April 2004 Archives
April 26, 2004
Experimental!
Unfortunately, I had to miss the screening of Baadasssss! tonight for personal reasons. As a consolation prize, you get to read a really awful, but hopefully marginally amusing, screenplay I’ve written.
As you all should know by now, I hate experimental films almost without exception. While it’s true that the experimental screenwriting class I’m taking this semester has helped me to appreciated certain experimental techniques, I still hate it overall.
And what do I do when I hate things? I make fun of them.
So, without further ado, here is the first and probably only screenplay I will put on the blog. You can read it here.
P.S.: I used the name of my old pal johnl’s love thang, Yeo-Reum, as the head Vietnamese soldier, because I had it in my head that she was Vietnamese and didn’t know any other female Vietnamese names. I realize she’s Korean, but I’m way too lazy to change the name. Sue me.
Update! Here’s what I learned today: when you type #333 in as your background color, some browsers interpret this as #030303 (which is black), and others interpret it as #303030 (which is dark gray). Similarly, when you type #CCC in as your text color, some browsers interpret this as #0C0C0C (which, again, is black), and others interpret it as #C0C0C0 (which is light gray). I have no idea why this is, but I’ve learned my lesson, and the troubles those of you were having reading my script should be fixed.
Posted by Stan on April 26, 2004 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Career-Based Rambling
Movement
Victoly, LLC, the gracious folks who host my mindless ramblings, have decided to buy me a domain name. Isn’t it purdy?
Posted by Stan on April 26, 2004 8:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
April 24, 2004
The Theory
Another week, another Owen story. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m already almost to the point of suicide, I’d try to get into some classes with him next semester just so I never run out of blog tales.
So last week, as we all know, the following things occurred:
- Owen intentionally butchered a reading of another student’s treatment, in particular highlighting a few spelling errors by mispronouncing the words to match the inaccurate spelling
- My friend Maria was assigned as his first reader
- Owen made an enemy for life (i.e., me)
And this week came The Theory. While reading this, bear in mind that we screenwriters are unbelievable gossips. Actually, “gossip” is too light a word. We’re shit-talkers; I’ll admit it. Long before any of us ever make a sale to legitimize our cynicism, we take on the role of “jaded asshole who thinks he is better than everybody else.” We’re just preparing ourselves for a career of being the lowest possible person on the totem pole (we’re lower than PAs, for the love of God!).
In addition to our shit-talking, we also have incredible, insane imaginations, because we’re hack writers. We understand the value of taking tiny snippets of disconnected information and turning it into cinematic gold! Or lead.
Essentially, in our off-time, we talk shit about everybody we know, and when we run out of shit to talk, we hone in on tiny details and use that to fuel fictional shit to talk. I make no apologies for this behavior. I know it’s wrong and that I, and all of my compatriots, are horrible monsters. Unfortunately, that’s not going to make me or anyone else not do it.
So during our class on Monday, Fellow, Maria, and I filled in another classmate on the events of Thursday. He was absent for whatever reason, so he didn’t know anything about Owen’s behavior. That’s when, after we spewed out all the details of the Thursday session, Fellow spewed out The Theory:
“I think he’s gay.”
Of all the people to pitch this concept, Fellow would be the one. He’s quite gay himself. Maybe he just understands the way homosexuals act more than we do, or maybe he has a more finely tuned “gaydar.” Whatever the reason, Fellow blurted it out and then explained that on Thursday, one of the hotter days of recent weeks, Fellow came to class wearing a muscle shirt. He’s pretty pumped, so it wouldn’t be like, for example, me coming to class wearing a muscle shirt, where, after the horrified recoil and vomiting of my classmates, they will settle on merely averting their eyes for the duration of the class session. Women stare at Fellow. This is not his desired goal, of course, but I haven’t noticed any men staring at Fellow.
Of course, Fellow has noticed men staring at him. One example he gave: Owen, who apparently could not take his eyes off of Fellow on Thursday. I didn’t notice this, myself, but then again, I don’t generally pay attention when people (least of all men) check Fellow out. I notice a lot when women check him out, when I’m with him, because I’m all, “Ladies, he’s playing for a different team. Why not give Stan a whirl?” That doesn’t really go over well, and I get jealous.
My neuroses aside, Fellow pitched this idea, and we were all sort of reluctant to agree with it, although we wouldn’t necessarily rule it out. It was just an odd, random declaration, backed up with no independent evidence. I mean, we’re all unabashed shit-talkers, and sometimes we dabble in the realm of fiction in our conversation, but we at least have inscrutable arguments to back up our claims.
But Fellow’s theory started to take shape on Wednesday. As I mentioned last week, I have a class with Owen and Grey on Wednesday nights, and Owen has apparently taken it upon himself to enter the group, much to the chagrin of myself, Grey, and the two ladies we hang with before class. Now, awhile back, I bought a shirt from Glark that reads, “Seventies sci-fi was all about hexagons.” I should’ve known better than to wear it at a time when I knew I’d see Owen. He instantly honed in on the shirt, read it to me aloud (because I am illiterate), and then said, “I thought seventies sci-fi was all about men in knee-length tunics.”
What the fuck was he talking about?
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. I’m too nice to embarrass other people* by making a scene, which is why I didn’t rip Owen a new asshole the instant he approached us, but I am not feigning niceness anymore. Not by a long shot. More on that in a little.
“You know how they wear those tunics, and they only go down to the knees, so you see their shaved, hairless legs,” Owen said. “It’s disturbing. I don’t want to see that.”
I’m sure Owen wasn’t making this up out of the blue, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a single example of seventies sci-fi involving men with unshaved legs wearing tunics that look like women’s dresses. Plus, for somebody who doesn’t want to see that, he’s spent an awful lot of time considering it. I thought about The Theory, and it suddenly seemed like there might be something to it.
I wasn’t convinced, though. People say tangential, homophobic things all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe it does.
On Thursday, our morning class was pretty much a blow-off. The prof was taking a trip to San Francisco, so she just spent half an hour teaching us how to use a budgeting program, then let us loose in the lab to do our budgeting. Instead of doing that, we all sat around shooting the shit. My friend Maria, Owen’s first reader, was trying to get her work done for our afternoon class. One of the assignments was to read his treatment and give feedback.
She let me read his treatment first, because she didn’t want to have anything to do with it initially. I have some minor nitpicks and some major nitpicks. The minor is that it’s not a treatment; it’s a short story. He’s all, “A long, black sedan drives down a desolate country highway, makes a right into the gravel-strewn parking lot of the store, and parks behind the building. Murton emerges from the vehicle, dusts off his pants, and slowly enters the store, which has a sign hanging above the door that reads JONAH’S HOUSE OF VIDEOS.” That’s not a treatment. A treatment is this: “Murton drives to the video store.” Visual, observable behavior, without any frills. Economy of phrasing is key, since most producers and executives will barely skim your shit anyway — it has to be tight, and it has to be short. I now know why his treatment was 10 pages when the rest of ours were three.
My other nitpick was that he wasn’t even finished writing the goddamn thing. A little more than halfway through, he has a little note saying, “Here’s where I changed the treatment, but I didn’t get to the end, so you’ll see some notable differences in subplots and secondary characters.” Which is fine, except for the fact that the story, which barely made sense to begin with, becomes completely illogical for the last four pages, because everything is completely different. It’s like Mulholland Drive, except unintentional.
