Temporarily Emancipate Yourself From Incapacity

I just found a nasty cut on my leg and I don't remember when or how I got it. Should I be worried?

Today is also Halloween. (pause) Eh. If the devil really wanted to possess me today (because Halloween is just that kind of holiday) he wouldn't have waited this long to do it. He's had his opportunity. Go pick some other poor soul to bully.

Anywayyyy, onto more important, more pertinent issues.

On the issue of time - how many times have I avoided something or put it off for later and justified my actions by claiming that "I don't have time for it right now?" To be honest, a lot. It comes with being a procrastinator - you never have enough time to do anything because you spend so much time not doing something. If that makes any sort of sense in a parallel universe.

The thing is, we never have time to do all that we want to do. And usually, we don't do all that we want to do, no matter how hard we try (or don't try). I definitely include myself in this category because I am inexplicably bad at managing all the hours in a day. But as I get older, I'm starting to realize that no time is really the "right" time to do something.

Some of the best, most worthwhile experiences in my life have come from simply following my gut instinct on something totally random and going with it, rather than pondering whether or not to do something for hours and coming up with no resolution at the end of it anyway.

So, in order to maximize productivity and not waste time (because I am just that much of a victim of the utilitarian world), I think I'm going to leave a lot of my life decisions to a specific mindset that I've designed for myself.

But first, let me provide a brief outline of how I used to think about doing things:

First, I would think to myself: 1) Do I want to do this?

Second, 2) How badly do I want to do this?

Next, 3) Can I do this?

And lastly 4) How can I do this in the allotted time that I have?

Sounds complicated, right? My new system is obviously much more efficient and doesn't require half as much thinking. Here goes:

1) Do I want to do this?
1a) Is this important to me?

If the answer is yes to both (sometimes even either) of those questions, then the thinking stops there.

If you want to do something badly enough, and you convince yourself to commit to that project early on, then usually that's more enough to get you started on it. Time shouldn't stand in the way of something that inspires true passion or dedication. It wouldn't. It just ain't that important.

If you want to do something, you go out there and you do it. And if you end up dependent on drugs or severely sleep-deprived, to the point where you need serious medical help due to mental instability, then you probably just didn't work hard enough. Just kidding. Hopefully you're not that crazy and you know how to keep things in moderation as well as in perspective. Trying to accommodate all your life's hopes, goals, and dreams in one go (i.e., one lifetime) isn't always going to lead to success. Sometimes you'll fail. Fail badly, even. But that shouldn't be an excuse.

And neither should not having enough time.

I want to become the kind of person who, when committed to something, sees it all the way through.

That's my ultimate goal in life.

Well that, and attaining full-fledged independence.

EW, go eat dirt.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20235010,00.html

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Twilight-Takes-Over-Entertainment-Weekly-9480.html

Maybe I would have more respect for EW if they didn't put a giant poster of Twilight on their cover in July. Call me biased but I think that pretty much destroys any credibility they might have had.

How can I take a movie seriously when one of the two main leads has no facial expression whatsoever and the other played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter 4?


And coming straight from the author herself:

''I just know I'm too much of a wuss for Stephen King's books,'' admits Stephenie Meyer, sweet-voiced author of Eclipse, the third book in her hugely successful ''vampire love saga'' for young adults. ''I'm waaay too chicken to read horror.''

(Who's described as "sweet-voiced" these days? I can totally picture her answering all their "serious" literary questions with a high-pitched valley girl's accent that becomes even more pronounced when she goes into a rant about Edward Cullen, who is apparently Meyer's --ooh, the Twilight god(dess) -- gift to humanity (or just really desperate 12-year-old girls). Like, OMFG! Can it, like, get any better than this?!)

EW: Is it true you've never seen a vampire movie?

"I've seen little pieces of Interview with a Vampire when it was on TV, but I kind of always go YUCK! I don't watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror. And I think I've seen a couple of pieces of The Lost Boys, which my husband liked, and he wanted me to watch it once, but I was like, It's creepy!"

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the author whose claim to fame is her best-selling series on ("YUCK!") vampires. Now that's creepy.

P.S. And I can't fully trust anyone who doesn't watch R-rated movies (especially if it's because they consider them to be "creepy"). I mean, that's (at least) half the good stuff right there. What's even more sad (well, not for me) is that I've been watching R-rated movies since I was like 10. And she couldn't get through Anne Rice?

