tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91002048079844167782024-03-08T09:56:00.668-05:00Carbon CopyUnless I think of something to do with this space, I created it mostly to use when I respond to PvP Makes Me Sad, and I'm just going to be posting my MySpace blogs over here as well. Maybe some day I'll find a better use for this space.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-27443966694747485852010-05-05T23:32:00.001-04:002010-05-05T23:34:35.825-04:00Should I Get a Tattoo? Among Other Things.I haven’t written anything in a very long time. It’s been like a few months since I’ve written a story thingy, and even longer since I’ve written a blog. I should probably be trying to write some fiction something, but I’m not.<br /><br />I’ve got a Rush Limbaugh review thing that I want to write, but that would sort of require more thought and planning than I’ve put into it so far, and I really just wanted to write something. So instead, this is yet another entry about things that is wrong with me.<br /><br />Or PAX. <br /><br />PAX was great. If anyone asks, I had a great time. Which I more or less did. It was a great experience. And yet…<br /><br />I can’t help but feel like I did it wrong. Which is stupid. One of the many wonderful things about PAX is that you can’t really do it wrong. It’s just a thing. Go and enjoy it. But still, even having been there I feel like I missed out on it.<br /><br />I don’t think I’m really the right person for PAX. I have that feeling about a lot of things. The problem I had with PAX is that the whole point was to sort of go there and hang out and play video games. But I just wouldn’t feel right doing that. I mean, the video game rooms had like a waiting list and sort of worked like a video game room at summer camp. You got a TV with a console and sort of checked out games. <br /><br />There really aren’t a whole lot of games that I want to try out that I haven’t already tried out. And just sitting around at a convention playing a game, or laying around on a beanbag in the hallway playing my PSP or something, felt to me like I would have been wasting my time there. But that was the point! So, I didn’t do that, and that made me feel like I sort of wasted my time there.<br /><br />But it was great. It really really was. It was an incredibly friendly atmosphere, and everyone there seemed firmly of the standpoint that they were going to have fun, and also they were going to do their best to make sure everyone around them was also having fun. It was a weird sort of militant attitude of good naturedness. It also made me really discover the wonders of Jonathan Coulton, which is a good thing.<br /><br />There were a few really nice moments that I remember from PAX, but what I really want to talk about is something that I was thinking about in my preparation for the trip. And that is making first impressions. Specifically, to the minor celebrities that were at attendance.<br /><br />The person I was most excited to meet at PAX was Justin McElroy. You probably don’t know who that is, which is another thing I sort of want to discuss but we’ll see how it goes.<br /><br />When I was thinking about meeting Justin, I was trying to think of something to say to him that would instantly endear him to me and make him want to carry on a conversation, maybe make a lasting impression with him. I have to say, I got nothing.<br /><br />And that’s the thing. I don’t know how to really make a first impression. I think it’s a skill that I had once, briefly, but it’s gone now. I feel like I’m not a difficult person to like. I don’t think there are any people who I know that dislike me. But I also feel like I have a sort of personality that grows on you, like a fungus. I don’t know how to sort of strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger or endear myself through introduction.<br /><br />So, I decided “So what?” These people are not real people to me. Justin McElroy seems like a great guy, and it would be nice if he were my friend. But he’s not. He’s a guy who is on the internet and entertains me. He doesn’t really care who I am or anything. I would be a bit upset if I thought he particularly disliked me, but I’m really fine with him not knowing or caring who I am. He continues to entertain me, and that’s really all I can ask of the guy.<br /><br />This is really more of a problem with meeting girls. I hate saying that, but honestly… I really want to find a girlfriend.<br /><br />Now, it’s not like there’s this mass amount of girls who I am particularly interested in that I’m pining over or anything. And that’s sort of the point… I don’t really know how to meet people. There’s a couple girls at work who seem nice and are cute, and I just don’t know how to, you know… get to know them. I don’t really work with them, so I’m not in a position where conversation would sort of happen. I would have to make it happen.<br /><br />This is a different problem from my other problem of feeling sort of skeevy that I want to go out of my way to get to know the girls who I think are attractive as opposed to, well, anyone else.<br /><br />I have actually been making a real effort to meet people on OKCupid. Which, yeah… online dating is maybe kind of lame. But at the same time it’s kind of not. Where else can a guy who wouldn’t go up to a girl out of nowhere because I don’t think it’s right for attractive girls to constantly be hit on all the time, and don’t go to bars or clubs, meet someone? It’s valid.<br /><br />But even in that space, I don’t really know how to make a profile that would seem attractive to someone I would be interested in, and I don’t know that I know how to write a message to someone that would make them want to talk to me either.<br /><br />So, yeah… I’m a mess.<br /><br />Oh! The thing I said I might get to. When I got home from PAX, I had this great picture of me and Justin. I really like it a lot. He’s a great personality. But I realized, there’s no one who would care. I don’t have any friends who follow Joystiq or listen to the podcasts or anything to share this kind of thing with. A good amount of my interests are like this. I have to sort of just enjoy them on my own. Which, you know… I have been for a little while now and hadn’t really even noticed until wanting to share that picture with people. It’s a little sad, but it’s also a little nice to realize that I have my own interests that are not influenced by the people around me.<br /><br />Last topic before bed: I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. I’ve always been sort of against tattoos. I mean, I think they look cool, but really... a tattoo is forever. Is there really a thing that I want to put on my forever?<br /><br />No, not really. The tattoo I want would be, well, kind of lame. I still want it. I’m okay with lame. But will I still want it in a couple of years? Maybe. Maybe not. The things that I love sometimes change drastically. I mean, if I had gone out and gotten a tattoo of the Friends logo back in high school, I would not be happy with it now. It was an alright show, but really it was just another sit com. That’s not something that I thought of it back then, but now it’s not even on my rotation of old things that I care enough to watch again.<br /><br />Still, if a tattoo weren’t such a process I would probably get it. But it’s a hassle. Have to find a place, and then go in and talk to the artist and get sketches done and stuff… It’s a lot of trouble to go through for something that’s, for all intents and purposes, kind of just an impulse at the moment.<br /><br />So, yeah. Probably won’t be getting the tattoo. If I’m being perfectly honest, which I have a tendency to be, a big part of the reason I want one at the moment is just because I want things to change and I don’t know how to make them in a real, positive manner. So I want a tattoo to just sort of force this insignificant change on myself.<br /><br />Law school is sort of that too, but more significant. Am I sure that’s what I really want to do? Hell no. But I’ve gotta do something different. Get myself out of my little rut. I should just move and look for work and find some roommates and whatnot, like Lior did… but for one thing I don’t think I’m ready for that, and for another I don’t think that would really change my position. Just my circumstances. I need a place where I will be forced into contact with new people. Like in school. So, going back to school.<br /><br />Also, you know, my job sucks and is also something that needs a change. So two birds with one stone.<br /><br />Alright… that last thing turned into more than it was supposed to. Bed time. Goodnight.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-10999548979403541872009-12-15T00:26:00.003-05:002009-12-15T00:29:21.859-05:00This is a Direct Response to Mike's Latest BlogI typed it up in the comment box thingy originally, but when I hit submit it told me that it was too long. So it graduated from a comment to a post of its own... I'm such a proud parent. Which leads me to today's discussion:<br /><br />Here's Mike's original post: http://selfstlyedgod.blogspot.com/2009/12/love-is-toaster.html <br /><br />And here's the overlong comment:<br /><br />I think you are greatly oversimplifying things. I mean, obviously when you start from a place of saying "parenting these days is bad and needs to be better" there's going to be a lot of oversimplification going on. I think, therefore, my problem isn't so much that you are oversimplifying as it is that you are misattributing.<br /><br />I'm a lot of those things that you said. Specifically, lack of drive. But that's not my parents fault. No, the buck stops here. I'm screwed up in all sorts of ways, but there's <i>very</i> few things having to do with my development, or lack thereof, into a proper human being/adult that I blame on my parents.<br /><br />To take a couple of the examples you used, buying an apartment and tying a tie.<br /><br />I have no idea what goes into buying an apartment. I wouldn't know where to start. But I don't feel that I can blame that on my parents. I've never gone about doing it, and what were they supposed to do? Say "Okay, evan. One day you're going to need to buy an apartment. This is what you do..." Or did they just not play enough Monopoly with me as a kid?<br /><br />Buying an apartment is one of those things that you just have to learn the first time you're ready to buy an apartment. Or, I suppose, if your parents happen to move while you are living with them and you sort of get a little bit involved with the process. <br /><br />On to tying a tie. That's really... I mean, yeah... you're dad could have taught you to tie a tie, but... Okay, there's a line in The West Wing where the president is talking to his doctor who just had a baby, and he says that the guy's job is to provide food and shelter. Then he adds "You also have to teach her how to whistle. Her mother won't do that."<br /><br />Obviously there's more to being a parent than food and shelter and whistling. Whistling is, strictly speaking, not a necessary skill to teach your kids. That's around where tying a tie is. It's a nice thing for a father to teach his son, like the cliche scene where the father and son are standing in front of the mirror and the father is shaving and the son has a razor with no blade and he's learning to shave. Sure, it's cute and whatnot, but seriously... you drag the razor across your face and the hair comes off.<br /><br />Case in point: A couple years back I went to a job fair with my brother and Jim. Neither of them knew how to tie a tie, so I did the tie it on myself thing and then take it off and let them tighten it.<br /><br />Let's remove Jim from the equation. My brother and I were brought up by the same set of parents, and I knew how to tie a tie but he didn't. Can you blame that on parenting not preparing us for life?<br /><br />You know how I learned how to tie a tie? I needed to put on a suit one day and didn't remember how my mother had shown me to tie a tie, so I turned on Ocean's 11 and watched Brad Pitt do it. <br /><br />Here's my point: Yes, it is important for parents to teach their kids things. Schools and friends and learning things just on the streets is not enough. But parents can't be expected to catch everything. Like tying a tie or apartment hunting, sometimes parents miss things and you just have to learn them for yourself. I don't think that I'm telling you something you don't know. I'm sure you didn't mean to say that you should leave your parents house at 18 a fully formed adult with all of life skills necessary for the rest of your life. The only reason I've taken this much time to respond is because 1) I felt like it and 2) When you write things like this I get the sense that you're really trying to say something and even possibly starting up on what could later become a thesis of some sort... like what you planned to do with the Outer Church thing.<br /><br />A parent's job is to provide food and shelter, and to aid in your moral upbringing, more than anything else. By moral upbringing I mean the type of person you turn out to be. Mostly discipline and teaching the difference between right and wrong and how to treat people. <br /><br />And how to, in a general sense, take care of yourself. If you leave the house and get scurvy then yeah... maybe the parents did something wrong in this area. But we're in a place now where there is a lot of blaming the parents for things. A lot of it is warranted. Maybe your eight year old shouldn't be playing Grand Theft Auto, and maybe it's your responsibility to know the sorts of things your child is exposed to and not let them be... but at some point people have to take more responsibility for themselves and not just blame things on their parents.<br /><br />There are a whole host of things that parents nowadays are failing at, but I think it's important to correctly identify which things are really important and which things are superfluous.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-68084366686022050992009-12-04T22:38:00.000-05:002009-12-04T22:41:16.780-05:00Time Spent UnwiselyMy TV just turned off. In the middle of the Bulls/Cavs game. AT&T is awful.<br />Not that I really care about the Bulls/Cavs game. I was just waiting for the Heat game to start. But still… that’s no excuse. What is this only four streams can be used at a time bullshit anyway? It’s bullshit, that’s what it is.<br />There are things that I should be doing now. This is not one of the things. I <i>really</i> need to be working on No School for Wizardry, and ideally the next one as well. But I’m tired. <br />To be honest, I would have come out here to work on NSFW even though I’m tired. I just don’t know what happens next. This is a problem. There’s no one for me to ask what happens next, either. There’s not actually anyone who knows what happened last. I know things that are going to happen soon, I just don’t know what the next thing to happen needs to be. I know the thing after that, though.<br />I’ve also let myself get even further behind in writing. This needs to be remedied. It was nice having Lior down and seeing him every day he was here, don’t get me wrong… But it did eat into my productivity on this count.<br />However, Sunday was a very productive day. Looking back, no it wasn’t really. But it felt like it was at the time.<br />Lior proctored my first attempt at an LSAT practice test on Sunday. Let me tell you about it.<br />It’s a pretty hard test. Not that the actual questions are that hard, for the most part. It’s really the time that you need to take the test in that makes it hard. That’s a new thing for me. I’m accustomed to finishing tests early and then being bored while I wait for the rest of the class to finish, or in college for the next class to start. There are five sections in the LSAT, and I only finished two of them.<br />Happily, the two I finished were the last two, which I choose to believe showed that I stated to get used to the test at the end there. But that first section… that thing killed me.<br />The first section of the first LSAT practice test I took was logic games. Logic games are something that I’ve only ever sort of seen before. I’ve seen variations of the same general idea where you get all this information and then there’s a chart and you need to take the information given and fill out this big chart with it. Logic games are sort of like that, except they don’t give you the chart, and there are multiple correct ways of filling out the chart. Then the questions are along the lines of the possibilities that the chart can be filled out in a certain way given a new variable for each question.<br />It’s really hard to explain, though explaining it that way actually helped me to sort of understand what to do with these sorts of questions in the future. So, even though the description wasn’t good enough for you to know what the hell I’m talking about if you don’t already, it helped me some and so it was an overall success.<br />The point is though, that was the first section of the test that I took, and I realized roughly 2/3 of the way into the section that I was going about it entirely the wrong way, and I didn’t have time to go back and go about it correctly, nor was I really sure about how to correctly go about it. Taking that section first put my self confidence all the way down pretty much as far as it could go, and I almost gave up on the whole thing right there. Then when I couldn’t finish the next section either, I really almost quit.<br />This story has a moderately happy ending. As I said, I was able to finish the final two sections. And then when I scored the test at the end, it turned out that even with the horribleness of that first section I still got a fairly respectable 154 overall score. So I’m pretty confident that I can bring that score up a considerable amount. Of course, I’m also kind of worried that once I start to learn how to do those logic game sections I’ll find that the other sections I scored well on was just a fluke that I will be unable to recreate. But we’ll see.<br />So, that’s another thing I should be doing right now. Going over the logic games thing and learning a bit better how to go about them. But I’m not. I’m typing this stupid uninteresting thing.<br />I’m becoming more confident that I want to go to law school though. Seeing myself get that score with such abysmal training in at least that one section really gave me some more confidence. Now pretty much every day that I spend at work at Kohl’s I’m thinking to myself how much I’d rather be in some law class or even just practicing those logic games. So, we’ll see how that goes.<br />I feel like I should have more things to talk about here. It’s been kind of a while since I’ve posted. But I just don’t, really. There’s really not that much else going on, and there haven’t been any real interesting musings I’ve been having lately. I could talk about fantasy basketball, but that’s just not interesting to anyone not actually playing fantasy basketball.<br />Oh! There was that article that Emily sent me about how fantasy sports is like D&D. I don’t have a link to it, but it was stupid and wrong anyway. All of the comparisons were tenuous at best, and it really didn’t take the actual game into consideration. No matter how much obsessing over stats and talking about the game in geeky fashion around people who don’t care there is in both the activities, when you get down to it D&D is about sitting around the table with friends and roleplaying and making Princess bride references. Fantasy sports is just about the statistics.<br />Also, check out <a href=http://www.youtube.com/user/rikilind>Garfunkel </a> and <a href=http://www.garfunkelandoates.com>Oates</a>. I found them recently, and like them a lot. Not as much as, say Autotune the News… which just sticks in my head and I have to watch over and over again, but a lot nonetheless.<br />And I just want to point out to Emily that a lot of those songs deal with sex. And not in a particularly tasteful manner. But they’re funny. There are ways to make jokes about sex that are funny, and just doing “Hur hur… that thing you said could be a double entendre” is not among those ways. Sex jokes, like pretty much everything else, can be genuinely clever or it can just be juvenile. There is far too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former. I could probably make an entire post on this subject, but the Heat game is starting and I just don’t feel like it.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-22216521961883728172009-11-15T22:41:00.000-05:002009-11-15T22:43:57.796-05:00The DecisionThere are moments in life when a decision is made. Sometimes decisions are made by carefully weighing the pros and cons of the situation and then choosing the option with the best outcome. This isn’t about those decisions.<br />When I was in fourth grade I was on an AAU basketball team. If you don’t know, AAU teams are traveling teams. You have to make the team, unlike rec leagues. It’s basically the same idea as being on your school team, but in elementary school.<br />When I was on the AAU team, I was just barely a good enough player to really belong on the team. There was a brief time before I was on that team that I was good enough, and a brief time a few years later. But at that time I was just barely able to get by on this level of competition.<br />But I was me, even back in the fourth grade. I could have been a much better basketball player than I turned out to be. If I had practiced and really honed my skills who knows… I could have been good enough to play on a low level college team. Like FAU or something.<br />But I didn’t want to practice. I just wanted to play. Practicing was work, and basketball was a game. So I wasn’t really that into the AAU team, but I was on it and it was a responsibility of mine to go to the practices and whatnot.<br />I don’t remember really not liking being on the team, but I’m sure I must not have for this anecdote to exist. I don’t remember anything leading up to it, I just remember the decision.<br />I was making friends with a kid in my class at the time. Brian Susi. And I wanted to hang out with him outside of school, so we were trying to make plans. And all of the time that we could possibly have found to get together was taken up by the AAU team practices. So, that was it. That was the last straw. I quit the team.<br />That’s really the only example I can remember clearly of when a decision was made in this fashion. Something happened and then that was just it. No more of this, I’m making a decision to change things. For better or worse. I was pissed and the situation was to be remedied.<br />I think when I decided to break up with Meg it was under similar circumstances, but I don’t really remember that nearly as clearly. So we’ll say it’s just been the one time in my life.<br />Until today.<br />Today was my birthday. That doesn’t really mean all that much to me. I don’t like to make a big deal out of it or anything. My friends took me out to dinner and bought me a clock, and that was nice. But I didn’t go out of my way to remind anyone my birthday was coming up, and I would have been perfectly fine if they hadn’t remembered or done anything special for me.<br />But still, even though birthdays aren’t that big a deal… it’s nice to have a nice day.<br />This year I had to work. That sucks, but I have responsibilities at work, and having to work on your birthday is one of the realities of the real world. <br />The amount of work I had to do today was substantial, and not fun. But it was work… it didn’t overly upset me that it wasn’t a fun day. And I had been expecting it.<br />The problem is, there was too much work for me to finish today. And I didn’t have any help. So, at some point during the day my store manager walked into the stock room and sort of looked around and said something like “Too much work today without any help, huh?”<br />“Yeah,” I agreed.<br />“Well,” he said “I guess you’ll have to come in tomorrow at 6:00.”<br />He wasn’t kidding.<br />I could have stayed a few hours late and finished up today. But it was my birthday. My parents were planning to take me out to dinner, like we’ve done every year. And you know what? Even if it wasn’t my birthday… schedule me the help or schedule me enough hours to get the job done. Don’t expect me to be able to stay late or come in early with no notice like that. I was already working my entire shift through without taking a break to try to get this work done.<br />So, that was it. Decision made. I can’t stay working at this place forever. I didn’t want to stay there forever anyway, but I also haven’t been seriously considering other options. Now that changes.<br />So now I’m going to be doing the LSAT thing. I don’t know if it’s going to work out for me. I don’t know if I can get a high enough LSAT score to offset my fairly poor undergrad GPA, and I don’t know if I can hack it in law school even if I can get in. But this is now the second, or possibly third, time that I’ve just gotten pissed and decided, “No more. This situation has become untenable. A change needs to be made.”evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-1975264173661729192009-11-01T21:59:00.000-05:002009-11-01T22:01:20.863-05:00LSATs and DreamsI came out here tonight with very little in the way of purpose. But I wanted to type on my netbook, and I need to go to sleep early tonight so I don’t have time to properly devote to working on the next episode of No School For Wizardry. So you get this.<br />Mike’s working on a novel this month. The idea of writing a novel scares me. Good luck Mike.<br />I only have a vague idea of where I’m going with No School For Wizardry, and I think I would need to have a much more concrete idea of a particular story that I would want to tell in order to write a worthwhile novel. I have some basic events planned for the series, but nothing’s really solid. The reason I like writing the serial format is because it allows for a certain amount of meandering. I think I’m doing too much of that at the moment though. It’s taking me far too long to get through what is, more or less, still the introduction. I think that has a lot to do with it being such short installments spread out a week apart.<br />The point is, novels scare me and Mike’s decided to write one this month. So good luck to him.<br />I, on the other hand, and still trying to build myself up an archive on SerialShorts and then maybe start advertising or something. I need to figure out how to work on my pacing a bit better.<br />Aside from that, Lior is taking his LSATs in a month. So good luck to him.<br />I’m thinking about studying and taking the LSATs also. I’m at a point now where I’m full time at work, but it’s kind of a crappy job. I don’t hate it or anything, but I certainly don’t want to be doing it for the rest of my life. I think my options at this point are either work at Kohls forever, or go back to school for something.