February 2003 Archives
February 27, 2003
The Evils of Evilness
Today I got out of class early, and so I sat around Union Station for awhile waiting for a train. That was fun, except for it not being fun at all.
Ever the multitasker, I was able to read about half of Slaughterhouse-Five while I thought about what a shithole my life is. That was almost as much fun as sitting around a train station hoping that fearsome hobos did not attempt to steal my coffee.
I kept hearing station announcements for a train that slithers along the general southwestern part of the country. It passes through Deming, New Mexico, which is where a friend of mine from high school lives now. I wonder how much it’d cost to go out there.
When I got on the train finally, some frightening woman got on with a large black dog. I have an unnatural fear of dogs, especially large ones that aren’t adorable beagles. Also, I am allergic to anything that lives but is incapable of rational thought. So I moved to a different car (and despite the two minutes I was in the same car as the dog, my allergies are still bugging me right now), and then contemplated existence for a little while.
Also, never take an online course. As irritating as I find the 90-minute commute twice daily, the terrible server errors that prevent me from doing homework and the lame-ass forum discussions are about a million times worse. For the record, online courses = bad.
There was something else I thought about rambling about, but I forgot it now, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain how bad people on the train smell. Most of them either smell like McDonald’s french fries, or like Ruffles potato chips, or like some sort of spiced meat-like substance (balogna, or pastrami maybe). Sometimes I wonder if I smell that foul. I wonder if the people next to me are thinking, “Jeez, doesn’t this guy ever take a shower?” (author’s note: I do) while I am thinking the exact same thing about them. That’d be weird.
I need to discuss stuff involving my long-awaited feature film project with Jeff, but I seem to keep missing him. He’s busy this week/month/decade, I guess, because of pledging for his fraternity. I guess I should just e-mail him. Or slit my wrists. Or something.
I started rereading the last draft of this script I decided I should rewrite. It’s really, really terrible. It has absolutely no focus, the plot meanders, and the bookend “future” sequences make no sense in terms of the meat of the plot. When I finished it two years ago, I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever written. It’s interesting how time provides clarity.
The final thing: I went to Borders and picked up copies of all the major religious works I could find that would be useful for my novel. This weekend, I’m beginning an exegesis of the King James Bible. I’m still not sure if this is a good thing to do or not. But, hey, it’s something I want to do, so I may as well.
Posted by Stan on February 27, 2003 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
February 23, 2003
My Movie Reviews
A few people have been asking me — which is to say, one person just asked me — why I review so few new movies, since I’ve hesitantly admitted to seeing many of the recent releases. So here I am with my answer: because I don’t.
More specifically, it comes down to what I have to say about a movie. I find that in a lot of cases — as with Daredevil, The Two Towers, and About Schmidt — I have little to say beyond “I liked it.” Of course, I can get long-winded about it, but what’s the point? I read what a lot of critics say, and unless I’m saying something overwhelmingly different, I won’t write up a review. It’s pointless.
The same goes for movies I don’t like. I hated Chicago and Star Trek: Rollerball, but any “in-depth analysis” I’d provide would be little more than cheesy flames, and if I wanted to write cheesy flames, I’d spend more time on the comments section of Slashdot.
So, that’s the rule: if I have something interesting or unique to say about a movie, I’ll write it down. If not, there’s no point, so I won’t.
There, happy now? Good. Now fuck off.
Posted by Stan on February 23, 2003 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
The Time Machine
When The Time Machine ended and the credits began to roll, the first thing my mother said was, “Well, that was stupid.” My thoughts were echoing the sentiment. It started out so well, but somewhere near the 20-minute mark it delved into stupidity and never recovered.
For a movie that starts out as well as The Time Machine does, what the fuck happened? How did it get from point A (promising) to point B (terrible) in six seconds flat? I think it was right about the time when Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), a reasonably logical guy, says to himself, “In order to understand why I cannot change the past, I must go to the future.” Huh?
Maybe my mind isn’t working on the same complex, mathematician plane as Alexander’s, or maybe it’s just stupid. After all, the screenplay was adapted by John Logan, whose pen committed the following atrocities on the film world: Star Trek: Rollerball, Gladiator, and Bats. I’m not saying Logan’s a bad writer (really, most of the awfulness of his scripts are not initially his fault, and I’d take the rewrite money and sacrifice what little artistic integrity I have if I were in the same position), but this unreasonable lapse in logic is actually what spurs the plot in motion. The least they could do is have it make sense.
