A 7AM PRODUCTIVE DAY IN MY LIFE IN NYC 🗽 finding work-life balance, cafe study date & reading

You guys don't understand how long I've been waiting for my grocery store to restock the croissant, sausage, egg, and cheese Jimmy Dean sandwiches. Because I've tried the biscuit ones, I've tried the English muffin ones, nothing compares to the croissant one. I only got two boxes, but I'm kind of wishing I just like bought the whole rack. Because it's been two months and they haven't had it. Hi guys. Many of you guys know that I am a full-time college student majoring in film screenwriting. If you didn't know, hi, now you know. But sometimes it can feel a little bit weird because I feel like productivity for me as a writing major looks really different than say other traditional majors. Normally my studying and work includes reading up on story structure, brainstorming ideas to pitch to class, watching three films so I can analyze the characters I love. And I do feel like a lot of people think that writing is something you've either got or you don't. But I truly believe that all you really need is a desire to be creative and all the other technical tools can be learned. Personally, I do think learning all those tools is the most fun part of the process. And I've been taking Benjamin Percy's class on Skillshare called Writing Suspense, How to Write Stories That Thrill in Any Genre. And it's been so helpful with the latest assignment I've been working on for school because he's basically teaching me how to create three-dimensional characters and connect my emotional plot with my narrative plot to create tension. Basically just all the great things to make my script the best it can be. But if you guys have never heard of Skillshare, they're actually the largest online learning community that offers thousands of classes taught by professionals. If you have a creative or professional skill that you want to learn but you think it's too specific and no one will ever teach it, I highly suggest checking out Skillshare because even I was surprised by the wide range and variety of classes that they offer. Literally from crocheting, notion organization, how to make money as a creator, how to edit YouTube videos. So this year, guys, it's finally time to invest in yourself and those hobbies that you're always putting on that new year's resolution by learning some new skills on Skillshare. If you guys want to get started, then check out the link in my description where the first 500 people that use my link will get a one month free trial on Skillshare. And thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and putting me on to some new skills. Good morning you guys. Today is Wednesday. Today is my other day off from school. I would like to take it back to my roots, can you say? I mean, it's not necessarily my roots, but I feel like the main thing that kind of like brought a lot of you guys to this club, to this community, like I haven't done like one of my like taking you guys into the city with me, like taking you guys into Manhattan. I feel like I have been chilling around Brooklyn and we've been like going places in Brooklyn. I just haven't been venturing out into Manhattan. It's partly because I realized yesterday, yesterday was our first like 72 degree day. It literally felt like summer, the cherry blossoms are basically in full bloom. All of the flowers blooming like it was giving summer and I just wanted to be outside and I was like, oh, I had seasonal blues. Like I don't want to say seasonal depression, but like because it wasn't that deep, like I know a lot of people like really genuinely struggle with seasonal depression, but I think I had seasonal blues. I think I just went hibernation and I feel like I kind of went mentally ghost the past five months. Like since November, really, I feel like I'm just like mentally kind of like checked out, but not in a way. No, in a way, in the sense that like, I feel like I've been running my life on autopilot. I just, I know the things that I need to do to continue existing and to not like crash out and burn my life to the ground. But that's like all I've been doing. I've just been like autopiloting my life. I haven't been like taking the steering wheel steering wheel. I don't know what pilots use. So that was my realization and I feel like autopilot came off as soon as I stepped outside in a, in a short sleeve shirt and some jeans and I was like, oh my God, it's hot. I could be wearing shorts. It's just like that little bit it takes. The sun was shining. I don't think it's going to drop again. I think it's going to be like sixties, basically all week. And then next week is just high seventies, 76, 74, 71, 72. Like we're in the spring summer mode. I do want to go into Manhattan today and just do one of my little like Manhattan days. I am still going to be productive. It's already nine o'clock. So you guys know how that goes. I want to go to a cafe, but I'm always worried about if I'm going to get a seat because I always leave so late. After that, I think like, what's the weather today? Today it's a little bit colder than yesterday. Well, a lot colder than yesterday. Yesterday, like I said, it was 72 and today it's saying the high is, the high is 61, but it's like cloudy. So the sun isn't really helping. There's not that much wind, so I don't think it's too cold. So maybe afterwards we could like go sit outside somewhere and get dressed. Obviously take off my pajamas and then we got to head out because I do, I'm always crossing my fingers