laptop open and automatically refreshing the winner lists; I'd periodically announce the winners to Christy. Now that's the way to watch the Oscars. Judging by some of the stories I saw the next day, I missed even less than usual. The very idea of trying to make the Oscars "hip" is pretty comical. It's like going off camping in the middle of the woods and then complaining that there isn't a good day spa in the area. Certain things just don't go together.

As for the winners themselves, overall I think the decisions were decent. My biggest gripe is probably in the Best Supporting Actress category. I was pretty astonished when I first heard that Melissa Leo was nominated. I didn't have anything against her performance; there just wasn't anything there that stood out to me. Hailee Steinfeld, on the other hand, definitely stood out to me (even though I still contend that her role was a leading and not supporting one). The Academy tends to penalize you for being young though, so it didn't surprise me that she didn't win.

Next week brings my favorite sports event of the year - the first 2 rounds of the NCAA tournament! The whole tournament is great, but it's the first weekend that's really something special. 48 games in 4 days and for the first time every single one will be televised this year. Could there be a better reason to sit on the couch and not move for 96 hours?