My official vacation started mid week, making my way to the Big Apple.  The film is done, the script is not quite ‘done’ but in a draft I could live with; my normal distractions weren’t around.  It was more than a little scary to me to acknowledge how much stress I put on myself on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.  Enjoy doesn’t cover how good last weekend was; it’s just not a strong enough word.  I spent the past few days with old and new friends from my time at the University of Kansas.  Being reminded of things I genuinely forgot I did, cracking up about how trifling I was as a teenager.  I wouldn’t do anything differently, I have a lot of good memories from that time in my life.  College was…college.  At the same time…

What drove this particular New York trip to happen at this particular time was my desire to go to the opera.  You read that right.  The operas we saw, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, were both on my radar in the KU days, because their music influences some of my favorite films (I’ll let you do the research on which films if you’re interested).  Outside of the financial impossibility of it though, let’s be honest, going to the opera just wasn’t ‘cool’ for someone of my background to even have an interest in.  It probably still isn’t!  But for me personally, college was the ‘figure things out/be cool’ phase; now (even in the city/industry I’ve chosen), I’ve lost a lot of the desire to be cool.  Now, it’s very important to me to be the best version of ‘Malik Aziz’ I can be, but a lot of the peripheral stuff doesn’t interest me anymore.  Anyway, I asked the people who I thought would be down to go to the opera (they all said yes), and away we went. 

The opera was better than expected, and we still had a day to do something else.  What ended up happening was (literally) a day long discussion about relationships, past, present and future.  Honestly, I don’t go into ‘hypothetical/what if’ mode as often as I used to.  (Hopefully) I’ve learned from my mistakes, and continue to learn from the women in my life, in whatever direction our relationships are meant to take.  Frankly my approach to my love life is similar to my approach to my career: don’t take the negative experiences too personally, stay optimistic and persistent when necessary, be ready for anything, and take advantage when a good ‘opportunity’ is staring you in the face.  And the rest will work itself out.

The definition of a life experience trip.  This whole week has been great for putting perspective back into my life.  Pushing the reset button if you will.  Not counting various family functions, I haven’t taken a true vacation in almost three years.  So maybe I need to ‘get out more.’