I'm on a bridge.

Superlegit.

I adore these people

So much.  They're awesome.

Film School: Part Two

Grant was sitting on the couch, orange and tan stripes, in Mike’s room, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling and catching it on the way down. He had perfected the art of very nearly almost hitting the ceiling.
“Grant?”
“Hmmh?”
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Righto.”
“I see that.”
“You know that movie we were going to make, but never did make?”
“Which one?”
Grant sat up, catching the tennis ball in one quick swipe and placing it on the couch beside him. “The one that won us several Oscars.”
“Oh yeah, that one.”
“It’s our Good Will Hunting.”
“Bro, are you saying that you want to make Good Will Hunting?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“We can’t make Good Will Hunting. Someone else already made it.”
“I don’t want to make Good Will Hunting. I want to make a movie the same way they made Good Will Hunting.”
“Mmmm, yeah. Hey, Adam Sandler? I was wondering if you could come over here and write a screenplay with me. Can you bring Matt Damon too?” He mimed, with his phone.
“You dumbass. If they can do it, we can do it. Get me a piece of paper.”
“I don’t have any paper.”
“Fine.” He pulled a wadded up receipt out of his pocket. “We’re gonna have a character. Main guy, the one who you root for, the one who’s a better version of you.”
“Geez.”
“Not you particularly, but a general viewer.”
“I see.”
“Yeah. We got the good guy, we need a bad guy.”
“Oh, I see, it’s a deep, artsy film about a couple of superheros and evil villains? Yeah. Cool.”
“Who peed in your mountain dew?”
“What? It’s a possibility.”
“We need an antagonist. They make plot.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do we want a person? Do we want someone to be out there, trying to get them?”
“This is your thing, not mine.”
“I know, dumbass. I’m bouncing my ideas off of you.”
“Whatever.”
“The world’s just going to be angled against them. Everything out there hates us sometimes.”
Silence.
“And so he’s going to go out into the world. Because when he was a kid, he got this idea in his head, this idea that everyone was against him. Right now, he’s just trying to see if it’s true.”
“Personal journey.”
Mike nodded. That sounded okay, even when you said it out loud. Good sign, he knew. “A personal journey makes a good story.”
“But it’s been done before.”
“Your mom’s been done before.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I know. But really, is that an okay story?” He needed confirmation, reassurance before he went any further. He always had that, the worry that it wouldn’t be okay, that he wouldn’t be successful. Weird. Unwanted.
“Yeah, it is. If you do it right.”
“How would I do it right?”
“Don’t hit anyone over the head with your message of deep, touchy feely, personal growth. That’s gross.”
“I’m not an inspirational speaker.”
“Look in a mirror once in a while, okay?”
“Ouch.”
“Truth. It hurts.”
“Whatever. I’ll try not to talk about feelings too much. You’ll police me on that front.”
Grant stood up, theatrically. “What? What are you talking about?”
Mike scrunched his eyebrows and spoke in the kind of voice usually reserved for explaining very complicated concepts to unintelligent people. “Well, when we’re writing the script for our film, you will tell me when I’m writing something that is more emotional than you’d like. Get it? You can make changes so that it’s not sappy, which everything I write is, apparently.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t I just explain what I was talking about?”
“No, I didn’t catch that one bit. There was something about me changing things, I think, and that seems like it was out of place and very unlikely. I’m not doing this. This is your stupid little project, and you can do your own thing with it.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’ll just screw around with it myself, and you can do whatever you want. You’re right, you’d probably just make it all suck.” Mike said, feigning a lack of confidence.
“I would make it all suck, even more than you would.”
“Why even bother making a movie, right?”
“This is what I’ve been saying all along.”
“Shut up.”

So what if I look like the unabomber?

I was bored and had a camera.  Dangerous combination.

I'm not sure

Quite what I was thinking when I drew this.  Whatever.

I like these buildings

They are Canadian.

