Hi. This blog can be found every day here: www.mymilliondollaryear.net/blog I can't keep up with the cross posting by hand. RSS feed please, MySpace! Love, Astrid (I do have the blog syndicated on LiveJournal, so if you have an LJ add "mymillionyear")

Found my hidden motivation this afternoon. Also delirious with fever. I think the two might be related.

Today I rediscovered The Point of it all. I was getting worried there for awhile. I got so much done today - neatened up things on the site, changed the pictures (which were taken by the amazingly talented Monica Mitchell), updated all kinds of things. Know what’s been missing lately? I had fallen out of touch with everything I loved about doing this, I could only see exhaustion, work, long hours. I couldn’t see satisfaction, creativity, accomplishment. For a few days there it felt like I was unravelling. To the chagrin of my naysayers, I’m back with a vengance. It’s weird how sometimes all I need is a small shift in perspective. I also checked the site stats for the first time in a few days - nearly 325,000 hits in nine weeks!! Whenever I think that no one’s listening, I read the stats and realize that there’s anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 people listening. Every day. That’s kind of crazy. +++ Re-read some of Tim O’Brien’s stuff today. He’s a Vietnam writer and I absolutely love him, one of my all-time favourite authors. Oddly enough, it was him who really turned me on to what documentary means - from him I picked up on the idea that there’s no absolute accurate way to tell anything. You can recount events, but what matters is the emotions that drove you and compelled you to make some choices and not others. Example: Say there was this one crazy night where something happened and you were scared you were going to die. What’s more true - telling the exact events even if they don’t convey why they made you scared, or embellishing events to make the listener understand how scared you were? Interesting. These blurring lines. My favourite book of O’Brien’s is The Things They Carried, which is a collection of short stories about one troop of soldiers in Vietnam. He writes war stories, these gripping, believeable, funny, tragic, human, technicolour war stories that have these indelible characters that you feel you’ve known all your life. Through the book he constantly reminds you that you’re reading fictional events, but there’s an indelible truth to it all. What I think is brilliant is that the line between truth and fiction starts to blur - the truth of the events starts to matter less than the truth of the emotions and memories involved. Reading that book was the first time I realized that there was more to documenting and “truth” than recounting events. For the first time in weeks, I am going to bed before 2am. Shock.

Lottery from weekend: Lost. Dang. Everything else: Slow. I feel like my brain is leaking out my ears. Where the hell is all the motivation. But I KNOW how this is. When I’m having ideas and am hugely productive I feel like I’ll never run out of ideas or steam. When I get like this I feel like I’ll never have another idea ever again and be unproductive for the rest of my life. It’s all ebbs and flows. I think I haven’t adequately figured out how to manage these down periods. I think I’m just afraid that I’m going to be like this forever. At times like this, it’s all about the small victories. And on the topic of small vitories, I did make a bunch of Jeopardy flash cards tonight though. If they ask me about the first twelve presidents or state flowers, I am SO up on that shit.

This motivation thing is no good. It’s not that there’s not a ton to do. It’s not that I haven’t slept or am not feeling well (I had the flu of death last week but it seems that it’s all draining out of my sinuses at the moment). It’s not that I haven’t slept lately (I’ve actually been managing to sleep fairly well). I don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe it’s just a creative slump or something. I guess I feel like I have to be firing on all cylinders 24 hours a goddamn day and if I don’t then I’m horribly inadequate in some way and cheating this whole process. I also know that the harder you try to put your finger on it the more it gets away, so maybe I should just chill already. I would like to go one week without a crisis of faith.

I’m getting frustrated with myself. I’m censoring too much. I’m wasting time pouring over the nuances of things instead of just getting on with them. I’m banging my head against things too much instead of forging forward. And instead of just getting on with it, I worry about it and gnash my teeth instead of just FIXING IT. I’ll feel so much better when I do and it’s not that it’s HARD, it’s just that I find myself more inclined to worry about getting over the hump instead of just doing what I need to to cross these annoying little things off the ever-present To Do List. However, there are some things that I’m very proud of, two months in. For example, I’m *really* proud of the fact that I have documented EVERY SINGLE DAY since this project began. There were one or two days that I didn’t document online, and those instances were because my net connection was down. I’ve documented on camera every day. There’s something really satisfying about many little steps. It doesn’t seem like much at the time, but even now, just a little bit in, I find myself looking back and think, wow, look how far I’ve come. I am in love with process. I am in love with becoming. I am in love with the act of making, not the thing that’s made. I mean, the thing that’s made is fantastic and I love that too, but it’s so much more meaningful when its story is just as important. Lots of people have made a million dollars. Lots of people did it younger and faster than me. Lots of people are doing it right this minute. I’m making a million dollars too, the only difference is that this million dollars has this story attached to it. That’s what I think is interesting. Noticing and documenting this process is still interesting and fascinating to me. This project is driving me crazy with the demands and the challenges, but it’s also driving me sane with the joy of carrying out an idea and being committed to something that’s bigger than I am. Someone said something interesting to me the night I met Richard Branson. I wrote it down. I may have posted it before, but it’s resonating again today: Don’t be an idiot. Be alive. Be aware. I have hung that over my kitchen window. Things are being crossed off The List this weekend. Enough sitting on my assci.

