This last month or two I have been fighting all of this, internally, more like spiritually, to the point that my mental and physical facilities want to help take up the fight, the holidays certainly didn’t help matters, but I refused to let them make me be lost completely, which is a possibility most of the time in regards to the holiday season. I know now, that I want out, I want to walk away, I want to start anew and start getting interested in things again, mainly because I am bored, at was at the brink of breaking, and whatever survival instinct I had left finally kicked in and didn’t allow that to happen.

I am taking an interest up in my writing again, already starting to form some new ideas, wanting to submit material to some upcoming contests, wanting to push for something of mine to get published by the end of the year, whether I succeed there or not, I at least want to try.

I want to start caring about politics again, and I am slowly starting to. After Obama got elected I pretty much quit caring, thinking everything was finally going to start moving in a direction it needed to, then everything else happened, the apathy kicked in, and then I pushed it and everything else away. I want healthcare! I want others to have good, affordable healthcare! I want this bill, however not perfect it is, to pass! I want to take up the fight again and this time get more involved than I have in the past and actually start getting more into local politics.

I want to start reading again, I want to start watching more movies and going over them critically again, talking to others about them, and having other intelligent conversations more and more. I want to do well at work and move up in my current job. I want to get my finances at a manageable level, and am already making steady progress there. I want to start looking forward to going back to school in the fall, and most important, which I have already mentioned, I want to start writing again!

All in all I want to break free from the escapism that I immersed myself into over these last two months, the world I allowed myself to be shackled to and ignore everything else that was more important and mattered to me at one time. It’’s not that I don’t love that other world, I do, I made it my own on some level, but I need to walk away for awhile, come back and baby it, give it time when I have free time to spare for it, and not immerse myself into it again.

I think I am making the right steps in doing that, and I am already thinking of the next steps to take and looking forward to taking them. Above all I look forward to healing completely, getting my life back on the road it was before I veered off, and immersing myself back into the public I missed, the friends and family I pushed away that I enjoyed.

I want to get back to the mostly anti-social guy I once was, instead of being the guy that totally cut himself off from everyone. I don’t like that guy, in fact I hate him and never want to see him again, and will do my damnedest to not meet up with him ever again.

I’m healing now, and I want to continue to heal and never stop…

It is very difficult to get back into the swing of things and come up with something new to write about. I do want to finish some projects that I have started, but I want to warm up first before I dive too deeply into those, and there are quite a bit of unfinished projects that I have going on. I’ve got an idea for something folksy and short that I hope to post soon to my main site, so look for it soon hopefully.

I’ve been in a rather deep and dark hole over the past 4-5 months, if not longer if you count the smaller web presence I had before that, and I am starting to slowly claw my way out of it and find my way again, along with it I have a mental image in my head on where I want to be in the next six months and a goals/checklist to follow along with that I am slowly going through and hope to complete most by the end of the year and before my next birthday next year, but one day/step at a time I guess.

I will say it was good to take a break, but I wish I had recognized what was going on earlier while I took that break and retreated some. I have my roommate, which is also a good friend of mine, in thanking for helping to snap me out of it, and despite how much I want to be on my own again, I am quite glad he was around to help me when I needed it.

For now I am just glad to be back in the swing of things and look forward to completing some goals and moving forward and not let a little failure get me down and make me retreat again like it did this past time. That hole was far too dark and lonely, and I don’t want to be there ever again.

I am already putting it to great use, but the plan was to a) get a more modern computer and turn the old one, which I have named Gandhi, into an iTunes only machine, b) have something I can hog until my roommate gets his computer up and running again since I had the only working machine in the apartment, and c) complementing (b) even more by allowing me to have something that enables me to be on when I want and spend as much time as I want online without feeling guilty of being a computer hog.

Plus, now more than ever, I can finally settle down and focus on writing more, which was a very frustrating experience when I tried to do this on Gandhi while also trying to simultaneously creating a stimulating environment that allows me to write more. I can have my music going on Gandhi, or even stream it to my new laptop, which I am calling Buddha, and write all at that same time, and I feel I am just more focused when I have music going on in the background as I write (TV and other things are too distracting for me).

So all in all I am a pretty happy camper write now, and hopefully you’ll be seeing some more updates on both of my websites from this point further.

As always, thanks for your continued patronage.

I will fully admit that I am pretty left of center on some major issues, and in our simplistic society that is the U.S. of A. considered a Socialist, even though the majority of the population of my country probably doesn’t even recognize what that really means. However, that does not mean that I am trapped within my own little wind tunnel that is one’s ideology and am not without compromise on some issues.

One specific example, and it also just happens to be what the current discussion is about with a friend of mine and myself, is our current state of gun laws. For the most part, I would be considered an anti-gun advocate, especially since I agree with the group of constitutional lawyers that think the 2nd amendment doesn’t give private ownership rights of firearms and am for the D.C. ban on handguns. However, in spite of all of this, I am not without compromise. I would forgo what I think the 2nd amendment really says if we had some sort of national conceal and carry law as well as some mandatory training that went into the process of obtaining a permit to own a gun. My main reasons for having this compromise is because guns have become a deep part of our society and have been for so long that it’s pretty unreasonable to think that we can get away with an all out ban on all guns just because some of us view the second amendment a different way.

There are more examples I could get into, but I wanted to keep this as a short post, but feel free to comment if you would like me to expand my thoughts on this further. I just think it’s important, that despite ideological leanings, that we are able to step out of ourselves and find some compromise that benefits all sides. Some want to do this willingly, some will only do this if they get everything they want, or at least the majority of everything they want, then still call it compromise (think of the latest attempt of Obama and the Congressional Democrats in trying to get some Republicans to sign off on the stimulus bill, especially when it came to the House), and there are still even some that refuse to compromise at all.