I read the original story by H.G. Wells when I was a kid, and I saw the 1960 movie. I barely remember either of them, but what I do remember is that in both cases, the time traveler didn’t really have some illogical reason for traveling into the future. He just wanted to explore. He had this whole time machine built; what the hell else was he going to do with it?
Because this is the 21st century, and every protagonist’s action has to have some kind of romance-induced explanation, all that’s changed. Alexander doesn’t build the time machine to see if such a thing was possible; he builds it because his only love was shot by a mugger, and he wants to go back and save her. And he doesn’t travel hundreds of thousands of years into the future just to see what the fate of the earth is; rather, he does it because he needs to answer his burning question: “Why can’t I change the past?”
This is almost interesting. Really, it is. When it first starts out, and Alexander’s fiancee is shot right after he proposes to her (gotta love that), and he’s driven to build the time machine out of a combination of guilt and love — that’s interesting. And when he actually does travel back to that fateful night to save her, only to see her die again in a different way, it sets up a fatalistic conundrum: is it simply impossible to save her because she was meant to die, or was it just coincidental bad luck? That’s interesting, and these are the kinds of baffling paradoxes upon which great sci-fi is built.
But neither of those questions, nor any of the others that are raised and dismissed in the first act of the movie, are answered. Instead, they concentrate on the one that doesn’t make any sense, and Alexander is determined to travel to the future to figure out why he can’t change the past.
So Alexander takes a little trip to 2030, where the first moon colony is about to be established, and he meets the 7-Up guy, who gives him some backstory on the future. Then he zips ahead seven more years, only to find out that the entire world is about to be destroyed in a hail of lunar chunks and high tides because the little moon colony thing accidentally, uh, blew up the moon. Alexander decides maybe this isn’t the best future to answer his question about the past, so he keeps going forward.
What follows are elaborate special-effects sequences involving traveling hundreds of thousands — at one point even hundreds of millions — of years into the future, all of which are impressive. And the sequences with the Morlocks are pretty neat — much cooler than the blue-painted ape-like guys from the older film. But none of it mattered to me because I was still trying to figure out what the fuck the deal was — why was he there? When the fundamental plot point doesn’t make any sense, it’s hard to really give a shit about anything that happens afterward.
All of this stuff with the Eloi, who now apparently live in giant pumpkin seeds attached to cliff walls and borrowed their clothes from the Lost Boys in Hook (if I remember, in the book and the original movie, they were more of an ancient Rome-type society), and the Morlocks — it’s all crap. It’s contrived, it’s pretty boring, and it’s worthless.
It builds to a dramatic conclusion in which Jeremy Irons, dressed up in his Edgar Winter Halloween costume, explains a lot of hackneyed crap about the way their society works (they are both evolved from humans, Jeremy Irons is a third race that can control all of their minds, etc., etc.). Then he gets into a fight with Alexander, who does some hoodoo with the time machine to get rid of the Morlocks once and for all. It also destroys his machine, but no matter — he’s happier there. He’s home. The end.
What the fuck?
Rating: ** (out of four; it barely deserves it, but the special effects, make-up, set design, etc., were all very well done — its shittiness was hidden behind some pretty nice-looking packaging)
Posted by Stan on February 23, 2003 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
February 19, 2003
Douglas Adams
“‘If I asked you where the hell we were,’ said Arthur weakly, ‘would I regret it?’
“Ford stood up. ‘We’re safe,’ he said.
“‘Oh good,’ said Arthur.
“‘We’re in a small galley cabin,’ said Ford, ‘in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.’
“‘Ah,’ said Arthur, ‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.’”
— Douglas Adams
Posted by Stan on February 19, 2003 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 17, 2003
Timequake
“You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for ‘lead.’ Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy.
“What’s your excuse?” — Kurt Vonnegut
Posted by Stan on February 17, 2003 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 15, 2003
My Maserati Does 185
I don’t really understand people who don’t fear death with every fiber of their being. Death is not all sunshine and roses and clouds and noncorporeality. Death is death. It’s not something to look forward to. It’s not something to be excited about. It is something to be feared. It means you aren’t alive anymore, and I don’t know about you, but I think being not alive is a bad thing.
