Burnt out

As expected, the whirlwind of the last week of shooting melded into wrap, and before I knew it I was sitting in the living room of my apartment in Brooklyn. The TV blared Nascar in the background as I sat in a daze next to roommates Robin and Ryan.

“How was the shoot?” Robin’s voice echoed.

You know that feeling when you have so many things to say that you don’t know where to begin? The familiarity of the situation makes it seem like no time has passed at all, and at the same time so much time has passed that it is as if you don’t know how to start the story, and even if you did, you aren’t sure how long it will be or how entertaining.

So there I sat in silence, my mind feeling like a hard drive spinning too fast. It was the first time in a month that nothing loomed in the immediate distance. My phone was not about to ring and I had no pending crises to deal with.

“It was good…,” I heard myself stammer, “pretty hard at times, but I think it’ll be a good movie.” My canned response.

And then silence. Robin, waiting for more, Ryan’s eyes glued to the television, and me searching for an anecdote, finding nothing.

“What’s new around here?” I said, finally.

“New bar around the corner,” said Robin.

“Sweet,” I said.

I spent the next day wandering around the city. I saw a few movies, juggled friends, had pierogies at Veselka, and spent an hour in Union Square watching the skateboarders and passers-by, doing just about anything I could think of to unwind my brain.

There was a strange dichotomy of life on the shoot. In one sense, I was stressed and busy. But in another sense, I never left the campus and life was perhaps the simplest it has been in a long time.

Back in New York, everything seemed to move too fast. I felt out of place and startled. Talking to friends was strange because I couldn’t quite find the words to describe how I was feeling. I was burnt out and tired. I needed some time alone, away from everything.

It was almost a welcoming feeling to know that I was back for just long enough to pay my bills and repack my suitcase before departing on my next adventure.

I am leaving for five weeks to edit “Beautiful Darling,” the documentary that I’ve been working on for the past several months, in seclusion. The Sundance deadline looms in the distance and the director and I are moving up to a small town in upstate New York called Cherry Valley. Our hope is that the fresh air and change of pace will make it easier to put the film together.

For me, it will be a much needed working vacation.

And in a flash, New York is a skyline growing smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror of the car. I sit in the front passenger seat, my computer and equipment squeezed into the back and 40 dumplings from the dumpling house in the Lower East Side between my knees, a snack and distant reminder of the city.

We listen to someone else’s mix CDs left in the car, an interesting thing to eavesdrop to a selection of songs put together by an anonymous person. My finger rests on the skip button, shuffling through.

I doze through the traffic and watch the hills become mountains and the air becomes fresh as we make our way toward Albany.

I find Cherry Valley quaintly charming, growing up in Narrowsburg, and interesting to see from a different perspective. Here, I am the New York City outsider, the unfamiliar face in a sea of recognizable people. I don’t run into anyone at the grocery store or the post office. Here, I am able to be anonymous.

An interviewee in the documentary that we begin working on today, after taking a much-needed weekend off, speaks of Andy Warhol’s idea that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. “Perhaps,” he says, “in the future, people won’t want to be famous; they’ll pay dearly for their anonymity.”

And perhaps, more than that, like most of the lessons I’m learning, it’s all about balance.