But here’s the biggest problem I had with his treatment. After making such a big fucking juvenile stink about the spelling errors and lack of proofreading in that guy’s treatment last week — guess whose fucking treatment wasn’t proofread? Yes, he spell-checked it, but that’s only half the battle. He had more than one “problem” word on every page, beating the other guy’s one-per-page average by quite a bit. I got tripped up on the first fucking page, when he described a character as “a bard,” with “hair legs.” I assumed he meant “hairy” on the latter, but I was baffled by the “bard” thing. I figured it was some kind of British slang term or something, but later I found out he just misspelled “beard.”
And the grammar wasn’t much better. The last time I saw that many comma splices, I was reading one of my blog entries! And ordinarily I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. Yes, it’s sad that both the screenwriting and fiction departments are filled with people who don’t know basic English grammar and think that a spell-checker will repair all their mistakes. They’re writers, for Christ’s sake. They should know it. But here’s the difference between all of them and Owen: they know they don’t know it. Every writer I know complains they don’t know grammar. They know how to spell, but they’re too lazy to proofread. Hell, most of them (myself included) are too lazy to even spell-check.
Plus, even if they do know proper grammar and spelling, everyone makes mistakes. Even in proofreading (especially proofreading your own work), you miss things that you know are wrong. Which, I think, is why we’re all (except for Owen) so lenient when it comes to errors in others’ work. In addition to the fact that it’s mean and humiliating, we know that everybody knows better, or at least they know they don’t know better.
So, when Owen started that shit up last week, he was a goddamn motherfucker, and because of it, he does not have a get-out-of-jail-free card. If he’s gonna be such an asslicker, he should have made sure his shit was immaculate. But it wasn’t. I pointed out the many errors to Maria and insisted she read it, write some constructive feedback, and be sure to own his ass on the fucking lack of proofreading. And she, as bloodthirsty for petty vengeance as I am, immediately agreed and ran off to read Owen’s treatment.
Later, as I was talking with some other friends, Maria approached me, claiming she had airtight, empirical evidence of Owen’s homosexuality. It was all in the treatment, she insisted, and while I agree she made a good case, I still was not necessarily convinced.
Owen’s story is an ensemble piece. It has five main characters who are gay, one of whom is a repressed and angry (and unwilling to admit his homosexuality until the end) reverend, another of whom is hiding in the closet. The other two main characters are straight, and one of them is a woman. With that in mind, here was Maria’s point: we screenwriters are lazy hacks. We take the old, elementary school mantra “Write what you know” to a whole new level of bland storytelling. And most of us, especially since we’re still in college and pretty inexperienced as writers, have a central protagonist who is basically a gussied-up version of ourselves.
For example, Maria tends to write about straight, single, white, suburban women in their 20s. Fellow tends to write about gay, single, black, urban men in their 20s. I tend to write about straight, single, white, suburban men in their 20s who jerk off a lot and live with their parents. It’s just a natural inclination, no matter how outlandish or unknown the subject matter is, to have a central character who is rooted exactly in something we know better than anyone else: ourselves. We’re hacks.**
Maria’s argument was that Owen, writing about not one but five gay characters, and the “central” character (yes, it’s an ensemble piece, but there’s still the one point-of-view character, through whose eyes we see most of the action) is the angry, repressed reverend who hides his sexual identity through random misogyny and homophobia that makes him feel like a “real” man. Sound familiar?
I immediately bought Maria’s argument, but after thinking about it awhile, I still wasn’t totally convinced. Writers do try to stretch their wings, especially if they’re really talented and experienced (or think they’re really talented and experienced). Owen’s the most arrogant person I’ve ever met, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he, perfectly straight and woman-loving, thought he could accomplish the task of writing five characters whose lives are completely unlike anything he’s ever experienced. It’s harder to do than it sounds, no matter how much research you think you can do on the subject. Even putting yourself into a different culture, sociologist-style, isn’t the same experience of living your entire life that way. There’s no way it can be, and no amount of interviewing, reading, or interacting will give you that experience. All we can do as writers is guesstimate based on what we’ve learned, and usually we’re pretty bad at it (see also: any female character in a David Mamet script).
During class, two things happened that pretty much forced me to believe The Theory:
- The coolest fucking thing to happen in a long time is that there’s a free screening of Baadasssss! on Monday night. This film, originally titled How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass (which, seriously, is a million times better), was directed and co-written by Mario Van Peebles, in which he also stars as his father, Melvin Van Peebles (the other co-writer), and it tells the story of the difficulties he had making Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. And here’s the kicker: Mario and Melvin are both going to be there, and they’re going to do a Q&A afterward. Unbelievably awesome, and you better believe I’m gonna be there (and I’ll blog it!).
Anyway, Fellow was the one who alerted the class to the screening. He found a flyer/ticket and passed it around and told us to pick up our own in the film office. After we basked in the joy and confusion of our memories of seeing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song for the first time, Owen announced to the class, “You all know Mario Van Peebles is gay, right?” He didn’t say this in a homophobic way, necessarily; it was more a declaration of something we absolutely had to know if we didn’t already.
After an awkward couple of silent seconds, Ted responded, “A gay man in the film industry? I don’t believe it.” He’s amusing, that Ted.
But it made me think. Again, this isn’t the open-and-shut case Fellow and Maria think it is, but of all the people I know who are fascinated to the point of obsession about who’s gay and who isn’t, only two of them are straight. And I’d say I know about a dozen, so there’s a 17% chance that Owen’s straight.
- We had to do evaluations for this class. Normally, we’d be doing them next week, but our prof scheduled individual conferences, so that fucked everything up. We were given permission to do them early, but we were not given a TA to proctor. My prof sought me out Wednesday night and asked me to get the evaluations and proctor them myself. Yay for the fun.
It wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible, because I thought we would be dismissed to go home afterward. It turns out we were not, which made me even more irritated, since it was getting close to the end of the session, and guess who was holding us up? Fucking Owen, writing a dissertation on the quality of our particular profession. Fucking Owen.
We were all done, sitting in silence, and people started grumbling. Most were bad-mouthing Owen, which, I discovered, can be heard very easily from the front of the room. Our prof, I’m coming to realize, hears all the comments we make about him from the back. As does Owen, who sits right next to her so he can annoy her at close proximity.
Finally, Owen said to me, “I’m probably going to need a few more minutes. Is there somewhere I can drop this when I’m done?” It was surprisingly conscientious, but still fucking moronic. Why? I explained it to Owen, so I may as well explain it to you, too:
“No, there’s not. You know why? Because these things need to be put into the envelope by me, sealed, and delivered by me to the assistant to the chair. If they aren’t delivered by me, and if they’re not in the envelope, you know what they do with them? They throw them the hell away. You know why? Because anybody could have written them, or told you what to write.*** So if you want to waste your time filling the fucking thing out to have them throw it away, by all means, be my guest. If not, hurry the hell up, because we all wanna get the fuck outta here.”
I am aware, of course, that if I hadn’t grandstanded, he would’ve been able to finish the evaluation that much faster, but the dude just pisses me the hell off, and I needed to vent. And nobody seemed to mind, since they all agreed with me, and since I’m one of the very few who pointed out how fucking stupid he is despite his guise of tortured brilliance.
Owen, who looked all stone-faced and stoic (though his eyes betrayed his shock and horror), said nothing and continued with the evaluation. A few minutes later, he quietly slid it across the conference table to me.
“You wanna give me the fucking pencil, too?” I asked. We’re given little, cheap golf pencils because, for some reason, nobody uses number-two pencils at my school. Since they’re such cheap pieces of shit, and there are millions of them, I wouldn’t have cared if it was anybody else. It was Owen, though. I had to give him as hard a time as possible.
