I picked up NIN's "Year Zero" little over a month ago. I'm not a big music person really (I normally just enjoy listening to movie soundtracks), but something about "Year Zero" is just simply incredible. I first started listening to NIN after checking out Phil Rice's "Only," a theological remake of the original NIN song set to video captured from The Sims 2. It really stuck with me and so has the entirety of "Year Zero."

"I am trying to believe" is an excerpt of lyrics from "The Good Soldier," a song about a soldier unsure of his purpose or future while fighting in a war he doesn't understand or agree with. The song's beat is infectious, and while I can't come to any really logical connection between the song and myself, I can't quit listening to it.

"This is not where I should be."

It is so fucking hot here. I guess I'm just not used to living without the luxury of air conditioning. I'm at my dad's right now for the week while my mom is in San Francisco. My shirt is nearly sticking to my skin and the weight of my laptop on my lap feels like it's burning right through me.

I fucked up my laptop early last week and had to go to work on the LCD. It's something I never want to experience ever again. If anyone reads this, ignore the rest of what I write if you promise to take at least this away with you: love your computer and treat it carefully because it's made out of thousands of insanely small and complicated little plastic parts made my undernourished and underpaid workers overseas. But seriously- don't fuck up your computer.

This accident cost me a week and a half of lost time. Big deal, right? I'm sixteen and I'm on summer vacation. Why should I need to worry? Because I'm making a movie and I only have about half the summer left to finish pre-production and start production before school starts. In that time I also need to read three books and write essays on all of them (for a college-esque course for school this year), find a job, work at said job, tour colleges, and start driver's ed. Oh, and by the way, I haven't even finished the first draft of the script yet. Sit-rep? SNAFU. Don't understand? Google it.

It's 3:05 AM and I'm wasting my time. Einstein said something once that rung something like this: "the surest sign of insanity is to repeat the same motions over and over again in an attempt to generate new results." So playing "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" for hours in an attempt to think of something creative to write down for the script won't help? Damnit. But I figured maybe writing some of my thoughts down would help me organize them. I guess it doesn't hurt, but then again, time is always against us.

I've been working on this movie for a couple months in my head and I've had the perfect people in mind for some of the parts. I've kept in contact with all of them and suddenly all contact seems to have ceased recently. I figure that comes with the summer territory.

So I have little over a month and a half to write, re-write, most likely re-write again a script, find locations, cast parts, create a filming schedule, get a [better] camera (that's an entirely separate damn story), shoot the movie based on everyone's schedule, reschedule unsuccessful shoots (based on schedule interference and re-shoots as necessary), and get all of this from camera to computer. At least I'll have until late winter to edit all of this. This is all, of course, sitting next to that heap of other crap I listed earlier.

And now I'm dealing with the drama of a friend who went out and did some stupid shit she promised she wouldn't. It's a long story that's painfully boring and painfully pathetic. To make it short and sweet (as sweet as it can be I suppose) she went out and did something she promised she wouldn't (partied and drank, something that has a not-so-terrific history in her family).

Whatever, I guess. I'm not her mother, I'm not her sibling, and I realize that I may not actually be that great of a friend. She said she didn't want me concerned and that I shouldn't care and that if confronted with the same situation from a reversed perspective (me partying, her learning of it) she wouldn't care. I'm probably overreacting, but I've seen the results of drinking and acting stupid before and I'd wish it only on a very select few. Maybe I care too much. Or maybe I just care disproportionately to how much others would care about me... oh here I go, now I sound like your typical whiny emo MySpace fuck.  But seriously? I don't know and at this point (3:20 in the AM) I don't care... but I do care that it's got me in a bad spot for working on the movie at the moment.

"I am trying to believe" that I can get this train back on track.