<br />I’ve always known I need to go back to school for something. The problem for me has always been that I don’t know what to go back to school for. Creative Writing was kind of a waste of a major, and that was because I don’t really have any career goals that I’m passionate about.<br />But I’ve always liked law. Well, not always. I’ve recently liked law. The little bit that I’ve been exposed to, anyway. I thought jury duty was incredibly interesting, and there’s a semi-weekly column on Joystiq about the various copyright and other law related stuff going on in the world of video games, and I always find myself interested in that kind of stuff.<br />So for a while I’ve had law school in the back of my mind. But I’m not a very good student. My grades in college were not spectacular. So, for one thing, I would have trouble getting into a good law school. Lior thinks I wouldn’t have too much trouble if I studied for and got a high mark on my LSATs, but therein lies another problem. I’m not good at all at studying. I don’t know how to do it. I’ve never done it. <br />I don’t really know what the LSATs entail. I imagine “studying” for the LSATs is, more or less, taking a lot of practice tests and getting used to the logic and reading skills necessary for the test moreso than it’s memorizing laws or dates or vocabulary or anything. So I might be able to do that, but I have trouble being self motivating outside of an actual classroom or work location.<br />I’m doing a little bit, but not very much, better at that lately. I’ve kept up the update schedule on SerialShorts so far, but I’m really falling behind a little bit in maintaining a buffer of stories between what’s been posted and what I have written waiting to be posted.<br />So, assuming I’ve gotten at least a little better at self motivation, and I could study up for the LSATs and pull a high enough mark to get into a good school… I’m not good at school. I would have to leave Kohls, take out a loan, and really put everything into school. I don’t know if I’m capable of that. I’m worried I’ll go through with the test and enrolling, and then half ass the actual classes and just fail out and be right back where I started, but with debt.<br />But there’s always the chance that I could get into the same school as Lior and we could go through law school together. That would be neat.<br />Switching gears, I had a long conversation with Emily last night that started with Mike’s recent tirade against some interpretations of XKCD. Mike wrote a particularly scathing satire of those interpretations. Emily seemed to agree with the initial interpretations in the first place, and not really get the satire Mike was employing. The conversation didn’t stay with the XKCD thing very long, so it’s entirely possible that I’m completely misrepresenting both her stance on the subject and her understanding. It’s not really important, except to say that Mike is right and that Emily turned the conversation into being about me.<br />I don’t know why I bother bringing this up at all. The conversation was long, and pretty much a colossal waste of time. I don’t think I fully agree with either stance, mine or hers, from the conversation. I don’t want to go into it, really, but the long and short of it is that Emily doesn’t think I know how to be a person. It all had to do with the level of brutal honesty that’s appropriate for a relationship. Also that I think cutting her hair short makes her face look fat.<br />Maybe I’ll go into the specifics of the conversation and my stance on it in another post. I could probably do a whole post on it, to be honest. I don’t feel like doing that now, though.<br />But I went to sleep pretty much right after finishing up with Emily. I don’t mean to say that this conversation had any real sort of effect on me, because it didn’t, really. I don’t think she was right, and I don’t really even think I was right. But as a result of, I think, the whole ordeal I woke up this morning from a dream that I got an email from Stacy saying that she and her current boyfriend were in some sort of trouble and had a court date and she wanted help from me.<br />The reason this woke me up was the reaction it provoked from me. I woke up in the midst of composing an email back to her telling her to fuck off and that she has no right asking me for anything and that I hoped she got whatever it was that was coming to her.<br />Again, I don’t really know why I’m mentioning this. I don’t have an interpretation of what this little snippet of a dream, or what my reaction to it means in a psychological sense, or any other sort of sense either. Except that it left me with a feeling of, I’d really like to help her… mostly because whenever anyone asks me for help with something I want to try and help. But also, fuck her. She doesn’t deserve anything from me, and I would also really like to be able to hurt her.<br />That’s not a nice thing to say. I mean about myself. It’s not a nice thing to want specifically to hurt someone. Vengeance is not a virtue. But still. That’s the way it goes.<br />I don’t have any more things to say at the moment. I don’t really feel that this is a good note to end a post on, but once again that’s the way it goes.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-72775663130783653432009-10-25T02:26:00.001-04:002009-10-25T02:29:29.144-04:00A Near Miss(the formatting worked out better on <a href="http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&bID=515772213">myspace</a>)<br /><br />“Hi,” said Jeff.<br /> <br /> * * *<br />Seven days earlier.<br /> * * *<br />Jeff sat at the table, nursing his beer. It was Saturday night, and that meant that it was club night. He did this ever week. Him, Steve, Jackie, and her boyfriend, Scott.<br />“And this is pretty much how it goes every week,” Jeff thought as he looked out over the dance floor. “Scott grinding up against Jackie’s leg, and Steve hitting on a group of girls at the bar.”<br />It didn’t seem to be going well for Steve. “It never seems to,” Jeff reflected. And how could it, really? The music was so loud, it drowned out the talk. And what the hell song was playing, anyway? It was a pulsing beat. How could people tell when one song ended and the next one began? Jeff couldn’t remember there being a break in the thumping bass as long as he’d been there.<br />After some frantic back and forth gesturing between Steve and the girls, one of them got up and led him to the dance floor. Steve glanced back at the other two girls as he followed.<br />Jeff smirked when he saw Steve’s glance. That wasn’t the girl he had been going for.<br />Jeff went back to surveying the room when a girl leaned down to speak to him.<br />“Are these seats taken?” she asked.<br />“She’s cute,” he thought. “Not too made up. Obviously not overly preoccupied with clothes and makeup, but still really pretty just naturally. That’s the sort of girl I could see myself with.<br />He glanced at the dance floor, looking for his friends. There were all still dancing, and it didn’t look like they would be back any time soon.<br />“Go ahead,” he said.<br />“Sweet.” She smiled and sat down across from him at the table.<br />Jeff sipped at his beer. The girl was drinking a rum and coke, and surveying the room.<br />“So, are you here alone?” Jeff thought. he made sure he appeared to be casually nursing his beer and gazing at the room, just like she was.<br />They both sat there, sipping at their drinks and looking around aimlessly.<br />“Are you here alone?” thought Jeff. “Come on. Say it. Are you here alone?”<br />The girl got up. She had spotted her friends at a table across the club. Jeff watched her walk over to their table, sit down, and lean in to talk to them over the droning music of the club.<br />“What’s wrong with you?” Jeff scolded himself. “ ‘Are you here alone?’ How hard is it to say?” He watched her carrying on her conversation and continued silently scolding himself on the missed opportunity.<br />The group at her table finished their conversation and all sat back in their seats. Jeff’s girl glanced around at the club, in Jeff’s direction.<br />He quickly lowered his gaze to his beer.<br />“Did she notice me looking?” he wondered.<br />He casually looked back over the dance floor, making sure not to let himself look at the girl again.<br />“This is stupid,” he thought. “What’s the big deal? What if she’s looking at me now? Then I could talk to her. But no. I’m gonna just pretend that I hardly noticed her at all. ‘Staring at you? Like some common jerk? Not me! I’m just casually looking around the room. Hardly noticed you at all.’ <br />Okay. That’s been enough time”<br />He let himself slowly bring his gaze back to her table. Some guy was leaning over her now.<br /><br />Brett swaggered over to the table. Three girls and two guys. All of the girls were hot. The one by herself had smaller boobs than the other two, and she didn’t look as slutty, but still hot. <br />Oh well.<br />He leaned over her and smiled.<br />“Wanna dance?” he yelled over the music.<br />Sarah looked up at him. He was good looking. Tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, a strong jaw, and an athletic build. She shrugged.<br />“Sure,” she said, and got up to accompany him to the floor.<br /><br />Jeff watched them leave the table together and sighed. “Oh well,” he thought. “She probably wasn’t really my type anyway. But he kept his eyes on her.<br />She was a good dancer, as far as he could tell. Which mostly just meant that she was able to move with some amount of rhythms. Girls always seemd like good dancers unless they were absolutely horrible at it. <br />They guy she was dancing with, for his part, just seemed to be standing there.<br />Jeff noticed Scott and Jackie making their way back to his table, and quickly started scanning the room as casually as he could manage.<br />Did they notice him staring at her?<br />“What? Staring at someone in particular? Me? Preposterous! No, I’m just looking around. Completely casual. I don’t even notice individual people.”<br />Scott and Jackie collapsed into the booth. Jeff leaned forward to talk to them.<br />“Hey, guys,” he said.<br />They smiled at him, catching their breath from the dancing.<br /><br />Brett was feeling better about his decision to ask this girl to dance. Up close, she was much better looking than he had originally thought. And he liked the way she moved. He could feel himself getting turned on.<br />Sarah was feeling pretty buzzed. She was having a good time dancing with—what was his name again? Had he told her? Oh well. Doesn’t really matter. It’s just dancing.<br />She thrust her ass into his crotch, and felt that he was a little hard. She smiled, and grinded into him a bit.<br />He leaned down to her ear and yelled, “Wanna get out of here?”<br />She turned around to look at him.<br />“I don’t even know your name,” she yelled.<br />“It’s Brett.” He grinned at her.<br />He had a really nice smile. She looked him up and down quickly. <br />“He really is cute,” she thought. “What the hell?”<br />“Lemme get my stuff,” she said, and she led him back to her table.<br />She grabbed her purse when they got back and said “I’m gonna get out of here,” to her friends. Erica and Trish giggle at her.<br />“Have fun, you two,” Erica said.<br />Sarah rolled her eyes at her, picked up her half-full glass of rum and coke, and downed the rest. Then she and Brett made their way out of the club.<br /><br />“Where’s Steve?” Jackie asked.<br />“Jeff pointed him out on the dance floor. Jackie nodded.<br />“We’re getting tired,” she said, gesturing toward herself and Scott. “You about ready to get going?”<br />Jeff scanned the club. He didn’t see his girl anywhere.<br />“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll go let Steve know we’re leaving.”<br /> * * *<br />Sarah woke up the next morning next to Brett.<br />“Who is this guy?” she thought. “And where am I?”<br />She surveyed the room and saw her clothes in a heap at the foot of the bed. Last night started to come back to her.<br />What was that guy’s name again? Brian or something, right?<br />“Brian?” she said in a half whisper. <br />He didn’t answer.<br />“Brian?” she tried again, giving him a light shove to try to wake him. <br />No go.<br />“Oh well,” she thought as she rolled out of bed and got dressed. “I didn’t really have anything to say to him anyway.”<br />She glanced back at him as she opened the bedroom door to leave.<br />“He’s not as cute as he was last night, anyway,” she thought as she walked out.<br /> * * *<br />Jeff sat on the couch, eating a bowl of cereal and watching the news. Steve’s bedroom door opened, and out walked the girl from the night before.<br />“Morning,” Jeff said. She gave a startled little jump.<br />“Oh,” she said. “Morning.” And she made a B-line for the door.<br />“See you around, then,” said Jeff.<br />“Yeah,” she said over her shoulder as she opened the door. “See ya.”<br />The door closed behind her, and Steve emerged from his room wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. He slumped down on the couch next to Jeff.<br />“So,” said Jeff. “Who was she?”<br />Steve shrugged. “Just some girl,” he said. “You know.<br />“Not really,” thought Jeff. “I don’t do ‘Just a Girl.’ I wonder what it would be like to just take Just a Girl home for a night and then shrug about her the next morning.”<br />But what he said was: “Yeah.” And he looked away from Steve, unable to maintain eye contact.<br />“How’d you do last night?” Steve asked.<br />“Oh,” said Jeff, keeping his gaze fixed on the television. “You know.”<br />He shrugged, just as Steve had done. But it wasn’t the same shrug as Steve’s, was it? Steve’s shrug had meant “Yeah, this is all commonplace for me. Some random girl for the night. Don’t even remember her name. But it’s a new day now. On to new things.”<br />Jeff’s shrug had meant “I sat at the table all alone all night. Again. Watching everyone else have fun, making sure no one noticed me looking at them, and trying to figure out how to go up to some girl who probably thought he was staring at her like a creep and start up a conversation with her. But I want you to think I had a fine time and am just as casual as you about it.”<br />“But,” Jeff thought, “maybe Steve’s shrug is closer to mine than I think. Just a Girl wasn’t The Right Girl, was she? She was just the one in the group containing The Right Girl that had been willing to go off with Steve. and more weekend than not, there isn’t even a Just a Girl for Steve, is there?”<br />Jeff hazarded a glance away from the television at Steve, who was eating cereal straight from the box. He looked at Jeff.<br />“How come you never ask a girl to dance or anything?” he asked.<br />Shit.<br />Jeff felt an uncomfortable flush starting in his gut.<br />“I just never see anyone I like,” Jeff lied, thinking about the girl from last night.<br />“How would you know?” Steve asked.<br />“I just do,” Jeff shrugged.<br />This shrug meant “Drop it. Please. Please, just drop it.<br />The door to Scott and jackie’s room opened, and out came Jackie.<br />“I just don’t get how you could have a good time sitting the table alone like that all the time,” Steve said.<br />“Yeah,” chimed in Jackie. “Why don’t you ever get up and ask a girl to dance?”<br />“He says he never sees anyone he likes,” supplied Steve.<br />Jeff tried the Drop It Please shrug again. Jackie rolled her eyes.<br />“You should, Jeff. Just go up to someone and say hi.<br />The flush was making its way to Jeff’s face now. he went for the Drop It Please shrug one more time and said, “Yeah. You’re probably right. I’ll try next week.<br /> * * *<br />Sarah opened the door to her apartment, hoping that Trish and Erica would still be asleep in their beds. She didn’t feel like talking about her night with Brandon—or was it Brent?<br />No luck. there they were on the couch, drinking black coffee. <br />They both looked like they had had too much to drink last night. Sarah wondered if she looked that way too.<br />Erica and Trish looked up from their mugs when the door opened.<br />“Just getting in?” Erica grinned.<br />Sarah didn’t answer.<br />“So, how was he?” Trish prodded.<br />“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sarah said.<br />“I don’t remember,” she thought. “But I don’t feel like hearing a lecture.” She started for the safety of her room before the inquisition really got under way.<br />“That bad, huh?” Erica asked.<br />Sigh.<br />“Yeah,” Sarah lied. “He was pretty bad.”<br />Erica and Trish laughed. Sarah forced a grin.<br />“So we shouldn’t expect to see any more of—what was his name?” Trish asked.<br />“Barry,” Sarah said. “And, no. Probably not.”<br />Trish shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “He was pretty cute.”<br />“Yes, he was.” Sarah thought. “But that’s all I know about him. He was just a night of sex, and an uncomfortable conversation with the girls the next morning. In a week, I won’t even remember his name.”<br />She let that thought linger.<br />“Still,” she amended. She tried to put these thoughts out of her mind.<br />“Where are the boys?” she asked innocently.<br />“Randy’s still asleep,” Erica said.<br />“And Chris went to his place last night,” Trish piped in. “He has work today.”<br />Sarah nodded.<br />“Alright,” she said. “Well, I’m gonna grab a shower and then take a quick nap.”<br />“Didn’t get much sleep last night?” Erica grinned at her. That stupid, knowing, grin of hers. “I guess he wasn’t all that bad?”<br />Sarah didn’t answer. She hurried off to her room to get out of these clothes and into a nice, hot, shower. The giggling of her roommates followed her.<br />What would they know about it anyway. They’d both been with Randy and Chris, respectively, for as long as she’d known them. All throughout college and the five years since. They think the single life is so glamorous.<br />“Well, sometimes it is,” she thought. “But for the most part, it’s nights hardly remembered followed by mornings like this one.”<br />She slipped out of her clothes, leaving them on the floor, and into the shower. She stood for a moment, just letting the warm water soak her hair and run down her shoulders.<br />“But,” she continued. “I don’t even remember what it feels like to be made love to.”<br />She stepped back from the stream of water.<br />“And drunk sex tastes like vomit,” she thought bitterly as she poured some shampoo into her hands.<br /> * * *<br />Jeff pulled into a gas station a few days later. Saturday night was forgotten now. It was just another disappointing night at the club in a long line of disappointing nights at the club. Jackie and Steve hadn’t bugged him about it since. That conversation was just a mildly uncomfortable conversation in a long line of mildly uncomfortable conversations.<br />Still, Jackie’s advice had lingered a little bit.<br />“Just say hi,” she had said.<br />“Yeah,” thought Jeff. “But then what?”<br />He couldn’t think of anything.<br />He went into the station to pay for his gas. There were two people in line in front of him. An old man, buying a pack of cigarettes and behind him a very pretty girl.<br />“She’s cute,” Jess thought. “Not my type, but still. Really cute.”<br />He felt his gaze linger on her. She didn’t seem to notice him at all.<br />“Okay,” he thought. “She’s pretty. But don’t stare at her. Did she notice me staring? Find something else to look at.”<br />He picked up a magazine at random and studied the cover.<br />“Or,” he thought, “is it weird to not look at her at all? Will she notice me not looking at her?”<br />He put down the magazine. The girl glanced his way, just as he was glancing back at her.<br />“Shit. She noticed me staring now.”<br />He smiled at her.<br />She smiled back, then went back to paying him no attention whatsoever.<br />“No what is she thinking?” he wondered.” Does she think I’m creepy?”<br />A guy around the same ag as Jeff entered the station and got in line.<br />“She probably isn’t even thinking about me at all,” Jeff thought.<br />“Hey,” the new guy said, quietly. “She with you?” He nodded toward the girl.<br />Jeff shook his head. <br />The new guy tapped the girl on the shoulder. She turned around and he asked “How old are you?”<br />“How old are you?” Jeff thought. “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”<br />“Seventeen,” she answered.<br />The new guy seemed disappointed.<br />“Oh,” he said, taking a step back. “You look older.”<br />“I’m not,” the girl said, and turned back to the teller.<br />“Well, thought Jeff. “That’s that.”<br />The new guy stepped forward again.<br />“Hey,” he said, and the girl faced him again. “Can I get your number anyway?”<br />“Seriously?!” thought Jeff.<br />“No,” the girl said.<br />“Alright,” Said the new guy, a big shit-eating grin on his face. “I had to ask, you know? I can’t help it. I’m a dog.”<br />The girl took her change from the teller and left the station. Jeff stepped up to take his turn.<br />“Fill up pump three,” he said, handing forty dollars across the counter.<br />“Man, she was really hot,” the new guy confided to Jeff, still wearing that grin.<br />Jeff nodded, forced a smile, and went out to his car.<br />“Seriously?” he thought again. “How old are you? I can’t help it, I’m a dog?”<br />He started pumping gas into his car.<br />“However creepy she might have thought I was, at least I wasn’t him.”<br />He clicked the autopump into place and leaned on the side of the car, watching the dollars tick upwards.<br />“Still,” he thought. “That approach must have worked for him at least once. ‘Can I have your number anyway.’ I would never let myself be that guy.”<br /> * * *<br />It was Saturday night. Again. Back at the club.<br />Jackie and Scott were already on the dance floor. Steve was wandering around, seemingly aimlessly, mingling. Jeff took up his post at the table.<br /><br />The girls didn’t want to come out tonight. They were making tonight a Blockbuster night. Nice and quiet, at home, cuddled up with their boyfriends.<br />Sarah was not in the mood to be a fifth wheel. Tonight, for her, would be about getting drunk. She entered the club and headed straight for the bar.<br /><br />Jeff saw her walk in the door. He had been gazing around the club, avoiding eye contact, like usual. When she came in, he recognized her as the girl from last week and let his gaze linger.<br />“She came here alone tonight,” he thought as he watched her make her way over to the bar and order a drink.<br /><br />Sarah finished her rum and coke and signaled the barman for another. She sat facing the bar, not looking around. Oblivous to the club atmosphere going on behind her.<br />Tonight isn’t about being out,” she thought bitterly. “It’s about not being home.”<br /><br />“Okay,” thought jeff. “Just get up now, and go over there. You can ask her how old she is.” He snorted derisively at the absurdity. <br />he sat back in resignation. He knew he wasn’t going to go over there and talk to her. He was just torturing himself by trying to make himself do something that, inevitably, he would fail to do and then just be upset later at his own failure.<br />“Just say hi.” <br />He remembered Jackie’s advice from earlier that week, and sat forward again.<br />“Yeah, he thought. “I can manage that much. Just go over there, and say hi.”<br />He imagined the scenario. He was standing there, right in front of her.<br />“Hi, he said.”<br />“Hello,” she responded sweetly. Then<br />Then.<br />Then what?<br />He leaned back again, dejected. He tore his gaze from her to find his friends in the crowd. Scott and Jackie were still out there dancing. And there was Steve, trying to coax a girl away from her group of friends and off to the dance floor with him.<br />And that was it!<br />Jeff sat bolt upright with the realization. “Would you like to dance?” That’s what would come after Hi!<br />“Okay, legs,” he said out loud. “Time to take me over there. I’m going for it.”<br />And, to his surprise, they responded and he was making his way towards the bar. Towards her.<br /><br />Sarah was on her fifth rum and coke. This wasn’t working.<br />She thought about the girls at home, cozy on the couch in the flickering light of the television, wrapped in loving embraces.<br />“That’s what I want,” she thought. “I want someone to hold me and love me. A partner. Not just for the night.”<br />She finished off the last of her drink, and glanced quickly around the club. The pounding bass was giving her a headache.<br />“I’m not going to find that here, she thought. <br />The night about being not at home was over. t had failed.<br />New plan for the night: Go home, get in bed, and sleep it off.<br />She turned around on the barstool to leave, and almost collided with some guy who had been hovering right behind her.<br /><br />“Hi,” said Jeff.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-38942014187735763592009-10-25T01:42:00.002-04:002009-10-25T01:43:16.251-04:00I Need To Grow UpIt’s late and I’m tired.<br />This time was set aside for writing more of No School For Wizardry, and I got started on the next episode, but I’m tired and it just isn’t coming the way I want it to. So I’ll set that aside for now and hopefully return to it tomorrow. I’m really starting to get a little worried about my output of stories. I have a decent buffer for myself right now, but I’d really like to start posting twice a week, and if I don’t start ramping up the productivity that’s not going to be able to happen.<br />Incidentally, if you’re following the story, tomorrow night (Monday morning) will be the fourth installment. I have four more written currently, and I’m working on the next one—episode 9. I’m expecting that around episode 12 or so there are going to be some big changes to the story,and that’s around the time I plan to start posting on Wednesdays as well. So, look for that in like a couple months.<br />But that’s not what I want to discuss in this space. Back when I first decided to try this website idea I said that there was a distinct possiblity that blogs would stop being posted here, and all around my other blog posting haunts (myspace, blogger, okcupid) and begin to be relegated more to serialshorts.com. Well, my last post was made there, with just a link to it in my myspace blog (which was pretty much only there because I wanted Emily to see that a new blog had been posted and I knew she would never notice it in the news/blog section of the site) <br />I think what I’m going to do is try to clean up the blog section of the site a little bit.—Maybe give each post its own URL or something… maybe some sort of archival system.—and post blogs there more regularly and here less regularly. Any blog that’s about the site, or about writing, or about a review of a book or movie or TV show or something will go there. This space will just be for things like relationship theory and more personal blogging. So that means my blogging will sort of be split roughly in half, I think, between here and there.