The problem with fearing death is that there are so many ways that it can happen. Death is just one of those things. I could cross the street and get hit by a bus. I could get shot by some fucker with an Uzi who’s just randomly blasting people because he himself is not afraid of death; rather, he does enjoy watching it happen to other people (shit, rent a horror movie, you fucking idiot — don’t shoot people). Shit, I could cross the street and the world could end. The universe could decide to stop expanding, thus collapsing everything. Or, even worse, it could decide to contract, and time would stop moving backwards until we aren’t born anymore. I’m not sure which is worse — dying because the universe ends, or getting younger and younger, losing everything I’ve gained in life (both dollars!), repeating all of my mistakes, only backwards so I can’t even possibly try to change them, and then becoming unborn. I think the latter would have to be worse.
I hate the universe.
I fear death.
The end.
Posted by Stan on February 15, 2003 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 14, 2003
School’s Out…Except for How It’s Not
My petition was unsuccessful. I wasted a lot of time on rational thought only to be ass-raped by an administration that didn’t give a shit. I love this school.
At any rate, I registered for Screenwriting I — all the sessions of Script Analysis were full, which is assy — and I managed to get into the session taught by my Development & Pre-production professor, a comically flamboyant homosexual who is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Also, he loves my writing and he doesn’t completely dislike me, which will probably help me get that Almighty A. Well, it’ll help more than shouting profanities at the professor like I did the last time I was in Screenwriting I (long story short: why do you think I have to retake the class?). I can’t remember who suggested that I start taking anger-management therapy, but after incidents of increasing violence and an unfortunate incident involving a shouting match with a broken parking meter (and I was the third party in that situation), I’m beginning to think that might be a good idea. I was going to insert a pot joke here, but maybe that’s not such a good idea.
Since I couldn’t get into Screenwriting I, I’m still registered for Lighting I. I blew off the first class because I assumed I’d be dropping it (whoops!), though I still may be. I’m mulling it over, because while it’s not a required course, I am interested in taking it, and it’s not like it’s costing me any extra money. I have until…well, Saturday, basically, to decide whether or not I want to take the class. I’ll sleep on it and decide in the morning. It’d be nice to have Tuesdays free…it breaks up the week.
Unfortunately, though, all of this means I will have to take some dreaded summer school classes to get caught up (unless, of course, we head out for a lengthy war, in which case my parents insist that I should stay in school forever at their expense, so as to avoid the draft, despite the fact that I have so many horrible problems that only the French air force would take me, and even they would ask me to shower once in awhile). This frustrates me because I was planning on spending this semester getting things organized to actually — finally — shoot my masterwork, but if I’m going to school five days a week for eight weeks, it might not be feasible. Maybe it will work out, though. It all depends on the position of the sun, the moon, and the stars relative to the earth.
I also started outlining my novel, which is all about criminals who band together to kill God. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because at first they think they’re actually working for God to kill Satan, but it turns out God is a giant alien beast who resides at the center of the earth and feeds on human souls or human misery or human energy or something that somehow involves destroying humanity. And the funny thing is, even that is dumbing it down to its simplest form.
So there you go. I’d like to shoot an unreleasable movie and follow that up by shopping around an unpublishable novel.
Am I an artiste (that’s French for “pretentious sack of crap”), or what?
Posted by Stan on February 14, 2003 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
February 11, 2003
As Time Goes By
“That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“What does it say to you?”
“It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.”
“What are you doing Saturday night?”
“Committing suicide.”
“What about Friday night?”
— from Play It Again, Sam
Posted by Stan on February 11, 2003 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
I Am Sam
I didn’t hate I Am Sam as much as I thought I would.
I thought I’d hate it because it was about a retarded guy, and movies about retarded guys are just generally not good. If they’re not making some big, bombastic point about how people mistreat everybody on the planet who is not exactly like us (they really should stop making movies with that particular theme because the obvious response is a resounding “DUH”), or now that I think about it, even if they are making that particular point, the film’s are generally either condescending or mocking. Or both. And when they’re not, they’re just pretty bad (see Molly).