Owen handed me the pencil and said, jokingly, “Maybe I should stick it up your arse.” He tried to fake a British accent and failed spectacularly. Then he giggled, very much like Robert Carradine in Revenge of the Nerds. “I bet that’s what you want, anyway.”
At this point I had the door open to leave with the evluations, but I turned around and was going to make a comment when I saw the look in his eyes. The tone in his voice, and that look. It both disturbed me and convinced me, now and forever, of his homosexuality.
Because, you see, it wasn’t what I wanted (and even if I did, Owen would be the last person I would ask to perform the chore) — it was what he wanted. That’s what that really fucking weird, suggestive tone in his voice told me. Although most of what convinced me was in his eyes, which were, quoth Eric Carmen, hungry eyes. With that one look, he cannot disguise that he feels the magic between he and I.
So what does this mean? I was last to leap aboard The Theory man-train, but now I’m convinced. But what’s the point of it all? He’s gay, he’s apparently repressed and masks his real feelings through a mixture of homophobia and misogyny. Added to his ordinary attention-whoring and misguided obsession with British culture, it makes him the worst human being I’ve ever personally met.
But, if The Theory is true, it almost makes him a real, human person. He’s not some walking, real-life stereotype of The Prisoner-loving, J.G. Ballard-reading, British spelling-using, opinion-screaming, it’s-time-to-slay-the-dragon-playing über-geek. He’s a guy with a problem and a secret and what he obviously considers a flaw, despite the fact that at an art school, being straight is considered more of a social taboo than being gay.
When I think about it that way, it makes me want to make fun of him less. But then, he says anything at any time, and not only do I want to mock him until the day he dies, but I also want to say horribly mean, abusive things to him and beat the shit out of him. Because, flawed human or not, he’s still the worst human being I’ve ever met, and I just. Don’t. Like. Him. At all.
*Not to mention myself. When I get angry and start yelling at people, I tend to get really incoherent. It’s a trait I inherited from my father, who has been known to spout more puzzling phrases than Darren McGavin.
**Which is not to say we only write through those characters. No, they’re just the main characters. Not every person in everything I write is somebody just like me, but there’s usually at least one thinly-veiled Stan trolling the story for some loose women or free coffee.
***This sounds like a logical fallacy, I’m sure, and it is. Usually students don’t proctor the evaluations; it’s either done by an impartial faculty member or an equally impartial TA, but here’s the thing about humanity: nobody’s impartial, so we’re pretty much on the honor system. I’m on my honor to seal that envelope, not look at what anybody wrote, not change what anybody wrote by filling out blank evaluation forms, or to say to the students, “Hey, everybody, let’s all write that she’s a bitch!”
I could do all those things, but they’re trusting me not to, and for the most part, proctors respect the rules. Most of the time they are impartial or simply apathetic, but if a faculty member is proctoring, they are sometimes competitive with others, and if a TA is doing it — well, they’re students, and they may not like this prof and try to influence us against her. I’ve never seen that happen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t.
Posted by Stan on April 24, 2004 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Classic Issues, School Rants
April 16, 2004
Owen Is the Biggest Fucking Asshole I’ve Ever Met in My Entire Life, and He Must Die
Probably the nicest person I’ve ever met in my entire life is a guy we call Grey (short for Greydon), who is nice, open, and accepting of everyone he meets. He’s even genuinely nice to Owen — he’s the guy who got frustrated last Thursday when we all laughed and made him seem like an asshole. I have a class with him on Wednesday nights and another on Thursday afternoons, the same two classes I share with Owen and a number of others. We screenwriters travel in packs.
On Wednesday afternoons, before my night class, I eat dinner with a couple of girls I had a class with last semester, which started as coincidence but turned into a planned ritual. While we shoot the shit, we usually run into Grey, who sits with us and talks until class time. Unfortunately, Owen passed through and noticed Grey. Since he’s probably the only person who’s nice to Owen, obviously Owen felt the need to stick by Grey. He invaded, monopolized, and eventually destroyed our conversation.
As I’ve already mentioned, Owen has an extremely loud, extremely shrill voice that cuts through all sound like a Ginsu knife. We tried to talk over him, and then to talk past him, but eventually we just gave up and sat in uncomfortable silence until the girls rushed off to class (30 minutes early). Put in an awkward position, Grey and I moved on to class, too. One of the things I find really interesting about Grey is that, while he actually is genuinely nice and genuinely cares about the shit Owen rambles on about, he doesn’t find the rambling any less irritating than we do. He’s just better at handling it than people who have no patience (i.e., me).
This, however, leads me to the first time I’ve ever been alone with Owen. I’ve wondered about that moment, because I knew it’d happen at some point. I kept thinking about how I’d handle it. I assumed I’d set him on fire or something, and considering that, I’d say I handled things quite well.
We walked to the classroom, and Grey went on past us to the bathroom (that traitor), so there Owen and I stood. Owen peered through the window to the door at another classmate, Dan, who was sitting at the classroom computer.
“Check it out,” Owen said, “he’s looking at porn.”
Dan was very clearly not looking at porn, but I chuckled sympathetically.
Owen looked me in the eyes, and I immediately stared down at the floor, fearing he would hypnotize me. “Your job is to get him out of the room so I can get his passwords.”
“What?” I was completely, utterly stunned. Of all the stupid fucking things I would have expected him to say, that was not one of them.
“Just go in there and convince him to leave,” Owen repeated. “Then I’ll run in and get his password.”
“Dude, just pay for your own porn,” I said, thinking about adding “Or check out Usenet,” but I figured that would betray the hoary depths of my Internet porn knowledge.
“Come on, it’ll be funny,” Owen said.
“Fuck you,” I said, pushing past him and going into the room. That was the end of our first — and hopefully only — conversation. Since this is the first time in a long time I’ve seriously (as in, not jokingly) said “Fuck you” to anybody, my mind started to race with the possible consequences. We’re always told not to burn any bridges, especially before we’ve crossed them (ugh, I hate metaphors), because it could come back and bite us in the ass. What if Owen was a studio head some day, and his was the only place in town even remotely interested in my script, but then he found out I was the writer and passed and murdered my children and blew up my car? That would suck.
All things considered about Owen, though, I think he has less of a future as a screenwriter than I do (and that’s saying something), so I figured it wouldn’t hurt in the long run. In fact, it made my life a little easier, because now he doesn’t even try to engage me in conversation or say hello to me or anything. It’s kinda nice.
Then, on Thursday, Owen did something unforgivable. And what makes it even more unforgivable is that he didn’t do it to me. In fact, it wasn’t about me at all. It’s about the fact that he’s the biggest fucking asshole on the planet, and even though I have no relation to the incident that occurred (other than being in the room), I feel it’s my personal responsiblity to destroy Owen before he tries to destroy us.
Here’s the setup: the assignment last week for my genres class was to write a two-page treatment of our entire idea. This treatment could not, under any circumstances, go over two pages, even though everybody did except one person. Most people were just writing the first act or maybe the first half. A few people — I was one of them — attempted to distill the entire script into two pages (even though they all ended up three or four and were pretty incoherent). My theory is that the term “treatment” was misleading — what she wanted, more or less, was an outline in paragraph form (which is not the same as a treatment).
Owen’s treatment, for the record, was ten pages. He didn’t even try to shorten it (or maybe he did, which is even more frightening). He’s had a history, in this class particularly, of flagrantly defying the actual assignments in favor of doing whatever the fuck he wants. That’d be cool with me if he wasn’t such a dick when everybody called him on his bullshit.