<br />I need to figure out a way to indicate that there’s a new blog posted over there, though. I’ll obviously update the twitter feed when a new post is made, but I’m thinking I need to put something on the front page or something when there’s a new post up. And I need to figure out how long a post is “new” for. Probably a week.<br />Also, maybe one day I’ll add RSS. I have no idea how to do that, but maybe one day I’ll learn.<br />Anyway… all of that is not the purpose of this post. That was just a bit of housekeeping. No, the purpose of this post is to bitch and moan.<br />I’m still lonely. I’ve been lonely for a very long time now. I say that I don’t have any friends often, but that’s not really true and I know it. For one thing, there’s Jim. I know that I neglect him a lot, and I feel bad about it… but I guess that’s just the way it goes. I’m sure I’ll be seeing him more regularly as my Heat game companion when the season starts up next week. So that’s good. <br />There’s also Emily, and the group of friends that I associate as being my Cherry group of friends. That’s not really fair anymore, because that group has become my group of friends now as well, but still… that’s the Cherry group of friends.<br />There’s also Jess, who I spoke to today but don’t speak with much, and Lior, who I also don’t speak to much, but I’ll be seeing him in February when he comes down, and then again in March when I go up there for PAX. And there’s Mike, who I really only keep up with through blogs and twitter. Oh and Sophia. I need to call her and get her hard drive back to her.<br />So, those are my friends. There are work friends and such as well, but they are all more of acquaintances. It’s a modest sized group of friends. But, to be honest, I feel it’s right about the right size for me.<br />The reason I’m lonely, really, is just because I’m single and have been for far too long, and haven’t been happy about it at any point. And I just don’t know what to do about it at all. It’s at a point where I don’t feel like I can think about it in terms of theory anymore, to the extent that I was ever able to in the first place. <br />I’m not comfortable going out to clubs or bars or anything to try to meet people, and so at this point I’m just waiting around for someone to come along. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that except that it’s not happening. I think a relationship should be able to grow organically, but what do you do when it’s just not happening?<br />Okay… let me take a step, well, not back so much as sideways. This is where my mind was when I decided I wanted to write this blog entry:<br />There’s that girl Melissa I work with who I decided I had a crush on. Nothing’s going to happen with her, and really I’m okay with that. It’s not a big crush. It’s not like I find myself thinking about her all the time or anything. But finding someone who I had a crush on at all was kind of a big step for me.<br />Anyway… there’s her. And I haven’t seen her much or talked to her much in the past few weeks, and so the crush has faded quite a lot. <br />But there are a few other girls at work that I think are really cute. So, now what?<br />I don’t go up and start talking to people. It’s not that I get nervous talking to girls or anything. I’m fine talking to people. I don’t clam up or anything because a girl is pretty. I just don’t know how to assert myself into someone’s life to the point where a conversation would be forthcoming. The work friends that I have, I have because I found that I get along with them when we were somehow forced into interaction through work. <br />Except Sophia. She came up and started up a conversation with me. That’s only slightly germane. The slightly is because I wish that would happen more often, and particularly with some of the girls I think are attractive.<br />Usually the fact that I don’t care to start up conversations with strangers doesn’t bother me at all. If I don’t know you, then you’re pretty much just background to me until I am somehow thrust into a social situation with you. That’s pretty much how I live my life, and it works for me for the most part. Except now.<br />Because now I want to find a girlfriend. For one thing, I don’t think this is a healthy aspiration. I think it means that I could thrust myself into a relationship with someone I don’t necessarily belong in a relationship with just because they were the first person to come along. But let’s set that notion aside for the moment.<br />Let’s focus on the handful of girls at work that I’m attracted to. For the most part, I don’t even know their names. There are a lot of people at work whose names I don’t know. Like I said, I’m okay with that for the most part. They’re just background until for some reason they become part of my life in a signifiant fashion.<br />But I’d like to talk to that handful of girls, and I just don’t know how to do it.<br />I could just go up to them and say “Hi. I’m evan.” That would work, at least somewhat. But I don’t do that. And there’s a part of me that watches me.<br />I don’t want to be the sort of guy who is only interested in talking to people if they are girls and attractive. So, there’s that part of me that’s watching me and saying “Well, you can’t just go up to her and say hi. Because if you didn’t think she was attractive, you wouldn’t do it.” So I have to sort sneak around that inner me and find a way to insinuate these people into my life naturally, in a way that the inner me doesn’t think is me being sleezy and only wanting to talk to them because they’re cute.<br />I know. I’m a wreck.<br />Really, a lot of this is sort of covered in that short story I wrote a little while back. I think I’ll post it here now. It’s finished, I guess. It’s not good, really, and if I planned to send it off to try and get it published or something I would have to rework it quite a bit. But I’m not going to do that. I’ve moved on to my Serial Shorts and left that story behind. So I might as well post it as is.<br />Anyway, the point is… I think I need someone to tell me that it’s okay to talk to these girls, and that it wouldn’t make me the sleezy guy I’m always guarding myself from being. I don’t think that would really help though, because the inner me wouldn’t believe them anyway.<br />So, really what I need is someone to force me into these social situations. Someone at work to know that I want to talk to these girls, and tell them or put us together or something.Or a friend to find someone that they think I would like and set us up. The person I’m describing is basically a wingman, and the situational reality is that this is a very grade school way of finding relationships.<br />I don’t have a wingman, and I’m not in grade school anymore. I need to grow up.<br />I’m very good at being in a relationship. Well, I’m good at the relationship anyway… I know I tend to get a little lost in them and maybe I need to learn how to be in a relationship and also maintain my own life outside of it a bit more than I have in the past. But my point is that I’m good in the relationship and am able to have a mature grown up relationship. It’s just finding that and being outside of the relationship where I am stunted.<br />I wanted to end the post by saying that I need to grow up, but it needed to be said in the spot that it was said in and then that last paragraph needed to come after it, and I couldn’t think of an easy way to rework things so that it came after instead of before. So I’m just going to say it again as if for the first time, and then make it the title of the post.<br />I need to grow up.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-66848761018285816112009-09-30T21:02:00.001-04:002009-09-30T21:03:26.217-04:00This is What's Going to HappenI’ve gotten frustrated, and given up.<br />Shannon was supposed to, for all intents and purposes, build my website for me and just basically leave the content up to me. Well, that’s not happening now.<br />I’m not upset at Shannon at all. She has her own things to do, and I’m sure she had all intentions of putting my site together for me. But I got impatient. <br />So now I’ve been trying to learn how to build this stupid website on my own. It’s not happening.<br />There are lots of great tools out there to build a generic website. But I don’t really have the patience to learn to use them properly.<br />I’m basically trying to jump into webdesign without learning how to properly design a website. I just want a tool that will do it for me, and while these tools exist, they aren’t built for the sort of thing I need them to do. Namely, maintain three blogs. Keep each blog archived separately. The latest post to any one of the blogs should be the only content on the front page, with links under the blog to the first blog of that category, and the previous in that archive. <br />Really, that’s it. Wordpress is a really good website generator, but it doesn’t seem to be able to do the things that I want, and I would need to learn how php works, and more advanced css than I care to, and all sorts of things like that in order to make the site work and look remotely the way that I want. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to just sort of make a new page. I’m sure there is, but… I don’t know. I’m out of my depth.<br />So, I’m frustrated by all of this. And it’s seriously preventing me from being productive in the actual writing of the stories, which is really the whole point.<br />So I’ve officially given up on having the site operate properly.<br />This is what’s going to happen:<br />I’m going to use my limited html knowledge to create a site that looks like crap, but at least is completely customizable. It will look very amateurish, I think. It’s going to probably have just a matte background color, and be primarily text. It will look, in short, like the personal webpage I made back in high school.<br />I’ll just be maintaining my archives manually. No databases, no fancy posting applets. I’ll just make a new html page for each archived story, and update the links accordingly. Old school.<br />On the bright side, in a few months the site will get a facelift.<br />Sophia is in some webdesign course again, so for her semester project she’s volunteered to design me a pretty site. I don’t think she knows anything about database management or anything, so the archiving thing will still have to be done manually, but at least the site will look nice.<br />Anyway… that’s what’s going to happen. SerialShorts will go live on Monday. It won’t be pretty, but it will be. Then I can get back to writing the content for the site and not worrying so much about designing the stupid thing.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-43433633490479528492009-09-20T01:57:00.001-04:002009-09-20T01:59:23.927-04:00Health En-Sewer-AntsLately there’s been a lot of debate over this health insurance thing. And then Mike said something about it. And so now, I suppose, I’ll say something about it.<br /><br /><br />I don’t really have that much to say on the subject. I’m really not all that informed on the healthcare issues. I listen to Rush Limbaugh, and he’s a crazy man. And his problem with this whole thing basically comes down to “Don’t trust anything government run. They do this, and then they’re setting themselves up to have the power to do literally anything else to you.”<br /><br /><br />That’s… well, I suppose he’s right. If you really believe that Democrats are honestly and truly trying to leverage the country from a representative democracy into socialism or communism, then I guess that’s something you should worry about. But they aren’t. If you really believe that Democrats hate the Constitution and want to do a complete rewrite of it, then I guess all these protesters and right wing nuts have a point. Passing this health care bill could provide the leverage needed to insinuate government into all sorts of aspects of your life. But that doesn’t seem to really be the goal, in the real world.<br /><br /><br />However, the goal is to socialize medicine. And I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.<br /><br /><br />The goal of the Obama White House is, very obviously, to completely socialize medicine. Medicine should be affordable for everyone. Nay, free to everyone. The government should provide health care to all.<br /><br /><br />That’s a nice thought, and a lofty ambition. I don’t know if it’s practical though.<br /><br /><br />Immediate health care is currently provided to anyone. This is a fact. If you are currently dying and need to be saved, an ER will do its best to save you, and if you can’t pay for it then you will have massive debt. That debt won’t be paid, maybe, and if you survive you will now have a whole slew of new problems caused by the life saving procedures. But you will have gotten the health care.<br /><br /><br />Then, when you can’t pay for it and you have to declare bankruptcy or whatever, the hospital is paid for its service through tax money. This system is currently in place. This system could be better, but those changes could ostensibly be relatively small in comparison to the overhaul of the health care system that is being proposed.<br /><br /><br />As I understand it, this emergency medical treatment is not really what this new plan is about. The plan seems to be more about preventative health care than it is about emergency health care. It’s about health insurance, which is a myth.<br /><br /><br />So let’s talk about that. What is insurance? Insurance is basically making a bet with an insurance company, in a backwards sort of way. Lemme dig up a Terry Pratchett quote and work from that:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"Well suppose you have a ship loaded with, say, gold bars. it might run into storms or be taken by pirates. You don't want that to happen, so you take out an ensewer-ants-polly-sea. I work out the odds of the cargo being lost, based on weather and piracy records for the last twenty years, then I add on a bit, then you pay me some money based on those odds-"<br /><br />"-and the bit-" Rincewind said, waggling a finger solemnly.<br /><br />"Then, if the cargo is lost, I reimburse you."<br /><br />"Reeburs?"<br /><br />"Pay you the value of your cargo," said Twoflower patiently<br /><br />"Oh I get it. It's like a bet, right?"<br /><br />"A wager? In a way, I suppose."<br /><br />"And you make money at this inn-sewer-ants?"<br /><br />"It offers a return on investment, certainly."</blockquote><br /><br /><br />So, basically, with insurance you pay a small amount to an insurance company, betting that something is going to happen. Let’s take fire insurance. Ostensibly, you’re betting the insurance company that your house is going to catch fire. The insurance company does some arithmetic and determines the odds that it will, then it takes your money and makes a bet with you that your house is not going to catch fire. If it does, then they pay you.<br /><br /><br />That’s the way that insurance works. But that’s not what we want with health insurance. We just want them to pay. We want to pay a small amount to some big company and then we want all of our medical expenses to cost less. This is not insurance. This is just health care.<br /><br /><br />That’s where this whole problem of preexisting conditions and such comes into play. If you have a condition that is guaranteed to cost a bunch of money every month, then you are not a good bet for the insurance company. So it will be very difficult for you to find affordable health care.<br /><br /><br />The point of the reform in health care is to make health insurance obsolete. The idea is that being healthy is a right, and that the government should provide it. Not based on an insurance, or betting, system, but just always give you the medicine that you need.<br /><br /><br />So, it’s a good thing then, right? Well. I don’t really know about that. Let’s assume for the moment that this bill is not about any sort of crazy liberal takeover, and it is really just about providing health care to the people who need it.<br /><br /><br />I think that if we had socialized medicine in this fashion, with the government picking up the bill for anyone who asked them to, that would put most to all of the health insurance companies out of business. That’s fine, I guess. Fuck em, right?<br /><br /><br />Well, now there’s a standard. Everyone gets the same medical treatment as everyone else. This will benefit people who couldn’t afford medical treatment before, but the people who had really good medical treatment and could afford it could find themselves with sub par treatment now. Their money may no longer be able to buy them the better things that they are accustomed to.<br /><br /><br />Okay, so let’s assume that this problem has arisen, and to combat it a small but expensive system of private health care is established. Health Insurance companies are now fewer and smaller, and cater to a much more select customer base. So there’s that modestly taken care of.<br /><br /><br />There will still be doctors. Doctors will still make a nice living. Maybe not as nice a living as they do now, but they will be compensated well for the work they do.<br /><br /><br />So, let’s discuss the death panels.<br /><br /><br />That’s silly. The term originated from looking at a provision in the bill that allows for “end of life counseling.” In other words, senior citizens are encouraged to see a doctor and discuss things like DNR, living will… that sort of thing. I think it’s twice a year. And I think it would be free to the person. It’s not mandated. It’s there for people to take advantage of, or to ignore. Stupid stupid republican bullshit scare tactic term.<br /><br /><br />Okay… but let’s look at how the term has sort of grown up to mean something that’s not QUITE as stupid.<br /><br /><br />When government takes over the health care system, it will be government bureaucracy that decides what life saving treatments should be paid for and to whom. Effectively, government will be deciding who lives and dies. This is true.<br /><br /><br />But it’s happening already. It’s sill to think that this will be new. As of now, medicines and procedures are paid for by the insurance companies. So, before you get your medicine it needs to be cleared through your insurance company. And they don’t want to give you your medicine. They want to protect their bet that they placed on you, and so you better believe that the list of things that have to be for them to pay for your treatment is just as suited to not paying for you as the government’s will be. We have the same death panels now that the bill would be proposing, but it’s in the private sector instead of the public.<br /><br /><br />What about drug companies? This is where, assuming that the bill is done without evil intentions and can be paid for and works to provide everyone with free or affordable health care, I have the biggest potential problem.<br /><br /><br />Drug companies are seen as evil entities. Drugs are ridiculously overpriced in this country. That’s why we aren’t allowed to buy drugs from Canada or wherever, where they are more affordable. Drug companies have a lock on that.<br /><br /><br />The $50 pill that you take to control your blood pressure did not cost $50 to manufacture. It was probably less than a dollar. You aren’t eating $50 worth of chemicals.<br /><br /><br />What you are eating is $50 worth of research.<br /><br /><br />Yes, drugs are too expensive, and yes, drug companies maybe make more profit off of them than is ethical. But the money is paid for the research to develop the drug, not for the drug itself. And I’m not crazy about the idea of putting drug research solely into the hands of the government.<br /><br /><br />The government doesn’t know how to do research. Government funded research needs to have a specific goal. It needs to be, say, cancer research. Or whatever. But that’s not always where breakthroughs come from. Lots of things are discovered by accident. Look it up. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cancer/discoveries.html There you go. I done the work for you.<br /><br /><br />Not only that, but research in fields like cloning and stem cells are politically sticky territory. I don’t know that I like the idea of politics being behind all of medicine’s research.<br /><br /><br />So, that’s my, admittedly underinformed, take on the health care issue. Is socialized medicine a good thing? I think it is more good than bad, but there are genuine problems with it that need to be addressed and talked about. All of this Nazi comparison and death panel crap isn’t helping.<br /><br /><br />Every once in a while I see a republican on The Daily Show or something talking about healthcare reform in an intelligent way. Admitting that our system is in desperate need of change, but that this big sweeping change that’s currently on the table isn’t the way to go. There are substantially smaller changes that could be made to make health care more affordable for everyone, while not throwing out the current system and replacing it with a whole new one. These are the people that I would like to hear more from. But this sort of reasoned analysis gets drowned out by the Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks and their flashy sloganing.<br /><br /><br />Both sides suck. Both sides need to take a step back and find a middle ground, because that’s really where the proper solution probably lies. But no. In US politics it’s go big or go home.<br /><br /><br />Serialshorts.com update!:<br /><br /><br />Shannon says she thinks she’ll be able to put together the site tomorrow. Could Monday be launch day? It’s possible.<br /><br /><br />P.S.<br /><br />Hey, Mike... I'm interested in what you think about this serialshorts website idea. I don't know if I can write a 2-6 page short story in a serialized series manner effectively, or if it can realistically be done at all. Or if it's something that has a chance of gaining an audience on the internets even if it can be done well. What do you think about it? As a concept, since I'm sure you're probably happy to hear that I'm doing... you know... something.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-33494388340214687132009-09-07T23:24:00.000-04:002009-09-07T23:26:08.224-04:00The Soulgeek GirlI didn’t mean to be writing a blog tonight. This time was allotted for writing episode four, but I’m not in the right mindspace for that at the moment. But this is Scheduled Writing Time, so here I am.<br />This is the second day in a row that I’ve not written the next episode and had planned to. Yesterday was because I spent the night with friends instead, which is important to do from time to time. Tonight I have the time, just not the mindset, which I think is not as valid of an excuse. Tomorrow I need to write it.<br />I also spent some time with Shannon going over rough plans for designing the website last night, so it wasn’t a total loss. It’s productivity of a sort, but I’m trying to get into a groove writing, and it’s hard going.<br />That’s not to say I feel ready to publish yet. I want to get another like… five episodes or so written before I start to publish them. And then maybe I can start work on the second series while simultaneously writing an episode a week on this one. Then maybe I can build like an eight story buffer on that one before starting on the third while maintaining the other two. These are lofty goals.<br />So, I suppose I’ll discuss those last two things about Stacy I mentioned in the last post. Interestingly, Emily didn’t ask me about that since. Weird.<br />I don’t know why I’ve been sitting on these. They’re fairly inconsequential. I think it’s because by the time they sort of came to mind, I was really past the point of feeling like I needed to be thinking about and discussing this sort of thing anymore. I guess I was sort of saving them for a time when I wanted to write a blog entry, but really didn’t have anything of consequence to write about. And here we are.<br />Thing number one. I used to say to Stacy: “I love you so much,” with a decent amount of frequency. Now, this thing isn’t really about Stacy at all except for the fact that she was the recipient of the phrase. The only thing I have to say about this is that saying it sounds weird. That’s really not much to discuss.<br />I think it’s the way that I said it with genuine feeling, and that it ended on the word “much.” The way that the word came out of my mouth and sounded really seemed very awkward to me.<br />There. Glad I got that off my chest. I feel better, you?<br />Thing number two is more of a statement about Stacy in particular, and the relationship I had with her. But I really don’t want to dwell on it that much. So, what I’m going to do is give it a brief setup, a brief explanation, and then skip the part where I explore what that says about life and relationships and Stacy as a person and me as a person and all of that stuff that I usually go into in this space.<br />I’m very stereotypically cheesy sometimes. Specifically in relationships. When I was with Dana, we did that adorable/annoying “you hang up first. No you hang up first” thing. I liked that. We also did the “I love you more” thing. With Stacy, I always waited for her to hang up first, and she always did. And I never ever tried the “I love you more” bit. Because, well, it was obvious.<br />There. That’s done. Said, and moved on from.<br />Next on the agenda, I want to talk a little bit about Melissa, the fact that I have this crush on her, and the nature of crushes.<br />I don’t understand it. She’s cute. By which I mean, I am physically attracted to her. But I don’t really know her that well. Which is why I can have a crush on her, acknowledge it, but not let it control my life or make me majorly upset that I won’t be dating her. That’s not what I want to talk about.<br />What I want to talk about is; why do I have a crush on her anyway. Yes, I’m physically attracted to her. But there are at least two other girls from work that I can think of offhand that I’m physically attracted to, and I don’t have a crush on either of them. <br />Why not? I don’t dislike them. I like them fine. It’s not like the small amount of time that I’ve spent with Melissa has been unusually fun or anything. So, I don’t get it. Where does the crush come from?<br />And the answer is, seemingly, it just sort of does. It’s not something that’s necessarily fundamentally explainable. It’s just something that happens. If I got to know her a lot better, there’s a good chance that I would develop what I would call real feelings for her as opposed to this easily disregarded crush that I’m currently harboring.<br />Of course, there’s also the possibility that I would find out I don’t like her at all. I don’t really even know her well enough to be able to disregard that as a possibility. So where does this feeling of a crush come from?