I bounced out of bed at 8.30 this morning because I was supposed to have an interview with a big news organization. For some reason these people always want to come to my house, which means I have to do the dishes. I also have a horrible cold. I keep saying “Oh, I think the worst of it is over,” which it hasn’t been quite yet, so I was in my kitchen trying to unblock my nose so I could speak like a human being when the phone rang. The news people called to tell me that some drug bust was happening downtown and their camera had to be given to the people who film all the live news stuff, so could we reschedule? It’s probably happening next week … and it’s national, so I’ll be posting to the mailing list when it’s going to air. I have a lot that I want to document, but it’ll have to wait until this fever relents a little.

So if you can believe it, I managed to meet Richard Branson last night. I HAVE EVIDENCE: Who's Richard Branson? He's a billionaire, and the founder of the Virgin empire (www.virgin.com), which started with a record store and now includes a record label, an airline, a chain of stores, a mobile phone company, and so on. I'm not one that usually goes crazy over celebrities - I've got enough miles in publicity under my belt to know that the art of PR involves a hell of a lot of smoke and mirrors making people look more interesting than they really are - and I certainly don't think he's magical. But he's managed to make something amazing, and he really inspires me to be more gutsy, more daring, more shameless. He's also massively famous. I wanted to meet him because his story has really affected me, and because I knew the odds of it happening were slim and I wanted to somehow make it happen. I get in the door of this party around 9pm as the "plus one" of someone I've never met. We walk in and discover, to my glee, that the drinks are free and there's lots of minature food being taken around by smiling people with trays. The place is also HUGE and PACKED. Branson was supposed to show up eventually and I positioned myself behind the stage with my camera. Sure enough he came out and said about ten words and got off stage again, and some horrible stage show started. The people I was with wanted to get some serious drinking done. I went with them. Someone handed my a fortune cookie. I bit into it, and when I removed the fortune I realized that I had eaten half the fotrune. What was left said something like "You will be a" and the rest was gone. Ominous! I tried to save it but I haven't seen it since. Eventually I was standing with some people on the main floor of the club eating tiny sandwiches and tiny boxes of pad thai and tiny lemon squares and having a good time. I could see the VIP area on the second floor from where I was standing. Branson was leaning over the railing. Stuffing a tiny samosa in my mouth to steel my nerves, off I go to get past the security at the VIP entrance. I walked up and gave some story about needing to speak to someone who was standing in there, that I was just leaving and needed to speak to that guy over there, I'll be two seconds. It failed miserably. I said fine, I'll wait right here. And watched the crowd and tried to figure out how the hell I was going to swing this one. I kept an eye out for someone I knew and tried to think of something brilliant. I considered taking a running jump but that wasn't going to work. I considered grabbing a tray off the bar, getting someone to hold my coat, and trying to sneak in as a waitress, but I had been standing there and they knew what I looked like. I considered bribing the guard but all I had with me was my camera (non-negotiable), and a cherry Blo-Pop in my pocket. Dammit. I don't know how long I stood there trying to look like I was busy waiting. But eventually Richard Branson walked out with security guards. I followed in hot pursuit. Eventually I ended up on the street in front of the club. I went up to him and said, "I'm making a documentary. You have been very inspiring to me." I asked for a picture, he said sure, and the result you see at the top was me trying to make sure that the camera was focusing and not looking at the lens. AUGHH. In short, the club was great, I ate my weight in tiny sandwiches and drank more than I could have possibly afforded, I met a ton of people, and I got to meet Richard Branson. That was cool because it was such a long shot, such a completely remote thing, and I made it happen. If I can get into this party and accomplish what I set out to do by sheer force of will ... hey, money's going to be easy. I think I'm going to send Richard Branson a copy of that picture. Too bad the focus is sketchy and I'm not really looking at the camera.

I met Richard Branson. Photographic evidence to follow.

So I’m going to a launch party tomorrow. Richard Branson will be there. Don’t ask me how I swung this one. I’m not really sure. Basically someone I know knew someone else and they knew this other guy and the first person mentioned this to me on Friday and I’ve been making deals with the devil ever since for an opportunity to go. Things worked themselves down the line and word got back to me at approximately 9pm tonight. (As an aside - I am starting to believe in miracles. I never thought this stuff would happen to me, but there’s been a lot of that lately.) As soon as I heard I was able to go my first thought was “Yeehaw” and my second was “Oh crap". What the hell am I going to do with this one? Whatever happens, I’ll make a press release out of it. I’ll be bringing my camera.