Anyway, our prof had us pair off and read one another’s treatments silently. Then, she left the room, so what did we do? Bitched. That’s what screenwriters do, in case you’re wondering. It’s all we can do in most cases. So we were bitch, bitch, bitching about what a pain in the ass it was to write such short treatments, apologizing to each other preemptively about how illogical they’ll sound when read aloud, et cetera, and then Owen stood up and started scrawling something on the board.
“What the fuck is he writing?” my friend Maria asked me. I shrugged; it looked vaguely Klingon-esque to me, and knowing Owen, that probably wouldn’t have been out of the question.
Finally, he left, and we could read what he wrote:
Be back later, needed to“That fucking asshole,” another classmate said.
find a quiet spot to read.
— Owen
“Who’s gonna erase it?” Fellow, who’s also in this class, asked.
“Fuck him,” my friend Ted said. “Leave it up there — let him have us fun. But we should all be really silent when the professor comes back.”
This idea amused us all, and so we were completely silent. Of course, what was funnier to me was that she didn’t neither noticed the note on the board nor that Owen was gone. The prof was in the middle of talking when he showed back up, looking very smug and pleased with himself. He immediately looked disappointed when all she said was, “Take your seat,” and then continued talking.
For the most part, what we did in class on Thursday was read our partner’s treatment aloud. Then, we’d all give them feedback, which was pretty tough to do for the people with “full” treatments (i.e., not just first acts), since they made very little sense. We got through it, but Owen got us off to a rocky start.
Owen volunteered to read his partner’s treatment first. And off he went, reading it dryly and ploddingly, which instantly makes the listener think this is the most boring thing in the history of the spoken word. Then, the listener usually zones out. I tried really hard not to, just to spite Owen. Plus, I didn’t really know if he was doing it intentionally or not at first. Everything he says is extremely tedious and boring, but usually when he reads, there’s at least slight animation. I thought maybe the problem was that he was reading somebody else’s work.
Then, he was tripped up by the word “security,” which he pronounced “seh-CUE-teh-ree.” I found that extremely baffling, and I would’ve figured he just fucked up the word if not for the fact that he spoke so slowly and methodically, savoring every single word. I thought it was really fucked up, but then I recalled Owen’s lengthy discourse on the subject of British spellings and how much cooler it is than American English, so I thought (in my infinite cultural illiteracy) that maybe that was some weird British pronunciation of “secretary” or something.
I came to realize that that was illogical in the context of the treatment, which was all about a security guard. Plus, our professor realized shortly after “seh-CUE-teh-ree” that none of us have heard this particular student’s ideas. He was absent the day we read our character bios, so we were clueless as to what the story was supposed to be about. She had the guy pitch his character, and then told Owen to read. Instead of picking up where he left off, Owen started from the beginning.
“Seh-CUE-teh-ree” was no mistake; he pronounced it in exactly the same way the second time. In fact, he nearly tripped himself up and pronounced the word correctly the second time around, but he stopped and re-pronounced it.
All of us looked around at one another. This was Owen’s intent, although the reason we were doing it was not. He was thinking, I’m sure, that we’d be aghast by the poor spelling and snickering at the other student’s misfortune. Instead, we were thinking, “What the fuck is his problem?”
Randomly throughout the reading, Owen would make eye contact with his audience. It’s something they teach you to do in fiction classes, but they don’t teach you to do it the way he did — he practically stopped reading, and went up and down the rows of people, looking at every single one of them. One of the guys muttered, “What the hell was that?” after the second suspicious round of Eye Contact for Sociopaths.
This weird eye contact thing reminded me of two things, if you’ll allow me to digress for a moment:
- During my first year of college, when I was a music major, I had a professor we called The Martin. The Martin was positively the strangest guy I’ve ever met (stranger than Owen, even). He had all sorts of puzzling quirks, like arbitrary outbursts of profanity for no reason, a lot of weird tongue action, and a completely over-the-top style of piano playing (which involved a lot of animated head-tossing and swaying). One day, we were practicing intervals, so we all crowded around the piano to watch the person playing the intervals. I had to take a shit, so I disappeared for awhile, and when I came back, The Martin winked at me.
“Why the fuck is he winking at me?” I wondered, but then I noticed that he looked at whoever was standing next to me and winked at him. Then he went to the next person down the line, who was looking at the piano. The Martin waited for this person to look up and make eye contact, then winked and moved on until he’d winked at everyone. What the fuck?
- When I was in high school, we were required to take an oral communications class. Nobody wanted to take it, but everybody had to. One guy, Deion, used to do the following during every single speech he gave: he’d talk for awhile, trail off, have literally nothing else to say, and then take about three steps forward, turn around, and look at the clock on the wall behind his head (the only clock in the room) to see if he’d hit the time requirement yet. If not, he’d take three steps back and try to bullshit, then move forward again to check the clock.
I guess it was the weird grandiosity of that gesture that made me think of Deion while watching Owen — Owen went going up and down the rows, and we’re sitting at conference tables so he can’t just see everybody by turning his head, so he was pushing back in his chair or leaning really far forward to make sure he made eye contact with everyone.
End of anecdotal digression.
There were two other words he pronounced oddly during his extremely boring rendition of this guy’s treatment: “parole” (pah-ruhll) and “rotary” (rah-teh-ree). He was intentionally sabotaging the quality of this kid’s treatment by reading it in a dull, slow monotone, but not only that — he was highlighting spelling errors by intentionally mispronouncing words. I couldn’t fucking believe it, especially since there were three misspellings in a three-page treatment; granted, there should be none, but three is definitely not enough to make a federal case about, especially at Columbia. Honestly, I’ve read 30-page scripts that were crippled by spelling and grammar problems to such a degree that the scripts were incoherent; even then, I spent a single sentence on it in my written critique: “Desperately needs spell-checking and proofreading.” It didn’t need any more than that, and I most certainly wouldn’t have highlighted the spelling errors while reading it aloud.
The treatment I read that day had one single spelling error (it said “his” instead of “him”), and you know what I did? I crossed out the “s” and wrote an “m” above it. And read it like a normal person.
I’m a huge stickler for spelling and grammar*, and I’m also well known for blunt criticism (although I always highlight the good before the bad), but even I don’t think it’s appropriate to openly mock and humiliate somebody — even Owen — for something like that. Especially when it was arguably the least of this guy’s troubles, what with the whopping three spelling errors and the fact that the content of the story was perfectly clear. (There may have been a ton of grammar errors, but if there were, Owen didn’t do a very successful job of pointing them out in his reading, aside from saying things like, “He wonders why he needs such a large manual for a quotation simple close-quotation job,” which isn’t even erroneous.)
“Well,” the professor said after the tense, horribly awkward reading, “what did you all think?”
“I think it could have used some more proofreading,” Owen said smugly. I wanted to jump across the table and pound him to death with my enormous, heavy backpack.
“Yes, I think you made that clear,” the professor said. She was clearly not happy with him, which I thought was awesome. She should’ve reamed him out right there, but she didn’t even have to, because it was so clear from her tone and what she just said (and what she’ll say here in a minute) that she was pissed.
“I had trouble following it,” Grey said.
“Well,” the professor said, “it’s always difficult to fully digest something after only hearing it once —”
“Especially when it was read that way,” Ted said. Before Owen could try to ask what that meant, Ted asked, “Would you mind if I read it again?”
“Please do,” the professor said.