<br />I don’t think this is something that has a satisfactory answer. I’ve written here about things like it before. I remember specifically wondering over the dynamic between people who find each other physically attractive, enjoy spending time together, but don’t have sexual/relationship interests in each other. Where is the disconnect between these things? It boggles the mind.<br />On a semi-related note, there’s this girl I found on OKCupid.<br />Let’s back up.<br />There’s this dating site called Soulgeek. It’s fairly new. Well, it’s like a year old at this point, I think. So maybe not so new anymore. The point is, it exists, and it’s small. It was put together by a guy who is, I think, an actor and, I know, a voiceover work… guy. He does voices for cartoons, is what I’m saying.<br />I think his wife died. I’m not sure on that anymore. It’s been like a year since I knew the specifics. But he’s a geek, and she was or is a geek, and they were very happy together. He seems like a good guy, and the reason he created the site was out of a genuine desire to help other people like him to find a geek like themselves out there so they could find the happiness that he had.<br />I bring all this up to say that the reason I still pay any amount of attention to that site is because I think that the attempt is laudable and I would like to support it. Unfortunately, it’s really small still. So there really aren’t many people in a given area that are on it. Which kind of defeats the purpose.<br />So, while I feel it is a worthy cause, and it’s worthy of my support, it’s just not worth paying a monthly fee for. Even though the monthly fee is considerably smaller than the fees of sites like Jdate or Match.com.<br />They way these sites work when they have the monthly fee, is browsing through the members is free. Creating a profile is free. But making substantive communication is locked for paying members. All you’re able to do as a free member is send a pre-fab message saying “hi. I’m interested in you.” But that’s it. There’s no way to follow up in any substantive manner. <br />This message is called variably a flirt, or a wink, or a number of other things depending on the site in question. On Soulgeek, it’s called a Hail in keeping with the geeky nature of the site proper. (searches are called Scans, and your homepage is called the Bridge… get it?)<br />So, I found this girl on Soulgeek who was in Miami and was cute and seemed alright by the little bit of a profile you can make on Soulgeek. Which is largely talking about what sorts of sci fi you’re into and what other types of things make you a geek.<br />So, I sent her a Hail, and she sent me a Hail back. And then nothing. Because that was really all that was possible from that site at the time without paying for it.<br />I sort of thought about paying for a month just so that I could send her a proper email, but there’s every possibility that you need to be a paying member to READ the proper emails as well. So I didn’t even know if she would be able to read it. And also, even if she was able to, I figured there wasn’t that much of a chance that anything worth mentioning would come of it.<br />This was all, I would say, six months ago. Maybe more.<br />So, I was on OKCupid the other day for some reason, and by some chance I came across the same picture of her that she had used on her Soulgeek profile. OKCupid is, for the most part, a free dating site. They are introducing a pay section, and it offers things like highlited profiles and more inbox storage, but the messaging and all the real functionality of the site is, for the moment, still free.<br />So, recognizing her picture, I checked out her profile. And I really liked it. This goes back to the whole crush on Melissa thing. I don’t understand it, really. There’s not very much that you can learn about a person from these stupid profiles, but for some reason I felt like I had a crush on her the same way I feel like I have a crush on Melissa.<br />So, a long story of stuff that doesn’t matter comes to the unsatisfying conclusion;<br />I sent her a proper message telling her I was interested. She got the message, and looked at my profile, but she hasn’t responded back.<br />What that probably means is that she isn’t interested. That’s fine. It would be nice if she was and we could meet up and maybe there would be something there, but I’m not emotionally invested enough in this person who I have never met, and yet still feel I have this crush on, to be really any amount of genuine upset.<br />However, maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Maybe she just doesn’t think that me sending a message to her really means anything at all, and that I just spend my time sending these messages to lots of people. A lot of girls on these sites have things saying “don’t message me if you’re just looking for sex” etc. And she had a whole big list of those sorts of things. I’m sure she gets messages all the time of that nature.<br />So, I’m going to try to take a little bit of education from that story I wrote, and go with reason number 2. Reason number 1 would mean that communication with this person is over, but reason number 2 means that persistence may be worthwhile.<br />I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with reason number 1 here, but oh well. If I don’t hear from her in a week, I’ll send a short message saying that I’m sorry I hadn’t heard from her and that I’m being sincere and that it would be really nice to hear back.<br />Then, if message number 2 is disregarded, I give up and move on without undo amount of heartache, but with at least the knowledge that I wasn’t letting my, admittedly numerous, neuroses prevent me from something.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-41096498936967038652009-09-05T00:39:00.000-04:002009-09-05T00:44:03.401-04:00Writing and EditingSo, after day of careful deliberation and a cursory look around at my options, I bought a netbook. It's an Acer Aspire One. Because I like Acer. I'm not under any sort of fantasy that this was an intelligent purchase.<br /><br />The problem I had was that I wanted to write, but I don't like writing in bed on my computer. I like to go outside and have a cigarette while I write. The phone with the bluetooth keyboard was fine for writing these blogs, but for any serious writing it just wouldn’t cut it. For one thing, the U button didn’t work well. But the real problem is that the screen just isn’t big enough to really see what I had written. There wasn’t really any way to read as I was typing. It was just the sentence I was on, and that was it.<br />So, for the past few weeks I have been writing. Like, real writing. But I haven’t been using the phone. I’ve been writing longhand, which I don’t really like. So, the idea is that getting this is going to help me to write more. It won’t though.<br />Let’s be honest. This was a foolish purchase. A monumental waste of money. The real reason I got it, while we’re being honest, is because I’ve sort of always wanted a laptop. I don’t really have any use for a laptop, but I’ve always wanted one just the same. And I was at Best Buy yesterday to pick up a standard to SATA power converter (they didn’t have one… Best Buy has a real crap Computer Hardware section) and I saw the netbooks. And they were just so adorable and affordable. And so there we are, and here I am. Writing on my new adorable netbook.<br />So, am I writing more of my current project, like I should be—like I bought this for in the first place? No. I’m wasting my time writing a blog entry while my new computer updates itself.<br />I only installed the essentials on this machine. Outpost Security Suite, MS Office, and Final Draft. It acutally came with a gimped version of Office, which included Word and not much else. I really could have just left it at that, but I decided to splurge on the whole Office Suite.<br />A quick note about the current state of my writing, and then on to more about that tangentially.<br />I finished the story that I had wanted to write when I wrote this last blog. The one about… well… me and my neuroses, basically. It turned out poorly, as expected. It’s basically just one of these blog entries—well, not this entry. One of the ones about my neuroses and my views on relationship theory and such—but in narrative form. I should really just post it up here. I might. It’s kind of long to be posted in this fashion though… so we’ll see. There’s also not much point to it, seeing as Emily already read it, and I don’t think Mike has any desire to. And I think the two of them represent the entirety of my audience here.<br />Anyway, I gave it to a few people to ask for there help on it. More on that later. Cherry tried to help. She seemed to have put a lot of work into it, actually. She gave me a couple good notes, but on the whole was pretty unhelpful. More on that later, in the same later as the last one. <br />The only person who was really helpful with it was Sophia. And, while her suggestion really was helpful and would probably make that story a lot better, I don’t think I’m going to go back to it. I wanted to write it, and it’s written. One of the main reasons I wanted to write it was just to get myself back (I say that, but I don’t really ever remember being there in the first place to go back to it) into the swing of writing. And it worked.<br />I’m revisiting my plan from like a year and a half ago of writing and maintaining a serialized short fiction series. But I’m trying to do it right this time. I have three different story ideas—one of which is the one that I tried writing last time. I’ve actually been doing a decent job of actually keeping up with it. I wrote the first episode last week, and wrote a second one this week. The plan is to try to write two more tomorrow.<br />There are some neat things about serialized work. One thing is that, if it’s not that great in the beginning, that’s kind of okay. It would be better if it started off fantastically, but the thing about serialized fiction is that it has a chance to grow and develop. By the time you’re on your 20th episode, the first episode is somewhat forgotten. Everything about the story could have changed by then, but gradually. Serial fiction has the bonus of growing and maturing with its author, which brings me to my next neat thing.<br />It’s a really good tool for practicing writing. Set yourself a schedule, and try to make it a little but not too difficult, and then stick to it. My schedule is at least one episode a week, for an eventual update schedule when I start to put this online.<br />I was listening to a podcast interview with Jonathon Coulton (if you don’t know who he is, look into him. You’ll thank me) and he was talking about the period of his career when he was just sort of starting out and he did Thing a Week. What he did was he wrote a song, or maybe more I don’t really follow him too closely, and posted it every week. So every week he had to write a whole song, which is kind of a big commitment.<br />He said that it really helped him to solidify his craft. And also he said that looking back, he doesn’t even remember writing or recording some of that stuff. He’ll go back and listen to it and not even recognize it as his own work.<br />So, I liked that idea. I took that principle and applied it to writing. Instead of trying to write a story or a script or, god forbid, a whole big novel and try to make it really good and go back and edit it over and over again for perfection (which I am really horrible at anyway) I decided it would be a better idea to give myself a posting schedule, like that of a webcomic, and make sure to have something worthwhile to add to the overall story every week. So far, even though I’m only two weeks in, I can feel it making a difference, which is neat.<br />I’m actually really kind of excited about this project. I’m not ready to talk about it in too many specifics, as in what the story is about or anything, but the plan is to build myself a buffer, and then post one episode a week online, just like a webcomic but with short fiction. Shannon said she would design the website for me, which is good because I can’t really figure out a good way to display this sort of content in a web browser. I even bought a domain! www.serialshorts.com belongs to me. I’m actually really proud of that domain name.<br />The eventual, hopeful, idea is to have three stories running. The one I’m working on now, the one I started (one kind of lame episode) last time, and a third idea that I like more than the other two, so I’m waiting till I’m writing a bit better to start working on. Then I’ll try to maintain an update schedule of MWF, one on each of the days. I think that’s a bit ambitious. It probably will not happen. But, that’s the hope at the moment.<br />Okay. I got more excited talking about what I’m doing currently than I expected to, and this is running a bit longer than I thought it would.<br />Oh! One more thing before I move on. A half hour lunch break is not nearly enough time to do any sort of substantial writing. Just thought I’d clear that up for you if you were wondering.<br />Sorry. As I was saying… this is going longer than I expected. I was going to throw in a couple quick thoughts about Stacy that I’ve been sitting on. But they aren’t important. So maybe next time.<br />Instead, I’m going to move on to the stuff I promised to move on to earlier. Editing.<br />But before I do that, I just remembered one more thing… the only problem with this new laptop instead of writing out longhand is the process of retyping. Having to read through and type out the stuff that you wrote is actually a really good tool for editing, because you have to read carefully at a per word level. If you’re reading something that you just wrote, the tendency is to sort of skim over it, but having to type it out forces you to do a thorough read through. I’m going to have to make myself learn some better quick editing habits.<br />Now, on to editing from a more theoretical standpoint.<br />Like I said, Cherry read my story, and she gave it a thorough workshopping, which made me remember why I didn’t like workshops. <br />There are things that you say in workshops, and they’re fairly predictable. Things like “the story doesn’t start in the right place” or “end in the right place”… basic things like that. I pretty much knew which of those sorts of things she was going to tell me. I knew that she would think them, and I knew that a workshop group would think them. The problem with a workshop group, and the problem with having Cherry workshop my story, is that people tend to take a bit of ownership of the story that they’re workshopping.<br />The main problem that Cherry had with my story was that, well, nothing much happened. It was sort of a snapshot of these two people’s lives, but not in a period of time where something altogether life altering was happening. I was trying to make a point with this story more than I was trying to tell a compelling “here’s what happened” sort of drama. That is, in itself, sort of a problem… trying to tell a story to make a point instead of telling a story to tell a story isn’t really the greatest approach. But it’s what I was trying to do nonetheless. <br />So, everything she said was trying to basically get me to write a different story. She wasn’t interested in this one. But that’s not what I wanted from her, and I never liked seeing people doing that in the workshops that I have been a part of.<br />In my workshop classes, in my hazy and not very reliable memory, I was the only one who would really try to see the story that the author was trying to tell, and then give advice on how better to tell that story. I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure others were trying to do the same thing. But I distinctly remember a number of occasions where the conversation would be “this is what should have happened here” and then I would say “well, that’s not really the point the author seems to have been trying to make. If you make those changes then you’ll be telling a different story than what the author was trying to tell.” In these workshops the author isn’t allowed to speak until the very end, and I remember the author saying, a lot of the time “evan was right. That was what I was trying to do with this story.” And then a huge portion of the workshop, if not the whole thing to most of it, were rendered useless.<br />I don’t really have a point here except that in this very specialized scenario, which is not relevant to pretty much anyone at this point, people do it all wrong and they should do it better. Also, people aren’t good at discerning what the intent of an author is as opposed to the things that they read into what the author is writing. Which, I suppose, is a greater literary theory topic that Mike would probably be far more suited to tackle than I am.<br />And on that note, I will take my leave. I don’t know how often I’m going to be posting here anymore. Maybe more often now that I have this nifty laptop, but that will probably be temporary if at all. I’m hoping that the lion’s share of the time spent with this will be on writing my stories. And I’m also hoping that sometime in the not so distant future I’ll have a site up at www.serialshorts.com, and my blogging will be there more than here.<br />Although, there are some things that go on a personal blog that don’t belong on a website like that. So we shall see.<br />Until next time.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-61211970331768558572009-07-25T01:46:00.000-04:002009-07-25T01:47:48.111-04:00The Story I'm Not WritingWhat I want to be doing right now is writing a story. The story that I want to write, and have been meaning to get around to, will not be very good. It's not the sort of thing that I would want to read. Even if I write it and it turns out well, there's pretty much no chance that I'll be happy with it. But still, I want to write it.<br /><br />I'm not currently, though. I think I'm afraid of it. It's been such a long time since I've really written anything, and the only thing that I wrote that I'm really proud of is the script I did with Jim. I don't really know how to start writing.<br /><br />I need a cast of characters. And I need to know my characters. At the very least, I need to know my main characters. And I don't want either of them to be me, though I'm fairly certain that one will end up being. I don't actually mind that he's me, since the impetus for writing this is based on my insecurities in the first place. I just feel like sticking yourself into the lead role of something you're writing is a cop out.<br /><br />I lied, but it was a useful lie. The real main impetus for this story is a blog entry I wrote a little while back about flashback stories. But that's really just where the idea germinated from, and not what the story is actually about.<br /><br />Aside from the problem of character creation, I have a whole slew of other problems preventing me from getting started. I have a rogh idea of the first scene, and a rough idea of the last scene, but I'm not sure how to handle all the middle bits. My biggest problem with writing is figuring out how to move the story along. If I could think of details and things to happen, I'd have no problem. The actual writing part issn't usually the part that scares me.<br /><br />Except, at the moment, it kind of is. Even if I knew my ch aaracters right now, and had a decent idea of things to make them do, I'm not really sure what sort of narrator I want to use. My instinct is to use a very detatched and boring narration style, because that's the sort of story it is. But I'd much rather be able to bring some life to the story through narration, like Pratchett.<br /><br />A big problem I have with writing is... Well... This is sort of hard to explain. It always seems inauthentic. Dialogue is easy, but describing action never seems natural to me. Even when I'm reading something. As long as I don't think about it, it's fine. But if I allow myself to sort of take stock of the actual narration of action and setting it all sort of feels like "it was a dark and stormy night" to me. I think that's why I prefer scriptwriting. The action tags are there specifically to be action tags because you need to know what it physically happening. They're not supposed to flow with the story in the same way as they do in prose.<br /><br />The last problem is that I don't owant to write a story onto my phone like I do the blogs. And I don't want to sit in bed at the compter either. I think I should use a notebookb, bt I don't know. I never used to really think about the setting I need to writ e in, bt now it's become a problem for me for the first time.<br /><br />All that said, and bearing in mind that this paritcular story is trite and worthless, I'd still really like to get it written. Maybe if I can get this one done I can soart of take the momentum of writing something and use it to go into writing something more fun. I'd like to revisit that Heroes at Home thing I started a couple years ago, but I don't really feel up to it at this point, and maybe writing this trite piece of crap will help me get there.<br /><br />In other news, there's this whole thing I want to write about here about talking to and checking out girls, but the subject makes me feel dirty and pathetic in an odd way. And it really shouldn't. It's right in line with the sort of stuff I usually discuss here, and really it also falls right in with the story I'm hoping to write.<br /><br />So, maybe I'll revisit that topic in a couple days. In the meantime; I got a promotion at work. Basically, that just means that the stuff I thouight I was responsible for before , I actually am now. So, no actual change there. It's just that now my responsibility for the stuff I do is oifficial finstead off... I don'td know whkat it awas before. I'm also going to be fll time starting in mid august, and I got a pay raise to just above nothing instead of just below.<br /><br />There's also a girl at work that I think I have a crush on. I say sI think because I'm really not sure at all at this point. It's been so long since I've had any sort of interest in anyone. I don't know her well enough to have any actual interest in her, but I think I remember this beihng what a minor crush feels like.<br /><br />I'm also fairly certain she has a boyfriend, and I don't work alongside her enough to have had any sort of meaningful conversation with her. So, in all foreseeable likelihood this is the stage the crush will remain. But I just thought I'd mention it.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-65207706396978873932009-06-25T01:03:00.001-04:002009-06-25T01:59:35.601-04:00Harry Potter vs. Ender's GameI could probably write a real essay on this, and have it turn out pretty well. Probably better than any literature analysis paper I've written before. But I'm not going to do that.<br /><br />To start with, I haven't seen these stories compared before. Harry Potter is this phenomenon, and while it's derivitive in the naming of spells and such, I don't think I've ever heard the complaint before that it's just plain derivitive. Granted, I haven't really been looking into it.<br /><br />That's the reason I felt this topic is worth writing. It's a comparison that I made immediately when I read Ender's Game that I haven't heard made before.<br /><br /><br />Herien there be spoilers.<br /><br />The basic plotline of Ender's Game (I'm just going to be discussing Ender's Game for the time being. Not the Speaker for the Dead series that follows it, and the Shadow series only briefly) and Harry Potter are incredibly similar. They both (Harry and Ender) are the prophesized saviors of mankind.<br /><br />That last sentence is only somewhat true. For one thing, Harry is the prophesized savior of Wizardkind, and by extension mankind, whereas Ender is the savior of mankind outright. More importantly, though, Ender is not prophesized. This is a major difference in the two stories. Harry Potter is Fantasy, and Ender's Game is science fiction. There's a big debate over what constitutes sci-fi and what constitutes fantasy, and where the line is drawn. But I think Orson Scott Card does a pretty good job of making the distinction as simply, and I'm paraphrasing "Sci-fi books have metal and compuuters on the covere, while fantasy books have trees and wizards and swords on the cover." So, because Ender's Game is sci-fi, Ender is not prophesized. He is, I think, genetically manfactured and then found, through science and observation, to be humanity's greatest hope. But, basically, they are both the prophesized saviors of mankind.<br /><br />Both stories begin with the children in their original circmstances--at home with their "families." These circmstances are not in any way similar, so they aren't worth going into in this context. It's only after they are brought to their respective schools that we begin our examination.<br /><br />Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is primarily interested in setting up the basic story, and introducing Harry, and through him the reader, to Hogwarts. Hogwarts is a magical place, and Harry has to learn how to inhabit this strange new environment. The stairs rotate around, and there are headmasters running around casting spells on things, and the pictures move, and the food phases into and ot of existence... Lots of things. Also he has to get sed to dormitory life and the restrictions therein.<br /><br />Ender goes to battle school out in space. It's a much colder atmosphere than Hogwarts, and the things he has to learn to deal with are different. For one thing, there's lack of gravity. Mostly, he has to learn to deal with being cut off from his sister, and the fact that there is no one in the battle school that is going to help him.There is an adversarial relationship between the teachers and students, and he has no friends.<br /><br />Which is another similarity. Harry Potter and Ender are both ostracized when they arrive at school. Harry, because everyone knows who he is. And Ender, becase he is the youngest and smallest student in the school. Harry finds Ron, and later Hermoine, but Ron right away. His friendships occur naturally, and grow strong over time. Ender has to manfactor his friendships, and then he loses them because the teachers take them away so that he is always in a state of having to fend for himself. The reationships don't mature the way that they do in Harry Potter.<br /><br />The school dynamics are set up in a very similar manner. In Harry Potter, we have the different houses. Gryffindor and Slitherin and ... Uhh... The other ones. All of the houses are in constant competition with each other. They're awarded points for everything, and there is a standings board which displays the points. Most notably is the Quidditch game.