Okay that was a lie.  Now that I’ve broken that first resolution, maybe I’ll keep the ones I’m about to make in earnest.

First of all, as a last minute surge, and because I was so close anyway, I achieved a great pre-New Year’s goal.  Before the end of 2009 I officially completed the 100th page of the novel I’ve been working on.  Which sets up the first of my New Year’s resolutions.  Page 200.  By the end of 2010.  I’m hoping I’ll get more done than that, but in an attempt to actually achieve my goal, I’m going to leave it at that and see where it goes.

Second thing.  I’m really proud of what we achieved on Lock, Stock, and Two Film Geeks this year.  We’ve had an audience that has consistently grown, even if it’s a bit small, and we’ve pretty much completely kept to our original schedule of one review per week on Wednesday, and a podcast every other Saturday.  We’ve even managed to put up some extremely successful additional feature articles here and there.  So the resolution with regards to this is simply to keep it up.  Keep to the schedule, maybe throw up some more content this year (more features from me hopefully, but no set number), and what happens, happens.

This year I’ve also begun to run at least once or twice a weekend, which is an improvement over my college years.  But this isn’t good enough for me.  I want to run five times a week.  With regards to this, I’m not going to hit the ground running.  The goal for this resolution is to be exercising five times a week by the end of the year.  Not all year.  End of the year.

And that’s it.  Of course I have more personal goals, but nothing that I want to set in stone.  Hope you all have had a better 2009 than I did, because, If I’m being honest, this was a really rough year for me.  It won’t be hard to make 2010 better than this.  Have a nice New Year’s eve.

The big thing you should be aware of by now is also the primary reason for a lack of content on this site. I have been writing, and it’s available for you to see, it’s just not on this site at the moment. That’s because my friend Benn Hadland and I have created a new website, called Lock, Stock, and Two Film Geeks. It’s been going on for a good 3 months now, and we’ve got a ton of content up.  There’s podcasts, reviews, and feature articles.  We’re both really proud of the work we’ve been doing.  I’ve been pushing it pretty hard on my various social profiles, so you’re probably aware of it, but the fact that there was no mention of it here was bugging me.  Please check it out if you haven’t, read some of the reviews, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

So now that I’ve graduated there are some changes in what I’ve been doing in terms of work.  I was laid off from Ritz Camera around the week that I graduated.  In June, I started a part time job with a company called Internet Brands, simply to pay the bills.  Basically I research what search engine keywords are valuable to the company and come up with titles for articles based on these keywords.  Other people have to write and edit these articles.  It’s pretty mindless work but it doesn’t exhaust me from doing some writing on the weekends.  I have been writing a bit more, most of it for Two Film Geeks, but also a bit of work on my novel in progress.  I also left my internship so that I could take on more hours at work without sacrificing the opportunity to write.  I’m still looking for film related work but it’s a tough job market right now.

As always, I’m watching a lot of movies.  A lot of these are for our website but I try and catch up on what’s in theaters and knock off some “list of shame” items as well.  My queue of over 200 movies on Blockbuster never seems to get smaller though, as I’m always adding to it.

And that’s really it for now, it wasn’t really my practice to do these sort of “journal posts,” but I figured some explanation was appropriate.

Photo by violent jane

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put a “YES” or “NO” after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

Note: I feel this list is unfairly chick heavy, way too many entries from Jane Austen and Bronte, etc.

My list follows after the jump:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – No
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – Not Completely
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – No
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – Yes
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – Yes
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – No
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – No
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – no
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – No
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger- Yes
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger- No
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – No
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – no
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – no
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Yes
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – No
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – No
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – no
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – Yes
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – No
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – No
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – No
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – No
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – No
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – no
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – no
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – No
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – No
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – No
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons- No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – No
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens -No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon- No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – no
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – no
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – No
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding- No
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – Yes
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – No
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Inferno – Dante – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – no
80 Possession – AS Byatt – No
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – No
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – No
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – No
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – no
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – no
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo -No

1. I really love listening to Peter and the Wolf.  Part of it is nostalgia from listening to it as a kid.  Part of it is that I just really enjoy the orchestral piece.  It’s beautiful, and it tells a story in a really unique way.  I like that there’s characters that interact and tell their story without words.  And the narration is really fun too.  For some reason Peter’s theme is the thing that most often gets stuck in my head — ever.  I find myself whistling it all the time.  It’s not that I listen to it on a regular basis, but I did just download and have started listening to it again.

2. I’m more comfortable in smaller groups.  It’s easier to have a more meaningful conversation and I like the general dynamic better.  2-4 people is definitely my favorite way of interacting.

3. Similarly, I’ve always been the type to have a few really close friends rather than a lot of friends that are not as close.  It’s nothing personal to the other people, it’s just what seems to work best for me.

4. Unintentionally, I seem to have put myself to the impossible quest of seeing every worthwhile movie ever made, read every worthwhile comic book ever made, and watching as much good television as I can.  It’s an unfortunate decision due to it’s sheer impossibility and the amount of time in my life it seems to take up.  My Blockbuster.com queue always hovers in the range of 160-170 items and never gets any smaller.

