The things we do before we think

What is it about this city that just drowns out the people in it? All the noise, commotion, movement, electricity just loses its potency with time. I’m not talking about weeks, or even days, and hour in this city is like a month in Minnesota time. The ebb and flow of it all is exhausting when you actually pay attention to it and I am starting to wonder what became of the time that affects this.
People laugh and cry all on one street, the scream in fear and shout in excitement, day and night, morning and evening. This city never stops moving and doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing down. I never imagined it could be the way it is until I actually lived it, or drowned in it. I worked and slept, ate when I could and tried to have hobbies but all in all the last five months were just lost time in a city that swallows anything and everything that succumbs to it.
I can’t say I was part of the madness that is New York, but I was in it. What I mean is that I wasn’t one of the people that looks for a muse and preys on all that presents itself. But I like to think of myself as a muse, and was looking for something to present itself to me when in actuality I was being presented. It was a feast for the ages, I gave everything to a grocery store that promised things which it couldn’t deliver. Four months of nothing to show except a high profit margin and increased sales, but that doesn’t apply to me so much as it does my boss who actually managed to do very little work aside from the ordering of merchandise and scheduling of employees for our department. It makes me wonder why I even bothered trying so hard as if there was some light at the end of the tunnel. I thought there would be, but now the holidays are over and the only light I can see is the brief glimmer of sun on occasion if I happen to walk down the right street during the day and it isn’t cloudy.
That last paragraph is me in a nutshell over the last five months, and it is embarrassing to summarize myself in such short context, but in truth I would only be kidding myself if I tried to add things to it. I did work a day on a film set, which turned out to be a bad idea because I was getting in a similar environment where I do all the work but then can’t be in the room when the camera starts rolling. I also filled out a handful of applications for graduate schools and a program for the Director’s Guild of America, and I did a lot of writing for these but it really was exhausting and now I am in the waiting stages for this process so I don’t have much to show or be proud of except a few documents and ideas. All that and nothing more, encompassing five months in a city that doesn’t sleep. I myself have been getting relatively good sleep, but I think I need to sacrifice some of that so that I can get more done with my time because I still don’t know what I am going to do with my life after this.
I will admit one thing though, this is the only city where you can physically disappear like this. It is not always a good thing, but every now and then I just walk around the busy streets and listen to other people’s problems and realize that maybe my life isn’t so terrible. This therapy is very conducive, and it makes me forget about what I was fretting over, and I have the city to thank for it. It doesn’t quite solve my problems, but it allows me to move on from them by realizing my faults.
After all, I have my health and connections to my family, and a wedding to look forward to. Yes my professional ambitions seem to be regressing, but my professional mindset has yet to settle and every day I learn a new trade or trick to excel. It is putting these to use which seems to be the problem for me, but every now and then I have a good day or two in a row and get a lot of things done. Yes, they are around the apartment or just a simple of balancing the checkbooks but they show that I am accomplishing something. I just need to keep moving forward with this momentum, and I think an internship is the best way to go at this point. It won’t guarantee me a job, or even a prospect of one, but it will be a change of pace from my normal routine and that may be just what I need to get things moving again.
I do have a few screenplay ideas as well, and now that these applications are finished I can actually work on them during the evenings, that is when I don’t lose myself in a movie or video game. But distractions aside, New York hasn’t been all that I wanted it to be, but that doesn’t mean it still can’t be what I expected it to become. What that is I am still trying to experience and find out, but so far there isn’t much to live up to. I just hope there is more out there than this for me…