<br /><br />Which brings me to one of the two games referenced in the title (Ender's Game. In fact, the fantasy game becomes the more important of the two games, and argably the one that the title is referring to, in the Speaker series. But, when the short story was originally published, the fantasy game wasn't even in it and the Game in question was undobtedly the battles. This information is, for the most part, erroneous) The battle school is divided not into houses the way that Hogwarts is, bt into armies. The primary function of the school is this game. Just like in Hogwarts, the standing of this battle sim game are tracked and posted, and matter a great deal to the students involved.<br /><br />If Harry is ostracized when he arrives because of the mythology behind who he is, then he finally becomes respected and regarded as somewhat of a hero through his supremacy in the Quidditch game. Likewise, Ender catapulps straight to the top of the standings of the battle sim game, and while that doesn't award him any really good friendships, he is held in reverence and respect by the general populace of the school because of his obvious supremacy in the game.<br /><br />I know that Quidditch is sort of a sideshow in Harry Potter, and that the war game is an integral focus of Ender's Game, but Quidditch is important in Harry Potter because it is a way to show off how special Harry is in a way that the students can understand and relate to. He's not the best in the classes, for the most part, but on the Qidditch field, Harry is king.<br /><br />Except in the self defense classes. He's the best in that class, which brings me to another important parallel. At some point in the Harry Potter series, the magical defenses teachers are not teaching the kids for some reason that is not germane to this discussion. So what does Harry do? He arranges for private meetings in a secret room where he becomes the teacher for a group of kids so they can learn the important aspects of magical defense. In this way, he also learns more and better magical defense, and again earns the respect and loyalty of, at least a small but important group of, the Hogwarts students.<br /><br />Ender has a slightly different problem, with a very similar solution. Because he is so young and so small even for his age, and because he is promoted more quickly than anyone has every been before, when he is first assigned to an army his commanding officer, who is forced to have him on the team against ihis wishes, refuses to train him. But he needs to learn the techniques of the battlea room and the effects of zero gravity and the battle room equipment. So what does he do? He reaches out to the kids that are too young to be placed in armies yet and arranges practice sessions with them where he figues out technique and teaches it to, and practices with, the students who elect to come to his sessions. In this way, just like Harry, he earns the respect and loyalty of, at least some of, the battle school students.<br /><br />One of the major sticking points I've always had with the Harry Potter series is that if Harry's father had just chosen to make himself his own secret keeper, Voldemort wouldn't have killed him and his wife, and Harry wouldn't have been orphaned or given that scar, and then he wouldn't have been the chosen one. Basically, the story wouldn't be. I think the reason for this oversight is that when the idea was originally concocted, Rowling was working under the assumption that a person couldn't be their own secret keeper. The oversight, on her part, was probably when she later allowed other characters to be their own secret keepers, rather than it being with not having Harry's father be his secret keeper.<br /><br />In Ender's Game, they should have just sent Mazer Rackhem flying around at near light speed for a longer amount of time so that he was still young enough to command the army during the human invasion of the Buggers. This would aleviate the necesity for Ender, and again there would be no story (that's not really true... There would be be the short story still, which is just about being at the battle school and not about the surrounding war. Bt we're going to go with Ender's Game the novel, not the novella) I think the idea here is that they needed a child to make the decision to destroy the Buggers' homeworld by tricking him into thinking that it was just a game, ths committing xenocide. But, that's just kind of silly.<br /><br />The last parallel I feel compelled to make (I've made a decent case at this point, right) is the boy who would be savior. In both stories, there is a backup savior. In Harry Potter, there were two childrehn who could have possibly fulfilled the propphecy based on... I don't know what. Astrology from what I understand. It turns out that it really is Harry, for a number of circumstantial reasons, but the other kid is there too, and he ends up playing an important role in the end as well. I don't remember his name.<br /><br />Ender also has a backup. His backup is another kid who is unnaturally genius. His name is Bean, and he is the subject of tche Shadow series. He also plays an important role in the resolution of Ender's Game, though his role isn't quite as explicit unless you read Ender's Shadow.<br /><br />Now, here's where the parallels end. Harry Potter is very much a coming of age story. It takes place in a fantastical world where the protagonist is risking his life and saving humanity etc etc, but it is really just as much about the relationships and about Harry and his friends growing up. We follow their lives and we get to know them as they mature. That is not true of Ender.<br /><br />The second book, Speaker for the Dead, takes place 20 something years into Ender's life, and 3000 years into the future (it just does. It makes some amount of sense. Just go with it.) Ender isn't the same person he was when he was just a little kid whiping out entire races. We don't see him grow up. We're just told that he did, and this is the person he has become. We're told that people have fallen in love with each other, and it just sort of happens all of a sudden. We don't see the relationships bud and grow. The next book takes place 30 years later. There is little to no focus on watching these characters grow and develop. Their work is more important to them, and that is what the books focus on.<br /><br />I'm not sure why I haven't seen or heard this link made by other people before. Like I said, it's entirely possible that it's just because I haven't been paying attention. But another reason could be that the audiences are somewhat different for these incredibly similar stories. Ender's Game is widely considered to be just the intro for the Speaker of the Dead series, which is supposed to be "better." I suppose in that it deals with more mature themes and issues. When I broght up the similarity withi Lior, he couldn't ospeak to it becauese he knows nothing about the Harry Potter series. He, like many, hold Harry Potter in a place of derision. Because, well, it's not really that good. The story is fn and fantastical, and the wrriting isn't bad, as such... It just does its job. And it's written, very explicitly, in a style for an audience of kids. I think this position is a silly one to hold. I have a number of problems with the way thew series is written, but for the most part it's still fun. I think it's interesting that Harry Potter is held in this place of derision while Ender's Game is held in this place of esteem.<br /><br />Hm... I think if I cleaned this up a bit and made some actual textual referrences and such, I could probably get this essay published. I have no idea where I would submit it though. So I probably won't.<br /><br />EDIT:<br />Cherry did a quick google search or something, which is more research on this than I did, and apparently this is a widely made comparison. Apparently there was even some sort of lawsuit, though, interestingly, it seems that Rowling brought the suit against Card rather than vice versa. I'll probably look that up to understand what grounds she possibly thought she had. Anyway, I guess this isn't worthy of publishing after all. Oh well.<br />END EDIT<br /><br />Okay... Real quick, life update. Today I started working on my new second job thing. I'm working for Stuart again, but only a few hours a week this time. And this time I'm doing all of the work from home by using remote software to trobleshoot and update his clients' computers. Basketball season is also starting up. Other than that, life is crappy and boring as usual. End real life update.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-66386100806653020462009-05-13T01:51:00.001-04:002009-05-13T02:03:11.812-04:00Hodgpodge: Some More CatchupHi! Back so soon?<br /><br />Yes, well... It was a really long time between my last post and the one that preceded it, so I have lots of stuff that I have meant to discuss, or at least mention. Here's a quick list, in no particular order:<br /><br />Speed dating, my most recent Stacy related meltdown, flashback scenes, blogs vs twitter, writing in general, I should move to Boston, XKCD, and some more of my social failings.<br /><br />I don't know how many of these things i'll get to today, or if I'll ever end up discussing all of them at all.<br /><br />Let's start with the Stacy thing for today. I forgot to mention it in the last post like I meant to. I'm not going to devote a lot of time to it, because, seriously... I'm pretty pathetic. But I wanted to mention it.<br /><br />So, I thought that ever since a year ago I had actually moved on. It finally registered fully to me how Stacy had never really treated me particularly well, and sometimes outright poorly and mean. Turns out, I'm okay with all of these things being in the past and have moved on--emotionally if not like... In actuality--but I'm not okay with the idea that Stacy is still... You know... Alive and in existence. Emily mentioned to me that she was the maid of honor at the wedding of a mutual acquaintance and I did not take it well.<br /><br />So, I afforded myself a day of being mopey and exceptionally unhappy, and that, for the most part, was that. Though since then she has been, most unwelcomelym closer to the forefront of my thoughts.<br /><br />And that's that. Moving on.<br /><br />I think XKCD next. Have you seen this comic? I've known it existed for years, but never bothered to look ionto it. Thenh a litt le bit algo there was a Captre the Flag FPS comic from it listed in the Hoystiq Weekly Webcomic Wrapup, and I thought it wuas just really clever. So I started to look at some of the streips by sing the random button, and it contined to be really clever. I've since read throgh all of the archives. Twice.<br /><br />If you haven't given this strip a look, you should. It's routinely insightful and incredibly smart. It has a lot to say about the way we deal with relationships from time to time... And it's in this vein that I sort of bring it up.<br /><br />Sometimes there's a strip that's just incredibly sweet, and it gives me a very melancholy/lonely feeling. It's not incredibly easy to find these sorts of strips mixed in with the complex math equations and frequent yor mom jokes, but they're there. And even when there's a your mom joke, it will often be a heel to the setup of some incredibly sweet imagery on the ideals of relationships. I just eat this shit up. Here's a few sample comics:<br /><br />http://xkcd.com/570/<br />http://xkcd.com/44/<br />http://xkcd.com/45/<br />http://xkcd.com/128/<br />http://xkcd.com/150/<br />http://xkcd.com/249/<br />http://xkcd.com/357/<br />http://xkcd.com/572/ <------- My favorite<br /><br />The art is, obviously, not the focus. Also, remember to mouseover each comic for the mouseover comment thingy. It's often better than the comic itself.<br /><br />Alright... Next up is speed dating. I'm thinking of giving it a try. I don't like that i'm thinking of giving it a try. I'd like to think that I can deal with just being alone and waiting for someone to come along who I develop a crush on and then a relationship to mature organically (read: I wear her down into dating me) But it's painfully obvious that this scenario is not coming into fruition with anywhere near the speed to satisfy me. I havena't met anyone new that i've been remotely interested in for like for years now. Maybe five. I lost count.<br /><br />So, speed dating seems like an... Option, I guess. Except I'm pretty sre it'll just be a waste of time. If for no other reason than the only event I'm aware of has an age limit of 25-35. I'm right at the bottom of that. I don't expect there to be too many girls of my preferred age bracket at one of these things. Emily mentioned a while back that she and Michelle had wanted to do one of these things... Maybe I should ask her about it. Maybe she'd go to one with me. I probably won't bring it up with her though. Also, I think she's currently mad at me. Oh well. Moving on.<br /><br />Let's do "I should omove to Boston" next. Lior's been bugging me that I should pick up and move up North with him for a few years. I probably should. I'm pretty stagnant down here.<br /><br />Problem is, it's comfortable here. I think I would be pretty much equally stagnant in Boston, but down here at least the rent is free.<br /><br />It might be easier to find a job in a sort of office settig that I would prefer in an area like Boston. But, I really don't have the first clue how to effectively look for a job. That wouldn't change drastically by changing location, I don't think.<br /><br />Also, I don't know that Boston would be the best idea for me. Not that I wouldn't like to be closer to Lior again. Thhat wouyld be nice. Bt moving p to live with Lior I would sort of jutst be adopting his friends instead of being forced ot of my little hole and making some new friends and forging relationships. So, in that respect, maybe a new city where I don't have any ties would be better.<br /><br />Except I don';t bel'ieve in my ability to meet people and form relationships, which is the whole point, in that sort of situation. I'm sure I would movle to a new city, live off the meager money I have savevd up, not find a job, not make friends, be miserable, and move back home. So, were I to do this, I suppose it should be Boston with Lior.<br /><br />But, who are we kidding? There's little to no chance of me taking myself up on this.<br /><br />I think thins one's gonna be the last topic, and I've saved it for last becase, while I wanted to mention all the other things, this is the one I realley actally want to write about. Flashback scenes.<br /><br />What's up with them lately?<br /><br />Maybe "lately" is a misleading term. I think going back about a decade now. Maybe 15 years. But still, in the scheme of things it's lately.<br /><br />A flashback can be a very effective tool in storytelling. While it was incredibly boring, Citizen Kane used the concept of flashback incredibly well. Guy dies, says Rosebud. Why did he say that? Movie attempts to figure it out.<br /><br />There are some other really good examples of this approach, but none spring to mind immediately. Fight Club was alright, but maybe not incredibly necessary. There's a particular episode of the West Wing where it's used really well. The one where Toby's brother almost dies in space. And lots of other stuff happened too.<br /><br />Actually, Aaron Sorkin has sed flashback effectively a number of times, now that I think about it. And the way he does it is very remeniscent of the last episode of MASH, which also did a good job of starting at the end with a purpose.<br /><br />But television shows, particularly I think moreso than movies, have been abusing the shit out of this techniqe. If a story starts at the end, and then flashes back to the beginning before working its way back to the starting point--read: the end-- then there needs to be a damn good reason for it. There needs to be some sort of impetous... Some amont of mystery in that first scene that's staying with th=e viewer throgh the rest of the story until we get back to it and it all comes together.<br /><br />If the story works just as well when told in linear fashion, then tell it that way.<br /><br />A lot of the ti me, I think the purpose is to give a story the illsion of complexity where there really isn't any. A scene cshown out of context can be really confsing and leave the viewer with a feeling of "what's going on?"<br /><br />But then the episode proper will start, and ten mintes minutes after that jarring "X amount of time earlier" screen, there's a story going on that is independent of the opening scene. None of the things that happened need be going through the viewer's mind.<br /><br />It just frustrates me that this techniqe has been so overdone senselessly. I really like the techniqe, and when sed properly it can aid in telling a really compelling story. And the blatant overuse of it when it's wholly unecessary only serves to weaken the impact it has when used properly.<br /><br />I want to asay that JJ Abrams is the most egregious practitioner in this. But, while it is very likely true, it's maybe not entirely fair. The stories he tends to be telling (namely Lost and Alias) are just so incredibly convoluted and ridiculous that the added "story being told out of order for no good reason" meme almost has a place.<br /><br />Heroes does it a lot too, but those guys are Abrams' buddies, so I'm lumping them in with him.<br /><br />But it's not just shows like that. Regular, non-incredibly-convoluted-more-like-soap-opera shows like Brothers and Sisters overuse the technique as well. How I Met Your Mother is founded on it--sometimes, to be fair, effectively. Sometimes, like that episode a couple weeks ago where the girl with the mbrella turns out to be what's-her-name from Scrbs, obnoxiously.<br /><br />Actually, to be fair... That was a good use of the technique, in more technical terms. The episode proper really wasn't about the main storyline. It was a cheap way to tell a series of uuninteresting anecdotes. It just annoyed me because it was purposefully and unabashedly jerking the audience around.<br /><br />Anyway... I think I 've, more or less, eclumsily made my point. Next time you're watching something and it flashes back to some time in the past after the first scene, really pay attention and ask yourself it it was necessary. Chances are, it wasn't.<br /><br />On a side note, before I stop swriting because my phone battery is dying and I also don't want to write anymore, I was thinki ng of going back and watching all of Lost again from the beginning and recording the major plot points as they happen. I think it would be interesting, if not amusing, to look at a list of the shit that's happened and see what things were dropped completely and such. Aside from that... Ever tried to explain Lost to someone who doesn't watch it? Yeah, you know how that conversation goes. A list of sthe plot points like that would just be ridiculous.<br /><br />Kim had missed an episode of Lost recently, and I sort of glibly summarized the things that happened in the episode, saying them, admittedly, in as ridiculous a manner as possible. She rolled her eyes at me like I was just making fn of the show. Which I was. But all of the things I said had happened pretty much the way I said them. The show's retarded. So I think presenting this sort of stuff in a master list wold prove hilarious.<br /><br />Then I realized that in order to do this, I would have to watch Lost from the beginning and really pay attention and stay engaged enough to be recording things as they happen. I wouldn't so much mind watching the series again... It's stupid, but entertaining... I just don't want to have to pay real attention to it. For the most part, that's not how I choose to partake in my video media. I like to lay in ybed and just let shows happen to me withot having to be alert. I often faltl asleep and have to watch things more than once to finish the episode.<br /><br />Okay... Time to go back inside and post this. If I didn't get to one of the listed topics that I said I was going to, and that was the one you were really looking forward to reading about, chances are I'm not gonna get to it. But ifyou tell me which it is, then I just might tdo it special for you.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-68901697866194620012009-05-08T01:36:00.000-04:002009-05-08T01:38:30.897-04:00Brought to You by: DjarumI like Twitter, and I think it has its uses... But it's just not the same as writing a good old lengthy rambling blog. I've missed it. And there have been things that I've been wanting to, but neglecting, to write about. So, when I was at the mall I picked up a pack of cloves to be used for writing purposes.<br /><br />There have been a bunch of things I've wanted to discuss here, but I can only really remember three of them: D&D, Rush Limbaugh, and How I Met Your Mother. So, let's discuss these three topics in reverse order.<br /><br />Lior told me How I Met Your Mother was good. So, I downloaded the entire series and watched it. It's alright... If you like generic sitcoms, then you'll like it. It's basically a generic sitcom plus... Well... Plus Neil Patrick Harris, basically. The plan a while ago when I wanted to devote an entire entry to HIMYM was to go into specifics about what is good and bad about the show, but it's been a few weeks since I watched it and it honestly wasn't memorable enough for me to do a decent job of pros and cons.<br /><br />Laterally though, I wanted to briefly discuss, once again, meeting people.<br /><br />You know what? I was going to go into the bar scene, and how television presents an unrealistic version of bars and clubs, for the most part, and how I don't understand how to in any actual way take advantage of that scene, or how to turn a chance encounter into something more... But I realized I've discussed all of these things ad nauseum in the past. So I'll just say this... I could really use a good wingman. As much as I think I wou ld hate it as iit was happening to me, like the dynamic between Barney and... Uh... The main character, whatever his damn name is, towards the beginning of the series, it's the sort of thing that I think would be ultimately positive. And that's all I'm going to say about that. Moving on to Rush Limbaugh.<br /><br />A few weeks back, Mike posted a blog discussing Rush Limbaugh's opinions on... Well...I don't really remember. Something to do with cars and the Obama administration's hostile takeover of GM. The specifics are less than important. The point is, he said he listens to the guy and that the podcasts are posted on demonoid.<br /><br />So, I decided that I wanted to read his blog with the knowledge of what had actually been said on the radio show. So I downloaded the podcasta and listened to it, and then read Mike's blog.<br /><br />Then I decided, "you know what? All of the media and pretty much everything i'm exposed to from friends and family tends to have a left wing slant. How much of my ideals are shaped by that, and how much of that is shaped by my ideals? What if I started to regularly listen to a persuasive and persistent account from the other side? Would I starte to mirror those ideals? Or is Rush Limbaugh just a big fat idiot, as has been posited through literature in the past?" And thus the experiment began.<br /><br />So, I've been listening to all his shows since. I download them and listen to them while I'mj working. I have to say... There are some things that genuinely surprised me. I 've always known that the differences between liberal and conservative rhetoric is largely cosmetic, but sometimes it's not even that. Hearing conservative callers and such spouting the exact same rhetoric was surprising. I never would have thought that conservatives also felt that they had the market sewn up in terms of sense of humor, for instance.<br /><br />Aside from the mild dose of culture shock, Rush has some pretty good points. Or he's just very persuasive. Either way, I find I agree with a lot of the things he has to say about specific intents of political PR moves. Certainly not all of what he says about them... He seems to think that the current administration is genuinely evil and selfish, but I can see his point on a lot of things.<br /><br />That said; the guy's a nutball.<br /><br />The best thing about listening to Rush Limbaugh is telling people I'm listening to him and watching them react. Jim's mom was particularly fun.<br /><br />I decided that I wanted to nfind an equally batshit insane liberal radio show and listen to that, so I can get a simultaneous crazy ass liberal take on the same issues as the crazy ass conservative Rush Limbaugh take I'm currently getting. But there aren't any good liberal talk shows I know of. nI looked into Al Frankenr, but he quit his radio show on Air America to run for senate or whatever he's in his legal battle about. So I downloaded some of his books... They're alright, but not exactly what I was going for.<br /><br />Jeanine Garrafolo's show is off air too.... She's busy acting on a conservative TV series that is broadcast on a conservative television station. Crazy bitch...<br /><br />You know who needs a radio show for me to listen to? Bill Maher. Or Michael Moore... Or even like a John Stewart, if he dropped the "centrist comedian" guise and just did a radio show. But no... Liberal crazies control the television and movie mediums, while the radio waves are ruled by the right wing lunatics. These lunatics need to get together and decide on one medium and then just compete fairly.<br /><br />Anyway; D&D.<br /><br />So, Brian wanted to try it out. And Jim wanted to play. So we got some people together to play, and I was tasked with the job of GM. If not me, then who?<br /><br />Well, someone else. It's not my thing. I'm just not very good at it. I would have thoght I would be better, but as it turns out, no.<br /><br />Maybe it's not entirely my fault (it's at least mostly my fault.) Maybe 4th edition is just not the venue for the game I want to run.<br /><br />I don't think that's it. I'm just not cut out for being a good GM.<br /><br />The problem is, a dungeon crawl just isn't a lot of fun. And that's really all 4th is; a dungeon crawl mechanism.<br /><br />That's not really the problem. The beauty of D&D is that you can use the rules as much or as little as you'd like. My problem as a GM is threefold. I'm not creative enough, I'm not quick enough on my feet, and I get frustrated too easily.<br /><br />When I write a story, I struggle over how to get from one thing to the next. WHat should the next event be? I could have characters sit around and talk about nothing forever. My problem comes when I have to make my characters do things. Story points are the hard bit for me. If I coul d map out a good story, I could write it no problem. It's the initial planning that's the huge bitch for me. And when writing acampaign, all you have is the initial planning<br /><br />So, because I'm so bad at it, my plots hinge on certain things happening. And if they don't happen, then the plot kinda falls to shit. And the players don't always want to do the thing that you need them to do to make the story move forward.