May 21st and rainy

It's my second to last night in Upland, Indiana. On Saturday I leave for home. And at the end of June I move out west - to Burbank, California. I'm there until the end of August. From September to December, I'll be attending a film school program in Los Angeles. And by January 2011, I'll be back in Upland - returning back to the only people I consider to be my friends.

My name is Brent and I'm 22 years and 3 weeks old - and I'm growing up. And this is my existential-quarter-life-crisis.

I feel so blessed to have so many awesome opportunities ahead of me, but the greatest mystery right now is where I'll be in 6 months. I want to make sure I eventually look back to this moment - to this rainy night in May, 2010 with half my room dismantled around me - three bankers boxes full of odds and ends stacked up against my desk chair. Hopefully if and when I look back to this moment I don't scrutinize this moody writing style.

I've just spent a semester in a fiction writing class where I wrote stories about adapting to change - all involving the same character archetype: the iconic, post-gender, 20-something-year-old male character searching for . . . something. Call him Zach Braff from Garden State. Call him Michael Cera from any movie with Michael Cera. Call him Jason Schwartzman from Darjeeling (that would be my choice, personally, but he's 30).

In half a year I want to think about now. At Sundance this winter I saw a movie called Obselidia. I heard it's been bought - so maybe it'll see a theater release sometime this year. I hope so. Anyways, the movie talked about a made up word called "nowstalgia" - an mindset of anti-nostalgia where you cherish the present knowing it'll be gone tomorrow when you wake up. Who knows? Maybe the whole world will be gone tomorrow? How then would you live today? That, there, is more or less that tagline of the film, so don't quote me on that. I actually feel like a bit of a plagiarist already - one of my fiction stories talked about Obselidia's "nowstalgia" concept very blatantly. This story also included blatant lyrics from a song by Atlas Sound - so I in no way feel original or ethical in retrospect. It's not like fiction pieces need credits or a works cited page at the end - do they?

Anyways, this concept of loving the "now right now" is something I hope I look back on when I return to Upland. Did I take advantage of all the opportunities that presented themselves? Did I learn any valuable life lessons (like: how to cook on your dollar? How to navigate LA traffic? How to [fill in the blank]?)? Did I "find myself?" And do I have quality film pieces for my senior portfolio (oh, I better).

"But Brent - you're gonna be in LA (spoken "el-EH")," says a friend. "Marijuana is legal there, dude. You can get some sweet 'tat' on your arm and not tell your parents about it until you get back."

Yeah, I know this. I understand these things. In many ways, California seems very anti-Brent on several major facets (I'm that guy talking about himself in the third person - nice), but seriously, how am I going to react to life out West? I'm from Indiana; a Hoosier is what some call me, even though I hated that movie. I thankfully grew up in Indy away from the dense cornfields and near-Amish lifestyle of these northern areas, but yeah, this will all seem very rural compared to the suburbian jungle-city that's Los Angeles. I want to preserve who I am, but at the same time I want to change and learn from whatever is out there - and hopefully shoot a short film on a Canon 7D (please, oh, please).

This brings me full-circle. Welcome back to now. Welcome to Room 209 - still a half-dismantled wreck amid the other wrecks in this building. Move-out weekend is the worst, but there's always something waiting for you beyond campus: your family, a dog back home, a girl/guy, a part-time job at Chili's - anything and everything.

-B