But I am Sam surprised me. Actually, I confess I was going to turn it off when, within the first frame of the first shot, I realized, “Oh shit, he works at Starbucks,” and ashamed of my immediate and intimate knowledge of his employ, I was ready to give up on it. I didn’t, though, and I’m glad I didn’t, because I am Sam isn’t really an indictment of society’s mistreatment of the mentally handicapped (thank God). Rather, it’s a long-overdue criticism of the blowhards at DCFS who are more than willing to ruin a child’s life because of their self-righteous insistence that they know what is best for the child.
Basically, the premise is as follows: Sam (Sean Penn), a guy with the rough mental capacity of a 7-year-old and an unhealthy obsession with the Beatles, impregnates some homeless girl, and right after she has the baby, she abandons both Sam and the child, leaving this mentally-deficient guy to raise a child. He doesn’t know what to do, but he has help from friends and neighbors, and he manages to raise her as well as he can under the circumstances. All Sam really has to give is love, and the film argues that that’s all he really needs.
So his daughter grows up. She’s smart for her age, and she’s played by Dakota Fanning, the creepy-ass girl from the mini-series Taken. Shockingly, she was less creepy and actually fairly adorable in this movie. One night, Sam accidentally gets picked up on charges of soliciting a prostitute, and this begins the child-custody nightmare that forms the bulk of the movie, but I won’t really go into details on the rest of the plot so as not to ruin it.
The main thing I dug about the movie were the performances. Everybody in the cast gives a bizarrely excellent performance, even Lieutenant Commander Data* as the disgruntled shoe salesman. All of the supporting players — Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning, Dianne Wiest, Laura Dern, Richard Schiff (from The West Wing), and even Dr. Kelso from Scrubs (playing the laziest judge in the history of the universe) — give wonderfully nuanced performances, which is surprising considering this is not really an ensemble movie. They should be just sitting around waiting to play off of Sean Penn, but everybody’s really fantastic. The elevate a script that is actually kind of weak (despite it’s well-done attack of child-welfare organizations).
The only real criticism I have is the overuse of color filters, dutch-angles, and the modern technique of arbitrary jump-cutting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to give the audience a feeling of how Sam sees the world. I think it is, but it comes across more as a director trying to be artsy-fartsy without any real purpose. And I hate it when directors do that. But it’s not too distracting, and it actually does work well stylistically in a few spots. But more often, it seems arbitrary.
Also, there are a lot of technical inaccuracies regarding the in’s and out’s of working at Starbucks. But that’s not really worth criticizing, is it? I mean, it’d just be sad if I scrutinized a movie that much, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it?
Rating: *** (out of 4)
*More geek-ass Star Trek trivia: The hooker that Sam gets picked up with is played by Rosalind Chao, who played Keiko O’Brien on The Next Generation and later Deep Space Nine.
Posted by Stan on February 11, 2003 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
February 10, 2003
Classes
Well, classes today weren’t nearly as dull as I assumed they would be. During a mere three-hour period, I managed to (1) have a brief reunion with a few people who I think have actually moved up a notch from “acquaintance” to “friend,” (2) mock one of my professors openly, (3) go on an insane tirade about how people who form political and ideological opinions based on misinformations or facts that come from another plane of reality should just shut the fuck up before I commit suicide (it ended with “…AND WE ENTERED WORLD WAR TWO IN 1941, NOT THE ‘30S. AND WE DIDN’T ENTER TO GO AFTER THE GERMANS BECAUSE THEY WERE EVIL AND MENACING; WE LAUNCHED A CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE JAPANESE, WHO DECLARED WAR ON US!!”), (4) get all of my books (the line in the bookstore was surprisingly nonexistent), and (5) get my U-Pass (so now all my rides up to Boystown for some hot axxxion are free).
Now I need to drop two classes and add two more. The whirligig of college registration is ever-so-much fun. I’m just glad they’re finally leaping into the late 19th century and implementing online registration, so I don’t have to wait around for hours or come down when I don’t need to. I’m dropping Lighting I to take Script Analysis, because the latter is required and the former is not, and I plan to drop some stupid science course I signed up for as my gen ed elective. It will be replaced with Screenwriting II, which is much more important than a class I don’t feel like getting up for.
