Not Interested

Listen up everyone. I’m running on empty here. I mean that. I’m so tired I can feel my eyeballs in their sockets. Have you ever had that feeling? Where you’re so tired, you can FEEL your eyes? It’s not pleasant at all, but that’s what I’m going through right now.

I’ve got so much on my plate, a lot of it I hate, and the other half I love, but don’t have enough time to devote to and I feel I’m nearing a crosswords. There is so much to think about that my mind feels like it’s been permanently diagnosed with ADHD. I can’t concentrate on one thought. But enough about the future. Let’s talk about the present.

I have about four movie reviews to write, a press junket to transcribe, a screening to go to tomorrow and traffic school to deal with. I’m losing my mind. I’m finding it so difficult to write my reviews. I’ve always found them difficult. I’ll read reviews by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, or the Village Voice or the Los Angeles Times and think, from what dark hole in your mind did you pull that out of? And how come I’m not seeing it? Is there something deeper and more profound I’m not getting, when I go to these screenings? I just don’t know anymore. I find it so hard to accurately express my feelings about films. The only films I’m able to dissect just as good as a NY Times movie critic are the ones I’m totally invested in and am passionate about. So I’m having quite a difficult time right now with myself and my movie reviews. I’m second guessing myself and I don’t like it.

Mostly the fatigue is getting to me. I just want to take a sabbatical and go off into the woods of Utah or something with a typewriter and enough tea to last me for a couple months and just write. Write to my heart’s content, without worrying about stress, and a full-time job, and traffic and life and graduate school. I’m becoming slightly disillusioned with the journalistic career opportunities this city has to offer. I do not want to be a movie critic. I don’t want to write about the movies and stars everyone is talking about. I want to write about the woman who turned a hobby into a full-fledged business and got herself our of debt, or the hole-in-the-wall restaurant that serves the best food in town, or the day laborer on the street who is working so hard to make ends meet for his family. I want to write about the pet organization that helps displaced dogs and cats find homes after natural disasters, I want to write about the injustices committed against journalists in Middle Eastern countries, I want to write about the professor who is doing studies on how video games in nursing homes are impacting lives. These are where the stories are, these are the people that matter, not directors, not producers and certainly not actors.

I’m just so tired of it all.