Thursday, May 23, 2013

A new financial fuck myself experiment - financial fuck myself get in good shape and become a bad ass martial artist along the way experiment...

First off, my latest short film that got into the Toronto Indy Film Fest - CHASING ROADRUNNER is now available to watch at chingofcomedy.com  Please watch it if you haven’t had the chance to.  Okay...

The Financial fuck myself experiment has been pretty successful at getting my lazy ass writing again.  Now in attempt to further better myself, I will be extending this fuck myself experiment to my own personal health and fitness...and hopefully becoming a bad ass martial artist along the way.  Yes, I know I haven’t updated my writing experiment blog in a while, I’ll do that soon. 

It’s bad when I try to flex my muscle in attempt to intimidate someone, and then all I get is laughter.  People would say, “It’s almost as if you don’t have any muscles at all.”  I then try to tell people that I have stealthy muscles and that taking a punch from me is like getting hit by an Obama drone attack, but no one seems to believe me.    

Some people who see me, a 6’2” guy, but incredibly scrawny think I’m completely wasting my height by...ya know, being scrawny and boney as fuck.  The #1 most clichéd question I get from people who marvel at my height is whether I play basketball and when I tell them I don’t, they look so disappointed, as if I’m wasting this height of mine.  But, I’m not wasting my height.  Hey guys, you know what’s awesome about being tall? Being able to see over your short midget asses!!  You know what’s a way more fun sport?  Curling!  No jokes, curling is actually a lot of fun.  And badminton...that’s a sport where I use my height to my advantage. 

Anyways...

There’s a reason you never see me posting shirtless pictures of myself.  It’s not because it’s a douchey thing to do.  It’s because I really have no upper body to show off.  I don’t even have a six pack which is kind of sad for how skinny I am.  Don’t get me wrong, if I had a 6 pack, I would totally post shirtless pictures every day.  If I had photoshop skills, I’d totally photoshop a 6 pack on myself...but sadly, my photoshop skills are as bad as my upper body.

My good friend Richard Fung (The sensei of Fung Fu) decided a year ago he needed to get in good shape.  So, he posted a picture of his somewhat flabby self, then went to the gym steadily 4 days a week.  He posted a picture of himself a year later, and the dude is fucking ripped.  He had a goal, he committed, and the results speak for themselves.      

I’m not going to make that commitment.  4 days a week lifting weights is just too much.  Why?  Because weight lifting fucking sucks!  Even lighting weights once a week is too much.  It’s about as fun as loading heavy shit into a cube van.  Seriously, weight lifting is just lots of pain, and a shitload of boredom to go along with the pain, might I add a shitload of insecurity as I watch other people in the gym lifting like 10 times what I’m lifting.  The only time I would be interested to return to a weight room would be if I showed up with like 4 other guys on Halloween to the YMCA, and we were all dressed up like a different member of the village people. I asked the YMCA employees if that was ever done and he said no.

Back on topic...So, what do I plan to do to get in shape?  Kickboxing class once a week.  It’s a start.  Maybe if I get in better shape, it’ll be more than that, but baby steps is what I need.

For those of you that have never attended, kickboxing class is the absolute most intense work out imaginable.  I used to think a punk rock moshpit was the most excessively sweat inducing activity, but it’s actually nothing in comparison to a kickboxing class.  When you go into the change room, the floor is like a skating rink of other people’s sweat, and after one kickboxing class, there’s not a single muscle in the body that isn’t in pain.  I remember having to roll out of bed, because I couldn’t sit up.  While I don’t have weights at my disposal, I figure the excessive amount of push ups, sit ups, and planking should suffice.  If I can commit to this class once a week for at least a year, I think I’ll be in pretty good shape. 

Even better, I’ll hopefully become somewhat decent at kickboxing.  I’ve always had a fascination for the martial arts.   Despite the fact that kickboxing class is 90 minutes of suffering and pain, it’s at least kind of fun.  I’ve given up on weights, but I think I can stick to this.

