Two hours of sleep and I woke up already.
No. It's not even two hours. Goddamn it.
Oh well. What to do?
I dreamed that one of the movies I'm doing, where I'm the producer and also the coolie, had started shooting already.
I went on set and was like, all bullshit and CONfidence.
Me: Hey, I thought we were supposed to shoot in May? Why are we doing it now? We haven't even locked down the crew yet!
Dude: Oh, I thought we'd just go ahead and do it.
Me: We were supposed to use prime lenses! What the hell are these other stuff? I told you to wait for me! I was supposed to do all this shit!
Dude: Nevermindlah. Just use whatever shot we can from this.
Me: No! The script hasn't even been written yet! How can you go ahead like this? How much money did you spend?
Dude: Well, around XXXXXXXXXXXXX.
Me: What? That's 70% of our budget! For nothing! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Needless to say, I woke with a cold sweat.
Fuck, man. Guess I was thinking too much about it before I went to bed.
These real-life considerations have been plaguing me all week.
For fun, I allowed my ego to run free for the past few months. I don't really care about a lot of things I wrote here, especially Malaysian politics.
The stuff and the people I really do care about, I don't really share here.
My work matter to me most of all. There are people I am working with I am only beginning to understand, but they have been good experiences.
You just have to sit down and listen to what they have to say. What they need. What their concerns are.
I tailor-make my shit according to who I work with and what it's about. No two persons and no two projects are the same. As long as I know what they want, I can give it to them. As best I can.
And the key is communication.
Communication was not my strongest thing. Not my forte. That is one of the reasons I went into the media industry. To force myself to face what I hated most - people.
I used to give too much a fuck about people. I used to not give a fuck. Finding the right balance was a painstakingly slow process. IS a painstakingly slow process. I do not have it pat down yet. It's not yet perfect.
I still make rookie mistakes now and then. Because I am still a rookie, comparatively speaking.
The only medium I have always been comfortable with was the Internet. Simply because the Malaysian version feels and sounds so much like the global one 13 years ago, only with better tools.
See, cynicism used to be cool. Maddox, et al. SOme people in Malaysia still think it's cool to be a bitch (regardless of gender) ALL the time.
I guess Spider Jerusalem got it right. "I've done it a lot in my lifetime. I don't want to do it all the time."
Variety, bitch. And cynicism has its cliches. Repeat it too often, and you're a fucked-up wannabe has-been motherfucker.
Then, in the early 21st Century, when the 40, 50 and 60-year-olds started invading the 'Net, it was a somewhat more positive shit. They made it a more positive slant. The Internet had to accomodate millions of newbies, and they lived in a different age and period.
Also, the first generation grew up, graduated college, and failed miserably in life - making them more obsessed forumers.
I was eternally tickled when Malaysia's older generation took to the web. They were amused by my usage of the word fuck and other curses. It's nothing new to me, or for many people, having watched South Park almost religiously in our youth.
I was a sideshow freak. Some older dudes started emailing me every day. Spooked, I deleted my blog. Mentoring people going through middle age and repulsing their online advances was really, really creepy.
Then, as Internet communities grew older, back to cynicism. Nowadays, the global Internet culture is reaching a plateau. There's a niche for everyone. The racists, the sexually-deviant, the n00bs, the soccer moms, the I-know-everything script kiddies.
One thing which will never go out of vogue is the weird shit. Crazy pictures, and bits and pieces of strange news. Though that, too, is becoming tedious and boring.
Feuds have always been entertaining to read.
SOme people try to discredit the Internet, and I have parroted their views here before, to see what kind of reaction that would get.
I would never discount the power of the Internet, simply because it is a medium of communication. It is as powerful as newspapers, radio, TV and human contact. Just some of the rules are slightly different, and each medium has its particular use.
Though initially, I started writing online as a parody to everything, I now have an experiment I am conducting. It has been going on for a couple of years. I will only see the results - if the cybercops don't get me - in another three years or so.
If anything I did becomes a factor in the results of the experiment, I can look back and say to myself, that I got it right all these years. Failure, meanwhile, will teach me even more.
People think it's ALWAYS, ALWAYS about them. And they take things - especially written ones - seriously.
Let's see where that leads us.