Film School: Part One

Everyone sat down in the theater for a clandestine showing of their film. Each of them had seen it, in bits and pieces, editing it into something coherent, but this was the first time they’d watched it together, all the way through. Someone turned the lights out and pressed play on the computer. Black screen. “Screw the Danger” in white letters. Helvetica. Grant had pushed for it, Clark had hated it, and the others had more important things to care about than typefaces. The letters dropped away in a cute little animation. Clark’s idea.
The black turned into a greyscale image, which turned into a coloured image, still with a lot of grey and dark blue tones. Vivian had said that they should start out with that aesthetic.
The camera was zooming in towards the back of Clark’s head.
“It seemed cool at the time, but now, so strange. Awkward.”
“I think it’s okay. It’s an original style to start in.”
“Shut up!”
“Fine!”
Clark turned around. Pale, skinny, wide jaw, wide pointed nose and messy bleached hair. He was singing something, but you couldn’t quite read his lips and the voiceover was talking, slow then faster and faster, reading poems without the appropriate pauses and rhythm.
Then it went silent. His lips stopped moving at the very same instant. He looked up. The camera panned to the sky, and back to him, now laying down on impossibly green grass.
A pair of shoes walked up next to his head and Clark started talking.
They remembered how the exact words had been ad-libbed. It hadn’t mattered what he said, so long as it seemed like he was spilling his guts to the camera/ And the effect, they unanimously decided, had been positive.
The camera switched to a bird, just sitting on a little branch. It moved it’s head, looked down, and then just flew away.
Fade to black.
And now Clark was sitting at the counter in a diner, fifties style. He was wearing a button down shirt and tie. Drinking coffee and staring straight forward. He never took his hand off the mug. When he was finished, he reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Took out money, laid it on the counter, stood up, and walked away.
He walked outside, and the camera focused on his shoes, shiny and black, looking like they would fit in far better in a church, worn by a man who was religious because he was a sinner than the Clark they knew. But in that moment, Clark, kicking pieces of gravel as he walked down the side of the road, became someone new, someone fresh.
“This is amazing.”
“Was I wearing brown socks with black pants and black shoes in that shot?”
“It doesn’t matter, it’s perfect.”
“I can’t believe you let me go like that.”
And then they were silenced by a passing semi truck that blew Clark’s hair to the side. And he turned away from the road, took off his shoes, loosened his tie, and started running. They all remembered shooting this scene, how Clark insisted that they get it right the first time, because there was no way he was running away from them twice. They had filmed until he turned into a speck in the woods at the end of the field, and taken years to come back. They’d filmed too, when he was coming back. It wasn’t planned, but they had put it in during the credits. To give closure to the scene, which , someone suggested, would leave the viewer feeling satisfied more than a scene without closure would.
The movie went on like that. Clark didn’t like it. It was too much of him, too much of the strange shots at strange locations, not enough plot. It wasn’t a story, it was a study in narcissism.
And when it was over, someone got up to turn off the computer and projector and turn on the lights.
“It’s not wh-”
“No. We’re not discussing it. Not now. We need to let it sink in, to become a part of us, before we try and do something more with it.”
“Okay. I’m find with that.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m good with that too.”
And their group, having felt so connected, so wildly together a mere hour ago, dissipated.

Quote of the...day?

"It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches."

Lemony Snicket

Flowers

Quote of the Month

"If being crazy is living life the way it’s meant to be lived, then I don’t care if we’re completely insane."

Revolutionary Road

On Emotion

I am strange and awkward and unemotional.  In the worst way, but I've come to terms with it, and the fact that I've gotten to this place where I'm okay with imperfection (in that aspect, at least) is one of my favourite things about myself. 
Still, there are some times when I would trade something that I am good at for some, say, social skills.  Grad parties exacerbate this situation, if we're calling it that.  Can an aspect of your personality be a situation?  No.  Whatever.
Anyway, I'm never quite sure about how I should socalize with people, but I'm getting better.  I'm still not good at maintaining conversations with people, unless I've known them for a long time and can make something entirely out of inside jokes.  I will laugh at those inside jokes, even when no one around me understands them.  This makes me slightly awkward.
What bothers me more is that I'm never quite sure how I feel about anyone.  There's someone who, once upon a time, I was very angry at, and then I forgave them because I realized there wasn't any point in being mad, but there's strange hostility, even now.
There were forty-five commas in that sentence.  Is that even legal?
Probably not.
Also, having conversations with yourself on your blog is not socially acceptable.

One day, there will be a big, sweeping blog post in which I summarize high school and pick out favourite memories and pictures and we all get sappy and nastolgic and slightly angry at the injustice of it all, but today is not that day.  Tommorrow will probably not be that day either, but it will come.

I was going to summarize this post and say "The moral of the story is..." when I realized that there wasn't really a moral.  I'm kind of a dork.  Can that function as the moral?  Good.

*I have worn my boxers from Senior All-Night Party every night since them.  Perhaps they should be...washed.  I've heard tell of people doing that with laundry.

Once Upon a Time

In a land far, far away...
There was a team of directors who were to direct a play.  Sadly, they couldn't think of a play to do  They were sad.  Then, one of them realized that she could write a play just for them to preform.  She wrote a play.  They all lived happily ever after.
If you want to read this play, go here.

Feeling Good is Good.

This is the follow up to Blu Dot's "Good design is good."*
Today was my last day of high school.  I went to Psych, then Forensics, then Lit, and then it was all over and I threw papers in the air and got my cap and gown and went to lunch.
We're not going back.
It's sinking in, and it feels so good to know that now.  After the class of 2011 got screwed over time and time again, they can't do anything else now.  We're free.
It's kind of awesome.
This may have aired on the PA system at school today.  Maybe.
As I was turning in my responsibility card and going to get my ugly gown, Mr. Finance told me that I was one of his favourite students because I could be myself even when I was surrounded by people who were trying to be someone else.  That made me feel good.
And then I got my oh-so-cheap cap and gown and strange little medal.  And then went to Noodles and Company, which makes awesome noodles.  And Trader Joe's (Peanut butter panda puffs) and drove Lauren home and went to the library to get Pushing Dasies and watched that with Conni.  And then we went to the Quiz Bowl party.  And then I hung out with Derek.  It was, all in all, great.

*To that, I say "Good design is invisible."