Reflections and Roaches

I have been having marvelously successful shooting on my project. It has caused me to step back and examine how I got to this point, and to give thanks if you will.

I am the kind of person who obsesses over the details that lead up to any particular event in a single person's life. Sometimes I try to predict things based on those details.

Sometimes small details have large and impacting consequences.... was there a well-meaning liberal lobbiest who cut me off in an LA traffic jam, finally sending me past my tolerance levels of suburban sprawl and hence, making the idea of a job in Indiana appealing and exciting (despite the horrified looks of friends and family)?

These kinds of influences can be projected back for generations. Example: Four generations back, a mother died very young, leading to her daughter having to take care of her siblings. Her life was hard and uneducated. This expectation was passed to her daughter, who worked hard to put her only son all the way through college. She wanted him to follow his dreams and reach his goals, not to feel the encumbrance she and her mother felt, and indeed, he didn't. She may have regretted that later, or maybe it never occurred to her he would not feel the same obligation she did, because of how she raised him. And he raised me the same way. There are thousands of other things that affect the course of my (or any) life, but I see this as another influencing factor for my emotional acceptance of moving to a state like Indiana, after living for so long, and relating so strongly to, a state like California. They are both physical places, but we can't help interpreting them as states of mind, ways of being, and for me to be willing to challenge that so easily, to leave all I know and expose myself to such changes, I see as a profoundly significant moment.

Hence, I trace the origins of each moment by looking through my life and through all those who have ever influenced me or those I love; I follow the character and plot development, look for the foreshadowing. We are all our own novel.

Saturday, I was in a 121 year old one-room school house, directing a section of my video. I felt something on my neck, and casually reached up to brush my hair from my shoulder (forgetting, of course, my hair no longer reaches my shoulder). On my touch, it slips, and what is then clearly a beast, falls immediately down my shirt. I do a little (quiet) dance, and it falls to the ground, running its (thankfully) tiny (disgusting) roach body under the threshold of the door. Things have lead up to that moment of a roach falling down my shirt, but I wouldn't change them for everything else they've brought me.