I.

Someone close to me once told me that I'm nothing like my blog. She mentioned it in a barbed manner, said it accusingly, and it struck me personally since I've been putting a lot of myself into the blogs I've had for over a decade. But she was right, mostly. I never really thought about it much until she made that point, and it's stuck with me ever since.

This blog is the idealistic me- you don't see the pettiness, the insecurity, the sheer volume of bad jokes I tell and poor decisions I make on a day to day basis. But what you do see on here is what I'd like to be, or at least try really hard to be every day. I try to be a raconteur of sorts- I like telling the tale and hearing others tell theirs. I don't have the funds to travel and explore the world as much as I'd like, so my life has resorted to making my own adventures in the environment around me.

A friend once asked what inspired me and I rattled off a list of things that, now when I look back at it, seemed kind of generic and canned. I remember not liking the response at the time, but I sent it to her anyway.

I thought I'd take another attempt at that in this post.

So I have a lot of ideas in my head.

A lot.

I keep a text file on my computer of long term and short term plans.

Where do these ideas come from? Well, basically, I spend a lot of time looking up random things. Searching out creative people. Seeing what else is out there. You look at these ideas and try to make them your own. Most ideas will get cut on the editing room floor, but as long as you keep adding to it, you'll end up with something right eventually. The more you're exposed to different things, the more of a basis you will have to execute it when that one idea comes.

Every time I get a new idea, it goes a little something like this:

Imagine a lotto system. Each new idea is a new ball. I have a bad habit of telling people, "I'm planning on doing this", and dropping that new idea ball among all the other idea balls in the swirling lotto machine in my head. For instance, I've had the idea in my head of recording my mom cooking so that I could learn to cook Vietnamese food better, and also to lock in that memory of my mom. I've had this idea for well over a year now, but things happened along the way and with my parents' house being remodeled, there's no functional kitchen at the moment. But I'm almost getting there.

So each day comes and a new drawing is held. When the idea balls come out, well, it could be any of the ideas I've had in my head for a long time. There are idea balls with mundane daily chores all mixed in with idea balls with long term goals. So when I come up with an intended idea, it may take a while- months, years to get it started. Or it may come up tomorrow. Sometimes, I think my friends think I talk a lot of big ideas, but I don't execute them. But that idea ball is always floating in my head- its number will eventually be drawn.

So something like "I'm going to take up tennis"- I told people that like 2 months ago, but it will be done. I bought new tennis balls, scrounged up my old racket and everything and it's been sitting in my room. I finally got tennis pointers last week and this week (if it finally stops raining), I'll be pounding the wall at the courts. I don't forget these things. But I'm always working on something, scheming something new.

I had a discussion about passion with my friend on a trip to Austin. It kills me when I see people who want something, but don't do anything about it. Instead, they complain of boredom and stagnancy. I know tons of people who are talented, but never make an effort or do anything about it. Passion without drive or determination is such a waste. I've always told myself I've wanted to learn how to cook more elaborate dishes. I set the bar at trying to learn one new dish a week (this is week 4 now- the dishes have been okay, but I'm slowly learning). I think most people are just afraid of the start- they want to start out awesome and don't want to put much effort into being awesome. Is it that they're afraid to fail? I've failed at so many things in life, but I keep throwing myself back at it. Jokes will fall flat, ideas won't come out right in execution, I will screw up relationships with people. But eventually, hopefully, something sticks.

So that's just it. Surround yourself with creative things in your life. Surround yourself with people you can learn from. Set small goals for yourself that you can meet daily so you have some rewards along the way to the big one. Hard work always beats talent when talent has no hard work behind it. And, finally, know that you are going to fail. Probably many times. But you will eventually win. You will have an awesome career, you will meet that amazing person, you will have all those amazing adventures you wanted. Life is exactly what you make of it and if you're going to have to lay down in the bed you make, try to eventually make it with those 1000 thread count sheets and that nice down comforter you've always wanted instead of just laying there complaining about how the sheets you're in right now are uncomfortable (and you know what, maybe for now, the sheets you've got ain't so bad after all).

I've been screwing up a lot of things in this past year of my life. But I know I've done a lot of things right too. I think things are slowly, finally headed in the right direction.

The BigBro came into town this weekend from Dallas to celebrate his birthday. The LilBro drove in from Austin and we all went out to dinner on Saturday night. Because all the siblings live in different cities, we're only all together a handful of times a year- birthdays and major holidays. We haven't taken a family photo in a long time. My dad was wearing a t-shirt that said "Shazizam" on it before the photo was taken- I don't know why he changed his shirt.

Around 2, 3 AM I made the LilBro be my guinea pig. I would make jumping shots and stop motion all the live long day if it weren't so ridiculously hard to take one's own photograph. This was much easier.

That's all, folks!

If you kick your feet hard enough, you can swim through the air.

And I wrote and directed the plot for this stop motion. It's horrible.

