Amber Benson

the longest few days of my life

seriously.

I have been in non-stop, keep working until you pass out mode for the past week or so. I think I have taken on too much, but since there is nothing I can do about it now I just have to keep on slugging through.

Drones, the film I co-directed with Adam Busch, got into the Slamdance Film Festival. We’ve known for about a week and it’s been really rough not to scream the news out to everyone in the whole world. Now, the cat is out of the bag, so I can finally scream, but I’m so damn tired that all I can do is give a quick "yip" of happiness.

Did I just use the word ’yip’? Yes, I did.

Anyway, Adam and I have been cutting a trailer for the film and working on the poster and the website and on top of all of that my step-grandmother passed away. She and I were never particularly close (she married my grandfather when he was in his 80’s) so it wasn’t like I knew her my whole life. Still, it was sad that she died ad I felt bad.

I put the whole Drones world away for the day yesterday so I could go with my dad to the funeral. It was the first time that I’ve ever really experienced the wall-crypt phenomena up close and personal. It was strange to sit in a white plastic folding chair in the middle of all these wall-crypts filled with dead people, the sun in my eyes, as the Rabbi officiated the memorial. I want to say that the experience put my life in perspective, but honestly, all it did was make me want to work harder.

There is so much I want to accomplish before I get lifted into a granite covered wall-crypt and I just don’t know how I’m gonna do it all.

I’m going to be 33 next month and I can’t help, but feel that a good chunk of my time on this Earth is gone. I know it sounds negative, maybe even defeatist, but that’s not my intent at all. I just feel this overwhelming drive to make my mark on this place, something that will live on when I die.

My dad wrote a eulogy that he read yesterday and I will leave you with the last paragraph. It left me strangely comforted, but at the same time it seemed to incite my ambition even more:

"I don’t know how the universe came to be, but it is so massive that our Earth and our individual lives seem to be minuscule when viewed in that way. But I know that each of our lives has meaning, even if for no other reason then we bring our genes and our lifetimes of knowledge to the next generation and the next and the next. And we make the best of what we have been given. In this sense, we never really die."

Amber Benson