What a Difference Four Years Makes

Four years ago, on November 2, I was furiously checking exit polls in the Journ room, waiting to get out of school. I rushed to the Roscommon County Democratic Party headquarters, ready to help finish the night with a landslide for Kerry. I stayed up until midnight, hoping to hear the news. I was even going to play "Morning Has Broken" once it was called for Kerry.

I woke up the next morning to hear he carried Michigan, but conceded. I was morose, and skipped school. I went to Family Video to rent Dawn of the Dead, and then went to Lee's Kitchen and ate lunch by myself.

Two days ago, on November 4, I was furiously checking exit polls at work at USC. At 3pm, the first polls closed and I got some raw numbers. By 6:30, when I left for class, I knew Obama would win. I called Mum and played "Morning Has Broken," four years later. Class went from 7 to 9:30, and in that brief time McCain conceded, Obama declared victory, and Virginia went blue. After class, we broke open some Sam Adams and Asti (in class), and welcomed the victory.

The next morning, I woke up with a cold, but drove up to Van Nuys, and walked on the set of The Office, and listened to Lee Eisenberg. After, I had breakfast with my whole class at Norm's, where our prof gave us advice on breaking in to writing.

What a difference four years makes. Where I might be four years from now on election night is unfathomable and frightening.

I and Thou, as Represented by a Chihuahua and 8 Cheeseburgers

What is the dog's relationship to the cheeseburgers? We must assume, of course, that the dog has intellectual faculties to a human being. Which it does not. So this means nothing. Except that I'm tired and need to vent.

So what is the relationship? His eyes are closed and his ears are pulled back. Does he feel the cheeseburgers? Feeling is an experience, which means the dog would then be in an I-It relationship.

Perhaps, though, this is so much more than four #2 extra value meals squished into his paws. Just as humans can have relationships with trees throughout their lives (Giving Tree, anyone?) perhaps the dog is in an I-Thou relationship. He is sharing a moment with the cheeseburgers. He is growing.

And when the burgers are cold and stale, and flies and small ants from the kitchen start to forage for food, perhaps the dog will take away from the experience. Perhaps he will have learned something

Or perhaps his owner will give him a bath, which he most certainly does not like.

Universal Constant

Whenever you are in an unfamiliar place, and you don't know what to do...

And it's dark...

Turn on your local PBS station.

Watch The New Red Green Show.

Chances are it's on, or it's being used for the yearly fundraising effort by that station.

It's a wonderful feeling.

Some things never change.

New Semester, New... something-something

I feel old.

Worrying about my credit score and the election. Constantly reevaluating the past. I guess my subconscious is trying to abstract something significant from it.

Hasn't my subconscious read Henri Bergson? It's a fruitless endeavor.

Lots of editing and writing. Trying to wrap everything up.

This reads like porno spam.

I am buzzing.

Today I Saw a Girl Cry

So I'm on my way to work on Monday, back to answering telephones and writing ideas and planning my future. I'm on Jefferson, about to cross Figueroa, when I see a girl driving a white Volvo behind me. She can't be more than my age. And she's crying. Her eyes are red, her lips are red, matching the color of her hair. And she's either speaking into a handsfree phone or she's repeating something over and over to herself. It's a sad sight. I continue on to work. She follows behind me until I turn onto Hope St.

What would make somebody cry like that on a Monday morning?

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

You don't really hear songs these days that just make you feel good. More than likely, if I hear a current song I think, wow, that would be really good in a movie trailer or at the end of an episode of LOST or Grey's Anatomy. What happened to songs that are just great on their own merit?

For instance:

My Maria by B.W. Stevenson

Photograph by Ringo Starr

Kodachrome by Paul Simon

Teach Your Children Well by Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Seriously, take a listen to them. I'm sure they've been used in TV or movies, but that's not the point. These songs speak to a part of us that doesn't get much flexing. Start exercising. 

You can go to pandora.com and put in any one of these artists or song titles, and get tracks back that are similar.

The Old Man

I've been back East for the past five days, and got to see lots of friends and family. I also saw my dad, which was a visit more out of necessity than desire. If I didn't visit, I wouldn't hear the end of it.