that I get a good seat at this freaking cafe. If this wasn't a sign that the seasonal slump is coming to an end, I don't know what else is. I opened up YouTube on this fine, warm morning to see that Miss De'Ara Taylor has posted a 40 minute vlog. And if you're a De'Ara fan, I feel like you know, like these past four months, four to five months without a nice vlog has just been, I feel like I didn't know how hard it's been for me. I kind of just like pushed it to the back of my mind and I forgot that she, that she was gone. She was on a hiatus and now that she's back, the level of serotonin that I got from seeing the name pop up on my subscription was unreal. So I feel like we're already off to a good start guys. We're off to a good start. I'm getting my energy back. I'm getting my vibes back. I'm getting my YouTubers back. Before I even step out, I need to finish my lime water. And back into doing my lime water, as you saw from when I did my grocery haul, I don't even know if I did a haul. I got lime. When summer comes, I'm very much into the lime water, the smoothies, I don't know, there's something about it. Winter? I'm like, no. Just give me my sausage, egg, and cheese. It's time to go. Like I'm not trying to do anything crazy. I love doing my lime water when it's warmer and also it just makes me feel good. I don't necessarily know all the benefits of it and I'm pretty sure like I'm not doing it completely right because you're also supposed to add like honey and like something else to it to have all the benefits. But I just do lime, warm water, and then a little bit of like agave, which is probably not. Like I should get honey, but to get an entire bottle of honey, whatever. I wanted to go back to doing it because I'm trying to do everything I can. This time last year, my skin was like, it wasn't perfect, but it was like better. So I'm trying to like replicate like what was I doing? What was the vibes? Because I went back to my skincare routine just being very simple. I went back to everything kind of just being plain Jane. Maybe it's the eating habits. Maybe it's something else. Okay. When I first moved in, I was chugging lime water like every day and I was working out consistently. So maybe those two things really did help to clear up my skin. I'm just troubleshooting. Okay. I'm troubleshooting because I'm tired. This is the fit, but I don't, I don't know. I'm not enjoying it. This is like the middle ground that I have to do because it's not too hot to wear. Like I can just like not wear a jacket. I don't know. I don't want to wear my North face, but these like jeans are like not flattering sometimes. I have to wear my backpack, which I normally don't like doing because I feel like it just gives me no help of like trying to not look like a high schooler or realistically like my back is going to hurt. I had to decide if I should just put on this fleece thing and if that would look better. Maybe this one's better, but I think I'm just going to go with this because the other one was honestly a little bit uncomfortable. When it out, I'll just go with this and it just won't be a good fit. I don't know. Good fits coming later. Okay. We're slowly getting out of the slump. All right, but we're still kind of in that outfit slump. So just give me time. Once I finally got done eating that wildly over expensive chicken sandwich, which actually wasn't bad, but I just didn't enjoy the fact that it was so expensive, but it was finally time to get started with my screenwriting assignment. Basically my assignment for this week was to finally get started writing the actual script because beforehand for the past few months, we've just been coming up with ideas, fine tuning our ideas, kind of like sharing our synopsis of our feature length film to the class and like making tweaks. And then we've been writing essentially like our outlines. And now we're starting off writing our first 15 pages of our script. Essentially this is like a feature length script writing class, but we're not going to actually finish the feature length scripts because that's normally like a hundred pages, you know, like 60 plus pages. And to be honest, I was really excited to get started writing the actual script and like get moving. But I didn't realize how rusty I would be because I haven't written in like script format in so long. So I was trying to get in the groove. I was trying to like set the tone with my Spotify playlist. I was like switching between like Renee rap to like hosier to see what vibe fit. None of the vibes were fitting for like my writing session. I still made some progress though. I wrote around like four pages. They weren't pages that I was completely proud of, but at least I wrote the pages and that was fine. But to be honest, I spent most of my time making a Pinterest board for this film because I realized I never made like a full Pinterest board for what I'm currently writing for this class. And normally like everything that I write in my free time or for like certain classes, I need a Pinterest board because I'm terrible at descriptions. I'm terrible at seeing things in my brain. Like I need to see a photo of it to be like, Oh, okay. I spent a lot of time like looking at certain houses because the script that I'm writing is taking place in the 1800s in Pennsylvania. So I was trying to look up, you know, like carriages, horses, and like looking up how people dressed and all of that stuff. Once I decided that I spent enough time in the cafe and got enough work done, I decided to