And so Ted re-read it, slightly more animated, much more clearly, without highlighting the occasional spelling errors. It’s probably not surprising that after Ted’s reading, the idea actually both made logical sense and seemed like an interesting to a script (he had just written his first act).
The thing that I’ve been struggling with for the past day is why, why anybody would do something like that. It’s not funny. It wouldn’t be funny even if Owen was the well-loved class cut-up and the kid who wrote the treatment was some fuck we all hated. If, for a real-world example, Ted had read Owen’s treatment very dryly, pointing out all the spelling and grammar errors, it still wouldn’t have been funny. True, we all hate Owen, but that’s still just plain mean and not at all funny.
Even if it were slightly funny, Owen has to know that nobody likes him. People try very hard, but they can’t even fake that they like him; they just try to ignore him, because if you can’t ignore him, you’ll end up beating him with a shovel. This is not me talking for myself — this is the attitude of everyone who has ever met him, including teachers. He’s that unlikable.
During the break, I went out to the stairwell with Maria and watched her have a smoke. Usually I stay in the classroom during breaks, but this class is the exception: (1) we’re in basically a poorly maintained storage room, so it’s always way too hot, and (2) I might end up alone in the room with Owen, and that can never, ever happen.
As Maria and I were walking back to the room, we ran into Grey, who looked unbelievably pissed. I’ve never seen him mad before, and it was sort of creepy. When he gets mad, you know something really awful has happened (or will happen).
“I’m gonna shoot myself in the head,” Grey said.
“No, don’t,” I said. “Then who’ll shoot us?”
“Well, I could shoot all you guys first, and put you out of your misery, and then turn the gun on myself,” Grey said. “That’d work.” Believe it or not, it didn’t sound nearly as “jokey” as it might read.
“Or you could just shoot Owen and save the bullets,” Maria suggested.
“Bingo,” Grey said, then pushed past us. “I need water. Desperately.”
So, there you have it. Owen managed, purely by being the fucking dickhead he naturally is, to alienate the only person who was legitimately nice to him.
Which means, of course, that he’s a prime candidate to head a studio someday.
*Except on the blog, which is 98% first-draft stream-of-consciousness “conversational” stuff that is posted as soon as I finish writing it, without even a second glance. Trust me, even if I have spelling errors/misused words/grammar issues, it benefits you, the reader, because if I went through and started proofreading, I’d edit out most of what you’re reading for content reasons.
Posted by Stan on April 16, 2004 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
April 14, 2004
Essay for Semester in L.A. Program
I’m not sure if this is too sarcastic or just sarcastic enough.
–––
I don’t have amazing, lofty career goals. I wish I did, so I could add some extra padding to this essay, but I really don’t. The only thing I want is to make a living writing, even if that means squatting in a recently condemned tenement, counting change so I can afford a box of ramen noodles. Hopefully, the Semester in L.A. program will ensure that my dreams of rat-infested squalor and scurvy will become a reality.
From what I understand of the program, it provides — among other things — a menacing, boot-clad foot in the door of Hollywood. It’s not, generally, easy to get a foot in the door. I’m often told to exploit every possible contact I have with Hollywood, no matter how remote. This either means taking part in Semester in L.A. or having my aunt in Boise write a desperate letter to Gary Cole, with whom she went to high school.
Semester in L.A. will, hopefully, make things a little easier than that. I have no delusions that it’s easy, or that I’ll suddenly and miraculously become the most in-demand writer in the history of the universe. But if I’m able to wedge my sweaty, corn-covered foot into the door of the Hollywood system, and if somebody decides to pay me to do something — anything! — related to writing (even if it’s reading, which I enjoy almost as much as writing), and I can quit my job at Starbucks and throw that green apron at my boss’s scowling face and say, “Never again,” and I can buy a small house on a pleasant suburban street, and I can convince my girlfriend to stop experimenting with mushrooms and marry me, I’ll be extremely happy.
Without this opportunity, I’ll probably be more depressed (and distressed) than I already am at my lack of skill and success in what I want to do. I’ll end up being a warped, frustrated old man who shoots bottle-rockets at squirrels and tosses hunks of ground beef laced with strychnine at his neighbor’s dog. Nobody wants that, especially not me.
I hope, for the sake of all the squirrels and yappy dogs in the world, that the Semester in L.A. program will help me realize my limited aspiration of being paid to do something I love.
Posted by Stan on April 14, 2004 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
April 9, 2004
About Those Hot Chicks…
For reasons I don’t even understand, the majority of my friends are women. What’s more, the majority of these women are attractive. I’m not talking about my standards (I thought of making a Stan-related pun, but nah); honest-to-God, normal, non-desperate men find these women incredibly attractive. And this is not nearly as much fun as you might think it is.
For example, when one of my friends approaches me with boyfriend troubles (and yes, they’re hot, of course they all have boyfriends), it’s very difficult for me to give them objective advice; instead, I want to urge them to dump their boyfriends and pick me up on the rebound. Sure, it won’t last, but I’ll understand that she was going through a period of confusion and we’ll end up friends. But noooooo; they have to work it out.
Women. Go figure.
Plus, it’s hard to have a civilized conversation with your close friends, people whose lives you know very disturbing, depressing, funny, poignant, crazy things about, when you’re picturing them naked. So I’ve got the current conversation, all the past things I’ve ever learned about them, their nudity, and my guilt about thinking about their nudity, to juggle in my brain.
Sometimes it’s just hard being Stan. In more ways than one.
And that leads me to yet another in a string of awkward conversations I’ve had with my former* co-worker, Eric. He’s a film student, so I end up seeing him constantly. Although it’s far enough in the semester that I’ve figured out when and where I’m most likely to see him, and I try to avoid it. Especially this week, since on Tuesday I ended up running into him, and he told me I had a check in the office to pick up, and if I didn’t, they’d mail it. I told him I’d go and pick it up, but I didn’t bother, so I thought it best to try and avoid him until after they mailed it.
So, after class, my friends and I went to this pizza place up on 8th and State. It’s sorta the best of both worlds: they have pizza by the slice for me and salads for them. I tried to convince them to stay and shoot the shit for awhile at the pizza place, but it started to get crowded (damn lunch rush!), so we went back to the film building and shot the shit in relative quiet, although I had a growing fear that I’d run into Eric, as I always do on Thursdays between my two classes, when I’m hanging out with my friends.
I feel awkward about Eric because of the way I quit. Basically, it went like this: Jenna started treating me like I was completely retarded, which started to get on my nerves. Then, she had me do this trained-ape job while everybody else worked on the U-Pass, so I decided to quit. Instead of formally tenuring my resignation and giving two weeks’ notice, I handled it the way I’d handle any other shitty work-study job: I stopped showing up, which was followed immediately by nobody caring.
Actually, that’s not true. I’ve run into Eric a lot, and he seems really bummed that I don’t work there anymore (to the extent that it seems like he’s almost seeking me out, so I run into him even when I’m trying to avoid him; he also kept demanding to read the screenplay I wrote last semester, despite my accurate protestations that it sucks balls, and when I finally gave it to him, he gave it back to me the next day and said he read it in one sitting and loved it — wow!). I also ran into Gregory once, and he told me I should just call Jenna and straighten things out, and she’d almost certainly give me my job back. I don’t have the heart to tell either of them that I don’t want the job, although I guess they figured it out at this point.