We caught breakfast with him in his hometown, at the old restaurant he and I used to visit. When I saw him, he was dumpier and older than I remembered. But in an amusing way. His neckflap had grown, his glasses appeared smaller on his head, his voice became more gravelly, and he was wearing a biker vest.

In some ways, he resembled Bill Adama. Not a spitting image by any means, but if there was an expanded lineage of the Adama family, he would be Bill's cousin, the one who runs a small fabrication company overseas.

The Happening, Part Two

9:25 p.m. Mount Pleasant, MI.

The sun has just dipped below the horizon. Two friends, Z and J, are walking back to their car. There is a light wind blowing through the trees.

"I think it's supposed to rain this weekend," says Z.

"Yeah, it's been doing that a lot lately," says J.

"It's nice, though. I don't get rain that often."

"Are you kidding? I'd love sun every day."

"I think it's supposed to rain this weekend."

"You already said that," says J.

"I think it's supposed to rain..."

"Z?"

"...supposed to rain..."

"You're freaking me out."

"...rain..."

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Z shakes his head.

"I was just thinking about The Happening again. G-ddamn that was a horrible movie."

Only in America...

...can you make fourteen bucks an hour selling underwear.

Movin' on up...

Today, I was a Bluetool

So WWDC happened today, and it was the single-most anticipated event for me this month. I had three liveblogs open, and the Apple Store page ready should the vaunted iPhone 3G be on sale today.

I'm sitting here, practically foaming at the mouth from all the goodies El Jobso was showing, when I am torn away from my desk to compile binders for a confidential meeting SC was holding this afternoon.

For nearly two hours, shuffling around, grabbing pages, binding, trying not to get papercuts, all the while the second coming of the JesusPhone was happening. I had a plan to have my wife run across The Grove to the Apple Store should it come, but disconnected from all sources of information, I was left with one option.

While sorting pages and having a minor freak-out, I used my Jawbone to call my wife and have her check for me. Now, this doesn't seem like that big a deal, except I was completely hands-free, talking to the air, while handling time-sensitive documents that could cost the University millions. All for a freakin piece of plastic.

Still, it's probably the most gorgeous phone I've seen. July 11 can not come quickly enough.

On Maestro

Sent in my laptop to the Apple Store to get repaired. My genius was really good about helping me out. Jason Sklar was there also, getting his machine fixed. He wore really odd glasses.

Now I'm on my first computer, a Powermac G4 MDD. It'll be tough going for the next 7-10 business days. I probably won't get my machine back until after I get back from MI.

I must be on my man-period

Didn't take long from June 1 for all those happy, light feelings to go away. After a few days of bad sleep, a bad review of my screenplay, the GPU fan on my laptop crashing, running short on money, watching friends have fun because they can afford it, and preparing to travel East to hardly have a vacation, I am officially tired, sad, and cranky.

If I could, I would retreat into my head right now and not come out until I got some fucking good news.

I need my computer to be fixed, to earn some more money to take care of debts, to have some confidence in my writing again, and to lose weight so that I have more energy and not feel like such a fat-ass around the people I want to hang out with.

If I can actually get accepted and afford to go to Prague in January, it will really whip myself into gear.

I do what I want

I think I'm actually doing what I want to in life right now. I've got my wife, our apartment, our pets, our money. I've got amazing, talented friends. I get paid to fix computers, and I write in all the time between.

This is what I want to do. Enjoy it while it lasts, I suppose.

Night Moves

Another part of the nineties that I miss: Windows 95/98. I know, I'm a tech nerd, but these remind me of the frontier days of computing. When people like me and M would build websites by hand, and copy floppies back and forth with patches for drivers. Back when 300MHz was screaming fast, and 4GB of disk space was more than you could ever fill.

On a completely unrelated note, do you know what's better than watching Jerry Springer late night on TV? Watching the latino version. It's called José Luis: Sin Censura, and it's on channel 23 Saturday nights at 9. Right now they're advertising a DVD set called Muy Caliente para Télevision. I have no idea what they're saying, but I like all the bitchfights and sound effects. They fight like pussies, though. I'm pretty sure it's fake.

