Starts & Stops

The day before Thanksgiving I had this conversation:

Friend: "So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

Me: "As usual, I forgot about it. It's my afternoon off."

Friend: "Really? Nothing?"

Me: "It's my third straight Texas Thanksgiving. My dad always asks if I'm coming home, and I'm like, 'If you want to buy a ticket…'"

Friend: Sympathetic stare, trying to gauge if I'm serious or masking.

Me: "No, really. Thanksgiving was always the holiday that made things seem more dysfunctional, with the going to the three different divorced families. I always work on Thanksgiving, too. I've never been a fan."

Friend: "I wish I would've known. I'm going to my college-buddy's in Ft. Hood."

Me: "It's fine."

And no, it wasn't fine, but its lack of fineness was pretty low on the priority list of not-fine things. At least, at the time. But, with my lack of foresight, I wasn't taking into account that I was at a bar with this friend due to his having driven me there. That's because my car had begun smoking from the hood when it rolled into park a block away from his house, a death knell it'd been trying to communicate all week to me. (For the last two weeks, only gears three, five, and reverse worked on my standard transmission vehicle.) And, in my increasingly unobservant state, I was unable to tell if another friend, whose birthday we were there to celebrate, was even having a good time.

With that in consideration, and the reveled drive-me-home drunkness I also was unable to foresee, I spent most of Thanksgiving on a bus trying to get back to my car and drive its whimpering, near-dead ass back home. Then take the bus back to work. Then walk home across I-35 after midnight. Which, to find reasons to be thankful, didn't actually occur on Thanksgiving in this time zone.

The bus schedule was severely limited, which increased the time on the bus or bus stops. I asked my roommate if he'd drive me to my car. He said, "But I just got home with groceries."

"Oh. Then it's OK, don't worry about it…" He went on to make himself a sandwich instead of interrupting my ellipsis, so I grabbed my coat.

After I'd missed my stop and walked a few blocks back to Hancock Center for a transfer, I ended up walking across one of Austin's busier parking lots—and it was completely deserted, post-apocalyptic style. It was a particularly dreary day, and at a certain point the fineness drained.

To compensate for my mood right now, on here of late, and in general, I think I'm going to break my job-story moratorium—safely, hopefully, since the names or proper nouns will be changed to protect the innocent and my non-disclosure agreement. Because, if I think about it for more than five seconds, my job is magical, and provides me so much to be thankful for.

(Long-winded background: The one thing I've always felt certain of in life is that I want to make movies. I do this because I decided sometime in my teenage years that the point of life was sharing one's inner-life and making the world better for, with, and by dialogue better articulated. Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the theory the film is the most powerful medium, be it because it combined so many other mediums, had changed the world so drastically in the early half of the past century, or because it'd meant so much to me so consistently. No matter how many transient details maneuver themselves through and past my life, this has never changed.

My whole movie-watching thing, that trait which has most likely to be identified in a limited-word quiz taken by anyone I've met in the past ten years, comes not just from love but also research. Even the most dogshit movie has techniques and ideas to steal. My favorite artists are the widely-read and -watched, those whose wide-net influences give them a toolbox to get the intangible across more powerfully. Long-winded background done.)

I've never respected someone I see day-to-day more than the boss-boss. A few Saturdays ago, the office is empty except me and him, and, as usual, I'd stockpiled work to show, get critiqued, noted, dismissed. He really liked something a little left-field I'd done, and after about five minutes finessing it, he notes, "You're doing that weird ____ ______ stuff," referring to one of his old editors and a flashy technique I'd employed.

"Well, you used it a bunch in ____ ___ ____," I said.

"We did?"

"Oh yeah! In the __________ stuff? In fact," I said, preparing to launch into another forced fact-about-myself exposit: "When I was first learning editing, I watched ____ ___ ____ a lot, and when I saw that, I remember thinking, I'll never figure out how they did that." But I wasn't saying it right. I'd "technically" figured out how to recreate it pretty quickly. (In fact, what I didn't know at the time, was that it was a camera mistake left in.) But I'd never seen that technique used so transcendentally, so out-of-the-box different yet functionally magical. And I got depressed. Because, at that point years earlier, I thought I could never be that smart or inspired to think that up and put in my toolbox.

"Oh," boss-boss said, dutifully satisfied. "I guess we did."

My thankfulness comes from the fact that, since moving to Austin (and especially since this job), I've become preoccupied with the idea of having a conversation with my different aged selves. If we started talking about levels of emotional happiness, yes, maybe nothing new would be said. I'd get told specifically what was happening then with details I'd fudged out, and I'd get bitter and either tell when such-and-such a person would disappoint us or get a grin when something unexpectedly nice hadn't happened to Young Me yet. And then Older Me would do the same to me. But when we get to the objective details of what's happening, right now, I can be proud to tell Young Me what I'm doing, and I'd love to see the wide-eyes m/he'd get. When I think about these conversations I can ignore my own hurt, or people I've hurt because of my petulant hurt, the wider number of people I've left unaffected, and the people whose unknown amount of influence I've had.

Plus, when I got off the bus to work, there was some decent dark meat turkey. Which, superficially, fulfilled one thankful Thanksgiving obligation.