Lame.

Sad truth: There's never enough time in the day to do everything I want to do.

And I'm pretty sure I bombed my midterm today. The only thing worse than bombing a midterm that's worth 30% of your grade is knowing full well you bombed it while you're still taking it. It's like watching an accident you knew was going to happen unfold right before your eyes. Not a good feeling.

You know how they say English majors are really good at bullshitting their arguments? Prior to today I've always taken some offense to that because I usually know what I'm talking about when I write for my English classes. But today was different. Today I fulfilled all those expectations and more.

Finally finished editing for Jacqui's film today. She called me up around 2 p.m. and I didn't get back to my apartment until 11 p.m., how crazy is that? Who knew it would be such a hassle (i.e. almost nine hours' worth of hassle) to edit a mere FIVE minutes of film? Geez Louise, how do professional filmmakers do it? About halfway throughout the whole thing I almost felt like giving up and walking away from an unfinished project....again.

But I didn't! Good for me. Let's hope the trend continues. Especially in time for NaNoWriMo.

Then again, I have a midterm on Tuesday, a test on Wednesday, and an application that I have yet to fill out. Man, I am so exhausted right now I can't even think about waking up early to study for that quiz. This weekend has been really draining, practically non-stop action. I'm really craving some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, college life and peace and quiet don't normally go together.

Among Other Things, Let The Right One In

You know, although I can't picture living in L.A. permanently anytime in the near future (or ever, if I'm to be completely honest), I have to admit that it's a really good place to go to school. Or even just as a place of exploration. I don't think I'd be too out of bounds if I said that every day here is an adventure. Okay, that's somewhat of a small lie; some days are definitely more mundane than others. But for the most part I'm really enjoying my time here.

Case in point, I love it when random (randomly good, that is - randomly bad, not so much) things happen, and these past couple of days alone have proved to have great potential in that arena. For instance -

1. I was walking back from Ralph's yesterday with a bag of groceries when the guy striding along next to me turned and asked if I played the piano. I was momentarily puzzled by the seemingly irrelevant nature of his question (after all, it wasn't like I was carrying a keyboard) but then I realized that I was wearing my piano belt. (Aha, mystery solved.)

Anyway, a conversation regarding the piano and music turned to a relatively lighthearted discussion about good and evil (yeah, I don't know how it happened either - and yeah, "lighthearted" and "good" and "evil" all in the same sentence? Inconceivable! But it really wasn't heavy-handed, to tell you the truth) and how it would really suck if select individuals had the power to read everyone's minds. Why, you ask? Let me inhabit the mind of a 12-year-old boy and enlighten you with my infinite Spiderman wisdom: "With great power comes great responsibility!"

After about 7 minutes discussing good and evil, he suddenly noticed the package of taco shells in my grocery bag. Long story short, he ended up telling me how to make homemade hard taco shells as well as homemade guacamole and where to get the best packaged kind (Trader Joe's) if I'm not up to chopping the onions and tomatoes and making mulch out of a $2 avocado.

I don't know about you, but getting random cooking tips from someone you've never even seen before (his name turned out to be Andrew - till we meet again Andrew!) is pretty cool for an ordinary Thursday afternoon. And you know what else? That piano belt is a great conversation starter. Someone else asked me if I played the piano today.

2. Today I saw a parrot. No joke. And it wasn't a wild parrot flying around (although that would have been a sight to see too, I'm sure). I suspect it was a pet parrot. So I was on my lunch break at work, minding my own business, when I noticed the woman sitting across from me feeding a french fry to a creature sitting (standing?) on top of a rectangular cage. Turns out that creature was a parrot. Don't think that's random? How often do you see parrots on this campus? Squirrels, yes, but parrots are more of a novelty. I like novelties.

3. On Bruin Walk - spotted a girl and a guy sitting at one of the tables dressed in hot pink elephant suits. Actually, just elephant heads - they were wearing regular clothes underneath. They were being filmed by someone else and the whole trio attracted some pretty weird stares as more people passed by. I think they were making a movie for Campus Moviefest. I only caught one line of the dialogue - I think I heard "And this is why we shouldn't go into Iraq" - but it was still a pretty intriguing experience.

Oh, and one last reason why I love L.A. (as a temporary, rather than permanent, home): Last night I got to see Let The Right One In, the Swedish vampire film that recently won a bunch of awards at several film festivals, including the Rotten Tomatoes Consensus Award (it has 100% on rottentomatoes.com - now granted, it only has about ten reviews) and Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.

