Yesterday I renewed the domain for the (soon to return, I swear) Orange Blossom Media. That means to me that it has been two years since I officially started that as a freelance business. I mainly stopped last year, due to excuses that don’t really make much sense anyway. I suppose being disheartened could be one of them that sticks. Still, I recently decided to do so again, and have gotten a few clients, so that has lifted my spirits on it a bit. I briefly considered changing the business name and going in a new direction, but as I already have all of the paperwork in for this one with the gubmint, have nice business cards, and the domain and logo, I decided that I’d just go the easier route. Still I think that it’s strong, so I have no regrets with the decision.

Writing this is more a reminder for myself that this is something that I will continue putting some of my time into, even if finding clients is more time consuming than getting the work done for them. In addition to my WordPress development, and hopeful mobile app development this year, I feel that it will be a good way to keep stretching my abilities, and teaching myself new skills. Here’s looking to you 2012, the year that I come into my own on the web!

I’ve heard the saying that the halfway point of a marathon is really the 20 mile marker, and having finally done one myself, I can attest that it is indeed the case. Daniel and I foolishly stopped our running regimen about two months ago, and went in to it a bit more unprepared than we would have liked. The week before was nice, with an excuse to slack on weight lifting, and to eat more delicious foods while throwing around the term “carb loading”. Getting through the event though, was quite an ordeal, and my body is still mad at me about it.

While running there was a woman near me that had a shirt on showing that she was running for her son, whose birthday was the same as mine, down to the year. I don’t know what he died of, but it got me thinking to the fact that I am 23 years old and healthy and able to do something like this, which I can now mark off as a bucket list item completed. I hope that the run gave her some form of healing, and am glad that I have the chance to do so myself.

Beyond that, I have already accepted my first freelance project of 2012, and it has gone well so far. I hope to complete it before going on a trip later this week to Fort Lauderdale to see Lisa and a short cruise that we were lucky enough to get via Daniel’s boss. While I’m still having general headaches over work and difficulties in school bureaucracy, I’m also hopeful that this portends a good year, and successes that I have been striving towards for some time.

Do any of my readers have things that they want to complete during heir life that they intend to do this year?

Click on Mario!

Here is yet another New Year’s post. It has been a full year since redesigned my website, and I feel another design coming on soon. I have tried to keep busy over the past year, though I haven’t always done as much as I wanted to, as usual. I find it easy to make promises that I do not keep, and plans that I do not follow through with. At risk of doing so again, I am going to post a list this year of a few things that I would like to get done.

• Develop a web application. It doesn’t need to be as grand as some ideas that I’ve had previously, but something that does something useful, is well designed, and works.
• Complete a  rough draft of my non-fiction book. I’ve already begun a good deal of my research, and have started an outline, so as long as I keep myself on task, I should be able to do a good amount of work. I’m setting the high goal of completing a first draft, in an attempt to stay motivated.
• Work on becoming more prolific with my blogging. If I resuscitate the websites that I’ve been working on, I’ll have 3-4 to update, and it would be useful to do so on a regular basis, especially if I’m trying to get more readers for them.

There are several other things that I intend on working on, but I don’t want to overload myself any more than I already am. Judging on how I overextend my actual reserves of motivation, I don’t want to do so quite as much. Maybe by making some proclamations here, some people can help keep me going.

Hermitage of St. Bernadine Library, New South Wales. Photo by Christopher John

I recently read an old New Yorker article, concerning what life would be like if most people stopped reading. I have aspirations of making writing become a career path in some respect, or at least continue on with it personally if I have an audience. I read constantly, in all forms and formats, and often wish that I made even more time to read than I currently do, or could go through more books quicker. I feel guilty if I pick up my 3DS or the television remote in lieu of a book, or if I open Twitter on my iPad instead of iBooks.