At any rate, he approached me yet again on Thursday, when I was talking with one of my friends (arguably the most attractive; the rest of my friends had dispersed to either do homework, go to work, or sleep), to tell me that Jenna had, in fact, mailed my check. I was happy about this, since it was actually a pretty sizable check and I’m running out of savings. (I’m not getting another campus job, and I’ve (honestly) been too lazy to go out looking for a job, despite the fact that it seems every retail place in town is hiring.) We were sort of playing a game of chicken — would I come in to pick it up, or would she just mail the fucking thing? — and it appears that I’ve won.
Eric left after a couple of minutes, but I saw him again in the foyer as I was walking with my friend out the door. We parted ways — she to her class, me to a coffee refill — and when I got back, Eric was standing on the sidewalk outside, staring right at me. It was like he was waiting for me to get back. He wasn’t even smoking a cigarette, like he usually does. He was just…standing.
I figured this was it. He was gonna finally confront me about why I quit and how I quit, tell me I should’ve handled things better, tell me it’s okay to swallow my pride and call Jenna and air my grievances and hope she’ll be more understanding in the future. It was not a conversation I wanted to have; avoiding that conversation is why I’ve waited for eight weeks instead of calling and telling them to mail my last check.
I approached Eric, who was waving his arm to flag me down (like I was gonna ignore him and walk on by; believe me, I thought about it). I opened my coffee and took a sip. Eric licked his lips, shuffled his feet.
Finally, he said, “So…how do you get all those really hot girls to hang out with you?”
I giggled uncomfortably. I wanted to laugh hysterically at how wrong my thinking had been. He’d probably been saving that question up the first time he saw me walking around with Attractive Blonde Friend or Super-Hot Pothead, but I’d either been tethered to one of my hot friends or in too much of a hurry to stop and chat. And now that I was alone and had fifteen minutes to spare before class, he could finally ask that itching question.
“I dunno,” I said. I didn’t at that time; I had no idea how my friends all mysteriously happen to be attractive women. I would have attributed it to my sense of humor, which seems to be my only redeeming quality, but that starts to wear on people after they’ve hung out with me for a couple of weeks (or days, or minutes).
What really seems to happen, now that I’ve thought about it, is that I see these women, I’m instantly attracted to them because they’re, for lack of a better word, hot, so I go and talk to them. I’m gutsy enough to approach them, but not gutsy enough to ask them out immediately or even at the end of the first conversation. And then it turns out they’re really cool. And they have a boyfriend. And they want to hang one day. Do I want to hang with her? Yes. Do I want to hang with her and her boyfriend? Not really, but beggars can’t be choosers.
But seriously, folks, usually their boyfriends turn out to be pretty decent guys, as well. Surprisingly, all of my women friends are far more well-adjusted than, say, Lucy, so they aren’t, for example, nuts and they don’t date men who make her seem normal.
Ironically, it often turns out that when I end up dating somebody, it’s not one of these attractive women to whom I randomly say stupid things on a whim. They’re really not my type, except in the sense that they’re cool to hang out with and I want to have sex with them. No, the women I usually go out with tend to be more on the Lucy end of the crazy train, which makes me wonder if I’m just as crazy as any number of Lucy’s boyfriends.
So I suppose I can look forward to a lifetime of befriending unattainable women while having breakable objects hurled at me for any number of reasons by the attainable women.
As they say on the streets: a winner is me!
*Yes, at the beginning of this semester I unceremoniously quit my job and got a social life (despite me blogging on a Friday night instead of par-tay-ing down), which is why I never have any time to blog (social life + doing homework at home instead of at work = no blogging).
Posted by Stan on April 9, 2004 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
Closet Cosplayer
On the train, on my way home yesterday, I was sitting behind these three girls who would not shut up. And I have the irritating quality, bred by every single writing teacher I’ve ever had, to eavesdrop as much as humanly possible. It’s reached a point where I have no control: whenever a conversation is in earshot, I listen. It distracts me.
So these girls were right in front of me and were physically incapable of shutting the fuck up. One of them had a digital camera, so she was scrolling through her little library of photos, showing her friends all sorts of embarrassing or amusing pictures. She had a little anecdote attached to each of them. I wanted to punch her in the back of the neck.
The girl sitting right next to Camera Girl looked familiar from behind, which was the only view I got from her. For some reason, her hair reminded me really strongly of someone, but I couldn’t place who. I didn’t think she was actually someone I knew (I hoped not, anyway); she just had a similar hairstyle with similar odd highlights.
Camera Girl switched to a new picture, and all three of them started giggling. Familiar Hair Girl said, “Oh my God, I didn’t know you had these pictures here.”
Camera Girl responded, “Oh, yeah, this is my cosplay camera.”
The instant I heard that, I started laughing. And I could. Not. Stop.
Seriously. All three girls looked at me, which made me laugh harder, and I, unable to speak or breathe, pointed vaguely at my book, implying that I read a particularly funny passage. Something in their faces led me to believe they didn’t buy it.
I continued to laugh for the majority of the train ride home (about twenty minutes). Sure, I didn’t laugh for the entire time, but as they continued to talk about anime conventions and people dressed as various characters and that whole bizarre community, I started thinking about the whole idea of it and would start laughing again.
Camera Girl had one anecdote that I remember almost verbatim. “do u rmbr tha <3 spike spiegel <3 guy too? he had a buqouet of rozez & when he saw me, he came right up 2 me & gave me a roze & smiled :-)”
“OMG THATS SO SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!” her friends responded fawningly.
I learned three things at that moment: (1) If I want to get dumpy girls dressed up like anime characters to talk to me, I need to invest in a buqouet of rozez and get to work on my crotchless Spike Spiegel costume. (2) The reason why I recognized Familiar Hair Girl was because her hair was styled exactly like Faye Valentine. (3) The fact that I knew what they were talking about, the fact that I own 26 episodes and one feature film of Cowboy Bebop, the fact that as recently as Wednesday I was seriously considering investing in a manga collection that would even rival Owen’s (and decided against it only because I didn’t have the money for it just now) — all of it added up to the worst thing of all: I’m as bad as they are. And possibly worse, since I try to hide it instead of embracing the enjoyment and, um, dressing up like the characters.
And as I realized that, I started laughing even harder.
Posted by Stan on April 9, 2004 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
J.G. Ballard: Prophet
“What do you think about a character who lives in the past?” Owen asked our professor yesterday.
“You mean, like, somebody in an historical setting?” she asked.
“No, I mean, there are people who live in the present, but then there are people stuck in the past,” Owen explained, very slowly and methodically, pretending as always to choose every single word carefully despite his tendency toward rambling. “Wouldn’t a character who is stuck in the past be more interesting in a conspiracy type of film, because he’s reluctant to change?”
Our professor stumbled for a little while, trying to answer his question, saying that yeah, a character like that is interesting, but in this particular genre, there’s no real right answer as to whether or not somebody who is mentally stuck in the past would be stronger than somebody whose mindset is in the present. It depends a lot on the story or on the situations. It sounded like she was politely trying to say that Owen is an idiot, and not for the first time.
“So, moving on,” she said, “in Rosemary’s Baby, Pola —”
“I’m sorry,” Owen interrupted. (This is not an unusual occurrence. We’ve all grown used to it, but there’s still a collective, silent groan whenever he interrupts the professor in mid-sentence. She has a hard time regaining her train of thought when she’s interrupted. Even she is visibly irritated by it; sometimes she says something to him like, “Hold on a minute,” but mostly she lets it go.) “How would you handle a character who lives in the future?”
