A Gun to Your Head

We've all seen this movie right?  You know the one where the guy needs to crack a code, but there's another guy with a gun to his head holding a stop watch, forcing him to think under pressure?  Well guess what, I'm in that movie right now.  I'm working on a small project at home that I'm far from completing and my time is running out fast....  What??...

Alright!.... okay!  It's been awhile, I know.  I've heard the grumblings and wonder whys and all of that yang.  I took a break okay?  I had a toothache... my laptop caught on fire....my dog ate my cell phone and I couldn't text.... I lost my password.... my computer caught a virus... the screen was bluuuuuue!!

Well actually none of that is true.  What really happened was, my beautiful darling wife came down with pneumonia and I had to become Mr. Mom for an extended period of time.  She's much better now.  But once it actually ended and I was sent happily back to normal living, I found that I was way out of blogging mode.  I had moved onto conducting research for my next project.  Yeah, I hear you.., another project.  Well I do admit I have far too many irons in the fire, but at least I'm working on something that I enjoy.  It's all about the journey right?

I did learn a few things during my time off however.  The most important thing was that being a working mom is tough and I can't do it!   Do you hear me?  I can't..  Not for an extended period of time anyway.  Now I love my kids, don't get me wrong.  But it's a heckuvalottawork!  Plus my wife was mostly confined to her bed while she was sick, so it was full service Mr. Mom.  Meals in bed, changing stinky kid sheets, cooking, cleaning the kitchen, the works!  But I learned that things like patience and kindness are very underrated.  When times get tough, it's so easy to just scream and yell and fuss and throw things and complain and complain about how you got such a raw deal.  But you've got to work to be patient, to remain calm, to be kind in stressful situations, to show love when you really wanna slap somebody!  I'm telling you, I went through almost every emotion possible during this time and I think I even found a few new ones.  But God is good.  I made it through in one piece.

On top of this experience, I was commissioned the job to produce my mom and dad's 50th wedding anniversary video for their upcoming anniversary party.  Now as I've said before, I'm a video editor and producer.  I do this stuff all the time.  And the last thing I want to do when I arrive home to relax is to work on another video, for free!  Yes it's for my parents and I love them dearly.  Yes it's for a special occasion, which I understand.  But dang, it's a lot of work.  And it's coming up in less than a week, and Christmas is in a few days which means even less time.  And I'm sweating, cause I can't just throw some mess together and call it a done deal.  I'm not like that.  I'm my own worst critic but I'm also my biggest fan.  I don't want to disappoint me more than I don't want to disappoint anyone else who might happen to see anything I do.  So I put undo pressure on myself to produce something good and moving and funny and touching and all of that.  But all I have right now is some pictures, a few video clips and some band-aids.  I wanna scream, I can't do it!!  I wanna tell the man with the gun to my head to just pull the trigger, cause I can't work like this!   I need more stuff to make this right.  But alas, I am out of time.  So we'll just have to see what happens from here on out. 

My wife Carla always tells me that I worry and stress out over all of the videos I do, but they always turn out well, and that the people always love them.  I tell her it's because they're idiots and they don't know anything.  Actually, I don't say that.  I know my work is good, even if it's not what I originally envisioned.  But that's what I feel sometimes when it doesn't quite turn out the way I planned.  No one else knows what it should have been, because they only see it for what it is.  But anyway, we'll see how it goes this time. 

Maybe this will be my biggest flop to date.  Maybe it'll be even bigger than my last flop, my second student film when I attended Howard U., and I stupidly used a black woman to overdub my white actress.  And yes, the film was so overexposed it looked like a blizzard in June.  BAD.  I hope not.  But of course, there's always the flip side.  Maybe I'll just pull it off.  We'll see.
 
Okay, so it may not be a big deal to anyone else but me.  But to anyone who has ever had to work under pressure, you know.  It doesn't matter the size of the project.  It takes just as much sweat and effort to produce a good three minutes of entertainment, and sometimes more.  But let me ask you this.  Could you do it with a gun to your head?