Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Second Chance: Opportunity to try something again.  Another try after a mistake or failure.

Interestingly enough, "Second Chance" is also the title of numerous films, songs, television shows, episodes of television shows, books, albums, body armor, algorithms, and a prison rehabilitation program.  i'm sure there's more, but that's all Wikipedia had under the disambiguation listing for the term.

So it seems pretty obvious that the concept of a second chance is something a lot of humans share.  The idea of arbitrary failure with no opportunity to give it another go is anathema to the old adage you only live once.  If i understand correct, there's even a popular meme (see #YOLO).


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Okay so maybe there's some argument as to the validity of the sentiment.  On the other hand, i suppose you can look at it this way: that our lives are linear.  Even if the above statement courtesy of Dwight K. Schrute is valid and correct, it does acknowledge that we are continually moving forward in time.  Of course if time travel is ever invented, we'll have to re-examine our position.  Although, as a friend of mine recently posited, "if time travel is or will ever be possible, wouldn't there always have been time travelers running around all over the place?"  That was one of the rare times where i could think of no plausible response.  You stumped me @Pet_the_Dog

Anyway, so yeah, second chances have popped up a couple of times this week already.  On the most recent episode of Flipping Out, Jeff Lewis stated that he believes in second chances because he'd been given so many in his life after mistakes and failures.

The younger brother of an old high school friend started a blog about his own second chances.  He posts every Wednesday from the Richland Correctional Institution.  i recommend checking it out.  Dude is seriously eloquent and thoughtful.  Here's a link:


i personally have two second chance scenarios in my life this week.  The first one i'll explain more about in the coming days.  It may turn out that it's not a second chance after all.  How it all pans out is still up in the air.

The second involves the very first amateur spec script i ever wrote, back in 2002.  A friend and i worked our asses off writing and rewriting it and learning how to write something like that along the way.  And damn if we weren't proud as hell of it and sent it off to quite a few studios and production companies.

They all rejected it.

We have always been suspicious of one in particular, who released a movie a couple of years later with the tagline "For some men, the sky is the limit.  For him, it was just the beginning."  Suspicious because that was the tagline for our film!  We made lemonade though, reasoning that even if they stole our idea, it was a good idea!

The second chance here emerged in a roundabout way.  That same friend who wrote the script with me recently posted a link on FB to a Fats Domino song "There Goes My Heart Again."  



That song was on our imaginary soundtrack to the film at a critical point in the story, and i commented on that.  He had forgotten all about that.  In fact, over the years we've talked less and less but every once in a while we'll get a bug to work on something together.  Out comes that old idea, the first real solid idea we had.  We decided to give it a second chance.  It's been a long time, and we've both learned a lot more about structure and techniques and stuff.  So we'll see what happens.  Maybe nothing, maybe something spectacular.  At any rate, it's an opportunity to try something again.

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