<br /><br />A good GM takes that, and works with it. A good GM has an idea of what is happening in the world, and then adapts that to what the players decide to do. I get frusrtrated and try to force myplayers lto do what I want them to.<br /><br />So, it's a little sadldening to me that my GMing debut didn't turn out well. I'm fine rnning a prebpuilt campaign, btu writing my own thing just doesn't look good. And the prebuilt campaigns aren't very fun. They're just dungeon crawls.<br /><br />You know? I kind of enx-ected this to be longer... But I'm tired, and I sort of glossed over things instead of delving into them with my customary zeal. Also, I'm not really enjoying the cloves so much. Hopefully I'll be back again soon. We should do this again sometime. Can I get your number?<br /><br />See how desperately I need a wingman?evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-14819597069821999232009-02-19T23:36:00.000-05:002009-02-19T23:38:02.899-05:00Dana is Six Months PregnantI got a new camera the other day. It's an okay camera, I guess. But I probably shouldn't have gotten it.<br /><br />I really like having pictures. Pictures are neat. You get to look back at pictures and say "Hey look! That's me!"<br /><br />I think other people say other things about pictures.<br /><br />Anyway... the point is I like pictures, but I don't have too many because I don't have a camera. And the camera on the phones just doesn't cut it, really.<br /><br />But I probably won't be taking any more pictures now that I have the camera, anyway. Because, while I like pictures and while I like taking pictures, I don't like having to take them.<br /><br />That might not make sense, because I said that I both like and don't like taking pictures. Well, deal with it.<br /><br />I enjoy actually shooting the picture and then having that picture, but, for one thing, then I don't get to be in the picture.Which I like. For another thing, taking the pictures changes the activity and makes it something else. Instead of having fun doing something, now you're looking for capturable moments.<br /><br />There was a movie that Cherry had me watch at some point. I don't remember what it was called, but it had Adam Goldberg in it. I just looked it up, and it was called Two Days in Paris.<br /><br />It wasn't good. It was the sort of movie Cherry makes me watch. But it had one line that I really liked and still remember. Or at least I remember it in paraphrase form. Goldberg's character said that he didn't like the other female lead's character's love of taking pictures all the time because it made her an observer. It's a way of being purposefully disengaged with the goings on around you, while appearing fully engaged. And I'd rather be either engaged, or an observer, but not try to straddle the line.<br /><br />So, that's that. This entry is feeling really forced, and I'm pretty much done with it now. I guess that's what happens when I try to write something on the actual computer instead of outside on the phone. I imagine my blog production is going to fall even further down now that I'm not smoking anymore.<br /><br />Oh, and if you've been waiting for some sort of reference to this blog's title.... doesn't look like your waiting has paid off, does it?evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-1318532726695135982009-01-28T01:26:00.000-05:002009-01-28T01:29:43.490-05:00Are We Really All Like That?A moderatrely attractive man is driving down the street in a Porsche. He sees a woman on walking down the street. He stops and tells her he thinks she's cute and points to a very nice apartment building and asks if she wold come up to his place and have sex with him. Nine out of ten times she'll tell him to take a hike.<br /><br />A fairly attractive woman is driving down the road in a beat up Civic. She sees a man walking down the street. She stops and tells him she thinks he's cute and points to a ramshackle apartment above a convenience store and asks if he would like to come up to her place andhave sex with her. Nine out of ten times, they're headed upstairs.<br /><br />I stepped on the delivery a bit there, but that's more or less a "joke" that they told on Las Vegas, which is the show I'm currently watching. I'm not going to debate numbers or anything with the joke, but for our purposes we're going to say that the joke is more or less true. I think we can agree to that.<br /><br />Of course, the fact that we're agreeing to that sort of steps on the point of my entry. I'd rather not agree on it just yet, and rather just use it as an intro into the conversation. So, let's pretend we haven't agreed on it just yet.<br /><br />Now then, the question: Are all guys really like that? I mean, really?<br />The numbers posited in the "joke" suggest that no, not ALL guys are like that. But it also doesn't go into the mitigating factors for why the man would reject the woman. Maybe he's on his way to an important meeting. We'll assume he's not just being faithful to his wife, because that sort of screws up the point of this exercise. Maybe the woman falls shy of his standards. It isn't standards that I wish to discuss.<br /><br />Now, before I delve too far into this, I need to admit that the "evidence" i'm basing this post on is flimsy at best. Some gross generalization combined with some only-mostly-related real world observation, combined with a whole lot of fiction. But, forging ahead.<br />Let's start with Las Vegas, since that's the show I'm currently watching and what made me think to write this post, which is something I've been brooding on for a long time now.<br /><br />So, the main character's a pretty smooth guy. Second in command for security at a prestigious Las Vegas Casino. He's your basic suave main character. Really smart, physically fit, attractive, infinitely capable, etc. But, when faced with the prospect of sex he's a complete moron. "I'm in love with my best friend who I've known my whole life. But you're hot and want to have sex with me? How can I get my pants off fast enough."<br />Now, like I said, granted this is more or less just a crappy TV show. And, one that takes place in Las Vegas to boot. So, there's a degree to which we can just throw this show out of our evidence entirely. And if it had been just this show, and not something that I've been ruminating about for, well, ever, then this post wouldn't exist. But it's certainly not relegated to this show. Or even to low quality fiction in general.<br />Aaron Sorkin, who I consider the pinnacle of intelligent and high brow writing for the screen, shows the same male tendencies in his characters. It's not quite as overt as the characters running off and screwing everything in a skirt, but it's definitely there.<br /><br />To start with, all of the characters in an Aaron Sorkin show are infinitely intelligent and dedicated. That's important to this discussion, because we're talking about a facet of humanity related to the reptillian part of the brain, which is more suppressed in the sorts of people that these characters emulate. (that's sort of a judgement call on my part. Just roll with it)<br /><br />So why is it that a nice pair of legs is all that's needed to distract these men from their infinitely important (sometimes not so important except in their minds) task at hand? I know these are just fictional characters and all, but the fact that they are written by a real man lends at least some amount of credibility to the way that they think.<br /><br />An attractive woman who is either stupid, or mean, or both, is often given a sort of pass on those less redeaming qualities, and will still find herself surrounded by guys who ant to spend time with her, ostensibly with the prospect of sex in mind. This statement is made through no specific instance, but rather general observation of both real world and fiction.<br /><br />There's a podcast that I ilisten to every week about movies. It's three guys, and basically they just talk about whatever movies were released that week and what they thought of them. Often, very often... I'd say at least once per show, there's mention of some horrible movie starring some moderately to untallented hot actress, and the conversation goes something like this: "Yeah... That movie was awful. The direction was horrid, there was no story. ::Inster actress's name here:: can't act for shit. But man she's hot. And you see her boobs! Hur hur hur. So, that made the rest of the movie worthwhile. Hur hur hur."<br /><br />So, the point of all of this is: Really? I mean... Really? Am I the only guy that isn't like this? Sure, physical attraction's a big deal. But lewd comments are really never necessary. In fact, I don't really even find it necessary to point out someone who I think is attractive if the conversation hasn't specifically somehow warranted that discussion. A good looking girl never makes me all of a sudden turn into a bumbling idiot. Being cute doesn't mean you can be stupid, and if you are then you don't get a pass for it.<br /><br />But, am I just being hypocritical? Does everyone think that they're "better than that" and then just aren't? Is it a conscious thing in, what seems to be, every other guy in the world? Or does everyone think that they're above that and then just fail utterly when it really comes down to it?<br /><br />I've gotta say no. I think, that while the evidence put forth doesn't show that the initial premise is necessarily correct, if we assume for the moment that it is then it's a conscious thing. It's written into fiction, consciously. And the comments are certainly made purpsefully in a sort of spirit of "male comradery."<br /><br />This is frustrating to me for a number of reasons. For one thing, I just don't like seeing it or hearing it or observing it with some other sense. For another thing, it's a big part of the "all males are jerks" attitude that, while isn't entirely true, is pervasive and not false enough to fault girls for thinking it. So, if I do find an attractive girl who I like, now I have to work agains the notion that has been imprinted upon her that I'm first and foremost trying to get her into bed. This propensity in guys to hit on anything in a skirt causes girls to naturally have defenses up when anyone new is approaching them, and so ow the first instinct for pretty much anyone that I would be interested in talking to anyway is to blow off the unwanted advance. So now I, or guys like me, aren't going to even bother talking to them because it's just not worth the rejection. So now only the majority of guys, who are jerks, are going to be approaching her and thus reinforcing the stigma. It's a vicious cycle.<br /><br />And this is where the entry sort of peters off. I have no real conclusion. But then again, I never really do. I suppose that's the problem withg making posts and calling them, and treating them like, "conversations." There's no real back and forth. No input from someone else. So, it just sort of ends.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-38019606254899680122009-01-05T00:17:00.000-05:002009-01-05T00:18:54.087-05:00The Jesus Fairy Tale (and other bedtime stories)I had one of those really lucid moments the other day where I was just thinking about stuff and they seemed like really good ideas. It was when I was just drifting off to sleep. As I was thinking about these things I decided that they would make good topics for a few blogs. It's now a few days later, and as is the way with these things, I now realize the ideas were either lame, done to death, or farfetched. So, now you know what to expect from this entry.<br /><br />I can't recall what it was I was watching, but whatever it was that was playing in the background got me thinking about religion and how silly it really is. I saw Religulous a few days ago, and it touched on the same sorts of ideas I have in mind. But in a poorly articulated and failing to be funny assholic Bill Maher sort of way.<br /><br />The thing is, most of religion is really undocumented. I'm going to be discussing primarily, if not entirely, Western religion, because I just don't know enough about Eastern religion to have anything meaningful to say. But I think that I'm going to be making broadly sweeping enough generalities that a lot of Eastern religions could be included as well.<br /><br />So, let's look at Christianity and its pillar of beliefs. We'll ignore, for the moment, the Old Testament. Even though it is the more important Testament, it's somewhere in the back in terms of importance in the mind of the average Christian.<br /><br />Now, I'm far from a biblical scholar, so I could be way off base with my characterization of a lot of this, but it seems to me the entire religion is based off of a belief that there was once a virgin in a faraway place who one day found that she was pregnant. As far as I know she wasn't visited by God himself, although that would probably make the story better. She was just pregnant one day. I a assume she thought she was just getting fat for a while there, because EPT had not yet released their tests.<br /><br />So, she gives birth to the kid, we'll say in December even though historically it wasn't. Three intelligent men bring the child presents for his day of birth. Then nothing important happens for thirty years.<br /><br />Thirty years later we pick up the story and Jesus is a great fellow. He has magical abilities the likes of which have never before been seen except in other religious texts that predate Christianity. He heals the sick and he walks on water. He turns bits of himself into food and drink to feed the hungry. The Romans don't like him because he preaches a different religion than they believe (that was why, right? I'm admittedly a bit hazy on this point) and so they torture him with whips and spikes, and he is forced to carry the cross on which he will be crucified.<br /><br />Which he does! For he is the foretold Messiah, and his death will cleanse the world of its sin, and bring about a period of Heaven on Earth.<br /><br />If we delve a little deeper into the mythology, it turns out that Jesus is the physical incarnation of God on Earth. So there's God, and then there's God on Earth, who is the same person (for lack of a better term) and also his son. Then there's the Holy Ghost, which completes the Holy Trinity, and at that point I'm just completely lost. I don't really know what the Holy Ghost is, or where it really fits into the story.<br /><br />I think it has something to do with the resurrection, which is the next fantastical part of the story. So they bury The Christ in a cave and seal it with a big rock, and a few days later they find that the rock has been moved and Jesus is alive. Another feat that has never before been achieved except in prior, eerily similar religious texts! <br /><br />I'm not sure what happens after that. Maybe Jesus resurrected into the Holy Ghost and floated up into Heaven where the three entities meld back into the one all-powerful God that Moses had warned us about oh-so long ago. Back in the good old Smiting Days.<br /><br />So, that all makes a good story. You want to believe in that, fine. I'm just saying, really, how much crazier is it to believe in Lord Xenu (Zenu?) and his alien fighter jet Volcano version of history? Or really, any other science fiction novel for that matter.<br /><br />Okay, so maybe Scientology is crazier than most, but no one at all believes in Roman/Greek mythology anymore. And why not?<br /><br />No, really. I'm seriously asking. Why is it easier to believe in the Jesus myth than it is in the various Zeus myths? Zeus came down to Earth in the guise of animals and impregnated humans all the time. At least in the Greek Mythology, it adds a bit of realism in that his wife was always super pissed at him about it. Is it the multiple gods thing? Is there something in the modern Western Psyche that intuitively believes there should just be one guy at the top who is in charge of it all? I don't think it's that. The Catholics have all their various saints, so how is that really different from having loads of gods? Does it matter that the person in the sky who you pray to for a good harvest is a dead human instead of a god? Wouldn't it make more sense to be praying to a god anyway?<br /><br />I know it seems like I was picking on Christianity almost exclusively here, but that's just because the Jesus story is the easiest to relate, and really the most widely known and referenced. All of the same things could be said of the Old Testament, or as it's less commonly known "The Torah." I've a feeling, though I don't know for sure, that it is also known, in certain circles, as the Quran. Although the stories probably diverge fairly significantly around the Kane and Abel bit.<br /><br />There will always be radicalists who believe in the absolute truth of the Bible, but I'm not really talking about those people here. They are beyond reason. But why is it so widely accepted to believe that thousands of years ago God presented himself as a burning bush to some schlub and led his people out of persecution? If you want to believe that really happened, okay. But why wouldn't that sort of thing happen in more modern times? Is there any possibility that someone could claim to have spoken to a burning bush that didn't burn and be taken seriously today? Maybe by some crazies off in the woods somewhere who would later commit mass suicide, but not by society in general. Or is society's closed-mindedness the reason those things don't happen anymore?<br /><br />That seems at odds with the god that we worship. When writing a code of laws by which to live, the first thing he thought important enough to include was "I am the Lord, your God. You shall worship no god other than me." Seems kind of ego maniacal to me. Maybe he got a little older, a little wiser, since then and decided "well, if they want to worship me they can, and if not then screw them." and so he stopped presenting definitive signs of his existence. But he helped the Jews from persecution in Egypt. Why not during the Holocaust? Because they didn't believe that some random guy was really him two thousand years ago? That's the supreme being of supreme kindness? I suppose he's also spiteful. I think that's somewhere in the Bible too.<br /><br />I don't mean to be inflammatory here. I don't mean o say that none of these things are true. A lot of them probably are. Hell, it's just as likely that there is a god as it is that there isn't. I just don't think it's likely that any of the religions have "got it right." The stories all probably happened, in some respect, and then were glorified. Most major religions have some important facets in common with each other, and they originate from extremely different geographic locations. So that either means there's something to those ideas, or just that humans all over the place think in similar ways.<br /><br />But you have to admit, taken at face value, these stories are pretty farfetched. The bit about the whale? Why believe in Jonah and not Pinocchio?<br /><br />The one thing about the film (Religulous, remember?) that I agree with is the overarching message that it was supposed to, but failed, to carry. It's not that these religions are wrong and that the people who believe them are stupid. It's just that, well, there's a better chance that these religions are wrong than there is that they aren't. And maybe it's a good idea to put some thought into what you're believing instead of just believing it. Chances are, whatever you believe isn't going to be right. It's a big crazy world out there, and in my experience there has been no evidence of any sort of absolute truth since the advent of modern science. Once we discovered a way of testing things and figuring out why they really happened, the need to invent reasoning and mysticism has decreased. All of the things that we believe as "religion" stem from an age where accurate recording was not possible, and once it became possible the miracles ceased. So, maybe take a moment to pick out your favorite sci fi universe, think of its gods and its religions, and see if believing wholeheartedly in those things feels any differently than believing in the absolute truths you are accustomed to from your religious text of choice. That's really the only point I'm trying to make. Really. The ideas out of modern fiction are not that more radical or silly to believe than the ideas present in religion. And if your answer is that those things are new and not handed down from God like the stuff you believe, then why wasn't Judaism, or your religion of preference (except Christianity, which stemmed from Judaism) the original religion? I f Adam and Eve had this personal relationship with God, and handed it down through the generations, where did all these Greek, Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, etc. Ideas come from until Abraham got there? <br /><br />I'm not trying to specifically attack Christianity here. Trust me. If I were I would bring p things like Original Sin and the time it took between Jesus’ life and the recording of Jesus’ life.<br /><br />Anyway, now that that is out of the way, a little bit of housekeeping:<br /><br />Another topic I wanted to cover was going to be a renewed fervor in wanting to create. Dr. Horrible has, in some of my sleepier moment, instilled in me a belief that I could write something and produce it to a point where it could generate a big enough following that I could leverage a career out of it. If you haven't seen or heard of Dr Horrible, it's a three acts short created by, basically, three brothers and a group of friends with a smallish (a few million) budget. It's what they did during the writers' strike. Oh, and it’s a musical. You know what? Here:<br /><center><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/apEZpYnN_1g&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/apEZpYnN_1g&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YxnOBhQ4fNY&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YxnOBhQ4fNY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6hCtugXr8dw&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6hCtugXr8dw&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RE8jxzWk8G8&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RE8jxzWk8G8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CdERWTsXE0g&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CdERWTsXE0g&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/To8V4RdY6N0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/To8V4RdY6N0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /></center><br /><br />Watch it. You'll enjoy it. Or, you already have. It’s in six parts, but all told it comes out to roughly the length of one episode of an hour long TV show. Minus commercials. And better. Well worth the time it takes to watch. Then, go buy the DVD and support alternative methods of television/movie production.<br /><br />Lastly, this post is a late birthday present to Emily. She likes to read these things, and the plan was going to be to actually write and post it on her birthday. But then I went to see her and give her a proper present instead. I was gonna put this paragraph at the top, but I didn't want to bog down my intro with a "shout out." So, Happy Birthday a few days ago, Emily.<br /><br />evan out.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-66990194762271281722008-11-22T04:51:00.000-05:002008-11-22T04:52:00.134-05:00Happy Belated BirthdayI just wanted to take a moment to wish me a belated Happy Birthday. It's alright though... I forgive me for being a week behind.<br /><br />I don't tend to make a big deal out of my birthday. Last year, Cherry insisted on taking me out to dinner. This year she did a whole birthday day. It was nice, and it's nice that I have friends who care that it's my birthday, but the actual events of the day aren't really what I choose to focus on.<br /><br />It's more that birthdays aren't a big deal to me. I'm not quite sure when this happened. I remember counting down the days to my birthday and then being all excited about the presents and such. But now I count down the days to the next Rock Band related release and am all excited about the new drumkit that I'm going to get sometime. Whenever they start shipping the damn things. But that's another topic.<br /><br />I took off of work this year because... Well... I don't know really. I guess just in case all of a sudden I started to care that it was my birthday and I wanted to do something? But then when it was actually the day it was just like every other day. Nothing felt different.<br /><br />Birthdays used to feel magical. It used to feel like it was really my day and everything for the day was about me. It doesn't really feel that way anymore. It's just a day. Oh sure... The day's events were up to me and we could have done anything I wanted, but really that's sort of like any other day. I could probably get a few friends together to play racquetball or go out to eat or play Rock Band with me. These things are fun and nice and all that, but they just don't feel necessarily special.<br /><br />I don't know... I had planned to write this thing up all week, but have just been tired because of the new work schedule so this is really the first opportunity I've had to sit down and write it. And now I'm not really sure of exactly what I meant to say.<br /><br />The main point is just that birthdays used to seem special and magical and that they don't anymore. I kind of miss it. I appreciate that Cherry and Emily cared enough to do what they could to make my birthday special for me, but it didn't really work. And it's entirely not their faults.<br /><br />I think if I had a girlfriend who decided to give me an extra special day it would be more meaningful to me. I don't know how I feel about thinking that. I don't know that I like thinking that a girlfriend planning a special day around me is more meaningful than good friends doing it. I think all throughout the day I felt like it was just another day and that there was really no need for my friends to regard it as anything else, and so a lot of the reason that I didn't feel like the day was successfully special was because I resisted it becoming so.<br /><br />Ah well, this is an uncharacteristically short entry, but I just don't have as much to say on the subject as I thought I did... Or maybe as I did a week ago when I decided to write this whenever I got a chance.<br /><br />Basically, I miss caring about special days... Birthdays and holidays. Well, I guess this is growing up.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-83787380554457699492008-11-03T02:18:00.000-05:002008-11-03T02:19:17.566-05:00Because Emily Bitched...Women. Am I right?