But before I can do that, I have one other thing to do. It’s probably the most irritating and difficult. I need to convince the chair of the Film/Video college that the Screenwriting I requirement should be waived in my specific case as a result of many, many, many atrocities that occurred in that class. Fortunately, I’m backed by my Writing For Television professor and my grade in that class (my nice, shiny A), along with my grades in other F/V classes (a solid B average in the department) and other English classes (straight A’s, bitch).
And it’s kinda nice, with two bitchy gen eds on Mondays and Wednesdays, to have the day end at 1:45 and just go home and relax. I’ve been planning my schedule all wrong for the last two years.
Posted by Stan on February 10, 2003 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
February 9, 2003
Yay
Classes start tomorrow. I’m absolutely thrilled. Except for how much I’m not.
I could follow that up with a pissy, whiny bitch-rant about all the things I have to do next week in order to get back into the swing of my exciting bachelor lifestyle (see, “bachelor” is a pun in this case, as I am (1) a swinging bachelor and (2) pursuing a bachelor’s degree; my hilarity never ceases to amaze and irritate me), and I still might, but I really probably shouldn’t because it’s not worth the effort. All’s I know is that everybody I know is converging in this general area tonight, and I’ll see a few them tomorrow, smoke some PCP, and then petition some grades with which I take issue. Also, I need to get a new U-Pass. And I need to drop and add some classes on Thursday. And I am looking forward to roughly none of those things.
Posted by Stan on February 9, 2003 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
The Last Castle
My dad’s gone insane again, and he’s decided that now that he works within 60 miles of our house and no longer has to work on Saturdays, we should rent every single movie made between 2000 and the present. So he’s started renting three movies a week, and unfortunately, the last three years were (mostly) lackluster for movies, with only a few bright spots. Also, my dad has pretty odd tastes. I have no idea where he comes up with this shit, but he brings home some really weird stuff. Fortunately, I end up liking most of it and I think my dad is somewhat less of a retard.
So this week it was I Am Sam, The Last Castle, and Reign of Fire. He rented the latter because he claims my mom has this crush on Matthew McConaughey (she doesn’t), and he’s extremely jealous of this fictional crush, so he decided to rent the Battlefield Earth-esque thriller where he’s all dirty and bald and wearing animal skins and shit. We haven’t watched that one yet, or I am Sam. Yesterday afternoon, we watched The Last Castle.
It didn’t suck. I didn’t really think it would, though I had no interest in it whatsoever. It started out as sort of a routine prison movie. The big difference was that — ooh! — it’s a military prison, not a normal prison. That means instead of corrupt prison guards, you have corrupt military officials. And instead of having homosex gang-banging prisoners, you have thuggish guys who are still pretty smart and general respectful of one another. It’s kind of an interesting twist, but it didn’t really seem like it’d go anywhere.
But Robert Redford shows up to the prison. He’s a lieutenant-general that disobeyed an executive order and ended up getting a bunch of people killed. Everybody in the prison respects him. The warden-like colonel guy, played by James Gandolfini, respects him, too, at first. But then he hears Redford insulting his prized collection of military antiques and shit. He says something to the effect of, “This is the collection of a man who has never set foot on a battlefield.” And then Gandolfini breaks out a can of hatorade and sprays that shit all over Redford.
But it’s cool the way it worked out. It builds to this huge revolt, but it’s not some cheesy, shitty thing. It’s all about the battle of wits. You see Redford constantly sizing up the prison, the soldier guards, and Gandolfini, trying to figure him out. There are chess metaphors that work without beating the viewer of the head. And there is a well-defined cross-section of prisoners struggling against the (pretty much) corrupt Gandolfini, who stands in front of a huge picture window in his office, watching the prisoners in the yard, manipulating them into fighting with one another.
That’s what the whole thing is about. Manipulation. Gandolfini manipulates the prisoners to turn them against one another, to fear him and the guards. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s not very good at it. They all know better, they know what he’s doing, and they want him the hell out. That’s where Redford comes in. He actually knows how to manipulate the prisoners into doing exactly what he wants; of course, it helps that it’s also what they want. They don’t want to escape. They don’t want weird benefits. They just want to serve their time without a tyrant overseeing the prison. They want Gandolfini out.
And of course, this all builds up to the inevitable revolt, which I won’t spoil because it’s really well done.