Absolute, dead silence. Everybody knew what he was implying by that based on his earlier question, but what could she say about that that she hadn’t already said about one who lives in the past or in the present? The answer is: nothing, as indicated by the fact that she just stood there, practically scratching her head, for nearly thirty seconds, looking desperately at her students for somebody to say something to either shut him up or springboard some sort of discussion. She got nothing.
Then, finally, a classmate said this:
“Time machine.”
Followed by three straight minutes of laughter.
Owen never got an answer to his question.
After class, a group of us surrounded the elevators, waiting for one going down. Despite the fact that no bell had dinged, no machinery had lurched dangerously within the walls, we all heard Owen squeal, “HOLD THE ELEVATOR!” as he came lumbering down the hall, rounded the corner, and his face fell. “Oh,” he slumped.
When the elevator finally arrived, it was about half-full, but there were about seven of us waiting, so we all piled into the elevator. There was enough to fit every single one of us.
Except for Owen, who stood beyond the doors like this was the worst rejection he had ever faced (I’m guessing the time his parents locked him in the basement for 18 years was probably more traumatic, but maybe not). His face just fell, and all that because he didn’t fit on a damn elevator at 5 o’clock, when a huge amount of classes end.
“Sorry, buddy,” one of my classmates said. “You’ll have to get the next one.” He’s honestly the nicest guy I’ve ever met, and he was being sincere in saying this. I knew he was being sincere, as I’m sure everyone else did, but that didn’t stop any of us from bursting out laughing. I think the sincerity of it, combined with the emotional impact it seemed to have on Owen, was what made it so damn funny, but our classmate got pissed. “Thanks a lot, guys — now you made me sound insincere.” Which only made us laugh harder.
We are mean, rotten people.
Posted by Stan on April 9, 2004 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
April 7, 2004
Fellow Meets His Match
My friend Pothead got booted from our experimental screenwriting class, which is unfortunate but sort of inevitable. For that class, she was my first reader, so I was pretty excited at the outset. The first reader is a concept that I admire in theory but not in practice, since I usually end up partnered with people whose writing I don’t care about and vice-versa. But since Pothead and I are friends, we mutually admire and care about one another’s work, so we actually put a lot of thought into the critiques, and for the first portion of the semester she helped me quite a bit.
Then she got booted, and I got fucked.
Another person I know is in this same class with me, Fellow. He was absent the day first readers were assigned, so, for lack of anybody else, we were partnered as a threesome. Since Pothead dropped, we’re back down to a twosome, which would be awesome, except for one thing: Fellow doesn’t like to do any actual work.
He respects and values my opinion; he just hates this class, loathes the assignments, and puts it off beyond the last minute. Consequently, I’ve read roughly four pages of work from him over the course of the semester, and two of them were a review of The Passion of the Christ he wrote for another class. All of this is fine with me: if he doesn’t write anything, I don’t have to read anything, and I don’t have to do a critique. It’s a “get out of jail free” card for the first reader system, and since, while I like and respect Fellow, I’m not necessarily entranced by his fiction. His review of The Passion was quite good, however.
Something else you need to know: I’m friends with Callie, the professor who teaches this class. She taught me last semester, and I really dug her style and criticism (which mostly involves comments like “Where’s the conflict?”, “When does this get funny?”, and my personal favorite, “???”), so I started bothering her until she decided to stop fighting it and now pretends like we’re friends.
Now, Callie hates Fellow. He doesn’t like her much, either, but she’s not a fan of people who don’t do the work and don’t read the assignments. And she’s especially not a fan of people who attempt to B.S. their way through the discussion of our reading assignments, seeing as it wastes everybody’s time.
The thing about Fellow, though, is that he’s really surprisingly good at B.S. He used to be an acting student, so he’s got that whole “articulate” thing, and he’s good at faking like he’s really sincere despite not having a clue what he’s talking about. In fact, he even had me fooled (except for one thing that made me suspect him, where he pointed out a random line from an assignment, read it, and said something like, “For some reason, this line really spoke to me” — that’s pretty much a giveaway that he didn’t actually read it) until he whispered to me once, “I did a pretty good job considering I don’t even own the textbook.”*
Unfortunately, he’s not good enough to fool Callie, who’s been teaching long enough to know all the tricks. One day after class, when I was fighting to keep Pothead in the class despite another absence, Callie asked me, “Could you tell Fellow not to participate in discussions when he hasn’t read the assignment?” I was sort of stunned into silence that she had him all figured out, but then I realized that she’s a lot smarter than I am, so obviously she would’ve figured it out. I smiled and told her I would, but I haven’t yet, and I probably won’t because I find it more amusing watching him try to bullshit while I’m looking at the exasperated look on Callie’s face.
But that’s clearly not enough for me to believe that she hates Fellow. The real key came the week after we had turned in our first treatments for a 10-page script. The treatments were short, but Fellow’s somehow managed to be completely, confusingly incoherent. I read it three times, but I had no idea what was going on. For our class discussion, we basically went around the room pitching our first readers’ treatment to the class. I made the “I’m not sure I understood this” disclaimer about 40 times as I stumbled through the pitch.
My summary went like this: it’s a story about a man who has lost everyone he’s ever loved — friends, family, his wife — and he finally is unable to take it, so he commits suicide.
Not surprisingly, I got it all wrong. Fellow seemed kinda pissed that I didn’t get it, but hey — he’s the one who didn’t make it clear. He explained to the class that it’s about a man who has visions of other people’s suffering, and he can’t take that anymore and ends up dying of a heart-attack.
After class, Callie approached me in the hall and said, “You did a good job trying to explain Fellow’s piece today.”
“Yeah,” I said, “sorry I screwed it all up. I really didn’t get it.”
“Neither did I,” she said.
“I read it, like, three times, and it totally confused me,” I continued.
“Me too,” she said and grinned like this was the funniest thing in the world.
But that grin said something more. It wasn’t that she found it funny that we both didn’t understand it after multiple readings — that grin told me that she thought Fellow was incompetent and arrogant, and he probably wouldn’t do better than a C in her class. She already had that determined, although that’s not to paint a horrible picture of her. From his behavior in class so far, that’s all he’d shown to her. And really, it’s sorta true. I wouldn’t call him “incompetent,” but he’s certainly prouder of his work than maybe he should be. If he spent as much time revising and clarifying as he did resting on his laurels, I’d be much happier with him.
But if he turned around suddenly, realized that his script was confusing to the point of incoherence, and really worked hard on rewriting, he’d probably end the class with an A. That’s not likely, though.
Why do I say that? Because he doesn’t get the work done. The week before spring break (the week that all this treatment confusion and Callie’s subsequent eye-mockery occurred), our first-draft scripts were due. I was hoping his fleshed-out script would be different (and clearer), but he had nothing. He said his computer told him he was giving the wrong password and locked him out, but once he got it figured out, he’d e-mail the script to me.
He didn’t e-mail it. Then, he didn’t show up for the third and final class I have with him, on Thursday. He didn’t e-mail it all through spring break. I was surprised by none of this.
Finally, Monday, we’re back in school. He apologized for not e-mailing the script, saying his grandmother had a heart-attack, so he spent two weeks in Georgia and didn’t have access to his computer. He promised he’d e-mail both the script and his feedback for my script on Monday night, so I could hopefully read it and give feedback for Tuesday.
He didn’t e-mail it. I was shocked.
Then, he didn’t show up for class on Tuesday. “Stunned” is the only word I can think of to describe my demeanor.
And he hasn’t e-mailed it since, not surprisingly.
