Ray mentioned how the game changes throughout life. So I'm taking that cue and running with it for a moment.

Being sick is my best example of game changing. Of the game changing. I was last in the hospital 3 February's ago. The real illness, the real blech, was almost 4 years ago now. 4 years the end of this month.

I don't count the days, the months, the years like I used to. I have stopped worrying about complications for the most part. But I still feel guilty, as I always have, when I bring up my emotions, my behavior as being influenced by the experience. By almost dying, by spending so much time wasting away, the month spent without eating, without getting out of a bed, without an undrugged mind. It's heady shit, just typing these things is making my eyes wince. I usually coat it all, dismiss it all. And when my parents say, 'You almost died,' I wave my hand dismissivly and say, 'But I didn't. And I wasn't going to.' But the truth is that I almost did, I easily could have and, in some parallel Earth, I probably did. It's easy to dismiss it because there wasn't a single 'oh shit' moment where everything was make or break. This was far more subtle, spread not into seconds or minutes or hours or even days, but into weeks. My body almost killed me. If my large intestine had been a little weaker, if the surgery was a few days later, if my doctors had been a little less talented…

But this is the what-if game. It isn't why I'm writing this.

There are a lot of emotions wrapped up in this experience. It opened my eyes to feelings and passions that resonate with me still today — an acute knowledge that I will be gone one day. That I will not be able to learn from things 200 years from now. That I will never see the future.

This is all I get.

And, though it is sometimes selfish, I have to do every single thing I can while I'm here. I have to find the balance between the 15 year old me, the 24 one, the 31 year old and the 72 year old. This is difficult. Not in the 'life is hard' way. But in the way that is is difficult to explain how prolonged illness with the threat of death looming changes one's outlook. There are many times that I simply shrug, I simply clam up because the person, the situation, can't relate to this viewpoint.

But that's a negative. The positive is that being sick has changed my life, changed everything about me. Game changing doesn't frighten me, as it does other people I know. I'm not scared of rules changing, of new circumstances, of change. I've been there, I've been through it and I've walked out the other side — in many ways, better for it. And in the worse ways — well, it can always be worse, right? "You take the good, you take the bad…" (That's right. I'm doling out life advice using "The Fact of Life" theme song.)

Worse is just a state of mind. Just as there is no ceiling to the glories of life, there is no floor either.

We can't be scared of the future. We can't look at change as a negative, as a stress maker, as a fear. Life is about change. And we are made of stronger stuff than to succumb to paralyzation.

My 32nd birthday approaches. Not quite a month off and people are starting to ask me how I am celebrating it. I don't have an answer. I am getting old. I can't figure out where things have gone.

(There is a beautiful girl on the train as I write this. She looks almost like Charlotte from Sex in the City, but more real and foreign. I keep wondering what she is listening to on her iPod. I'm still trying to get into the new Portishead album. "Machine Gun," the first single, is sadly the best song on the album.)

Right. So I'm old. I've spent a lot of time in the past months thinking heavily about happiness. About success. How these things are measured, accumulated, ranked. Needed.

I've been gathering all my creative works for months, trying to gather them in ways that could be useful in the future. I've been trying to figure out what I've done, what I want to do. And how best to do it.

And you know what? These are hard questions. Not hard questions like "Hey, how do we want to architect this filesystem?" or "What does the db schema look like for an arbitrary tree structure where any node can exist in an infinite number of other trees at the same time?"

No, those are silly examples of "daytime" problems. I'm talking about the nighttime problems. The ones that sometimes keep me up, the ones that move me quickly on some days and slowly on others.

The nighttime problems revolve around happiness. About being alive, about finding a niche, about defining success.

It is arguable that everything I do is connected to this set of topics, indeed everything we all do is connected to our own happiness in some way. But over the next while, I want to break it down into discreet ideas and topics. I want to poke at it some and really try to find some nuggets. I want to deconstruct (or attempt to) most every bit of my life. Here.

There will still be links and silliness and stuff. But this is as good a place as any to also talk about the things that have been keeping me awake, the things that scare me, the things that delight me.

I have been motivated by fear for quite some time. Roxy is doing a brilliant job at forcing me to open up more. But I shouldn't and can't be dependent on her. And I've slowly moved from writing about my personal life as it has gotten more…personal.

But, as with everything, there is a balance. So I'm going to find it.

I dropped off last week, so I'll play catch-up tomorrow.

