Shh!  Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t have a job right now.

Wait.  You knew that.

Anyway, I’ve spent many days at home alone.  I beat some video games, lazed around doing now a whole hell of a lot, and didn’t leave the house very much.  It’s not been good times.

After a while, I decided to do something other than apply for a few jobs that I know no one will call me back for.  Whatever I was doing, I needed some background noise.  Since all my music is on an external hard drive that requires my computer to be in a specific place that is not very conducive to me doing anything with the computer other than listening to music.  Consequently, I put on movies.

Using cinema for background noise is a delicate art.  When you’re listening to music and a song comes on that you really want to listen to, you stop to listen to it.  When a song comes on that you don’t want to hear, you ignore it.  Either way, that’s losing four minutes of noise.  Not a huge interruption; in fact, it could even be thought to be a good thing, a little break.

With a movie, you have to think a lot harder about what you want.  It has to be something with which you have enough familiarity that you won’t get sucked in completely, but also something that you won’t completely tune out and therefore defeat the purpose.

I believe that this conundrum rather neatly illustrates the differences between the four-minute masterpieces that good pop music can be and the ninety-minute opuses that every film aspires to be.  Unless, you know, they’re not ninety minutes long.  Or four minutes.  Whatever.

Our society has evolved.  We are all consumers now, and art is a commodity.  Sometimes, we have to turn that commodity into noise so that we can stay sane.

Because I don’t have a camera.  Silly me.

You would think that getting a job where I was surrounded by creative types would have led me to be creative myself, but that was in fact not the case.  I suppose I fell into a level of comfort that has never been conducive to making things for me, and that caused me to overlook some really obvious solutions to some problems that have been knocking over my plans to make movies for a while now.

Namely, I may have access to some high quality resources, including a Panasonic AG-DVX100B.  A friend of mine goes to the New School.  She can borrow equipment.  Why didn’t I learn this until yesterday?

I should never have dropped out of college.  The lesson, as always, is that I’m an idiot.  Like Bill Simmons, but with no money, no fame, and no funny.  And, ironically, no college degree.

Hate to admit that my mom was right to keep bitching at me to finish college.  Actually, I hate to admit that my mom is right about anything, but that’s just part of our relationship.

I am in the process of compiling information for another story.  I don’t know which medium the story will occupy, but that’s more or less irrelevant.

The short summary is that someone is trying to make a mixtape for his best friend, and rather than just downloading all the music he wants, he goes on a quest to find what he needs.  In my head, it’s rather like Broken Flowers in certain ways.

I am going to make the mix in question first and write the story from that.  With that in mind, I would greatly appreciate anyone who would put in their two cents as to what music you would want on a tape from your best friend.