1-8-26
Been a minute since I updated on here. To be quite real, the holiday season kicked my ass this year. Christmas has always been a rough time for me for personal reasons, and some years are harder than others. This one in particular was rough as it was the first after my beloved grandmother had passed, combined with having to quickly save up to replace all 4 of my car tires which were dry rotting. It feels like New Years, a time I typically look forward to, also came and went in a flash while working more than usual in a different schedule.
As quick as it went, I did still have a good time for new years. My partner and I had a couple of friends over to join us in our burgeoning tradition of ending the year on a thematic movie. For 2025, we ended on Big Night, a 1996 film starring and co-directed by Stanley Tucci. It was a delight for us, something very personal and profound and yet still universal. In it, two Italian immigrant brothers, Primo (Tony Shaloub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) are struggling to keep their Italian restaurant afloat when they get an opportunity to turn things around. It explored the flaws and virtues of both brothers, had messy love lives, and Ian Holmes biting asses. Couldn't ask for more, or for a more perfect ending scene.
My partner and I also like to start the year with a purposeful movie, and this year we landed on Dreams from Akira Kurosawa. I am admittedly the worst cinephile in the world and have massive blind spots of good cinema, and Akira Kurosawa is shamefully no exception. I'd only seen a scant few samurai movies-- Rashoman and Seven Samurai back in college a decade or so ago, Yojimbo a few years ago, and Ran a few months back. I'd never seen much of his late period work, and was intrigued to see one of his last few. Dreams is a beautiful collection of Kurosawa's own recurring dreams, little vingettes of life and love and fear and hope. I was particularly moved by a segment featuring Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh driven by a hounding need to keep creating, to keep capturing the beauty around him before he ran out of time. To know that Marty still maintains this mindset, that Kurosawa had this mindset, is profoundly moving to me. It makes me want to get up and create, to get off my stupid phone and put down the stories of my heart.
It's a work in progress. Since the new year, I have done a little bit more writing, aiming for a paragraph a day. I've only touched my sketchbook twice, but building habits takes time. Most of my time has been going into a DnD campaign I'm building, forcing myself to do the work because I do have people relying on me for it. Not a project that only lives in my head, but a world my friends are interacting with on a biweekly basis. It is really emotionally fulfilling to do collaborative work with my friends, something I hadn't realized I had been craving as much as I do. Maybe I'll take some time soon to make a page for this game, to put out there the ideas I have and maybe organize a bit of the backstory I have informing the world. It's time to get these fantasy worlds out of my mind and out in the open, where others can try to see the beauty that I do.