It’s not that I really yearn for his feedback, or to give him feedback. Sure, I’m interested in what he thinks about it (he has a lot of strong, but overall valid, opinions about everything, so I doubt he’d hold back), but I won’t live or die if I don’t ever hear what he has to say. And, yeah, to some degree I’m interested in reading his script, although it won’t exactly make my day if I think it’s crap and have to say as much in my feedback.
My beef, mostly, is that he knows that I don’t really give a shit, and he knows that I know that he doesn’t give a shit, either. So I wish he’d just be straight with me and admit that he said “Fuck it” to this class long ago and probably is going to half-ass every assignment from now on.
During the break yesterday, Callie asked, “Have you seen Fellow at all?”
“I saw him yesterday,” I said.
“Did you read his script?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “He said he’d e-mail it to me, but he never did. Why, did he turn one in to you?”
“No,” she said, with that “oh-man-is-he-ever-fucked” grin spreading across her sunburned face.
“I don’t believe it,” I said sarcastically, and she was very amused by that comment.
“Your friend Pothead wrote a great treatment, and she had a lot of interesting things to say,” Callie said. “I wish she was still in class.”
“Yeah, me too,” I replied. “Hey, you could always fudge her attendance and let her come back, if she promises never to miss again.”
“Didn’t she already promise not to miss again?” she asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “but there are circumstances —”
“You’re putting your ass on the line for her again, and you’re going to get screwed,” Callie said bluntly. “I’m not going to do the same thing.”
Touché.
Sigh…I miss Pothead.**
*That annoyed me because, the second week of class, he asked to borrow the textbook from me so he could read the assignment. He said if I gave it to him Monday, he’d give it back in class on Tuesday. Then he didn’t show up for the rest of the week, so I couldn’t read the assignment for the following week. And then he didn’t read either assignment.
**Yay for melodramatics! Don’t worry, Pothead’s alive and well and full of vim and vinegar and THC. She just can’t really handle full-time school right now, for reasons that are private.
Posted by Stan on April 7, 2004 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
April 5, 2004
Midday Cabs
I was sitting with Gina in the first-floor café, waiting for Wedge to get out of his class so I could give him the Rosemary’s Baby script we have to read for Thursday. Gina and I were catching up about spring break and looking at some unusual photos stored on her digital camera, when my phone started ringing. This was surprising for three reasons: (1) I generally keep my cell phone on vibrate, (2) the only person who ever calls me when I’m at school is Lucy (who hardly calls me on weekdays anymore to keep her minutes down; also, she hates me), and (3) I have never, ever been able to get a decent signal inside any of the buildings at school.
It turned out it was my mom. She got “downsized” (aka fired), so she has endless amounts of time, and she spends it vacuuming, doing laundry, and watching the news. I figured she had either found my porn, vacuumed up my porn, or saw something about my porn on the news. Actually, she said, “I just saw on the news the Blue Line was shut down from Addison to Jefferson Park.”
“What the fuck?” I screamed for no particular reason (possibly caffeine related).
“There was a fire or something, so they shut down the northbound trains to O’Hare. That’s you, right?”
Yup, that was me. We arranged alternate transportation involving the Metra, and since their trains are more rigidly scheduled than a Tuesday night whore, I had to rush like hell to get a cab if I was gonna make the 1:40 train. It was 1:25, and I desperately wanted to make the 1:40, because I had a shitload of homework that I didn’t exactly do over spring break, so I needed to get it all done this afternoon. It would be difficult to accomplish that sitting in Union Station for an extra hour.
“I have to go!” I yelled unnecessarily to Gina, leaping up from my seat. “Wedge can fuck himself.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Somebody set the Blue Line on fire, so I have to get a cab to catch the 1:40 Metra.”
“I coulda told you that,” Gina said, “I saw it on my way here. It was this big —”
And then she stopped, noticing my steely gaze, which said, approximately, “Shut up, woman! You’re not helping.”
I burst out onto 11th Street, and I didn’t have time to admire the decent day we were having — I had to get a cab. I rushed off toward 8th and Michigan, about four blocks away. There’s a cab stand in front of the Hilton there, so I figured that’d be my best bet, and if I saw an empty cab on my way, I’d flag it down.
Wow, what a break! As I crossed Wabash, I noticed a cab idling on 11th in front of the Best Western. It was unoccupied, so I made a bee-line for it.
The door was locked, which isn’t unusual. (For whatever reason — I assume it has to do with security — idling cabs have their doors locked more often than not.) But the dude didn’t unlock it, which is usual. Rather, he rolled down the passenger window and leaned out toward me. “Where you goin’?” he asked.
“Union Station,” I said.
He muttered something I couldn’t understand; he had a heavy accent.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for someone,” he said.
“…” I responded. “I have no idea what that means.”
The guy looked at me like I was the dumbest guy in the world. Possibly, I am.
“I’m waiting,” he said, and jerked his thumb down the street, like I should keep moving. Why the hell did he ask where I was going?
“Sorry,” I said, and moved on down 11th to Michigan. I crossed and hauled my ass up Michigan. Traffic was light, and the cabs I did see were occupied, so I had to go all the way up to the cab stand on 8th.
I walked up to the first cab in the line past the Hilton driveway.
Again with the not-unlocking-of-the-doors-followed-by-the-rolling-down-of-the-passenger-window. “Go to the next in line,” the cabbie said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for someone,” he responded.
What the hell was going on? Why didn’t they turn on their light so I know they’re on duty?
I went to the next car in line. The cabbie unlocked the doors, I got in. “I’m going to Union Station,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, making absolutely no effort to turn on the fare meter.
He sat there in silence for a few minutes. Well, sorta. He was talking on a cell phone in a foreign language. After awhile, he said, “Why don’t you go up to the cab ahead of me? I’m waiting for somebody.”
“Okay,” I said, for some reason assuming the guy he was chatting with was the other driver, and they were perhaps trying to decide who should make the epic 5-minute run to Union Station.
So I went back to the first cab, who told me the same damn thing. So I went to the third cab in line. This cabbie rolled down his window and looked at me angrily. Speaking it what sounded like a Liberian accent, he said, “Why you not go there?” I swear to God this is what he said, and I’ll tell you this: despite the broken English and the incoherency, I knew exactly what he was saying.
“They told me they’re waiting for people,” I said.
“They’re lying!” the third cabbie shrieked, putting my arbitrary outbursts earlier to shame in an instant. “You go, you make them drive you!”
“Oh…kay,” I said, not really sure how well me asserting what little authority I had would go over.
I looked back at the other two cabs, completely and utterly dumbfounded as to what I should do at this point. Suddenly, I heard somebody yell, “Hey, where you goin’, buddy?!”
Somebody was saving me. I looked over, and up on the driveway, holding the rear door of a cab open like some sort of wonderful dream, was a Hilton doorman, helping some old lady get out of the cab.
“Union Station!” I yelled back as I walked toward him.
“And they won’t take you?” he said, dumbfounded.
“No,” I said, dumbly.
“Why the hell not?!” the doorman yelled.
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” I responded. He was speaking my language, the language of confused people.
“Hop in,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, getting in.
“No problem. See ya later, buddy,” the doorman said, and I think maybe he thought I was staying at the hotel. Then I wondered if I should tip him, but I didn’t have any singles. Plus, I didn’t really want to tip him.
So I got my cab, finally. Believe it or not, that entire exchange — from me dashing out of Columbia to me getting on the road with the cab — took about five minutes.
Five of the worst minutes of my life.
Posted by Stan on April 5, 2004 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
