been thinking a lot about this quote from this video essay about Jackie Chan's style of action lately. it makes me strangely emotional in a way i can't fully describe, but i will still attempt to do it here.
Jackie's movies with Sammo Hung have such a beautiful fluidity to them, and they're all a joy to watch, even the ones that kind of suck. (sorry Wheels on Meals) i look at them the same way i look at random tiktoks of alt bitches skateboarding that scamper across my various timelines every so often: "i wish that i could do that... but i'm probably at a point in my life where it's too late to get there." sooner or later, life is at last a list of things you every day deal silently with not having done.
it's easy to dismiss things that look or feel impossible (that very well may be impossible for different people/bodies, everyone is different obvi), but something about One The Greatest Action Actors Of All Time saying, "This isn't hard, I just have a studio that pays me enough to keep trying until I get it right," makes me re-assess a lot of my own feelings toward the things i've admitted defeat on without even trying. obviously, our time is all limited and often gated by access to money/resources by which to learn or practice whatever it is you want to do, but still...
in a strange thought experiment, i often wonder how many hobbies i want to pick up i would actually engage with if someone handed me a piece of paper that had a firm number of minutes it would take for me to get to a point i'm satisfied with. if when i watched a video of some goth trans girl doing a sick kickflip, someone gave me a piece of paper that said "159 hours" (my current playtime on Neon White) on it, would that be encouraging or discouraging?
in the age of Metrics, i'm often able to see the time spent sunk into things like games that (at least, to me) Don't Matter in the grand scope of the world and it makes me feel incredibly foolish at times. i'm not making art, i'm not improving anything other than my ability to click in a very specific way. i'm not special, you could do it too. however, that also means i get to see incredibly dumb numbers like how long i spent playing Rock Band pro drums last year. (321 hours) music is one of my silly passions in life, and the fact that i'm playing better, faster, and cleaner than i ever have in my entire life is really fun to me. the hours i spend clearing my head while playing every other night does more for me than several months of therapy did in the past.
i set small goals i work toward each time. i sometimes surprise myself mid-song with what i'm able to play correctly. even though it's not playing Real Drums, it's as close to it as i can get at home. i know that i will probably never 100% most of the songs in the game, especially certain ones. i've accepted this already, but maybe with enough time i won't have to.