Mission Statement (Jerry-Maguire-style)

I am sipping on warm apple juice, after a soothing meal of nabe and wheatberries. The pool lies in my immediate future. The sky is blue and wide, wide open, in that thin Fall way that happens down against the Gulf the way that New Orleans is, closer to the Equator than Los Angeles, or even San Diego.

I’ve come to understand better, in the last few months, what it is that I’m supposed to be doing. My career as a camera assistant in the film industry is fun, glamorous, and lucrative, leaving me with more than enough time off to travel and to dream. And yet I still was left with a feeling of something missing from my life. 

I’ll come to explain that better. But for now, I’ve succumbed to writing again. I’ve also started eating macrobiotically. And I see that the answer that I gave the AFS officer, when I was fifteen years old and was applying to study abroad for a year in Italy, remains the same. To the question, ‘What do you see as your role in the international arena?’ I replied: ‘I am a bridge between worlds.’

I start a new feature on Tuesday. I don’t expect it to be easy, but I’ve decided my role will be to be a bridge. A bridge between green and experienced crew members. A bridge between 2nd Unit and 1st Unit camera departments. A bridge between camera department and the rest of the crew. A bridge between Los Angeles and local crew. A bridge between French and American crew. A bridge between local people and film crew. 

On a film set the hours are long, the stress is high, and people have a tendency to feel underappreciated, and isolated, from one another. My aim, for the next several weeks, is to combat that tendency in myself, and support a feeling that we’re all in this together. 

I always knew that one day

I would take this road but yesterday

I did not know today

Would be the day.

                  – Nagarjuna