If you and I have taken a picture together in the last four to six weeks, you should be furious with me for not making them available online yet. I’d like to tell you that I was just waiting for all the New Year and Inauguration hype to die down so that people would be able to properly enjoy me and my friends in all of our photogenic-ness…but anyone who knows me knows that I’m just being lazy. Anyone who doesn’t know me, though, is probably still under the impression that I’m a decent and likeable guy. Suckers.
For those of you keeping score at home, I have officially lived in LA for a little over a year now. When I first moved out here, my primary goals were to obtain a decent job; live in a nice part of town close to the beach; reunite with old friends and make new ones; and cure cancer. With some minimal resistance along the way, I have done all of that pretty successfully (still working on that last one). The key to constant self-perfection is remembering to set new goals as you achieve the old ones. So that said, my short-term goal for the new year is to become lame. This is kind of an odd goal for me since I’m already so predisposed to lameness (I’m skinny, dorky, uncoordinated, etc.) and I’ve spent roughly 24.75 years of my 25-year life pretending to be cool and not lame. However, it’s time to cowboy up and embrace my inner lameness in order to achieve my ultimate goal of advancing in the entertainment industry.
A quick aside: Mark Cuban is a major major douche. If you don’t know who Mark Cuban is, he’s the billionaire part-owner and resident douche of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. And aside from being living proof that money can’t buy happiness (or tact, or love, or brains, or fashion sense, or likability, or a decent haircut, or an NBA championship), he is perhaps the second biggest douche associated with professional sports (behind only OJ Simpson). Also, he’s a douche. And now you know.
Now back to the most important topic: me. What exactly do I mean when I say that I will be striving to become lame? And how will being lame help me with my goals? Well let me break it down for you by telling you some of the things I’ll be doing in order to achieve my version of lameness:
-Go Out Less
I love LA, and there are a million things to do in this city at any given time (except when it rains), however, by going out less and staying in more often I can maximize the amount of time I have for important things like sleep and networking; while minimizing the amount of money I spend on unnecessary things such as extra gas, alcohol, cover charges, etc. Which leads me to my next step…
-Drink Less/Detox
Drinking’s awesome, you guys (if you’re over 21, of course). And even though I drink responsibly and within my limits, drinking even less (or not at all for a limited time) will help me save money that I can spend on headshots, union dues, and the like. Also, I’m trying to get into some kind of decent shape, and I’ve yet to see a fitness program that includes doing shots of tequila before working out. So unless it’s some kind of incredibly worthy occasion, I won’t be consuming anything really bad for me (as I deem it: coffee, alcohol, fast food, and anything else detrimental) until I break my detox in March to go back to Vegas with some friends for Spring Break (and yes, apparently you can still take a spring break when you’ve been graduated for almost three years).
-Read More
It’s a fact: reading sharpens the mind, widens the vocabulary, and repels cool LA girls. With a sharper mind, wider vocab, and fewer girls to distract me, who knows what I could accomplish?
-Shop Less
As much as I hate to admit it…I probably have enough stuff for the moment. I recently stocked up on some things I needed to replace, but really I can do without a PS3 and new shoes and all the other stuff that usually catches my eye.
-Write More
There’s a lot of things I like to write (scripts, comedy bits, blog posts, love letters to Rachel Bilson), and hopefully my newly cultivated free time will allow me to focus on doing more of that writing. That’s a bonus to you, too, since you clearly love my writing enough to make it this far down into a relatively boring post. Don’t worry, I love you, too.
-Work More
Whether it’s working extra shifts at work, or working as an extra on film sets, or whatever other odd jobs God drops in my lap, the fact of the matter is that money is necessary evil (SAG membership doesn’t come cheap) and accumulating it while I have the time to is probably a good idea.
-Athlete More
Football with coworkers, basketball with roommates, snowboarding with chums from all over…the Greeks knew eons ago that athletic activity was a great release and one of the essential components to becoming a dialectic thinker. I’ve never let lack of athletic ability keep from participating before, and it certainly won’t stop me now. My main goals are to get decent at the major board sports this year (surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding).
…There are other things I’m forgetting on that list, no doubt, but you get the idea. Basically, for the first time in my life that I can remember, the social aspect of my life is taking a backseat to the responsible aspect. How long for? I’m not sure yet. Right now I’m thinking about six months of being lame ought to be enough to build a good foundation for the future, but really it’s going to go on for as long as I think I need the extra focus on my first love: performance. Hopefully around six months from now I’ll be able to start swapping out some lame things for slightly cooler things like more legit auditions, classes and networking, and maybe even shooting some of my own stuff just for the hell of it. All I really know for sure is that for the moment, this feels like the right thing to do. Don’t worry, I’ll still go out and see movies with people, I’ll still plan cross-country trips to visit family and friends (I hear NYC in the spring is awesome), and I’ll still make completely inappropriate comments at completely inappropriate times. And regardless of how other things shake down, I’ll still keep you posted with real stories from my life and fictional stories from the wine cellar of my imagination here in Blogland.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get a full night’s sleep so I can write you something entertaining after I work all weekend.
Cheers,
Dustin
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1 comment:
If you're really gonna stop drinking, you may want to cease the use of "Cheers" as your sign-off. Especially since I use it as well :::::: (If not better)
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