12 Months

12 months.  365 days.  1 year.  However you put it, today I celebrate the one year anniversary of starting this blog.  I remember starting this as if it were only yesterday.  After seeing the 'Evil Dead' remake in theaters, I had gotten a spark to finally start up my own blog to post movie reviews.  Sure I had thought about doing it several times beforehand but I was never really all that serious about it.  So I had decided that since I had a busy week of school ahead of me that I would start it up the following Saturday.

But a few days after I had decided all that my personal life threw a wrench into things as my relationship came to a sudden end.  Nothing ever really went wrong in it's duration and we never really fought.  We just had a discussion and towards the tail end of the discussion she made the decision to end things.  Her reasons for ending it were indeed legitimate reasons for why things probably weren't going to work out.  Even with legitimate reasons it was still heart breaking and devastating.  With this happening, it was hard to focus on anything.  I had a short story to write for one class, an essay exam to write up for another class, a huge semester paper to write up for another class (and read a book to write this paper), work my usual shifts at the dining hall, and still go to class.  It was an incredibly tough week emotionally and mentally.  But I decided to still go ahead with my plans to start up my blog, and I decided to start things off with a review of the Jackie Robinson biopic '42'. 

Now I hadn't planned originally planned on seeing it.  I had only seen a few commercials for it and it looked okay, just nothing too special.  Before our breakup, my ex girlfriend had asked if I was planning on seeing '42' and said that it looked like something that I would go see.  Like I said, I hadn't originally planned on seeing it, but after hearing that the movie received relatively good reviews I decided to go see it.  I was also in need to escape for a few hours just to clear my head and take my mind off of things.  So I saw the movie, came back to my dorm room, and starting typing away at what would be the blog known as "Jake says stuff!!". 

One year later I've written 82 movie reviews and typed up picks for each week of the NFL season.  I've talked about food and even published the poem I wrote for my Creative Writing class.  I've talked about holiday movies for Halloween, Christmas, and even Valentine's Day.  I've talked about sequels that I thought absolutely sucked.  I answered 20 random questions and wrote an editorial on my thoughts about the Boston bombings.  I wrote an open letter to everyone I knew who was graduating college, something I myself would eventually do in December.  I wrote about various books I planned on reading.  I've talked about various nitpicks I've had with certain movies.  I talked a little about what I was doing for summer break last year and a little bit about my job as a camp counselor.  I even posted a whole bunch of one liner jokes and puns, many of which I had written on my dorm room door for the past several years.  I posted about movies that I had finally watched, some of which people have been surprised to hear that I hadn't seen before.  I'd usually keep you guys updated with what posts were coming up when and if I was going to change or add things.  Sometimes I've even thrown in a little bit of movie news in their.  As you can tell, I primarily write about movies but I'll post just about anything that comes to mind that I feel should be shared with you, the readers.

And my thoughts on movies and those various other subjects have churned out 115 blog posts.  An average of about 9.6 per month.  Seems a bit much, but I've never felt burnt out by it.  I've enjoyed every minute of it.  Sometimes I do get writer's block (delayed reviews for 'Noah', 'Epic', 'The Wolverine'), sometimes I just get really busy (no blog posts for the month of July last year, and only writing mini capsule reviews for the summer movies I saw...at the end of summer), but this is still something I enjoy doing.  It would be great if I actually got paid to do this, but I have nowhere near the readership that would be required for such a thing.  Who knows, maybe I could actually do this as a job one day.  Or I could just settle on a job that will at least pay the bills, especially with the first payments on student loans coming up this summer.   

Well I'm just rambling at this point.  Overall this has been a very fun creative outlet for me and I hope you have gotten at least some enjoyment reading this blog in it's first year.  I have many ideas for this second year that I would like to try.  I'll keep you posted.

-Jake