kind of find somewhere to go read my book because I brought my Kindle. So I found this little garden called Elizabeth Street Garden, which is like this really cute, just quaint seating area that I feel like a lot of people don't know about in New York, but I kind of want to keep it that way because it's just really like serene. And I feel like if it starts to get packed with a bunch of people, it will no longer be that way. But for you guys, this is Elizabeth Street Garden. It's open to the public. It has seats and chairs and birds. And it's a really cute place to just come if you want to sit and eat or if you want to sit and read, just like do calming things. I have left the garden and I'm now on a hunt for a bathroom. And then from there, I'm going to decide whether or not I'm going to go home or possibly go into Urban Outfitters, which is like, I shouldn't go into Urban Outfitters because I don't need to spend money, but it's a possibility, so I don't know. It's me kind of realizing that this hairstyle kind of looks really insane. Maybe it's like looks fine, but like the more that I look at it in the mirror, the more that I'm just like, did I really walk out the house like that? And I felt the same way about my outfit. This was very much an L outfit today. And it was like, I hate when I put on an outfit and then I go into Manhattan because it's like, okay, I could put on whatever outfit, stay in Brooklyn unless I'm going to like Bed-Stuy. If you've literally just been to Soho, you like would recognize within 2.5 seconds that it's like everybody there just has on the best outfit. And it's not even like you feel sad about your outfit because you didn't like your outfit walking out of the house. You feel sad about your outfit because compared to everybody else's outfit, it sucks. My outfit wasn't good. I got like three and a half pages into the script that I'm working on for my Screenwriting 2 class. Basically, I need 15 pages due by Friday at two o'clock when my class meets, and we're going to read it out and act it out. Well, not act it out, but like we have like the reading of it. It's not something I want to like rush. It's not something I want to leave to like two hours before class that I'm doing because I really want it to be my best work because I want to be proud of it when I'm presenting it to the class. And I also want like genuine and honest critiques on something that like I put a lot of work in. I currently only have three and a half pages, and I feel like maybe it's partly because I just haven't written in like screenwriting format in a really, really long time. It is very different than just writing in like your regular prose, say you're like reading a book. Like obviously you would think it's very different, but it is very different in the act of like writing it and in the act of how you think about writing it. The biggest struggle for me with like switching from writing prose to like screenwriting is that in screenwriting, everything that is on the page has to be able to either be seen or heard. It's different in books. You also write thoughts, write exposition and world building. Natalie was so tired from the, from, from the party that lasted four hours. I don't know. I don't know why that was an example. Something like Marissa was so angry because the previous night Sam stubbed her toe. I don't know. Something like that, that were to happen in a film. We obviously would not be able to know that Marissa is angry because Sam stubbed her toe last night unless we see Sam stubbed her toe or if there's something visually, if there's some hints, you know what I'm saying? Like I don't, I don't, I feel like there's such an easier way to explain this. I believe it's just like exposition. When you're writing in prose, you have exposition. I could write, I walked to the store, the store I love so much because my mother took me here since I was five years old. If that's in a script, if you want that explained in a script, that needs to be visual or, or you could do a voiceover, but like it needs to be either be sound or visual. Like it needs to be an action. It needs to be something that can be done and also with like emotions. Like kind of writing Sam was angry. Like yes, you like can write that, but it's better to write action Sam slams this or something like that. Anyways, you don't know. So that's like the biggest difference. Obviously the formatting is also really different and screenwriting is very like dialogue heavy. So it's just a completely different, at least for me, different mental way of like going into it with writing. I need to get back used to it because I haven't really written a script in a long time. So I do want to like read some scripts because really like majority of scripts, like if you want a script for really anything like TV shows, movies you love, they're pretty much just like online. Like if you just type up, like I always look up like the Teen Wolf pilot scripts cause I love reading the scripts of pilots of shows that like I absolutely love. Like the Teen Wolf one, the Vampire Diaries one I've read so many times just cause it's like so funny. I need to know like the different things and the things that they change and everything. Maybe I'll like read some scripts to like get me back into the vibe. And also writing a script is more snappy. Like when you're describing things, it's very like to the, to the point. Like say you're introducing a character or do I have an example that I could literally just read for you guys? Okay. Here's