the ideal life

wow. so i said i would post about once a week. that hasn't happened. i think it is mainly because i have not taken the advice i dished out last time.

nevertheless i've been thinking quite a bit lately about what i would like my life to be like. throughout most of my conscious life i have always debated "what i want to be when i grow up". being the abstract person i am, i have often theorized about how one goes about making such huge decisions and analyzing those decisions i see others making, including my own. anyway, the following ideas that seem to be "out there":

1. do what you're good at
i think that people arrive at this conclusion often and early. i think this does suffice in many cases. an exception to this arises though when one hasn't experimented with different activities or delved into different domains. i used to think photography was relatively pointless and uninteresting, until one time when i was dating amy and she wanted to go out and take random pictures. of course i had to try to impress her, so we went. three years later, i am crazy about photography (though not sure how good i am yet). but if i would have never tried it i wouldn't have ever known. obviously, making some kind of career (part time or full time) is quite another story.

2. do what you're passionate about
similar to #1, except it deemphasizes whatever talent one thinks he/she has, and shifts focus to some external object or people. i have often thought that god communicates a good part of his plan for our lives to us by the dispensing of such passions. i believe this is not a bad approach, unless one is passionate about a new thing every day and throws himself/herself into the wind. i suppose true passions stand the test of time.

3. pray and fast and isolate yourself until god strikes you with lightning
this one is obviously further into the emotional end of the spectrum. i don't personally follow this approach but have seen it many times in the quasi-christian atmosphere i've always lived in. i believe there is some value in it but this doesn't really work out of the context of other approaches and a community of people who care about you, moving in the "withward" direction.

4. minimize the importance of choosing a career/job/whatever
i think we may see this happening increasingly more as the postmodern mindset slowly saturates our culture. pouring all our efforts, thoughts, and money into a specialized life-long career seems to me a very modern and almost ascetic thing to do. i have friends who take this approach to some extent and are relatively content and enjoy life, partly because they are not fixated on, say, climbing some corporate ladder, for example. i suppose this blog post doesn't fit into this category too well...

the main point:
i'm sure there are many more approaches to this subject, but it's getting late. i guess the main point of this one is: i think i have an idea about what i would like to do for the foreseeable future. i would like to score films and/or television. of course this will not be as easy as 1,2,3 to get into. but i have stumbled upon some decent connections and i am possibly going to start working on a portfolio soon. and i think i have arrived at this conclusion with some of the aforementioned approaches (except the lightning part). not that methods are all-important. but my main passion in life, music, also happens to be my strongest talent, and i have always visualized the music i write against the emotional backdrop of a movie, whether hypothetical or an actual one. so there it is (hope my boss isn't reading this, yet anyway).

Labels: career, film scoring, life decisions, music

hello.

hello.

i hate to break my tradition of only having one post with one word. but it's probably necessary. so without further ado, here is something that i've been comtemplating for quite some time:

the last several years of my life have been plagued by knowing that god has given me some ability to create. not just an austere ability, but a fire in my bones for it. this is problematic for me because the more excited about creating something i become, the more tangled i become in both mindless day-to-day distractions and mind-strangling perfectionism. any potential product of creativity is extinguished before it's even started. i think it's similar to the paradox that can be found in romans 7:14-16, except that instead of dealing with sin, i'm struggling with being uncreative.

or is it the same? one of the wisest people i've ever encountered told me that pride is simply disagreeing with god about your identity. i suppose this kind of pride could take root and bloom as a passive sin of omission.

the other day i was reading an interview with [my current favorite songwriter] sufjan stevens, and he mentioned something i will not forget. he explained his embarrassment with the way his fans often associate his music with himself personally. i was astonished by this because i [and maybe most people?] tend to identify many artists and musicians by their work; therefore the distinction is not made. furthermore, i also tend to think that most of the best artists would not want that distinction to be made. yet what truly sparked something in me from that interview, though, is that he described his creative process as though he were tapping into something completely outside himself, something that already exists "out there".

actually this makes perfect sense, looking back at just about anything i've ever created (or should i say discovered) that seemed to have value. in those [unfortunately rare] creative sessions, the only true labor on my part was making myself simply sit down at the piano, or simply getting away and putting my pen down on the paper or my fingers to a keyboard. from that point forward, if i just prevented myself from trying very hard or caring too much about the outcome, my best work would flow. i suppose that tapping into the stream of ideas from "out there" really just involves us letting that stream filter through our emotions and thoughts onto the paper. (to be honest, i didn't have much of an idea what i was going to write about in this post, but here i am rambling along, not that it's particularly interesting...)

this presents a stark contrast to the way i have always viewed artistic composition. for whatever reason, i always felt that poignant emotion or a brilliant and original thought was the only way to birth any creative work. i'm coming to think that the emotion and thought is more a filter through which we let the ideas flow.

a perfect example (not to offend the newer fans of death cab): i was talking about the band with my friend spencer, who told me that the last couple of albums had marked the beginning of ben gibbard actually "trying" to write music. this helped me, an avid fan myself, understand the significant difference between the last two albums and the first three (which i perceive as vastly superior): the first three don't feel forced, and are some of the best albums of indie rock that will probably ever exist. the most recent ones are more formulaic and mainstream, and though they are indeed good records, you will not find such raw poignancy and originality in them.

anyway, this idea gives me hope for growing closer to who i really am (and to quit disagreeing with god about my nature)...

Labels: art, creativity, inspiration, music