HAS IT BEEN FOUR YEARS?

North Dakota

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY

North Dakota

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY I SUNK MY FEET IN THE EARTH

North Dakota, community garden

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY, AFTER BEETS

tommyrot

Remember how I write parking tickets for my job? And how sometimes I contemplate doing weird jobs like that my whole life? And how sometimes I admit it's for this very reason. It sounds like a lot of what I've been doing lately. Homemade crap? Yeah.

a university graduate in 2011 might live like this:

Let's be perfectly clear: I'm not exactly needed at RadioWest. They already have an intern, I just intrigued people with my enthusiasm and when you're a public program I don't know that you regularly turn down qualified (yeah, I'ma say I'm qualified, check out my univeristy degree!), free help. But they've taken me on and I've got work to do. Right now I am currently compiling a list of classic documentaries and since I'm ridiculous like this, I'm taking it upon myself to actually watch all of these films so I know what's up. Maybe you don't get how ridiculous that is: it is often plain to see, without watching a film, what its impact has been. And when documentaries have a tendency to take their time without apologizing...

I have decided I need to stop telling people I do what I want, whenever I want. Because while that's true (in fact, I feel like I've been doing that for months) because I am doing what I want and I work on my own so I make my own hours, this has a tendency to give people the idea that I am prancing about partying or being lazy. I've never really been that person. Even if I didn't have a job and an internship I've got a long list of things to do: study for the GRE, start pretentious discussion groups, find grad schools I want to go to and apply to them, work on my paper to submit to a conference, sand and refinish some furniture, make a short stop-motion film, edit the Community Gardens doc, go running...

There seems to be a pattern where all my paragraphs end with ellipses, I wonder why...

Another project I have up my sleeve we'll call my reconstitution/re-appropriation/mending of things. It doesn't sit well with me that I can own something that's in perfectly good condition but is a little out of date so the general rule would be to buy something new to replace it. Does that sound vague? Let's take it out of the abstract. I buy nice planners. Moleskine planners. But 2010 is over and 2011 is different and I need a new planner. I am not a smart phone person. I am a mildly resistant owner of a flashlight that serves as a cell phone. This summer my nice little Nokia fritzed out after two years so I bought a $20 Nokia go-phone and put in my SIM card. So paper is my planner. 2010's Moleskine planner is in good condition minus the dates that are already written all over and planned. But I was looking at it today and thinking, this I can easily reconstitute for 2011. It's gross to consume when I've got a nice thing already. Well...

I have nothing more to say today.

...

ALSO: If you have any suggestions of documentaries that should make my list or want to get in on this docfest of mine let me know! 

let me be boring

So lately I've been on this researching Frederick Wiseman kick. He's a filmmaker that's a legend in documentary but not necessarily to the wide world. Part of the reason for this is that he makes films about institutions–a mental asylum for the criminally insane (in 1967 so you can imagine), law enforcement, high school, juvenile courts, welfare, ballet companies, boxing gyms to name a few– and they're observational films: Let's sit and roll with the camera and take our time. You might not know this about me anymore because for the last couple of years I've been making docs for pay or for causes, but that's my first love. I want to be a "boring" filmmaker and I've forgotten that. The cause of commercial documentary is a foreign and stressful campaign to me: I doubt and trip over myself because it's my counter-intuitive. Anyway, thanks Freddie. Thanks for you doing what you've done. I forget myself.

Oh. Also, you should look up pictures of Frederick Wiseman. He looks like a thoroughly charming and idiosyncratic character.

And, I guess, happy 2011. I can't believe this eleven business. Time is no linear beast, it's an unwieldy, fluid, and here-and-there substance. The next thing we know I'll be 45 and...well...I don't know the rest of that sentence.