like kind of an example. She rips around furious to face Jude Bennett. Put in parentheses their age. Not everybody uses parentheses. Some people just use a comma and they put their age, but you normally have to put their age or their age range for casting purposes. Jude, 13, a small black girl with just as wild curls peeking out of her headscarf. That's like the only description. You just need the main things that like casting can get the vibe. So like this was honestly like kind of just like a very mundane, like this wasn't really a good description, but like a lot of like great descriptions that I've read will be like George, 15, white blonde male looking fresh out of the ocean like he just surfed a wave or something. And then it's like, Oh, casting can kind of get that vibe. They're like, Oh, I'm looking for like a surfer boy, like a surfer boy with like blonde hair. Like that's the vibe. I don't know if any of this makes sense or anybody cares, but that's kind of what I'm going through. I did want to watch All American, but I think I should be more productive. The new season of All American just started coming out, but I completely forgot that I stopped watching kind of halfway through season five. So I'm having to go through and finish season five so that I could get to season six. But that's been my latest entertainment because basketball, college basketball season is over. So I don't have any college basketball to watch. So instead of college basketball, I'm going to watch Spencer James and Jordan Baker play football at a fictional university and enjoy my time. My other update, if you watched the last video, I mentioned that I started reading Longshot by Kennedy Ryan. So I'm still reading that 38% through page 174. So I'm slowly chugging along. When I first mentioned it in the last video, I was like, Oh my God, like I just feel like this is gonna be a five star immediately. I was eating it up. Still loving Kennedy Ryan's writing style. And I'm still like really enjoying like I'm not bored at all. And everything that she explains like it's just such, I just really enjoy her writing style. But she lifts out her trigger warnings like very thoroughly at the beginning of the book. So I do suggest like, if you're going to pick up this book, read the list. I believe it's a list. But she like wrote like a whole like paragraph basically and I suggest taking it seriously because I've never really read a book that had an intent like I read a book that had a trigger warning but it was more so like trigger warning like depression or trigger warning like anxiety or possible self harm like things like that. And I've read those and like yes, they're like heart wrenching and they're like very impactful. They never actually like made me feel triggered like you know what I'm saying like the trigger warning but like I was like, okay, the trigger warning isn't for me. Trigger warning like really lists like domestic violence like this is a very heavy domestic violence book. I think I just didn't realize how much of it there would be and how long it would be. There was also SA in this as a trigger warning. And normally the SA trigger warnings that's what I really gotta take my time, I really gotta take my time and step back because that do be triggering. I do be getting triggered by that. And also the deep, I've never read like a domestic violence storyline like all the romances I've read realistically have been very light and fluffy. The main problems have been like daddy issues and mommy issues. This by far is the most intense thing I've ever read and I have read like fantasy, okay, you know I've read fantasy like where Faye, Faye, Faye are getting tortured and like, you know limbs cut off and this is more like it's just giving me like a more visceral reaction but it's not in like you read a book and it's like oh you have those moments where you cry. Like instead, like the way that I think of like a trigger is like instead of crying, like you feel like you might throw up. In the garden and I was reading a chapter and I was like oh wait, wait, wait, I might throw up. Like I actually might puke should I pause. So I had to pause because I didn't know, like I was just like, like it's just like you get that like feeling. Like and it's just the she goes into like really heavy detail and it's very descriptive. Like I feel like I'm there. Anyways, more of the story. This definitely is not like gonna be one of my comfort books. So I don't know if that's gonna impact the rating because I was putting it like I was going into it thinking of it in the same category as the Windy City series, which is by far so far my favorite like comfort romance sports romance books. I would dive back into those books any day just to get like a good vibe. This is a book I probably will read it one time. It'll be like a phenomenal, perfectly executed, very eloquent, beautiful love story, but I can never return because the trauma that I'm experiencing like it like, oh, the first domestic violence chapter that I went through and I was taken, I was taken aback because I didn't know. I didn't really expect. I didn't know how much to expect and there was a lot. There was a lot and it was fast and it was and it was scary. And I read it and I was like, okay, it's time to put the book down. And it took me three days to come back to the book because I just had to recoup. And it was like, I didn't want to, I didn't want to go back. Like I feel like I'm the character and I just want to run away. That's my updates on that.