525,600 minutes indeed

i've been at my job just over a year, and in that time i've produced a video that took me exactly nine months from pre-production through its print-to-tape date. and because i work at an educational company that deals with birth & parenting, it obviously was the worst irony in the world to have my video spend exactly nine months in gestation before delivery. but for the first time in my life, i'm being asked to learn things slowly instead of in warp-speed increments, and it's an interesting--albeit mind-numbingly frustrating-- process.

in high school, mrs. niccore showed "the miracle of life" to my awkward sophomore class, because that's what biology teachers do. out of the 30 students packed into that 22-seat class, two of us almost fainted and had to be removed from the video: justin carter, who claimed he had low blood sugar that day, and myself. ten years later, i'm paying my rent from contraction how-tos and diaper comparisons. ahh, irony. it's taken me a long, long time to not have a literally physical reaction to our subject material. birth, estrogen, pregnancy, babies, umbilical cords, lamaze breathing -- still very terrifying and, for the most part, really unpleasant. but once i was able to look at pregnancy as a biological triumph and families as social groups of mammals-- voila. very, very, very interesting.

everyone knows we're mammals, part of the animal kingdom graced with a little hindrance called "intelligence". but it took a year of watching it on G5s, field monitors, camera LCDs and CD-ROMs for it to really sink in-- we *are* animals. every waking moment of our lives is driven by animal instincts, whether it's cerebral or not. a mother watching her infant can apathetically carry on a cell phone conversation, but if you watch her body, she hovers... her fingers twitch at the slightest movements of her son... she shields his shiny bald head from the harsh sun. i love watching people as mammals, which is why i'm loving every page of my library book-- territory, exile,reproduction, alpha behavior... we do it. each and every one of us. and we truly aren't so different from a humpback whale, barn swallow or silverback gorilla.

fetal development is something that i don't think most of us think much about until we're 30lbs heavier, paying a mortgage and reading "what to expect when you're expecting." but it is one of the most beautiful, heart-stopping things a person can learn about. 23 chromosomes from two parents meet in the darkness, shake hands, make a little home for themselves, and 9 months later you have a 7lb person floating in complete darkness. a few microscopic cells have created an organism with a brain, a chamber-supported heart, veins, eyes, pores, taste buds and fingerprints. quiet, introspective adults frequently start out as quiet, slow-moving babies -- many insecure rock stars began as agitated, kicking fetuses. our personalities, our biological rhythms, our need for attention and ability to calm ourselves down, our preference for the human voice and even the sound of music begin in complete darkness, before we have ever even met ourselves. i used to joke that babies are alien pods, but a fetus has an uncanny strength. across all ages, races, socioeconomic status and countries, pregnant women come in dead last in the statistic of suicide rates. an upper west side socialite might abuse herself through her pregnancy; eat daintily, over-exercise and skimp on her calories, but her body is paying a toll far higher than that of her baby, who's getting almost a majority of her nutrients. and minutes-- seconds-- after giving birth, a woman's body is flooded with hormones that dull the clear memory of the intensity of her pain.
the purpose of the fetus, by all accounts, is to survive. and the human being is designed to reproduce.

today i contemplated all of this during a staff meeting, which was attended by people who have lunch-nazi'd, boulder-liberal-ed, rank-pulled through my year, but at the end of the day are devout professionals to a field i'm interested in. i thought about how a fetus develops in 9 months, and to be cheesy, i considered how i've developed over the past year. i came to boulder without the intention to unpack my bags-- i applied to an incredible documentary company on the universal studios set in los angeles and a production fast-lane job in kentucky. i looked at job / grad school possibilities in new york, chicago, maine and seattle.

i didn't expect that i'd end up in boulder, but life doesn't always go the way you expect, and i found myself working as an unpaid intern at a production company, serving coffee 50 hours a week at borders and driving to denver late at night to edit a documentary about two young men traveling across the country on a segway. i started working a 4th job as a freelance assistant for an educational company, and after a month they asked me to join them as an on-staff producer's assistant. within three months i had my own desk, a business card that said "producer" and my own video, and a year later, i'm printing a 3-volume set of health videos, finishing all of the marketing writing for three departments, and publishing a 50 page booklet that will be sold to hospitals.
i have learned so much from this job-- everything from editing to light kits to interviewing skills to how to be a producer to how to move from "gofer" to "head of writing" overnight. i've learned about diplomacy, business etiquette, professional consultants and letting things drop when your boss wants it his way.

it's such a human addiction to get comfortable when you've finally found a place to sink into. much like my early fetal developments, i've made complete chaos into a sanctuary-- i found an apartment i loved, a family i'd been away from for four years, a job that held lots of potential and a small group of people who felt like home.

but when a place can no longer nurture your needs-- when you've gotten too big for your surroundings or when a stress in the environment threatens your well-being, it becomes necessary to leave. today, in that meeting, i realized that maybe it's time for me to leave. my body is telling me something -- and it's probably a simple message. i'm very stressed out. i'm battling a series of elements that i can't control and may have long-lasting effects on my life. i keep getting sick the way i used to get sick in the fall of my freshman year, when i started shedding pounds at an unnatural rate and felt achy and dizzy like i was getting the flu all the time. food feels like a constant chore, and i can't get enough music at night or pen-tapping during the busy work day.

tomorrow i'll settle in to what will probably be the last video i make with this company. it will go quickly, merge slightly with the holidays, and leave me one credit happier on my resume to go out and explore the world. i don't want to leave this apartment that i love, my family, my favorite late-night drives, the margaritas at mama citas or the comfort of my friends. but maybe it's time. it's time to go out and get inspired the way i need to be, creatively challenged the way i'm designed to be, and emotionally nurtured the way the human race needs to be. i'm nervous, and i'm not sure.
but my last thought in that meeting was-- maybe the human fetus isn't ready. maybe it's warm, safe and comfortable, and birth is the most painful, terrifying moment of your entire life.
and maybe that's what's supposed to bring you out of the darkness and into your conscious self.