It’s not easy being green.

One of the biggest reasons anyone is on social media is to show off.  People show off their kids, their pets, their food, their homes, cars, new shoes, new girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever object they have happen to currently have sex with.  In some ways it’s a remnant of being a kid who upon getting a new toy runs out to show the other kids on the block. If we were lucky enough to have some sort of middle class upbringings we all did it.  And we continue to do so as adults, only our block is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and probably some other platform or two by now at this rate.   

So there we are on Facebook and such showing off. It’s awesome when we can do it, but it can turn one a gloriously puke tinted shade of envious green towards others when we can’t .  Happens to me all the time. I see plenty of my friends and contemporaries with posts about buying a house, or travels to exotic places, or whatever other shiny pretty things that we for some reason expect to have when we hit certain ages in life.  And that green shade creeps in on me as I am at a certain age in life and feel far way from making that post about buying a house, or traveling to an exotic place, not to mention those shiny pretty things.   But that shade of green fades fairly quickly.  After all, comparing one’s life to someone else’s on such a materialistic slant is as big a waste of time and energy as showing a card trick to a house cat.  

As an indie filmmaker struggling with my career, on the other hand, holy asscrackers does that shade of green blast off like a death ray straight from an Oscar statue’s golden butthole into my very soul when I see the success others appear to have in their careers.  I get that success is a relative thing, but still.  The green shades of envy cloud the mind. They make me question everything – Why am I doing this? What have I gotten myself into?  How come that piece of shit got funded and made and my amazing project is barely funded at all? I could go on and on.  I imagine I’m not the only film maker with such feelings when turned green.

Trying to break into the film industry (and let’s not ever kid ourselves, it IS an industry) and becoming at least successful enough to make a living out of it is tricky.  Well, unless you are either born into it or already have that whole money thing taken care of.  Turning green with envy is a growing pain of it all. The only cure for it that I have is to just get back to the project(s) I am working on.  I have BIG ones to finish and smaller ones as well. It sucks when I turn green, because it sure as shit isn’t easy, just ask Kermit the Frog when he sings that song. But at the end of the day, it must be shoved aside and dropped like the bucket of horse shit that it is.  All that green envy won’t get my documentary made, or a new draft of a script done, or one of the short films that have been lingering in post finished.