<br /><br />It occurs to me that, inasmuch as anyone reads this at all, my readership is probably mostly women. So let's, you and me, just pretend that I wasn't just being purposefully offensive there. Good. There's a good girl.<br /><br />While you're at it, why not pretend that I wasn't just being condescending in that last paragraph. There. Now if we just ignore all of my obvious and varied faults, I'm not such a bad guy after all, eh?<br /><br />Seriously though... This, like the candidates not telling us the whole truth most of the time, is Emily's fault.<br /><br />I've somewhat been meaning to write up a little bloggy thing. But I really have nothing of consequence to talk about. And then Emily made some sort of snide comment or other when I was ranting to her about how Kurt Cobain was a douchebag that I should be blogging it instead.<br /><br />So, fine. Now I'm blogging. And I have nothing of consequence to say. So this is going to be probably primarily about Rock Band. And you have Emily to thank for it.<br /><br />So, Rock Band's good. I approve. There are lots of things about it that frustrate me, sure. But those things can sort of be ignored... Or vast amounts of money can be spent to fix them. I do a combination of both.<br /><br />The thing that annoys me the most is that there are drumkits out there that people are using RIGHT NOW with the proper amount of cymbals and drums and stuff. And I don't have one. Well, that will hopefully change. I'm not positive how it's gonna work, but eventually I will have a drum kit that works, more or less, the way I want it to. I might eventually end up going all out and putting together an electronic kit. I believe Rock Band is set p to accept midi, so I would have a real kit that also plays my video game. Neat.<br /><br />The other thing that bothers me a little bit is that my drums keep turning themselves off currently. I put in an RMA order for a new set, but they're backordered at the moment. No matter... It works more or less. And if Aelsis ever releases the Ion for PS3 like they're supposed to I'll be getting that anyway.<br /><br />The main thing, though, is that I'm not very good. Oh sure, I play on expert and can make my way through most of the songs. But I can't drum my way through the Dream Theater song on the new game. As well as one or two other songs. Painkiller's a bitch, but I can get through it from time to time. This annoyance can be avoided by avoiding the songs that are too hard for me, and sticking to the ones that are just hard enough to be fun and make me feel like I'm better than I am. But damn if John Myung, Mike Portnoy, and John Petrucci aren't all better at their instruments than I am at even their fake counterparts.<br /><br />Oh well... I'm sure I would be able to play the Wii Music version of Panick Attack just fine. Haha! Man, that was a geeky joke.<br /><br />Also, I ordered a little dongle thing that would allow me to se a second pedal as a double bass pedal. It doesn't work though. It's more or less cheating, since the note chart is mapped out with only the primary foot because Harmonix knows you're only supposed to have one pedal. But I'm not good enough for one pedal, and painkiller hurts. So hopefully customer service will send me a new one or something.<br /><br />So, that's more or less that. In other news, I'm working at Kohl's. It's going alright, I suppose. It's not fun or anything, but it's a job. And I seem to be advancing. I 'm working in the shoe department currently, but pretty much any of the supervisors I've worked with have said nice things about me, and it's gotten back to the Asst. Manage, so she wants to move me to customer service. But I think she wanted to do that anyway, because I'm pretty sure she would have had nice things to say about me even if the various supervisors hadn't said anything to her. So, I think that's sort of a promotion. I don't know if it comes with a pay raise or anything, but it's more responsibility and that's always good.<br /><br />But the praise seems to also have gotten to my General Manager, and I had an interview with him the other day about an administrative assistant position that was opening up that I applied for. He liked me in the interview, even though he hadn't really noticed me much up until then... Or probably more accurately hadn't thought about me because he didn't know I cared at all about moving up in the company. So he said that I shouldn't take that new position, even though it would be a pay raise on what I am currently making, because it's more or less a dead end job. Instead, he enrolled me in a sort of fast track managerial program inside the company. There should be some new stores opening up in the area in the next few years, and he says he wants to try to get me and a few other people in the store that he likes into managerial positions in those stores. So, that's somewhat promising. Except it means that I'll be working at Kohl's. But, I suppose one job's basically as good as another. I don't HATE being there. So, we'll see how this thing pans out. He's got me scheduled for a conference call on Thursday with someone who is in Central Standard time to go over the program details.<br /><br />So, that's that for the time being. This was a pretty worthless blog update. Maybe I should have expounded on why Kurt Cobain was such a douchebag. But I didn't.<br /><br />Oh. And I need to find a girlfriend. I'm getting really tired of this being single for years at a time thing. Just thought I'd throw that out there..<br /><br />Toodles.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-11372948791619691392008-10-09T00:02:00.001-04:002008-10-09T00:02:56.302-04:00Re: Something Not About SexI've been more or less avoiding writing about the election here because... Well, a few reasons, I suppose. For one thing, it's just so big. Where do you really start to write a stupid little blog that will just sum it all up. There are so many different facets worthy of discussion, and I am hardly well educated on any one of them.<br /><br />For another thing, it's just too mainstream for me. Everyone's writing about it. I'm like that pnk kid in the back of the class with a mohawk who is too cool to talk about all of the things everyone else is talking about. But not because they don't interest me. Just because everyone else is talking about them and so they are lame.<br /><br />But then Mike wrote a thing about it. And I disagreed with some major points that he had made, and so I decided that this was a wonderful opportunity for a sort of virtual debate. And I just love to argue.<br /><br />Mike's post is <a href=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=47853335&blogID=437386385&Mytoken=3F734A86-98B7-475C-837FF95D90347531173946366>here</a> if you want to read it before reading mine. There's a Sarah Silverman video that I may be discussing, but sure as hell won't be embedding. So you may want to check it out.<br />Originally, I was just going to post a comment to his blog. But then I realized I had lots to say, and it just wouldn't fit inside a comment. It deserved its own post. Here's as far as my comment got, and then I will continue from there:<br /><br /><br /><br />Citing the Sarah Silverman video and saying "Neat how she just sort of says he has a good foreign policy and will help Israel and just sort of doesn't explain how. Cool" is very much like the politicians you are lambasting for doing the same thing. That is taking what she said entirely out of context. It's not like this was a hard hitting expose on the reasons that you should vote for Barack Obama. This was Sarah Silverman being her usual not-very-funny self. The message of the entire thing was "Sarah Silverman is going to vote for Barack Obama, and so should you." It was not "Sarah Silverman is going to vote for Barack Obama and here are the very important and well thought out reasons why."<br /><br />Now, the point you were trying to make is that the candidates themselves say this sort of...<br /><br /><br /><br />And now, the exciting conclusion!:<br /><br />thing all the time as well. The fact that we don't know where Barack Obama really stands on these sorts of issues is an important thing to discuss, because it is more or less true. The candidates don't really say very much to us, and that's because of a lot of things.<br /><br />For one thing, I like the way Lior phrased this. Listening to either of them speak or debate each other is like listening to an argument in a relationship. They know what the other person is trying to say, and they realize that the point probably has some merit. But they purposefully and willfully take it out of context, or rephrase it in such a way as to make it seem silly. One could say (and I would agree) that this is what debating is. I don’t think there's really anything wrong or sinister about the candidates doing this. You take your opponent's argument and whittle it down to the lamest sounding 2 second explanation you can, and then you tease it. That is, when you get down to it, a large part of what debating is. The problem here is that because of this offensive onslaught against each other's policies, we get little sound bites about an inane version of their policies instead of a greater understand of what the policy is supposed to have meant. Take, for example, the tax plans. <br /><br />When watching the debates, or the McCain campaign speak, Obama's tax plan sounds awful. "Obama wants to raise your taxes. In a time where the economy is collapsing and you are having a hard enough time paying your bills as it is, do you really want higher taxes?"<br /><br />Well, that makes sense. Obama wants to raise taxes to pay down the debt and eventually get the economy back on track, but in the short term, I won't be able to afford it. And what does the long term matter if by that time the higher taxes have put me out on the street?<br /><br />Except that's not what Obama is proposing. If you look at the two different tax plans, yes, it is true that McCain will lower taxes on all of the tax brackets and Obama will raise them in the higher tax brackets. It is also true that taxes will, in total, be lowered more by the McCain plan than by the Obama plan. Bt that is only part of the whole truth. <br />The truth is, McCain's tax plain lowers taxes more on the wealthier population than on the middle class and poor population. See, a 1% cut on someone making $250,000 comes to $2,500, while a 1% cut for someone making $30,000 a year comes to $300. Still, though, it is less expensive for the government to cut the taxes of the higher tax bracket than the lower, because there are so fewer of them. <br /><br />So, in order to ct everyone's taxes, the federal government would have huge bill to pay. McCain proposes cutting everyone's taxes, but the cuts become smaller and smaller as they get further down the line of income. Because it's cheaper to give the smaller group of wealthier people a tax cut.<br /><br />Obama's plan raises taxes on the people making over $250,000. The money that is raised by taxing those people, the people who can afford it, more is used to give the people making less a higher tax cut. So, with Obama's plan, while it isn't false to say that he is raising taxes, would more accurately be said to be raising taxes on the super wealthy to give a larger tax cut to the average America, who needs it more. His plan will cost the government less, and give the average American more. But you need to hear all of that for the plan to make sense, and you just don't get that level of detail from the debates or speeches. Because it's sort of hard to follow and sort of hard to understand.<br /><br />Now, the media should be breaking it down for us like that. But it isn't. Well, why not? For mainly the same reasons. It's dense, and most people won't follow it or even care to. The media covers the much sexier, but less important, stories of "what did Governor Palin say that was idiotic today?" I watched the coverage of the VP debate, and I don't really know what was said in it. All I know is that Palin didn't fuck up horribly. Because that is what was important from a media standpoint. We were expecting a spectacle, and all we got was this crummy debate about issues.<br /><br />Not that I think watching the debate would have made me much more intelligent about the issues. Like I said, the debates are more about sound bites and making the other person's ideas sound stupid and trivial than they are about informing the American public on the issues that they will be voting for.<br /><br />So, whose fault is this? Well, it's Emily's.<br /><br />Emily is not a stupid person. I like to tease her and call her dumb, but she's not. She's perfectly intelligent, and fully capable of understanding the complexities of a political debate if she wanted to. And I have a feeling she does understand more than I give her credit for. I think she knows more about the real issues than I pretend to think she knows. And the reason is, she doesn't get excited about that stuff. What she gets excited about is the latest clip of the stupid think Palin said. Haha! She couldn't list the newspapers she reads! What a moron!<br /><br />This sort of thing, while it has its place, is distracting from the things that are actually important. Like her policies on drilling, or abortion, or foreign policy, or the economy. Bt those things have received a back seat to her apparent stupidity and the fact that she's attractive and winks at you a lot.<br /><br />And whose fault is that? Like I said, it's Emily's. But what I mean is that it's all of our faults. There's a time and a place for entertainment, and while a general election is, in some respects, both the time and the place for it... Can we please keep that time and place to the late night shows and comedy routines? Places that are actually meant for entertainment?<br /><br />The reason the media doesn't report on the things that really matter is because the American public is largely disinterested in the things that really matter. And it works in a huge circle that ends in a lack of information. The media will not report on the intricacies of the tax plan, because the public won't watch it. The will report on the stupid sound bites and gaffs that the candidates make, because the public eats that shit up.<br /><br />The candidates will not talk about the intricacies of their tax plan, because the American public isn't really watching anyway. The public finds out about what the candidates said from the news, and the news is only reporting on the quick and easy things to understand and laugh about.<br /><br />If we were more demanding of our media, and by extension our political leaders, then this shit would stop. I'm sure that the analysts and anchors on news programs (the ones that are actually balanced... Not O'Reilly or stuff like that) want to discuss some real important issues. But they can't because they need their ratings to stay on the air. And so Washington just becomes another brand of Hollywood. And, ultimately, it is the fault of the public for not demanding more.<br /><br />In the coverage I was watching of the VP debate, the pundits were asked if they think Obama is going to reveal the details of his economic plan. And their response was "No, probably not." See ... There is no reason for him to do that. So far, all he's really said is pretty much the same things as Sarah Silverman said in that video. I have an economic plan, and it's a goodun. I'm gonna go through the budget page by page and personally reform it!<br /><br />And that's it. And we won't get more until he is in office, because there is no impetus for him to reveal more, and significant risk in doing so. At the moment, we are satisfied with what he has been saying. Sounds good. He's gonna make it better. He's ahead in the polls, and if he reveals more there's a chance people won't like it. So, don't talk about it.<br /><br />If we demanded more of our media, and of our politicians, he wouldn't be able to get away with that. The Sarah Silverman video was fine... She's just a shitty comedian. The video wasn't presented as a hard hitting look at the issues. It was supposed to be, more than anything, funny. But, the problem lies in the fact that the actual candidates don't find it necessary to divulge much more information than that video does.<br /><br />I have just one more, semi-related topic before I put this to bed. I know I haven't done a good job of addressing the issues, or even really making it abundantly apparent who my choice is. But that wasn't what this post was about. I never meant for it to be. Like I said, there are many facets to this election, and I choose lack of information and how it is Emily's (and the rest of our) faults. If you want actual information on some of the real issues, you’re going to have to do some independent research. Cuz the candidates aren't talking about it, and the mass media sure as hell isn't talking about it. And neither am I.<br /><br />But the last thing I want to talk about is Jim's perception of the bailout. Jim is willfully ignorant about politics. Let's not get into that at the moment, except as a point of fact. So, his mom told him that the bailout is going to cost each taxpayer $20,000, and he's lucky he isn't paying taxes at the moment.<br /><br />I find it very interesting that this is the way that is coming across. That the bailout is going to be this horrible burden on individual people in that manner. What that meant to Jim, and I'm sure what it meant to millions of Americans, because Jim is no idiot, is that it would literally cost each taxpayer $20,000. Like everyone was going to get a $20,000 bill in the mail on Monday and have to figure some way to pay it. And that's just ludicrous.<br /><br />First of all, we pay our taxes and then they go into a big pool l and the government basically decides what to do with it. Infrastructure, schools, law enforcement, hospitals, FEA, military, and yes... Corporate bailouts if necessary. If the government spends more son any of those things, they have less for everything else. But if the government decides to spend our tax dollars on a corporate bailout, we aren't all literally sent a bill in the mail. It just means there's less money left in the pool for all the other things.<br /><br />And, to say that it costs each taxpayer $20,000 is misleading in the first place. As we discussed earlier, the rich pay far more taxes than the poor. For one thing, each percentage of tax is higher for them, and for another they have a higher percent of income tax that they pay. So, dividing $700,000,000 evenly between every taxpaying citizen and coming up with the $20,000 is misleading, at best.<br /><br />But, in case you thought you were going to be getting a huge bill in the mail that you were going to have to get a second mortgage to cover, that's just not the way it works. <br /><br />Our schools are just going to have to live with those 30 year old textbooks a while longer, that's all.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-4871125942742232772008-09-29T02:45:00.001-04:002008-09-29T02:47:30.227-04:00The Road Not TakenI came out here tonight to write this thing, but I'm finding that my heart just isn't really in it at the moment. That's not really true. I really came out here, primarily, to read Mike's post. Then I decided to write this thing. But the heart comment is still fairly accurate. Oh well, forging on...<br /><br />It's time for a little bit of what iffery. Hm... I'm not really sure how to get the ball rolling on this topic. See, the thing is, this could be a topic that I could write about for years and never finish. Like... Years straight of writing. Thousands upon thousands of pages. Because there is always a road not taken. .In every decision or happening that occurs, something else could have occurred instead that would make everything that follows it completely different. So, for the purposes of this, I'm going to focus on Jess.<br /><br />Jess was, pretty much, my first really big crush. In the interest of full disclosure the previous statement is entirely untrue in every respect. My first really big crush was Sarah, back in sixth grade. I asked her out, she said no (the first of... Well, not many... But the first and then there came everyone else I asked out) and then we were friends for a while longer. And then she got really obnoxiously girly, and then I think she got really obnoxiously anti-girly.... The point is, soon after she said no she changed and I was no longer interested in her anyway. And I don't really think I have any friends currently who even know who she is. There's a chance Lior might remember her if I brought her up, but he'd have to try to think back to middle school and there's really no reason to bring her up at all. That was a stupid tangent to have gone on, and I should, but won't, delete it.<br /><br />So, Jess. I actually don't remember meeting her. I'm sure I must have been peripherally aware of her existence back in sixth grader. And then I changed schools. And then I met her again in freshman year of high school. This is the meeting that I specifically don't remember. What I do remember is coming home after school that day and flopping down on the bed in the computer room and burying my face in the blanket and seeing her face. I hadn't realized that I had a crush on her until that. I still think it's weird the way that happened. How I hadn't even realized it until that moment, and that is the moment I remember all these years later.<br /><br />That little story was, again, not entirely pertinent to the subject at hand. It was just some unnecessary and sappy background filler.<br /><br />Okay, well cut to roughly nowish. Jess was down a couple weeks ago and we hung out, and when I was driving her home she pointed out Kevin's house. That was the catalyst for this current line of thought.<br /><br />Cutting back to ninth grade: I got to know Jess more and we hung out some and whatnot, and the crush got bigger. So, at some point, I decided to ask her out. That was a big deal decision for me back then. I don't know that it would be now if I were in the same situation, but it might be. That's irrelevant. The point is, when I finally decided to ask her, it turned out Kevin had asked her like... The day before or something and they were currently going out. See how that cut came into play? Everything is fitting together quite nicely now, eh?<br /><br />So, I went through my self destructive depressed phase, like I do, and then I moved on. Jess and I stayed friends.<br /><br />But what if I had asked her a couple days sooner? Looking back, I'm pretty sure she would have said yes. So then what would have happened? At some point in high school things got really bad for her. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it had a lot to do with her parents, and then that probably extended a lot into her relationships with her friends, which she seemed to have mostly lost. But what if she had been dating me at the time? Instead of dating a string of guys that were, very obviously, bad for her and probably added to the horribleness of whatever it was she was going through at the time, she had been with me, who would have been there for her and to try to make things more bearable? There are little things that happen every day that change out lives tremendously, but could this have been a rather big thing that would have ostensibly changed hers' for the better. All of that is, quite honestly, very possible. Instead of telling her parents that she was hanging out with me as a cover for w hen she was hanging out with people they wouldn't approve of, she could have been actually hanging out with me. Now, some of the people her parents "didn't approve of" were perfectly fine people and there was really nothing wrong with her being with them. But some, probably a lot, weren't. And she would have been far better off not hanging out with them doing the things that they were doing.<br /><br />So, assuming all of that could have been true, where would that have put me? This is a bit of a tougher question, because with her I was thinking in broad generalities, and with me I am thinking more specifically. Would I have not dated Meg? Or Dana? Or Stacy? Probably not. Not having dated any one... Well... Maybe not Meg... Of those people would have made me, probably, a much different person than I am today. Better? In a lot of respects. Maybe worse in a few. But I think being with Jess would have made up for the ways that those girls made me a better person.<br /><br />I know I would be better off right now if I had never dated Stacy. And even better off if I were still dating Stacy. If either of those things were true, there's a good chance I would have given my life some sort of direction, instead of where it is now. But let's try to keep this hypothetical train on the tracks and not turn this into the aforementioned thousands page diatribe (i wonder if I used that word correctly)<br /><br />The problem with this line of thinking is that after the first hypothetical, it leads inescapably into a whole slew of new hypotheticals that can be neither proven or disproven. And any one of them being wrong leads all of the following assumptions in an entirely different direction.<br /><br />So, here's where the train really comes off the tracks: (I've used that metaphor twice in way too short a time period, and with slightly different meaning) Most of the supposition from earlier wouldn't have happened anyway.<br /><br />Yes. It's possible that everything would have turned out great and that we would now be living together, both moderately successful and happy. But that really isn't very likely, is it? She would have been my first real girlfriend, and what's more likely is that it would have ended in heartbreak, just at a different time. And so maybe that time period would have extended through Meg. But, in all likelihood, the only thing that would be different if I had asked her out a couple days earlier is that my history of heartbreak would be written slightly differently. In all likelihood, she would still have eventually gone down the same paths as she did. Maybe it would have taken her a little longer to get to them. Maybe I would have staved them off for a little while. But, in all likelihood, we would probably both be in roughly the same place today as we are anyway. Maybe gotten there differently, and maybe we wouldn't still be talking to each other from time to time and hanging out when she's down. But for the most part, things would be the same now as they are anyway.<br /><br />So, what does that mean for the road not taken theory? Do things work out, generally, the same way regardless?<br /><br />No. This flight of fancy didn't, realistically, happen to pan out into the perfection that my earlier posturing suggested that it might. But the little paragraph about Stacy would, I believe, have me in a completely different place than I am. And so I still believe that the little things, like manning up and asking out a girl just a couple days sooner, can have a drastic effect on the entire life that follows.