Now, I’ve accepted that laziness has been written into my DNA, so I need to get around it.  I now have a new financial fuck myself plan.  A good friend of mine...let’s call him Dick Siemens (this is a real name. I ain’t makin this shit up).  He has a really big debt with another friend of mine...let’s call him Jakov Mehboob (okay, this name isn’t real, but there really is someone out there named Jakov, and Mehboob is a much more common name than you’d expect).  I absolutely must attend one kickboxing class a week.   Mr. Siemens will text me every Sunday night to find out if I went to kickboxing class or not.  If the answer is no, I have to give $25 to Jakov to which he will castrate the $25 off Dick’s debt. 

Now, there are exemptions to this.  If I didn’t make it to kickboxing class, but I did have a really intense work out in another form (ie: playing squash with my older brother...trust me, this is tiring as fuck!!, or I went to a punk rock show with a really rockin moshpit), then that’s good enough substitute workout that I don’t have to pay.  Or I get sick, it’s probably not a good idea to go to class and risk infecting other people.  Or if I’m on vacation, but that one’s obvious. 


But otherwise, I better get my lazy ass into kickboxing class once a week , or my wallet will take even more vicious rapings.  I’m not going to blog every week about this like I do with the writing experiment, but I’ll keep a score card for those of you that want to know how I’m doing.  This deal takes affect this week and will go for the rest of 2013.  Who knows what the future has in store?  Maybe a year from now, you’ll see a shitload of shirtless pics with my bad ass 6 pack flooding the internet.  

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Financial Fuck myself writing experiment part 7 - I'm back to playing 500 ball!


THE EXPERIMENT IN A NUTSHELL
I went through a year and a half of writing absolutely nothing. That shit’s fucked up. I had to unfuck the situation by making threats to financially fuck myself in an attempt to fuck the laziness out of... myself...with a big rusty pole or a splintery post (anyone know what song I'm quoting there?). Each week I set a goal, I will write X amount of pages on a feature, or sitcom, webseries, whatever. If I don’t reach my goal, my wallet takes a vicious raping.


RECAP Of the most recent writing challenge:
I needed to write a short film by April 30th or I'd have to buy 5 grams of we....soil and give it to my friend for free. To this date, my financially threatening muse has gotten 12 grams of free soil. Anyways, I had a very crazy week-end (unrelated note, The Croods 3D is one motherfucking trippy ass movie!), and on Monday when she came by to pick stuff up, I gave her a recap of my crazy weekend, then I told her it would really help me if instead of the 11:59 PM deadline on Tuesday, she let me work all night on Tuesday if necessary and the script would be in her inbox early on Wednesday morning. She said no problem, just get it done. 
So, Tuesday rolled around, after getting back from work, I had maybe written up to page 3 in the previous days. I ate, watched The Daily show, took a half hour nap and then took my uhh...creative medicine which is taken by uhh...inhaling smoke.
1 A.M is when I started, and at 6 a.m I had finally finished the short script. It's currently 22 pages long, which I definitely want to make shorter, but for now I left all the jokes in. Result: I won, motherfuckers!
Is it good? I think it turned out pretty good. It's a romantic comedy, and a satire about today's cellphone culture. Most interesting thing that happened; I originally planned for a low key ending, but at 4 a.m, a completely different ending came to my brain. An ending that may be totally ridiculous, but far more memorable than my original ending. I still don't know if this ending that came to my head in a state of exhaustion is good. I'll wait to hear back.
So, with this short script complete...perhaps, I might be shooting a new short film this summer. Though the original concept of the script would have been much easier to shoot. The new stuff I added in will cost more $$$$ and more headaches too. Who knows?
So, that now makes me 3 for 6 in this writing experiment.
THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE:
 
I'm going with the same challenge I gave to myself two weeks ago, but failed. Write 2 blogs within 10 days: My blog about the worst & most over-rated movies of 2012, and a Roger Ebert blog...something I should have done much earlier, but something's better than nothing. The deadline is April 12th, 11:59 PM. Once again, here's an opportunity for an easy $25. Email me your paypal email address, and I'll send $25 to 2 people. How I pick who gets paid? I don't know. It'll be random.
 