I really liked The Last Castle a lot, but I had a problem with its monologuey-ness. Every other scene plays like a musical comedy: three lines, one of which leads up to the big song-and-dance. The song-and-dance being, of course, the lengthy monologue that allows either Redford or Gandolfini to act and emote and feel the burn of the Method. I’m not chiding their acting ability, because they both do a great job. I’m mocking the monologues (you see the consonance there? It’s fun), because there’s just too much of it in the beginning. After the first 45 minutes, though, the monologues sort of go away. They’re done developing characters and talking chess, and the monologues (yeah, there are still a few later on) become a bit less tedious.
I think I’d like this movie a lot less if it had still been as monologue-tastic but had a sub-par cast. Like, say, Jake Busey in Redford’s role and that fat dude from The Practice who was in a bunch of Coen brothers movies in Gandolfini’s role. Redford and Gandolfini make the monstrous monologues (there’s the consonance again) less tedious than they could have been.
Rating: *** (out of 4)
Posted by Stan on February 9, 2003 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
A Brief History of Failure
I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know why it happened. But it happened, and for that, I am grateful.
I got a C in African History.
A C. Not a D. Not an F. A fucking C.
I should have failed. No, seriously, I should have. Of the thirty sessions of the class, I showed up for maybe twelve. Maybe less. I stopped counting after week five. I stopped showing up — no, literally, I stopped showing up entirely, and I didn’t even turn in any assignments or harp on the professor to give me another chance to turn it all around — around week 9. After the midterm, because by that point I had already fucked up so much that there was no longer any turning back.
The root of the problem was that this class, being a history class, was part of the Liberal Education school, which has no enforceable attendance policy of any sort. The basic philosophy among the professors — including dear Professor Jones, whom I barely spoke with during my brief and unmemorable tenure in the class — is to thoroughly outline the syllabus and stick fucking to it. That way, kids can leave early, show up late, or never come to class at all except on test days or paper days. It’s up to them; they can be enriched by the classroom environment, or they can stay home and watch Judge Mathis in their underwear.
I decided to do the latter. I showed up rigorously for the first two weeks, during which the professor made her agenda clear. The syllabus was set in stone, and by the time the first two weeks were over, I knew it’d be okay to occasionally bail. Sure, I’d show up when I felt like getting up for it, but mostly I’d have the freedom to sleep in and screw the class.
So I missed a week. And when I came back, things were scary. And things were different. We were behind in the syllabus. None of my peers had any knowledge of the two papers we were supposed to do during the semester. And apparently — though I didn’t learn this until much later, as a direct result of my lack of communication with the professor and my lack of caring for the class as a whole — the papers had been transmogrified into a slightly different assignment: five brief oral presentations during the course of the semester. By the time I discovered this, I had missed two of the presentations, was ill-prepared for the third, and had faxed in a paper I didn’t need to research or write.
This was right around midterm time. I was conerned I had missed the midterm. I was also concerned that there might not even be a midterm, and whatever had replaced it was something I had no knowledge of nor preparation for. As it turned out, though, we were just ass-behind on the syllabus, and the midterm had been postponed for a couple of weeks. During this couple of weeks, waiting for the midterm, I was told about the presentations-in-lieu-of-papers deal, which seemed like a cool idea because it required far less research or effort. But then I realized that, because of all the problems, I was currently failing the class, and the way the percentages broke down, it would be nearly impossible to recover.
Did I talk to the professor and explain my situation? No. Did I scramble to create the illusion that I gave a damn but had some sort of harsh-mistress (and largely fictional) job that required more of my time and energy than a class? No.
I panicked. I do that sometimes. Actually, I do that a lot. I simply froze up and left, take-home midterm in hand, wondering how I’d pull myself up. I’d have to get an A on every single thing I did in order to even squeak by with a D, so I’d really have to buckle down and study in order to…
Ah, fuck it. I turned in the midterm, got a B+, read my essay portion orally, and then never showed up again. My humiliation and paranoia got the better of me — I maintain to this day that every person in that class, Professor Jones included, we mocking me and laughing at me constantly.
You know what that means. Instead of having three missing oral presentations, I had five. Instead of having the midterm and the final to boost my grade, all I had was the midterm. As a matter of fact, unless you count the paper that was never supposed to be turned in and the pseudo-oral presentation of my midterm (both of which must have counted toward my final grade, I guess), the only assignment I ever did in that class was a midterm worth 15%, on which I got a B+.