Paranormal Activity. from Andrew Nguyen on Vimeo.

I don't like not being able to do things. Unless it required sheer physical strength or dexterity, I think I can pretty much do anything if I commit to doing it. And so I'll usually throw myself at something challenging until I at least get some sort of average result out of it. I was born in the year of the monkey, and apparently we monkeys have a tendency to be easily frustrated, so my persistence butts heads with frustration fairly regularly. As I've gotten older, I obviously know that there are some things I will not be able to accomplish no matter how hard I try, so I just remove myself from the equation.

But that's not the point of this post.

This post is about what I can do.

This post is about my idiotic first attempt at a stop motion video.

I've been meaning to do stop motion for quite some time (and before, my only option was through generating ridiculously large gifs). So on Saturday, while the entire household was gone, I set up some studio lights around the living room, turned down the a/c briefly (those studio lights run hot at 500 watts each) and set up my camera.

Then, holding an ice skating pose for some 10, 15 minutes straight as I slowly inched (well, more like, hopped slightly forward) across the room. You wouldn't believe the sheer pain of the inch-at-a-time hop forward, holding your arms straight out, bent forward, and balancing on one leg. Sustained. My leg began to burn as lactic acid built up. I was dripping with sweat. But in the end, I was quite pleased with the stupid result. This is only the start.

Wood Skating. from Andrew Nguyen on Vimeo.

My first real attempt at time lapse photography. On a Friday at around 6:30 PM, I plopped down on the island with the traffic light on the corner of Westheimer and Post Oak Blvd. I set up my camera to take a shot every 4 seconds, mounted it on the tripod, and it let it fire away. I brought a small mat and sat down cross-legged and read Predictably Irrational for 2 hours.

I figured someone would recognize me as it's a pretty busy intersection and about half an hour into the shoot, my friend Jane drove by yelling at me out the passenger side. A lady rolled down her car window at a red light and asked what I was shooting. The buses passed by regularly, throwing dust and debris from the side of the road into my eyes. A cyclist asked me what I was shooting with as he waited for the light to change. An older man stopped to chat with me, showing me the camera he had just gotten from Amazon that very day and how he wanted to check his new super zoom out around the area.

As the sun set, I tried to adjust the settings to compensate for the approaching darkness- I think it only works if you're taking a picture every few minutes, not every 4 seconds.

I got home and merged all the photos into this video- it's your standard time lapse. It's not bad, but my technique could still use some work with the sunset and all. If I were feeling more ambitious, I may just sit out at the park near downtown one day and time lapse the sunset over downtown Houston.

Time Lapse Galleria from Andrew Nguyen on Vimeo.

Directed by M Night Shyamalan.

The pile of books by my night stand is as stunted as my adult development.

During grad school, I picked up a bunch of books meant for future reading- popular books at the time. Instead of bluebonnet and caldecott awards books, I was now in the demographic for the new york times bestsellers, pulitzers, and oprah book club books.

I love reading, though I do it in spurts, sporadically. Grad school got in the way, then pursuits in photography as well as the corporate world. The books fell by the wayside for things requiring less time to read- science magazines, Esquire, online articles. But I'd read a book here and there every once in a while.

While I'm ahead of my friends who don't read at all, I'm far behind my friends who read regularly. I generally read books to their finish, but there are two which I just can't seem to get more than a few pages into. #1 is The Da Vinci Code, purchased back in 2005. I read two, maybe three chapters and was so annoyed at the writing style (5 page chapters? A cliff hanger at the end of EVERY chapter? Really?!) that I had to give it up. Then The Lovely Bones, which I wanted to like, but I stopped after a few chapters because the writing was too elementary (which, told from the perspective of a child, I suppose I can't blame).

One of my friends looked at my reading backlog and noted, "You read a lot of women's books." Well, that's mainly because almost all my book recommendations come from girls. With the exception of my friend Patrick, I don't have any guy friends who read. And Patrick reads purely non-fiction while I like reading a broad spectrum of subjects. You have to have balance- non-fiction to unravel the mysteries of the world with economics, psychology, politics, and fiction to unravel the mysteries of the interactions between people. Non-fiction and fiction are like meats and veggies- sure you can only have one or the other, but I don't think a diet of solely one or the other is healthy.

Patrick and I had batted around the idea of starting a book club for a while. It started out as a joke, but then I finally made a facebook group for it and invited a few friends. It was meant to spur discussion, to select a different genre/topic each month and have books associated with it.

My pile of books on my night stand has been halved, finally, and with "new" books added including- The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

And then there's the inaugural book of our book of the month club- Predictably Irrational. I had recommended it after watching his two TedTalks, one of which is this.

Sometimes at night I will fall asleep while reading, waking up to realize that my hand is firmly clamped down on the cover of the book beside me, as though even in my unconsciousness, I sought to keep the stories inside from escaping. I wish I could do the same with the fleeting thoughts in my head.