Main reason I'm not going going to write anything new outside of blogging is because I'll take some time to go through my sitcom pilot and my short film and re-write and revise. Re-writes are equally as important as the writing itself. 
 
Recap of the previous writing challenges:
Experiment 5 - The due date was 420, due time: 4:20 PM. An HQ of weed...I mean soil, was on the line.
I needed to either write episode 2 of my sitcom, a short film (I always leave a short film as an option, as it’s been a while since I’ve directed a short), or 3 episodes of my webseries “The Human Project”.
RESULT – I LOST
Yeah, I texted my friend on 420 asking for an extension to Sunday night and I’d add in an extra 1.5 grams if I lost.Then on Sunday, I woke up hung over as shit from the big 5 year college reunion party the night before.I tried to write, but man...writing while hungover is just...not...good!It’s like trying to take a shit after someone slipped a constipation pill into your drink.So, I’m now 2 for 5. I’m currently playing 400 ball, which is like...Blue Jays bad.I need to win the next challenge to be better than the baseball the blue jays are playing.
EXPERIMENT 4 - I was supposed to write 2 blogs...one where I recap the most over-rated and worst movies of 2012, and a blog about Roger Ebert. As you can see, those blogs have not been posted, so I “lost” the challenge. If I had lost, I was going to paypal $25 to two people who posted theirpaypal email address or messaged me with it. Well...

I LOST...SORT OF.
A bunch of people did read my blog, but no one bothered to leave me their paypal address, therefore I didn’t lose any money after all. So ha! Take that bitches! You lost an opportunity for an easy $25. Now I still do want to write those blogs, but I’ll save it for another time.
What can I say? I had a busy week-end, I got lazy, and I noticed that no one bothered to send me their paypal address...laziness got the best of me again. So sort of thank you for not posting your paypal addresses as it would have sucked to lose $50, but for next time...post your paypal address. Tough love is what I need to not be lazy. It looks like I have a drunken week-end ahead of me, so that $50 I didn’t lose will likely end up getting me drunk.


Experiment 3: I had to either write the pilot to my sitcom (22 pages) or a short film and it’s due on April 1, 11:59 PM. If I lost, I’d have to give my friend a free HQ of weed.


THE RESULT: I WON!! This was pretty cool, because this sitcom pilot is something I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I’ve taken quite a few stabs at it and was never happy with what I wrote; I kept re-starting. I would often get to about 6 pages, re-read it, hate it, and delete it and start from the beginning.


It was nice to finally write it all out, flesh out all the characters, and write in a few teases at where certain storylines and characters would go with future episodes. It was about 25 pages I wrote. I think I’m happy with the characters I’ve come up with, and I like to think it’s pretty funny stuff. I perhaps did recycle a few jokes from older scripts, but for the most part all the jokes were new, and just pulled out of my ass while I was writing. I've gotten the script notes today, and I'll re-visit and re-write the script in maybe a week. Here's the blog for financial fuck myself part 3:




EXPERIMENT 2 - SHIT GETS EPIC – GOAL WRITES 10 PAGES OF THE EPIC SCRIPT... (a chain script concept between 3 writers, of the script being passed back and forth to each other to do whatever the fuck we want to it). Here's the link to the blog of part 2:
http://thechingofcomedy.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-financial-fuck-myself-writing.html


WHAT WAS AT STAKE? A deal with 2 people. $40 on the line for Warren, and a permanent ban on myself to ever try to force my musical taste on Scott again. That means no more showing upto his house and being like, “Yo, this emo band is awesome!! Here’s their cd”
And him being like...SIGH..."okay, I guess I’ll listen to it."
RESULT – I WON, MOTHERFUCKERS! Scott, I’ll burn a CD of The Menzingers next time I see you. They’re fucking awesome! They’re like a punk rock version of the Tragically Hip.


EXPERIMENT 1 – WRITE 30 PAGES OF A FEATURE. I LOST (came up short. I wrote 20 pages), and had to buy a quarter ounce of weed and give it to a friend of mine for free. Here's the link to the original blog:


CURRENT TALLY:


3 wins
3 losses