I failed the class. The grade I got was F. And I’ve been paranoid about that for weeks, but at the same time silently hoping that maybe she’d just take pity on me and slide me by with a D. After all, I had created a somewhat fictional counterpart for that class to slightly explain my behavior — the shy, silent guy who trembles and whose voice cracks when he speaks in public.
And yet, somehow I got a C. Thank God for the bell curve, I guess. I didn’t earn it, but dammit, I’ll take it.
And jeez, I snatched my grade report and hid it from my parents for nothing. Dammit!
Also, for those interested, I got an A in Writing For Television and a B in both Fiction Writing and Aesthetics of Cinema. I think I should have had an A in Fiction Writing, but that’s okay. I know why I got the B, and I probably deserved it in the end.
Posted by Stan on February 9, 2003 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
February 8, 2003
Ideas
As is often my wont, I spent last evening browsing the Internet for descriptions of new and inventive sex acts I could one day attempt, in the unlikely event that I ever speak to a woman again. Somewhere between the Abraham Lincoln (that’s where you shave off all of your pubic hair, set the clippings on a sheet of paper, and when a girl goes down on you, you shoot your load on her face, pick up the paper, and blow the hair all over her face…the sp00 makes it stick like a Lincoln-esque beard) and the flying Dutchman (not really complicated — all you do is yell “flying Dutchman” at the height of passion to confuse your partner or any friends who may be listening/watching), I came up with a disturbing idea. A very disturbing idea. A decidedly non-sexy idea, you fucking pervert.
Actually, it was the embryo ideation of what actually might become a script or a short story or something else that is in one way or another written down on paper. But the idea itself is kind of disturbing. Usually, when really odd and terrifying ideas pop into my head (once a second, on average), I dismiss them immediately, crawl into a snug corner of my closet, and whip myself with a bloody scourge as penance. But even with all the self-flogging (in more ways than one), the idea won’t leave. It’s still there, and it’s fleshing itself out while my horrified conscience says to itself, “There is something seriously wrong with you. Seek help. No, seriously.”
It dawned on me that this is entirely what’s wrong with me, and this is why I will never, ever make any money. Ever. For life. My ideas are not mainstream. Actually, my ideas border on utterly wrong. And yet I feel like I have to run with them, because otherwise they won’t go away. I have a drawer full of completed, half-completed, or outlined written ideas that will probably never leave the musty drawer. Meanwhile, I have maybe two ideas a year that are not completely terrifying and wrong and might actually be lucrative. I guess two is better than none, but the ratio of scary to sane is becoming a little rich.
Oh well. At least this idea is marginally better than the pornographic TV sitcom I came up with that’s set in a gas station called Exxxon.
Posted by Stan on February 8, 2003 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
February 5, 2003
Good Old Spike
“Who you gonna call?” A beat. “God, that phrase is never going to be usable again, is it?”
Best ever.
Posted by Stan on February 5, 2003 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 2, 2003
Dannii Minogue Needs to Be Worshipped as a Goddess
So Dannii Minogue, the terrifying Australian who sings shitty pop songs, has a new album on the horizon. While it’s true that her music is terrible, a new song from her album is called “Vibe On,” and — you guessed it — it’s an ode to vibrators. I don’t think any non-funk group has written an ode to vibrators since Prince’s nine-minute epic on the subject, so I think it’s high time for another tribute. Here are the lyrics (I swear I am not making this up):
Instead of just lying there,
Why don’t you show me that you’re powerful,
Put in triple X batteries just so you give me something wonderful,
Change it up fast and slow
Till I find the frequency I like.
Love it when you do my vibe on
Good vibrations, that’s what gets my ride on, gotta have vibrations,
Jump on to it, sit right on it, plug it in, give me my vibe on, gotta have vibrations.
I don’t want to put you down, looks like I’m a vibraholic now.
A vibraholic. Holy shit, that is great. “Triple X batteries” is my favorite part, I think. But my God, is that not the funniest damn thing a pop singer has produced since Crossroads (which was only unintentionally hilarious).
I’m generally not much interested in pop music, but I will be buying Neon Nights, Dannii Minogue’s new album, as soon as it comes out.
Posted by Stan on February 2, 2003 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
