Struggling to be myself…

I watched I ♥ Huckabees the other day. Its one of the oddest movies I’ve seen in a while. In the vein of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Gattaca to name a few. Essentially its a movie where the filmmakers set out not to tell a story but to explore a philosophical idea. In this case the plot is subservient to the philosophy. (This is a much better alternative than the plot being subservient to special effects, you only get crappy action or sci-fi movies that way.)

This one asks multiple questions, one of them is: “How am I not myself?”

If you’re going to be a literalist, you’re always yourself. But being a literalist isn’t very interesting, and well is a bit limiting.

But its an interesting question. One I realized I’ve been working at for a while, and even attempted to pin down in such ominous and/or bland sounding documents as Personal Marketing and Personal Statements of Purpose. I also listened to an interview on NPR with Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman . The part that is relevant here occurs about in about six minutes into the interview. Those documents are not me. Many times I wish they were me, but they’re not. I try to get there, and I think many of us try to get to our ideal but we have to compromise with the actual world.

I’ve been kicking around going by the name of Cliff for a while. While that is still me (Cliff is derived from my middle name) part of it is a motivation to make a bit of a fresher start. (not a fresh start, I’m not looking to be birthed again)

Part of this is I look back on all of the records which comprise part of the history of “Nicholas Barnard” and well many of them don’t look so great.

• I’ven’t left a job on good terms in about four years. (Excluding the temporary position that came to an end.) Its not to say that I wasn’t a good employee, but when I left it wasn’t pretty and left me in an “unrehirable status.”
• School-wise I’m on college number four, and its going just grand. (sarcasm)
• Theatrically, I’ve done a bunch of good things, but I’ve also incinerated my bridges with nuclear bombs.
• Dating, I won’t touch.
• Writing/Programming, they’re both littered with loads of false starts, and no finished products.

This isn’t to say I’ven’t done some very good things, and I know the people who know me well think highly of me, which counts more than the failures I see. To be fair to myself I do have positive attributes to each of the above complaints about myself, its just I remember the negatives more strongly than the positives.

For balance here’s the list of things I’m proud of:

• Nick’s Place (i.e. My website) I’ve managed to put a huge amount about myself here, plus keep the dang thing organized and sane to manage. (Previous websites I’ve worked on spiraled out of control into crazy insane works that ended up driving me nuts, and became very hard to manage and update.)
• My friendships. It sounds like an odd thing to be proud of, but I’m actually pretty picky about who I surround myself with and who I call a friend.
• My values and my ability to strive towards them. I’m the first to admit that I do not fully live upto all of them, but the direction I tend to move in is one of improving compliance with my values. (No, they’re not “family values” or “liberal values” or some other similarly crazy system of prepackage values that people don’t fully understand or even agree with, although they profess them.)
• Levity. I’m not the one to make a good joke, but I can keep things funny and light, even if its others laughing at how bad my jokes are, I know they’re bad and I’m also laughing at my joke’s Grade ZZ level.

Okay but back to the point of Cliff. I’m wanting to make a break, and steer away from the crap I’ve done in the past.

So to start off I’m going to be using the pseudonym Cliff on my new novel that I’m writing with National Novel Writing Month I have no idea at the moment what exactly its going to be about, but I’d expect it to be more in the vein of I ♥ Huckabees or the like. So I start writing it sometime around November 1.

Yeah, Cliff is getting off to a great start…