Distressingly, though many an Instagram graphic told me not to worry about accomplishing tasks during a global pandemic, I stayed true to my brand and refused. In fact, I worried HARDER. Like a CHAMP. My results haven’t overly changed since my mid-year check in, but I’m a completionist. Let’s do it!
WELL WELL WELL. 30 years ago, and also somehow eight months ago, I wrote a list of New Years Resolutions for a 12 months bursting with potential, job security, and creative freedom. So… how are we doing?
So we’ve got 2 outright failures (not my fault) (well, mostly), 4 in-progress, and 4 successes. For a year like this, that’s not bad at all. Are they arbitrary benchmarks? Yes, absolutely. Do they help? I mean, does anything? Hope you’re well.
I’m going to attempt to deconstruct two things today: the fact that I, Bri Castellini, am engaged to be married, and recent discoveries in therapy. Because it’s not a Bri’s Own World blog if it isn’t multitasking!
Thing the first: I am engaged! To my partner of 7 1/2 years! I’m very excited, even though marriage is functionally meaningless in modern society aside from some archaic tax laws. I don’t care, though. I wanted to be married, and now I will be, to the person in the world I love and treasure the most.
Thing the second: I have discovered that I have an intensely hard time being sincere, everywhere but particularly in person, and becoming engaged has brought a lot of that to the surface because I realized I was dreading having to tell people in a way that genuinely conveyed my excitement without attempting to minimize the vulnerability through jokes and glibness. Even the title of this blog is glib!
Thing the third: the featured image on this post is a TIE fighter pancake my FIANCÉ and I made on our first date.
Thing the fourth: black lives matter, defund & demilitarize the police. This post will live on as evergreen content but it would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge the day in which it is originally being posted. Educate yourself and donate what you can to relief efforts and bail funds to support the incredibly brave frontline revolutionaries. For education, I recommend this very thorough resource, and this one, as well as this video and this other video.
I will delete any comment about thing the fourth that is anything but 100% supportive. I am not interested in your both sides nonsense today or any day.
Continue reading “Fiancéd”
Happy New Year, what’re your arbitrary passing of time goals?
Not bad! Especially given the absolute insanity that was this year. I mean, just look at the travel tally! 2019 was not, by any means, a good year, but it was certainly an interesting one. Here’s to accountability.
So it’s safe to say that this year didn’t go to plan at all. In January 2019 I was fresh-faced and insistent that my motto was going to be “Boundaries and Balance.” I was going to take a step back from production and producing, I was going to take a real vacation or two, and by god, I was going to write. I had a day job at Stareable as their Community Director (starting year 3 of my employment there), a new side hustle in teaching once a week at my old grad program, and was looking forward to a less hectic year ahead.
By February, that was completely out the window. It’s still a little too soon to talk about the rough stuff of the year, some of which you can probably guess based on context clues and my new years resolutions posts (my 2019 final tally post goes up in a few days), but I would be lying to act as though my year wasn’t creatively and personally fulfilling. So in order, as best I can, here are the cool things that happened: Continue reading “Cool 2019 Things In Chronological Order”
Since college I’ve had a folder on my laptop called “Be Professional,” where I keep the various versions of my resume, my professional headshots (a thing I never thought I’d need), my business card InDesign file, and my cover letter templates. Since childhood, I’ve had a pretty clear understanding of what my professional path would be. It was gonna be great- I’d go to a small liberal arts college somewhere in Oregon or Washington, graduate with a creative writing degree, write novels, and work as a barista until I was published.
It’s misleading to say that was always the plan, I guess. I had a brief flirtation with law school after my first year doing speech and debate in high school, and I dabbled with graphic design because I was an early (and young) adopter of Photoshop and rudimentary web design. In both cases the plan was still to be a published novelist (and maybe YouTuber- John Green I’m comin’ for ya), but I knew I needed a survival job that paid well in the meantime.
I didn’t really have ambitions in the film realm, and I certainly never imagined myself working for a series of exciting media start ups where I’d use skills I’ve cultivated as hobbies for literally two decades, but here we are. In an attempt to explain to my family what exactly the fuck I do for work, and in an attempt to showcase how the strangest things end up being professionally important, I wanted to go through the steps that brought me to where I am now. Unpack my career path as it were.
TL;DR? I am currently employed as the Film Community Manager for Seed&Spark, a film crowdfunding platform, and as an adjunct professor for two MFA programs- one in Brooklyn where I teach a class on web series production, and one in LA that’s low residency (meaning it’s 95% remote) where I am the thesis advisor for four students writing a web series for their capstone script.
Continue reading “Be Professional”
Not as bad as I thought! The resolutions that require a week over week lifestyle change I’m giving myself a break on because I’m human and I’ve still got a few months of the year left to change these habits, and calling them a failure in July seems unnecessary.Â
Been a while! I foresee a handful of New Years Resolutions not being fulfilled this year, because this year has been… unexpected.
Last year was insane for me, one of the busiest years I’ve ever had, one of the most creatively rewarding, and one that I felt very strongly about not repeating right away. “2019 will hopefully be defined by boundaries and balance,” I stated in a blog at the end of last year. I even made my work Slack status “Boundaries and Balance 2k19” for a while, because branding is important.
And then 2019 actually started and I remembered that I’m me and that’s not how things tend to go in my life.
Continue reading “2019, Noticed”