Still, I am aware that I read more than the average individual. I keep a large backlog of fiction and nonfiction books by my desk to work through, often working on several at a time depending on my mood. I have several novels on my iPad that I’m working on, and if I get bored of that for a bit, I pull up the newspaper, Flipboard for its articles, or the invaluable Instapaper app (seriously, if you ever read anything online and have a compatible device, buy this app). According to studies quoted in that article, and from my personal observations, the purchase of books has declined, as has their consumption, and reading comprehension in general is moving in a downward trend. The author foresees a return of reading for pleasure or personal information to a niche group, this time not due to a higher rank or elite status, but due to general disinterest and apathy.

Is this a bad thing? As someone who enjoys reading myself, and who would like to find paying customers for things that I write, which would become increasingly difficult with a smaller customer base, I cringe at the thought. Still, different strokes and all, so I can’t take this personally. I just wonder if there will be other side effects that we can’t envision now, or how people will change in general without the more consistent use of the internal conversations that books provide. Watching a movie or television show, even based on a book, is not the same as living that story in your own head, mapping your experiences onto it and letting it shape you as you are shaping it to yourself. Creative thinking results in many of our greatest achievements, and I worry: will a decline in literacy correlate to a decline in creativity?

‘The Tree of Life’ is a slow burn. It is a film for the patient, and for their patience, they are rewarded.

The film had been on my radar for about a year, and life, as well as only the single art theater in town playing it for a limited run, kept me from seeing it until now. I’ve never particularly paid attention to Terrence Malick before, and did not go into this movie with the history of his work that many critics have. I did watch ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ again recently, and I think that it helped to prime me for the visuals in the film. Indeed, Douglas Trumbull returned to do visual effects for this film, as well as Peter and Chris Parks, who had previously worked on ‘The Fountain’, one of my favorite films that is also concerned with a different tree of life. Their work and Malick’s eye for a great shot made Every scene a bit of eye candy, whether Jessica Chastain tending to her children, or a volcanic eruption on early Earth.

‘Tree’ is about the universe, all encompassing. Beginning with the news of a son’s deaths, the movie jumps back through the creation of the Earth and life on the planet, including the rise of dinosaurs and their fall to a meteor strike. We are then returned to one of the other sons re-visitation of childhood, in Waco, Texas in the 1950′s. There is love and beauty on behalf of his mother, raising him and two other brothers with a tender hand. There is hardness also, from the firm embraces of his father, a stiffly paternal Brad Pitt. He is conflicted both at home and at work. He loves his sons but cannot express it in the same way as his wife. During a scene where he is teaching his sons to fight you can feel the tension, the play punching bordering on real fighting. His struggles in reconciling his love of music with his need to earn a living for his family fuel his inner turmoil, which most of us can attest to being stressors in our dealings with others in our own lives. A good portion of this pain resonated with me personally, which I imagine is what many of the positive reviewers of the film felt as well.

I’m not going to say that I fully felt Malick’s entire vision. I do agree with some of the detractors that there is a bit of pretension in the movie, and not enough of the substance is stated outright” I gathered it to be about the contention and duality of the different ways of being, whether tender or firm. When young Jack confides that he feels that he has become more his father than mother, it puts his scenes as an adult making a living as an architect into perspective, as memories of his childhood flood him while at work. Sean Penn, as an adult Jack, had far too little screen time, and I was yearning to feel more of how his childhood shaped him as a person. While ostensibly being about the formation and destruction of the planet, the film is really his story, and one that was entirely human.

Emotional, overwrought, beautiful and melancholy; ‘The Tree of Life’ is one of those films that can have tremendous impact on an individual, but if they do not feel it, then it can falloff and fall flat.

With every trip to DC, I find something new to take in. There is so much to see in the city, it is difficult to do a fair amount of any of it in any one trip. Even over five full days as we took over Thanksgiving weekend, plenty of important sights and sites have been left out. We visited a mass of memorials and monuments and museums, saw an assortment of art, partook in eclectic eateries, and visited a sampling of shops. A Jonathan Coulton and They Might Be Giants concert was part of our vacation, as well as a two hour drive to Charlotesville, VA to visit Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello. A few trips per day and plenty of relaxation time kept the trip from becoming stressful, and we were never at a lack of things to do. The weather was generally pleasant as well, and overall I would rate it as our best trip to the nation’s capitol.