5. I get really nervous when I get my hair cut.  It doesn’t make much sense because I trust the people who I let do it, and even if they did mess up my hair grows absurdly fast.

6. I love to write but can never get myself to sit down and do it.  I have a horrible lack of focus.

7. I may be clinically addicted to the internet.  I should get that checked out.

8. While I truly love music, lately I’ve been finding podcasts are taking up more of my listening time.  I think it’s leftover from my last internship when I had a nasty commute to deal with.  Now I’m hooked on a few too many shows and need to figure out a way to narrow it down.

9. I have a really hard time leaving jobs.  I get attached.  Even mediocre ones.  And ones that don’t pay me.

10. I think the two most pivotal moments in my life so far were moving to Thousand Oaks from Sherman Oaks and my parent’s divorce.  I think they’re the only things that really changed me in significant ways.

11. One of my favorite things is watching old movies in the morning on a rainy day, with a blanket and maybe some hot chocolate.

12. I miss the days when I was fit enough so that running was relaxing.  Right now it’s really hard any time I do it.  It used to be my primary form of stress relief.

13. I find I’m much more efficient and productive when I have a busier schedule and I have a job.  I use my spare time better even though I have less of it.

14. My favorite feature in a movie or piece of literature is when it brings something new and fresh to the table.  Whether that’s a fresh way of telling an old story, a character I’ve never seen an analogue of, or an event that really seems new, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that there’s some sort of novelty.  This is part of the reason Jonathan Safron Foer is my favorite author and Charlie Kaufman is my favorite screenwriter.

15. I’ve learned played three instruments over the years: piano, violin, and guitar.  Violin was the one I committed to the most, I was in a youth symphony and everything.  I still play guitar from time to time, but haven’t had much time for it lately.

16. I’ve always worn Asics for running shoes.

17. If I don’t get some time alone now and then, I start to go a little crazy.

18. I sleep best when it’s cooler and there is absolute silence.  Not even white noise.

19. I think about names for kids now and then and I have a few favorites.  That’s probably more than a little girly, but whatever.

20. I’ve been living with Jonathan long enough that I can understand what he’s trying to tell me before he’s able to get it out.

21. “Well played, sir” might be my favorite phrase of the moment.

22. I’m an avid audio/videophile.  I’m on a quest for the perfect entertainment system and I can sense imperfection a mile away.

23. Talking during movies/tv shows is probably my greatest pet peeve.  There are situations when it’s okay, particularly when it’s related to the show or it’s something I’ve seen once or twice before.  But in depth conversations that don’t relate to what we’re watching are pretty much unacceptable.  My mind is too susceptable to stimulus, and will be pulled away by pretty much anything.

24. I really admire  many Nike commercials.  They’re very often a work of art in themselves.

25. I have a love/hate relationship with movie trailers.  99% of them give away too much of the movie, even if it’s not a spoiler, it still makes it feel like so that moments in the movie aren’t fresh.  As soon as I’m decided that I’m going to see the movie, I’d rather all temptation of seeing anything more be removed.  On the other hand, I love the way that a trailer can tell a story in the short amount of time it has.  The editing can be really awesome, and so can the music and the combination thereof.  It’s an art in itself.

1. This is my webpage, so it’s a central location for all things… me.  It may seem pretty basic, but I really wanted a central place to have links to everywhere on the internet that has any connection to me (that I can think of).  Mostly this means linking to my social networking profiles, which you will see in the right hand column of the page.  At some point I plan to add a more extensive list of links that will include explanations of what all these websites are, for the uninitiated.  This will eventually appear on the about page, but for now, if you see something and are confused, check out the “ClaimID” link on the right for a similar list.
2. I want to make myself accountable for putting out some creative writing every week.  I often find that pressure to write something really good keeps me from starting at all, so I’ve created a place where I can just throw work out into the world and forget about it, and this is it.  Additionally, because other people are looking, hopefully I will feel some sort of obligation to get work out on a regular basis.  Inspired by Paul Dini’s “200 Words” column on iFanboy.com, I’ve tentatively decided that writing 200 words once a week is a good starting point, so expect to see pieces around that size soon.
3. I’m a film student, so in turn, I have made films.  A lot of people ask me to post them on YouTube, but I’m just not a fan of it’s cluttered format and low quality.  I would like to share my films with those who can’t go to a screening, so soon I will have my reel posted on this site.  Similarly, I’d like to get some of my art photography up here as well.
4. This site should serve as a marketing tool both for myself as someone who works in the film inustry, but also as a freelance photographer/videographer.  This is why my resume appears in the links above, and if a business for photography/videography ever begins to build up, you’ll probably start to see more information on that somewhere on this website as well.
5. It’s been a while since I had a blog, and it would be nice to have someplace to go when I feel a rant coming on, or if I have something to say that doesn’t fit in a twitter post. (By the way, if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you should note that I’m extremely active on it, and it’s one of the better ways to get to know things about me.  The link to my account is on the right).

There’s more details to be worked out of course, I’d like to come up with some sort of schedule for posts.  Perhaps 200 words on Mondays and blog posts on Thursdays?  Don’t hold me to that quite yet.  And obviously nothing real has really been posted quite yet.  Hopefully that will change soon.  Until then, “Good night, and good luck”.