I didn't know much about it going in - I didn't even bother to watch the trailer, partially because I feel like a lot of trailers these days give a misleading impression of the actual story, probably for marketing reasons more than anything else - but I must say, Let The Right One In is one of the best horror movies I've seen in a long time. Watching it reminded me of how much I love foreign films, sometimes because of the sheer fact that they're foreign (or "different"), but mainly because more often than not they deviate from typical Hollywood clichés. Even though many (okay, most) of the horror scenes were rather campy and purposely outrageous, I really enjoyed watching them on-screen. I don't know, maybe I have a thing for vampire movies, but my usual dislike for slasher flicks (or gratituous violence for no real purpose other than to shock the audience) was momentarily suspended when I watched certain scenes last night. Although - the movie itself was by no means a slasher film and thinking back on it, most of the serious violence occurred offscreen anyway.

The casting was really well done (and the cinematography, my god! I love snow and anything to do with snow even more now) and I loved the actress who played Eli. There was just something truly alien about her that drew the audience in- maybe it was in the way her eyes would change colors depending on the lighting in the scene (sometimes they looked completely black, other times a darkish blue) or how she looked so young but sounded and smiled like someone who's seen the ways of the world. I don't know, she was just good. It made me wonder how old the actual actress is. I tried googling her afterwards but nothing really came up (a downside of watching non-mainstream movies).

The romance in the film was a good offset to the dark undertone as well - not too overboard but still a good backdrop for the story that unfolds. I remember one reviewer on rottentomatoes.com comparing it to Twilight (it's here, actually: http://www.horror.com/php/article-2088-1.html ) and I was somewhat irritated because when I think of Twilight, I think one-dimensional. Stephanie Meyer doesn't ever really show Edward gnawing on a human's neck or describe what his face looks like right after he's had a meal (i.e. not very pleasant, unless you enjoy the sight of blood). In Let The Right One In, vampires are savages, serious predators who aren't afraid to hunt and destroy in order to survive (as in, when they bite you, it hurts), and the filmmakers don't hesitate to show that. But at the same time, their savage nature is heavily nuanced, as in one minute I was thinking, "Man, that Eli girl is downright VICIOUS!" (does the fact that I say that somewhat with a sense of glee make me a bad person?) and another minute, "Oh, poor little vampire girl...She desperately needs a hug."

Nuance, nuances, nuanced. Man, I love that word. I think all good things should have nuances. No, scratch that. I think all good things do have nuances. I refuse to see things in black and white for the same reasons why I dislike the blockbuster genre (as a general rule - though there are certain blockbuster movies I enjoy) : 1) it's BORING (predictability = somewhat lame) and 2) it's not realistic. Now by realistic I don't mean realistic in the sense that it could happen in real life- that would totally rule out any sci-fi or fantasy potential, which are two genres I've grown to really like. But realistic as in: Can I see that happening in an alternate universe where all things are possible and yet somehow life still makes sense at the very end? It's a paradox, I know, and I'm not so sure I understand it myself. But it's like that one Nietzsche quote:

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

Now replace "love" with "movies" and that's what I mean when I use the word "realistic." Not every detail in a film has to make sense in the long run (although the ones that do are usually good films), but when too many of the details veer offtrack (or are just plain absurd), the sheer lack of coherency, as well as believability (in the same loose sense that I've been using these rather concrete terms), renders the story invalid. Now this is not to say that I don't enjoy a little absurdity every now and then, because I do (I really liked The Science of Sleep, for example, and half of that movie went right over my head. The style of Requiem for a Dream was also appealing for the same reason. And don't get me started about The Dreamers). I just don't like walking away from a movie feeling like the filmmaker made it just because he could, that he made the movie because he's a filmmaker and that's what filmmakers do. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If you're going to do something, make some effort to do it well.

To some extent, I believe in Oscar Wilde's philosophy, or the notion that all art is useless for the mere purpose of being art, but still, that art should mean something to you at the end of the day. It should mean something to its audience. There's nothing worse than taking the time to experience something (whether it be a movie, a book, a song) and feeling completely indifferent about it afterwards. I'd rather hate a movie than feel indifferent about it. I would rather think "This movie sucks because of this or that" rather than "I could have totally spent the last two hours doing something else and it wouldn't have made any difference at all." Now that's sad.

