While my obsession gently weeps...

Obsessions*, I believe, stem from some deep, dark place of need: failures, desires, dissatisfactions, or possibly just from pure boredom. I won't go into my latest one, but suffice to say it stems from a physical ache I get in my chest when I think about not having pursued my intended career in film.

I know life is full of woulda-shoulda-couldas, and we should, in the inimitable words of Jim Wright, just "suck it up buttercup" and move on. I also fully realize that some of the good things in my life, like my precious son, would never have happened if I'd done what I was supposed to have done.

Why didn't I? Hmm, well, like so many other things, deep-seated fear of failure is strong with this one. I did actually have some valid reasons, though. My daughter was still in high school and I wasn't about to yank her roots up and go off into uncertainty (even more uncertainty than moving across country to go to UT in the first place). I got moved around so much as a kid (17 places in 17 years..yow) that I had vowed to never do that to her. I had no real set of skills other than my wits and really 30 years ago, UT's RTF department really just prepared you to be a production assistant, albeit a highly educated one.

1985-almost done with film school

For years I shoved it all in the back of the closet and didn't think about it. Myriad films have been made since then, even just counting well-known US/Brit flicks; I'd get a bit of "wow" that would have been fun to work on and I'd get a bit nostalgic, or whatever you'd call it when you really wish you'd spent your life doing something other than what you are/did. But in the wake of the three Hobbit movies I've been watching a lot of the production vlogs and perhaps I shouldn't torture myself like that, but at the same time they're fascinating as all hell to my movie-making-inclined mind. They painfully remind me of what I really wanted want to be doing, instead of being a university paper schlepper for the past 23 years. This was only supposed to be a job, someplace to be until I found something else. But lazy-ass me, I never looked. So in the end it's only my laziness and complacency to blame.

If, in some alternate version of this universe, someone were to offer me a position (costume-room sweeper? tea-making-assistant?) on a production, I'd snap it up so fast the door would come off its hinges. The caveat is I'd have to be able to take my cat with me. Other than that *POOF* I'd be outta here.  Realistic me knows nothing like that would ever happen. Fantasy me indulges.

*One only has to look at my Pinterest lately to figure out fairly quickly what that obsession is.