Shut the Fuck Up, Harold Ickes

You snake in the grass.

Emo User's Guide

How to generate user name; label photograph, poem, short film, or song; describe mood, feelings, or thoughts; come up with saying for either the high school yearbook or tattoo:

1. Come up with positive adjective, i.e. beautiful; gorgeous; breathtaking; graceful; magnificent

2. Come up with negative, destructive noun, i.e. destruction; desolation; extermination; eradication; obliteration

3. Put them together: gorgeous desolation; beautiful obliteration; breathtaking destruction; et. al.

Because irony makes you more insightful.

Actually...

I'm not racist, but some things at my place of work go beyond mere coincidence. Whenever I get a call about difficulty with software that we've never heard of, or assistance compiling, or basically programming UNIX, it's always an indian person. And because of our shitty phones, I can never get their usernames right. They always have the same types of names too, stuff like ndbepta (a made up example.) You know how hard it is to figure out what those letters are?

The one thing that always gets me is that when these people call in, there are two things I can always count on in the start of the call. Either, they will ignore me and not provide their username, they will interrupt me in the beginning of my introductory spiel, or they will explain their situation with "Actually..."

"Actually, I'm looking for help compiling in g++. I believe that the header files are out of date after the latest upgrade to Solaris 10 and I would like that to be fixed."

Sonofabitch.

Lunch Ramblings

- You know what would be fun? To master a Christopher Walken impression. That guy can read the phone book and people will laugh.

- I'm sick of movies like 21 Grams, and Crash. You know. The ones where there are multiple characters with intertwining stories that are united by a tragedy of some sort. Fuck that. It's a boring formula, yet I keep checking imdb and seeing more films adopting this route. You know what that tells me? That you can't sustain a couple of characters for the length of a feature. Just go and write television. That's what you want to do, anyway.

That's Enough, John Williams

Johnny,

You've been a role model, an inspiration, since I was 10. I've even got a signed picture of you chilling in a frame at home. 

But it's time to retire the scoring sheets. You haven't made a truly memorable soundtrack since 1999. Yes, I'm giving you the benefit of counting Episode I. Truthfully, though, your last best work was on Saving Private Ryan.

I can't list all the reasons, but here are a few:

1) Your Harry Potter theme sounds quite similar to your Hook theme. Listen closer.

1a) The Quidditch chase scene has PRACTICALLY the same score as the smelting factory in Episode II. Don't believe me? Watch them again.

2) AI, Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds... all forgettable.

3) Yeah, Munich was good, but for the first time, I thought to myself "Wow, that sounds like Bear McCreary." You've reminded me of another composer now, and not the other way around. No bueno.

4) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which should have had themes and motifs as rousing as the other THREE, did not. What happened? Not even one?

I don't want to see you keep deflating like this. Don't turn into my grandma who eventually lost her mind. Quit while you're ahead.

I Miss the 90s

Remember when REM used to be cool?

And the internet was the next big thing?

And the edgiest kids dressed in plaid?

Yeah, those were the days.

In A State of Flux

I got knocked out of my groove, man.

Sunday some punk kids broke into my car and stole my XM radio and 5o cds. It's not that awful, since I can track which cds I lost/on my iPod and a new XM is only $40, but still. My chi is all fucked up or something.

I've also finished the first draft of a script I was working on. That weight has been lifted. Now I'm worrying about the next steps I need to take to revise it, make it better, make it sellable. I'm also working with my writing partner on a new scifi project, but we've both had tough weekends and so our progress is somewhat stagnant.

Then there's money issues. Not as bad I'm making them out to be, but it just never seems we get out of the hole that we dig. We like buying things.

I've gotten addicted to Civilization IV. And watching SNL sketches on hulu.com. I'm trying not to get distracted, though. I've done lots of things lately to keep my mind polished.

Diet-wise, I've cut out as many simple sugars as I can, as well as breads & pastas unless they're incidental to the meal. I've also almost wiped out all caffeine intake. The apartment is cleaned, the office has been rearranged slightly. Everything is becoming calmer.

Just not today. Which is why I'm downloading class rock songs and starting another fucking blog.

POW!