I’m all against bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship, which is really another matter altogether, but I think compromise, on some level is key to getting things done and making some progress in life.

Starting with the new box set that I purchased, Carnivale. Right now I only have season one, but I do plan to own both. Carnivale for me touches on my affinity for great spiritual stories with religious philosophical tones. This series was no exception since it took aspects of religious literature and philosophy and melded it with an American historical era. It’s a shame that only two seasons came out of it and even more frustrating that it ended with, in my opinion, what is one of the largest cliff hangers in television history.

The two films I added are Unbreakable and What Dreams May Come.

Unbreakable to me is seen as the best comic book movie of all time, at least from the list of the ones I have seen, without actually making a real comic book into a movie, like Marvel and DC have done with some of the comics from their lines. It’s also in my opinion the best M. Night Shyamalan movie to date, and I really do hope that he goes back to working on the sequels like he had originally planned. On top of this I also think it is in my top ten list of best directed movies of all time as well.

What Dreams May Come might not be a hollywood gem, at least not from a story perspective, but you might as well get used to the fact that my collection isn’t all about hollywood gems. For me it hit me on the spiritual level, at a time when I was rethinking some of my personal philosophical and spiritual leanings and helped me to research more and redefine how I have truly believed. Since that time my beliefs have changed, as any good evolving, thinking, human should constantly do, but the way the film touched me remains even to this day. Plus, you have to admit that it is one stunning visual piece, however hollow the story may seem.

Stay tuned because more are going to follow soon, as well as some much needed reviews for these movies in my collection written on nathanpguest.info.

Again, thanks for reading.

With it will hopefully come more writing. I’ve had some time to get some notes together and get some new ideas generated, so expect some updates to both here and on the writing side of my blog nathanpguest.info.

Until then please be patient as I am slowly catching up to being offline for a good two months or so.

Thanks for continuing to read.

Doing it this way has several positives, one of which is that my film collection will be limited to a much smaller size if I were to just try and buy every film I found to be good, which is what I was doing before. I’ve also decided that it will not contain a lot of TV show sets like I was doing before as well when I was collecting Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and at some point wanted to start adding Babylon 5 to my collection. Besides, with things like Netflix and their ability to watch movies on my TV (once I get to that capability), and borrowing films from the library or renting from other video stores, it makes it very easy to just focus on what really grabs me and inspires me on some creative level since I can always just rent films that I find good from various sources.

To start my collection off with a bang, I decided to begin it with some of Chaplin’s works, so I purchased The Chaplin Collection, Vol. 2, which contains City Lights, The Circus, The Kid, A King in New York, A Woman of Paris, Monsieur Verdoux, The Chaplin Revue, and a documentary titled Charlie – The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin. I’ve already seen most of the movies from this film set, of which my favorites are City Lights, The Kid, and Monsieur Verdoux, and am looking forward to checking the rest out as time allows. These are very good box sets and I do recommend them if you plan on getting a few of Chaplin’s movies. I will eventually have all his works including all volumes of this particular collection, but one piece at a time for now. Also be sure to check out my writer’s journal for some movie reviews of some of the films on this set, and I will especially at least do one for Monsieur Verdoux since I think it is one of his better films, yet least known.

The other film I bought was the 15th Anniversary Edition of Chaplin which stars Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin and is Sir Richard Attenborough’s biographical film of the life and times of Charles Chaplin. I had originally owned an older version of the film, but saw that they had an anniversary edition out after I reset my DVD collection and decided to get it again since I watch it all the time and really enjoy the film, plus I just can’t get enough of Charlie Chaplin and Robert Downey Jr. definitely brings him to life very brilliantly in this film.

So those are the only two things I have for my DVD collection for now and I probably won’t add anything else for a few months, but will update the status of my collection as I add new pieces to it. There are quite a few silent film sets out there that I want and I’ve already got a handful of films that I would like to add to it as well.

You can check out what I plan to add to the collection in the future by checking out my film wishlist off of Amazon. I’ll be updating it on a regular basis and will be removing things as they are added to the collection obviously, so keep a look out from time to time if you are interested.

Just a few additions:

• Added a Movies page that will display some of my RSS feeds from my Netflix account. Currently the page is only displaying my At Home, Queue, and Recommendations feeds. I plan to add a My Reviews feed once I get some reviews up on Netflix within the next few days. Just a word of note though, there is something very weird going on with the Queue feed in that it sometime displays and when it doesn’t it gives a PHP error, but then will work again after a few refreshes. I’ve had the code checked and all is well there, it might just be something wonky with the actual feed from Netflix and nothing on my site. If you have any suggestions on how to repair this issue please feel free to let me know, I would appreciate it. Thanks to Eric VanBergen of PalmerforPresident for helping me with his Netflix-X2 plugin for wordpress, he really steered me in the right direction.
• Added a FriendFeed page which displays all the information you could possibly need on connecting up with me through friendfeed and the various services I use that are linked to my friendfreed account. I might tweak the color scheme a little bit on the images within that page later, but I think it works for now.
• Added links to be displayed with all posts so that you can share things a lot easier through friendfeed.
• Added an image of my Chess.com info within the sidebar, feel free to play me a game of chess sometime if you are up to it.

That’s all the site updates for right now. I plan to add more links on a day by day basis and expect to see a few more posts before the week is out.

Thanks for your continued support!