You Mean There Really is a Bart!

I just found this website: Scamblog

Scamblog is dedicated to those e-mails you get detailing the plights of those people who send you e-mails with heart wrenching stories about how their entire family was killed in a car accident, now they have a few months to move $XX million out of the country before the government takes it.

Turns out that there actually are real people sending out those e-mails. It's a scam, but these aren't the bot spam we're used ot from our native soil: chainletters built to spread viruses. These are real, well orchestrated scams. If you write back showing interest, you will get a response. Or at least stand a good chance of getting a response.

The Can Just Looks Big

I'm coming to the realization that my film teacher is either one of the more un-engaging people I've met, not very good at teching film theory, or doesn't know film theory with any real meaty depth. Or she's just like my English teachers through the years and is trying to keep everything down to a level where wet meat fresh out of High School can struggle through but still pass. In my normal villanistic attitude, this means trying to explain that American Pie does not represent any pinnacle of civilization, and is more of a gatekeeper to the place where civilizations go to die.I guess we'll see what kind of year htis is going to be in film when I get my essay back in a month.

Life at 25 kph

thomas, one of my brother's buddies, got a broken down scooter a few weeks ago. Just earlier today they finally got it to the point where it'll run, but you have to pur gas directly into the engine. He brought it over and I got to ride it for about 50 feet before it cuts out. I want one.

The Bloggosphere

I've been spending some (too much) time recently cruising around the bloggospher using the "next Blog" button up at the top on the tool bar. What I've discovered is exactly what you'd expect: a lot of derelict blogs with one or two posts on them, a lot amounting to "I hate my teacher. My Teacher sux. My mom sux too." and a few that have been really neat.

One Million Footnotes has been getting more and better coverage than this little post, but I found the idea to be quite refreshing, especially since the content is actual quality.

Milk Bottle is in French and some broken English, but has a little box on the side with a new song every day. Some days it's some neat Euro-synth stuff, other days it's just weird. It caught my attention.

Lisa's Blog is a personal Blog that I stumbled into. I've kept going back because there's something about the current emotional state of the author that I find very intriguing. I see something in people, I find them fascinating.

Away With the Faeries To be honest, I've been reading a lot of Scary Go Round lately, and the fact that the author of this one is from England made me want to read it. She's kinda quirky.

Disoriented Chaos I feel I should include because I go there fairly regularly to read something. The author posted a random comment on Brenda's Blog a long while back and I decided to go see who they were and what they do. Well, we all need an occasional influx of aimless teen angst to keep us remembering what High School was like.

It doesn't matter where you kick me, I'm still coming back for more

This is probably the primary reason why George Lucas is able to do what he does. Some of the changes that have been made to the DVDs (and most of the changes in the Special Edition which are thusly inherited) feel like molestations of something that wasn't really broken, and in many cases seem like Lucas doesn't understand why these films are actually popular. Though it is significant that The Empire Strikes Back has remained pretty much intact across the two recent incarnations, the largest change being the insertion if Ian McDermot as the Emperor instead of the old lady they had orriginally used. This is a change that not only makes sense, but looks a lot better than the orriginal. I'm undecided though about the change in dialogue as I havn't seen it yet.

Still, Episode III...

Me / You = Error

There's this song that keeps playing on the radio at work, and it's kinda irritating. The lyrics are something like "I was invisible, invisible to you" but the first time I heard it I found myself coming up with some kind of "Schoolhouse Rock" song with lyrics like "I was indivisible, indivisible by 2..." Then as I was driving home form work, this being the song that was playing as I left the building, I combined the two lyrics to some crappy mathgeek love-song "I was indivisible by you." I think it'd be a top ten hit. It sounds exactly like a song that is a top ten hit, so why wouldn't it be? In fact, the girls made us listen to Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40 while we worked. I want to insert small blasting caps in my ears and set them off so I never have to listen to that again. Sure there sare three, four good songs on the countdown: Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, Dashboard Confessional, but Rick has this way of making them seem like they're even more trite then the self-revelant crap that they play. When he went off about how Spiderman, in SM2, gives up being a superhero because he's demonized by the press, then saves everyone from Doc. Oc and everyone sees he's a superhero "in other words he is 'vindicated' now here's Dashboard Confessional with 'Vindicated' fromt he Spiderman 2 soundtrack..." it stripped both the movie and the song of all emotional punch. After the song finished he made some comment about how feminine Chris Carrabba's voice is.