Speaking of which, that's sort of how I felt when I read the last Twilight book, Breaking Dawn. I was reading it because it existed (and yes, my curiosity does often get the better of me), not because it offered anything particularly innovative or worthwhile. The writing started off terrible. The story became terrible. And the characters all became mere caricatures of themselves - i.e. without nuances.

So please, don't compare Let The Right One In to Twilight, of all things. For me, it gave off a more Interview with a Vampire vibe than anything else.

So I'm going to be really nerdy and talk about something we learned in English today. Ironically, it doesn't really have anything to do with English (surprise) but it's definitely one of the more practical pieces of advice I've been given in a long time.

True fact: The days get shorter as you get older.

We were talking about the difference between a child's perception of the world compared to that of an adult (while discussing one of Blake's more famous lines: "The child is father of the man"...so I guess it was somewhat English-related) and we reached the conclusion that the reason why the days seem so much longer when you're a kid is because for children, everything feels new. There's so much to do and you have no real perception of time so you can go on doing whatever you feel like indefinitely.

But when you're an "adult" (however you choose to perceive that word -- I for one don't believe that most 18-year-olds are adults. Technically, for the sake of being able to vote and buy cigarettes, sure. Intellectually, probably not. Some of the most immature people I know are eighteen and over. Speaking of which, I definitely was not an adult at 18), sometimes time seems to be the only thing that matters. Everything revolves around it. You're almost always aware of it. Therefore, the days get shorter and shorter.

According to Professor Lopez, there are only two real ways to fight this phenomenon. They are:

1. People you really don't like. Hang out with them more frequently. Because when you're with them, time automatically slows down. The ticking hand couldn't be moving more slowly. Problem solved. The day has become long again.

2. People you do like. Hold off on seeing them. As long as you postpone seeing them for a while, it allows you to enjoy your own sense of mortality for longer, especially during that period when they are fluttering in and out of your life.

Got books?

I've recently discovered something about myself that I probably knew all along but just never really wanted to admit.

I can't dislike people who like to read. I just can't. It doesn't matter how far-fetched their ideas are or how different their opinions might be from my own - as long as they have that one little detail connecting me back to them then I just can't dislike them. I have nothing but admiration for people who are genuinely able to enjoy the written word. Maybe that's a dumb reason to like someone (or not to like someone) but I always end up giving heavy readers the benefit of the doubt. They can say something totally outrageous and offensive to me and I will actually think about what they said instead of dismissing them in my head like I would someone who never reads books.

It's biased for sure but that's the way it is.

The sad truth is that I'm extremely weird when it comes to first impressions. These are always the things I notice first:

1) Hands. (Call me weird but I believe that you can tell a lot about someone just by looking at their hands.)
2) Laugh.
3) Speaking and/or writing ability (and then I can usually tell how much they read).

Salmon and Politics

This morning, as Jess and I were about to enter Royce 164 for English class, I turned to her and said, "I bet you anything that J.D. Lopez (our professor, as he is informally known) is going to spend a good portion of the class talking about the second debate today."

And lo and behold, before the classroom was filled and the seats were even warm, he turned to everyone and asked, "So what did you guys think about the second debate?"

And that was the first twenty minutes of English.

Oh J.D., you never cease to crack me up. I love that class more than I love ice cream on a hot day. Okay, that was a pretty bad metaphor considering I don't even love ice cream that much (even on hot days).

On a different note, it was my turn to cook for the apartment today. I wanted to make salmon and I kinda forgot what I usually put in it (even though I've cooked it numerous times before) so I called my mom to ask her. She didn't pick up. I called my dad. He picked up after four rings. I said, "Dad, how do you cook salmon?" And he's like, "What? I can't hear you." So I had to repeat the question four times before he finally got it (he's a little hearing-impaired). He gave me an acceptable answer and hung up. An hour later, my mom calls back. I ask her the same question. She says a whole bunch of stuff and then concludes it with, "You're a smart person. You'll figure it out." Thanks, Mom. What about all those times you directed comments at me like, "How could a smart person be so stupid?" But it's okay, 'cause she's still my mom and I love her.

The salmon turned out pretty well. If I had seasoned it earlier (and for longer) it probably would have tasted better but honestly, who has time to do things early these days?

I gotta go. I'll finish this later.