<br /><br />There are also other things that would have changed as a result of having asked her a couple days sooner. Assuming she said yes, which I choose to, I presently wouldn't have been rejected every time I have asked someone out. And that little fact could have changed my life drastically--maybe more drastically than the ensuing relationship has been shown to probably not have done.<br /><br />But, I really don't feel like going into how.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-63161150017593542172008-09-15T00:43:00.002-04:002008-09-15T00:51:52.629-04:00I Want To Make Myself CryI'm pretty tired at the moment, and I have work in the morning, so I should be going to sleep right now. Bt I wanted to come out here and write a blog. I don't really have a blog to write, bt I would like to write one so here I am. I'm sort of divided about whether this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, I think it's important to have something to write before trying to write it. But on the other, a big part of writing is forcing yourself to do it. Forcing yourself to work through the times where you don't have anything to write, but to write them anyway.<br /><br />Let's be clear thogh... What I'm doing here isn't really writing. Yes, I'm typing words into a, for the sake of argment, computer for the purpose of commnication between myself and anyone who chooses to read it. But let's not confuse this with things that authors do.<br /><br />I've noticed that the posts I have been making recently have two main categories that they fall under. They've been either about relationships and the theory therein, or abot writing and theory about that, or how I'm not good at it. So maybe that tells me something. Maybe I should be putting myself ot there more in trying to actively find a relationship. This blog isn't about that. And maybe I should be putting myself out there more in terms of trying to be a more, or at this point any degree of, prolific writer. This entry is more about that. But only slightly.<br /><br />There are some things that I watch over and over again. Aaron Sorkin shows, some other shows... That sort of thing. And there are things that I read (or listen to) over and over again. That's relegated more to Terry Pratchett these days.<br /><br />Terry Pratchett is a wonderfl athor. On first glance, and certainly at the beginning of his career--the earlier dDiscworld books--he may appear to be just a Douglas Adams clone. Not that that is a bad thing, but itisn't what he is. Oh, I'm sure he has his Doglas Adams influence. I'm sure he's read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But his books have a depth to them that Douglas Adams was only able to valiantly fail at achieving. There's parody, to be sure, in them. But there's also a good deal of genine philosophy, and some adapted physics. There are messages to his books outside of pre entertainment, and he is able to accomplish all of this while still being entertaining. There are also moments in some of the later Discworld books, and the non discworld short serieses, that are geninely sweet and touching. It's these moments that I choose to focus on today.<br /><br />As I said before, there are things that I watch/read/listen to again and again. And there are moments in some of these things that I find genuinely toching that bring me to tears. On film, there is a degree of atmosphere that is created by lighting and score and all of the other aspects of direction and filmmaking that adds to the heightened emotion of the scene. So, the fact that I know a given scene is coming and yet it still manages to elicit the desired emotion is not so surprising. But with books it's just the words doing it. And even though I know that Vimes is going to lose it and start bellowing the manscript of "Where's My Cow" into the darkness in a feeble attempt to read it to his son, who is miles away, at the agreed upon time, it gets me every time. There's something magical about that.<br /><br />I really want to write something that has that sort of power. I don't think the trick for this is to have a great idea for a story. I think it can be done with jst a mediocre idea. Of course, I don't really even have any of those at the moment, but I choose onot to focuus on that aspect of the predicament at this current juncture.<br /><br />This is as far as I've gotten in my thinking on the subject. I want to write something that, when I go back and read it months, or years, later--enogh time for me to have gained enogh distance from it that it feels like reading someone else's words instead of my own--it will bring tears to my eyes in the way that Terry Pratchett is able to. I want to be able to make myself cry.<br /><br />So, that's that. I would have liked to have had more of a conclusory feel to that, but I told you from the beginning this post was sort of half baked. Another topic I had consdidered writing in thisspace was going to be about "The Road Not Taken," and what if I had asked Jess ot just a few days sooner back in freshman year of high school. But I wrote this one instead. I still have that other one in me, so it very well cold be my next post.<br /><br />As a qick, unrelated, addendum: I saw Burn After Reading yesterday. I would write up a review and send it off to Shannon for her to post it on the Coral Springs Teen Website thing, as my free admission to the theaer was intended for, but it is rated R, and so it isn't allowed to be discssed in that space.<br /><br />I liked it alright. It is no Big Lebowski, but the Coen Brothers have been disappointing me lately with their movies, and this one was at least not disappointing. It kept me entertained far better than No Country did, and at least it had a coherent ending.<br /><br />In fact, the ending was really the whole point of the movie. Generally this is true of most movies, but with Burn After Reading I got the feeling that they wrote a fnny little scene and then went back and crafted a movie to get them back to that scene they wanted to shoot. The entire movie felt like a bild p to the punchline of the end scene. It was a really, really, long winded joke.<br /><br />Not that the movie was overly long, or long winded. I think it clocks in at around 90 mintes. Maybe a bit more. But the very end sort of neatly smmed up the previous 90 minutes of movie in roghly 30 seconds in a way that felt very much like the punchline to a joke.<br /><br />The beginning dragged a little bit. It spent a bit too much time introdcing the characters--specifically John Malkovich's character. And then after that it sort of kept on dragging. At least in my opinion. It wasn't boring, but I didn't know what they exact story was that I was supposed to be following. So, when the climax arrived, I was nsaware that we had reached the climax. It sort of felt like the movie was jst rising action, only I didn't knonw where it was rising to. For this reason, I think itn wo uld benefit greatly from a second viewing. A second time throgh where I understand the story that is being told and don't have to feel myself searching for it in all the mayhem and hijinks.<br /><br />I probably won't see it again though. At least not for a while. Movies just don't hold the same appeal for me that they once did. An hour and a half to three hours with a group of characters and plot just isn't enogh for me anymore. I much prefer getting to know the characters and setting in the serialized setting of a television series.<br /><br />I have some new thoughts that I put together very briefly while watching this movie on the differences between telling a story throgh a serialized format and a movie format. It has to do with how much nonsense and filler you can afford yourself in a shorter format. Everything in a movie has to be important to the central story or it doesn't belong. A big storys can be told in those 90 minutes of screen time, bt it has to be truncated in a way that keeps the movie flowing and still fits in everything that needs to be told for the story to make sense. I have somhe more on this topic, but I'm tired and I havenv't worked out how to say it effectively. So it would end up being a lot of restating myself and trying to work my way around to a point that cold have been made in a third of the time. So, I'm going to go to bed instead. Goodnight.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-33495980525654982352008-09-04T04:34:00.000-04:002008-09-04T04:35:48.861-04:00There is Only One Aaron SorkinThis is not supposed to be a revelatory statement. Obviously, I hold him in high regard, and obviously there is a reason for that. And just recently I've realized just how far from understanding what that reason is I am.<br /><br />As I've said, I'm watching through the West Wing again, after about three years. Right before I came out here to write this, I finished off watching season five. That's the season where the show went drastically downhill.<br /><br />Now, I think I want to preface this by explaining a little bit about Aaron Sorkin shows. They're all, fundamentally, the same. There's three of them. One is about the guys running a sports news program, one is about the guys running the country, and one is about the guys running a sketch comedy show. Already you can probably see the formula, though I wrote that last sentence in a way to specifically make it blaringly obvious. The formula for the types of things he does isn't really "Guys running x." Really, it's a behind the scenes look at something, and the characters are very passionate about what they do. But that is the overarching formula of the types of things Sorkin likes to write. That's not going to be my point here, though now it seems I have made you wade through a mostly erroneous paragraph.<br /><br />The formulas that I am talking about are a little bit harder to identify, but only slightly. All it really takes is watching the three shows and paying some slight bit of attention, really. For one thing, the dialogue style is very unique and parodiable. There's a sort of Sorkin cadence that the dialogue inhabits, but that's a very vague way of discussing it. For one thing, characters repeat each other a lot. Far more than people repeat each other in real life. That is probably the most defining characteristic of Aaron Sorkin dialogue, and it is easy enough to replicate. But there's something else about it. I don't really know what it is, but I'm working on it.<br /><br />Beyond the actual dialogue, there are only just so many frameworks Aaron Sorkin uses. If you watch just West Wing and Sports Night you will notice that there are a few episodes which are pretty much identical. Everyone watching an event on television that is annoying at first because its happening is casing everyone to be idle waiting for it to end, and so they take the time to write letters to their parents. And then they get excited about the participant and end up rooting them on. That's one example. I have a few more in mind, but don't feel like expounding on them, because that could be an entire essay all on its own and I realized while typing the abbreviated explanation of the last one that it is incredibly boring when boiled down to the bare essentials necessary to explain the similarities in the episodes. Suffice it to say, a lot of the basic story frameworks are reused in new settings.<br /><br />Sorkin uses the same character names all the time. He obviously comes up with new ones as well, because there are a lot of characters in both the West Wing and Studio 60, but if you pay attention to the names being thrown around you'll start to recognize them. There are phrases that are used a lot too. "Her legs go all the way to the floor" "Like shooting fish in a barrel"... Only it's not exactly that line... He writes it slightly differently and I can't remember the exact wording, but when I hear it his way I know it was him who wrote it.<br /><br />I am not the foremost expert on Aaron Sorkin and his writing style. Not by a long shot. He didn't write The West Wing all by himself. He had staff writers helping along and such. They worked with him on scripts, and as such I'm sure they understand his idiosyncricities far better than I do. So, with all of the formula present in his shows, you would think it would be easily duplicated. But it just isn't.<br /><br />Aaron Sorkin, through the character of President Bartlett, has this so say on the subject: "Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music. They have rhythm, and pitch, and timbre, and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us, and lift us up in the ways that literal meanings can't. Do you see?"<br /><br />Up until recently I sort of thought it was okay to try to replicate Aaron Sorkin. I mean, I sort of do it. My writing style, specifically my dialogue writing, has shifted towards his a lot since I started watching his shows and movies. That's not a bad thing. Influences are fine. But up until recently I hadn't consciously understood that trying to replicate his writing style is no good.<br /><br />The forth season of the West Wing was the last season written by Aaron Sorkin. I just finished watching the fifth, and it is not nearly as good as the first four. I hadn't realized how far from the first for seasons the rest of the show was until I just went back and started watching the whole thing marathon style. When I watch things marathon style I gain more of an appreciation for the story and the flow of the series. I hadn't watched the non Sorkins stuff in this manner before, and I'm finding it a bit of a chore to get through, which is somewhat odd.It isn't poorly written. It's still a pretty good show. And all of the groundwork laid by Sorkin is still there, for the most part.<br /><br />All of the characters are still themselves. They react in a predictable way to the events surrounding them. I don't mean that in a bad way. What I mean is, you grow to know and understand these characters, and they react in the ways that they should. Their characters remain in tact from the time Sorkin stopped writing the show all the way through to the end.<br /><br />And it's not like the events stopped being interesting. In fact, they became more interesting. When I think of the prominent stories of the show, I remember the president and Josh getting shot, I remember the MS scandal, I remember Zoe getting kidnapped and the speaker taking over as president, I remember them putting a liberal and a conservative judge on the bench at the same time, Donna in a car bomb, bringing peace to the middle east, and the final two seasons of the presidential election. That list is in order of when the events happened, and Aaron Sorkin left by starting off the storyline where Zoe gets kidnapped. Everything after there wasn't him. So it's not like stuff stopped happening. In fact, the episodes that stand out to me that Aaron Sorkin wrote were fairly mundane in the actual plot.<br /><br />Oh yeah... And they killed off Mrs. Landingham. That was the end of season two or three.<br /><br />So, you would think the show wold be just as engaging with the formulaic nature of his writing and the major, interesting events continuing. But it just isn't. And I don't really know why. I can sort of tell why when I'm actually watching the show, but I don't know how to put it into words. It's an X factor that I hadn't fully realized until just recently. The characters all interact the same way they used to... It's just not the same. The conversations aren't as inherently entertaining. The jokes are still there and the back and forth still works, but just not like it did.<br /><br />On a peripherally related subject, I suppose I am a Writer. I am not an Author. Claiming Authorship requires that you have Authored things. And that you are continuously Authoring. To be an Author you need to want it and live for it. It needs to be what you think about when you wake up and what you want to be doing all the time in between. Or, a t the very least, you need to have a considerable backlog of thing that you have e written of which you are proud. But I am a writer. It's the way I view pretty much everything, I suppose.<br /><br />Most people, I think, wold just watch these serieses and like them or not and leave it at that. But me? I think about why they are written the way they are and what is different in the writing between the seasons that I like and the seasons I don't and why. And it doesn't just stop there. Earlier in this post I used the word "erroneous." I didn't really know exactly what it meant, and I had no idea how to spell it, but I knew it fitted there. I could have said "superfluous" instead, but I wanted it to be erroneous. Erroneous fit better. There's no real reason why it did, it just did. They both would have satisfied the intent of the statement, but it had to be erroneous and not superfluous, so I looked it up. That sort of thing happens to me all the time. I know there is a right word for what I am trying tot say, and another word will just not do, and so I will have to find that word before I can move on. I sometimes stop conversations trying to find the right word to finish my thought. Even if I can find another way of conveying the thought that is effective, I need to figure out what the right word is that I was looking for that belongs there is before I can continue the conversation. I imagine it is rather annoying to others, but it has to be done.<br /><br />I recently started working a part time job at Kohl's. During the interview process and the orientation, there was a video that basically went into the history of the company and company propaganda and whatnot. But there was one line in the video that annoyed me, and it was on a loop, so it annoyed me every time I heard it. The narrator said "Kohl's is expanding its business and has opened up 400 (i don't remember the real number) stores in 26 (again... No idea what that number should be) states in four months. That's more than most businesses open in just one year!" And that is really all I remember about the video. Because that line is wrong. It's just wrong.<br /><br />There's a symmetry to the statement they were trying to make. They were trying to say that Kohl's is opening up all these stores and that is noteworthy because other places open up far less stores in a far greater amount of time. So it started out fine. You start with up playing the accomplishments of the entity to which you tare trying to grandeurize, and then you want to downplay the accomplishments of the other entity. So you say that they have opened less in a greater amount of time. But you don't want to downplay the amount of time it took them to do less. You want to make that amount of time seem gigantic in comparison. It's not "In only one year." It's "In an ENTIRE year!" Every time I heard that line it was grating. <br /><br />There isn't really any greater point that I'm trying to make with this line of discourse. Just that I view the world through the eyes of a writer. The West Wing thing was more of a focused point than this, and really I suppose I should have ended there. Go out strong. But I chose not to. I chose to end not with a bang, but with a whimper (That's Eliot!)evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9100204807984416778.post-59772994907241759322008-08-29T04:07:00.001-04:002008-08-29T04:07:46.432-04:00Revisitting the West WingI'm not working at the dry cleaners anymore. There was.. Well there was a thing and then a small grade fight and then a shortish conversation. Anyway, I'm not working there now. I'm starting a part time job at Kohl's now. There's really no reason why you should care that these things are true, except that the lack of time spent idly at the dry cleaner's is the reason why updates in this space have been and will most likely continue to be, less frequent. I like calling it "this space." It makes it feel like I'm writing for something that matters. Like it's space that needs to be filled otherwise it would just be barren wasteland. It's not, of course... But it's nice to pretend.<br /><br /><br /><br />I went back and read one of my early blogs about phrases people (mis)use. I liked that entry a lot. It was entertaining and had nothing to do really with updating you poor suckers who bother to read this drivel on the current nowhereness of my life. Don't get me wrong... Periodic updates are somewhat important to me. The main reason I started writing here was to keep in touch in a very laxidasical way with Mike, so I like it when time to time he has a real life update. But other than that, I think it's just boring to be recording the things that are going on in my life here. Of course, I don't really talk about them very much outside of this space (I did it again) so I suppose there's something to be said for letting people who care know these things in some fashion. But, well, I'd like it if I had more actual things to rant about in an entertaining way. I wonder if any of my old livejournal blogs are still around... And I wonder if any of them were entertaining at all. I remember I wrote one about the passion of the christ that I turned in as an essay to a teacher I liked at the time and he liked it. I wonder if I can figure out how to find that again. Probably not.<br /><br /><br /><br />The main point of writing this entry tonight, really, is because I haven't written one in a while. .That's about it. I haven't had anything much to say, so I haven't said it. I've wanted to write a substantive and fun entry, but haven't had a topic. There have been little things... I remember wanting to write something about politics, but not Mike's kind, and something about how much bigger and at the same time smaller everything gets as you get older. But those wouldn't have been enough of a topic to have really filled enough space for me to bother writing about them. And they wouldn't really have been that much FUN.<br /><br /><br /><br />Both of those topics, though, arose from watching the West Wing again. I didn't have anything that I really was excited about watching, and so I'm making my way once more through the best television series aired to date, a position I will hear no arguments on. Watching the West Wing is kind of a big thing for me. It's a Stacy thing, and only mildly interesting and not very entertaining, so I will be keeping this somewhat short.<br /><br /><br /><br />The West Wing was a big part of mine and Stacy's relationship. At around that time I had fallen in love with Sports Night. It's funny... I had never really thought about the writer of a movie or TV series before that. I had wanted to write, and was aware that shows were written by someone, but it just hadn't occurred to me to follow the writer of something I liked from one project to the next. Actors, and even directors, I had been paying attention to. But somehow the writer, who I now consider to be one of if not the most important facet of the medium, had somehow escaped my scrutiny. Aaron Sorkin and the West Wing changed that.<br /><br /><br /><br />On a side note, there was another entry I had thought about writing about how until I got into Friends pretty heavily I had never thought about television shows in terms of seasons and beginnings and endings. There's not too much meat on that topic either... Just something I had thought about for a minute or two the other day.<br /><br /><br /><br />Back to the issue at hand. So, I had fallen in love with Sports Night, and then there was a Winter Break or something that put me and Lior both in Springs at the same time. We were hanging out at Stacy's place because he was dating her at the time and that's what we did, and there was an episode of the West Wing on television that we watched. It was Celestial Navigation. That was the episode. I didn't really' understand the underlying themes of the episode. I didn't understand that they were trying to put Mendoza on the bench of the Supreme court, or any of the other plot lines running through the episode. But I enjoyed it. All of the things I loved about Sports Night were present, plus a much richer story that I , at the time, didn't follow. So I started downloading and watching the series furiously.<br /><br /><br /><br />It was one of the first things Stacy and I sort of bonded over. Another was the fact that we were both up late nights and talked during roughly the time the sun was coming up regularly. But, seeing as I was downloading the series anyway, and she liked it too, my first excuse to see her, though at the time was a platonic excuse, was to drop off the dvds of the series that I made for her as I accumulated them.<br /><br /><br /><br />When we started dating, watching the West Wing together was sort of our thing. It was more important to me than it was to her... But I suppose that could be said about the entire relationship. We never got through the whole series, but the time I looked forward to the most back then was laying with her on her couch or her bed and watching The West Wing with her.<br /><br /><br /><br />When she broke up with me, I finished off watching the series proper, because it was still running at the time, but it wasn't as good. The reason it wasn't as good had more to do with the fact that Aaron Sorkin had left the project than it did with the fact that it was our thing and now there was no more us. But after the series ended, I never went back and watched it again. I was afraid it would hurt to watch.<br /><br /><br /><br />But recently I decided that I now, finally, have enough distance and have left her behind enough that I can go back and enjoy it. And I have been. It's really a fantastic show, and I can't imagine that I won't find myself watching through the whole thing again sometime once I've finished with this viewing. Every once in a while a character will say something and I'll think "Hey! I say that all the time! So that's where I got it from.<br /><br /><br /><br />I could continue to talk about the reasons why I love the show, and specific scenes or just specific emotions that scenes evoke for a long time. But this is already longer than I executed it to be, and I don't really feel like writing more. And if I did feel like writing more, it would be to explain the topics that I said I had contemplated writing earlier. But, no. This entry ends here. The point I was trying to make is that watching the show again is a big step for me, and I'm very glad that I'm finally able to make it. Not just because it's a further sign that I've left her behind me, but because the absence of the show from my life for son long has really been a shame.<br /><br /><br /><br />When I finish it, I'm going to revisit Sports Night also, which I have been avoiding for just as long and for much the same reason, and that is almost as much of a shame.evanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253818249278879324noreply@blogger.com0