This is an old animation that Meg and I did way back in the day. Her concept and something that was done very quickly. Nonetheless, it still makes me laugh.

raged bull from tripp millican on Vimeo.

So a recent project has been to move most everything I have on video (VHS and DV) over to true digital bits — which explains these weekly posts of video projects. This one was shot in 2003, when I just had a camera with me and decided to shoot as I drove down Sunset in the rain.

No narrative, nothing but lights and darkness. The soundtrack is "Weak Become Heroes" by the Streets. It's actually what the original soundtrack was on the video, but since there are a couple of cuts, I just threw the track over the original sound. It's also apropos because I was still rocking the hell out of that album then; this was shot at the end of my love affair with it. (And by love affair, I mean I probably listened to it once or twice a week at least.)

I didn't do a ton of LA specific shooting while I lived there; this is one of the few pieces I have that puts me right back in the heart of that city. And yeah, sometimes I really miss it down there.

l.a. in the rain from tripp millican on Vimeo.

Ah, the last of the movies from my 519 class. This one is notable for several reasons:
1. it stars my freshman roommate, Richard Bloom, who lives in LA, working as an assistant and art dept coordinator. He did acting as an undergrad, so it was fun to re-connect with this little piece, 8 years after we lived together.
2. it is certainly the video I think of when I think of the art I made over these years. Weird, static, unbalanced, closeup shots. A surreal, improvised story that is larger than what we end up seeing in the film.
3. I reshot parts of it as the final project for the class, so two version exist. This is the re-edit, which is marginally better than the original.

phone calls from the dead from tripp millican on Vimeo.

I'm on CalTrain, bouncing home after another day working. The daily commute, which has become more welcome to me than it has any right to be.

My brow is furrowed and I, as usual, there is something just outside my grasp, some piece of rope or a stray bit of light that I just can't quite see.

I alluded the other day to how full my life seems to be. This is a true statement; at the time, however, it was one I expected to have changed for me. It has not changed and right now, I am trying to decide what I have done to make my life feel more full than it was a few weeks or months ago.

The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter. It is the results that matter.

I do know that I have had relationship complications as I have grappled with the notion of Roxy going to grad school. It is the elephant in the room — not only the choice of schools, but all that comes with it. Moving. Budgets. Relationship. And, worst of all, the very real possibility that we could be on opposite coasts. Again.

All of this has led me on a whirlwind — ups and downs, lies and truths told to myself over and over. And all of these things have created an avalanche of self-reflection and re-centering that seems to come knocking a little louder during emotional crisis's.

Work, too, has been an amalgam of stress and reward. Last week was on the far side of the stress see-saw. My code was suddenly being hit by many people, but without the safety net of any true testing. One tweak would cause another bug and, after a few days, the intricacies of my code were starting to annoy me.

But much like my relationship, work has balanced out and this week has me once again whupping up on my code base and reminding it that I am in charge.

Now if I can catch up on my sleep, I think I might be onto something here. Regardless, I am very much alive and kicking, even as I wait for the inevitable change we all know is coming.

So I missed posting some creative work last week. Totally my bad — it was all queued up and ready to go and my Friday-Monday got a bit sidetracked. More on that later.

To make up for it, I'm throwing up last week's movie plus this week's one at the same time. These are two more of the 4 from that USC class that 'stubble' came out of.

'Block' was the third film shot and I will be the firs to admit that it doesn't totally jibe the way I wanted it to. It fits, logically, into the work I was producing at the time — surreal with static shots, alternating between extreme close-ups and large voids of negative space. Narratively, it evokes a dream, though I wish it felt a bit more coherent.

block from tripp millican on Vimeo.

The fourth movie is "The Makeout Queen." I had the title long before I had the film and, again, as has been the case in many of more ambitious stories, the execution fell short of the original script. In this case, it turned out to be far too difficult to find random people who were willing to kiss a stranger. Valerie also had a zit on her chin — I hadn't noticed and we seriously had to crit this in class. The ending rubbed my teacher the wrong way, but I think it was because he was hoping for more. (People thought I had put the credits in the middle of the movie and were all ready for 3 minutes more of some torrid affair. I much preferred to tease it, which turned out to disappoint in anyway.)

As was also the case by then, all the dialog is improvised. With both of these films — anything said onscreen is made up, anything said off-screen was scripted.

the makeout queen from tripp millican on Vimeo.