Sebastian Hagan

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

I do not know much about advertizing. I am aware of some market research that found that the more a person doesn’t understand what they are seeing on the screen it tends to stick with them longer than regular informative commercial. So I could make a weird commercial or a story type commercial with a comedic hook. It would have to have a beginning that rose allot of questions. Let's say I was making a Travelocity commercial. It would start like so. A man in full mountain climbing gear with a huge beard that is covered in a blanket of snow and snow goggles with a furry hood. You can see he is frostbitten on his nose and looks to be exhausted and on the brink of collapse. There is a blizzard and snow is violently spinning in the wind in cyclones. The view switches to first person and it looks like there’s nothing but snow and mountain for miles. He takes long and slow painful steps. The camera pans from right to left focused on his back as he turns to look at the camera. He squints and looks as though has trying to make something out through the white out. Then a hard cut to a silhouette that is concealed by the snow, it slowly becomes more visible; it’s a woman with summer clothing on with her hair in a pony tail with flip flops on. She stands there with her hand on her hip and says "Jack?" and it echoes. The camera cuts to his eyes as they close in the snowy landscape and open again the area is different. He is standing in an ice box at a grocery store. His presumed girl friend repeats her again "jack? What are you doing? The man with the beard looks disappointed as he steps out of the fridge into the super hot grocery store and the scene freezes as a narrator says "Need to get away?" And the whole marketing shpeal goes on from there. WOOOOP! Cut, print, BAM thats a winner.

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I have been through a good amount of shit in my life. Things were crazy when I was growing up. My mother left me when I was a baby and I bounced between my father's house and my grandma's house. They were both there for me and for the most part my father was ok. He had a temper and lost his patience easily and a few things happened between him and me fights and episodes that I would care not to write about. One thing I always heard from him growing up was that he never wanted kids, he hates raising them, and all he wanted to do was live his life, and because he has kids he couldn’t do that. He always said he was going to pack up and leave one day and that I would never see him again. This type of thing horrified me considering one of my parents already didn’t seem to want to raise me and now the other one was talking about how my birth was preventing them from living their life. The guilt I felt for this type of thing caused me to cry regularly when I was in grade school. I felt so bad because I loved my dad so much and all I wanted for him was to be happy. I hated to see him upset about things and still felt bad even if I was the pin cushion for his frustration. Then one day he actually did leave. We got into a huge argument and he informed me that I wasn’t going to see him again that he wanted nothing to do with me and said good bye. I watched him walk out and I sat on the floor for 3 hours with tears quietly running down my face. That kind of pain that hurts so bad you can’t move think, or hardly breathe. It was some of the most intense sorrow I ever felt. I had finals that week and it was the last week of school. I slept at a friend’s house and walked to school every day and took my finals. I did not see or hear my dad for 4 months. Then one day I got a call and he asked me if I wanted to talk to his girl friend’s daughter he was living with. All I remember thinking was “you left me because you never wanted to raise kids, yet here you are raising someone else’s". That shit hurt. It still hurts.