I hate top 40 radio.

Waiting for the lights to turn themselves on

I'm liking this whole putting up of pictures. I enjoy photos. I enjoy visual communication. So I decided to throw up a picture that I helpped a friend of the family make for a school project. The project was really just a tutorial for home schooling to demonstrate that you're capable of sending in projects and stuff. The requirement was "Darw a happy face, scan it into the computer, and send it to the e-mail adress." Well, that's boring, so when they asked for my help with the scanner, I developed this instead of the simple drawings.

No one suspects the butterfly

This is probably the saddest (as in unhappy, not pathetic) thing I have ever written. I hope that some day someone reads this and decides that it’s worth waking up tomorrow.

paycheques and songs about suicide

The cheque is in the mail. I'm writing them with my mouth, you're going to cash them and I'm going to laugh when the bounce. Everything is wonderful now. I'm dead and you're dying. Everything is funny. Sorry if I laugh when you're down, but I don't smile at other things any more. I only eat fruit. You know where you're going; I've been there before. I told you about it, but you probably tuned me out. You work for your paycheque, but you don't need to do anything. When you're paid by the hour, you only need to be there. The activity keeps you from the insanity. The insanity protects you from the world, absolutely. It's your own circle, as vicious as you want it to be. It is a different circle. It is not a perfect circle. This circle ends. You've seen the end coming from the moment you started moving away from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, you break your bones, and someone breaks your heart. You remember the old rhymes, right? All your answers were given to you when you were in the crib and bleeding on the playground. Sticks and stones my break my bones, but your words will never hurt me. This is a lie, and yet it is the truth we know. We know that words tear deeper than any knife. Sticks and stones my break my bones, but your words may kill me. I will not die by their force, but by their guidance. That is the ultimate swan song. The end is the swan song. The swan song is, at its core, a song about suicide. If you write a swan song, you know your going to die, and you're letting it happen. Resignation is suicide. You've got all those songs in your head: all the songs about suicide. You'll be sorry when I'm gone. The darker side of the biggest ride you've ever been on. Another six months I'll be unknown. Who ever thought she'd miss the ins and outs of oxygen. Music, you'll definitely miss music. They found her in her room. I laughed the loudest, who'd have known. It's always the happy child. That's one of those unspoken rules. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. When you're not squeaking, you don't get the grease. No one can see the pain beneath the facade if you don't take off the mask. That's why we disappear, and no one sees it coming. No one suspects the butterfly.

Do you like the taste of it in your mouth?

Fear technology in every way.

More Tales From The East

Well, I've been sitting around trying to find the remote for the DVD player so that I can watch the new Star Wars DVDs on the big TV with good sound (better then my laptop to make a gross understatement) but someone seems to have lost it. I can vouch confidently that it wasn't me, since eveery movie I've watched at home since I got back from vaction I've watched on my laptop, up in my room. So, couldn't find the remote, so I scanned in a bunch of pictures from my trip. Yes, Brenda, I do have the ones you asked for, I can MSN them to you whenever we're next online at the same time.


Me at the CN Tower. I think I'll use this for my new profile picture.

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Me in Ottawa. That's Gateneau on the other side of the river.


The map of the city of Chibougamau. Well, part of it at least. There's not much more to it.

So there we have it, some more random pictures of where I spent my summer vacation.

The Best Way to Die

Well, classes are going reasonably well, by my yard stick. I recieved my term project outline from my film teacher yesterday. we have to attend a film in the international section of the Calgary Film festival, then do a thorough analysis of the film. The length is 750 words. That is the part that has me smiling with an cheeky smile. I did a quick comparison, and 750 words is either a little more than my breakdown of King Arthur or a little less than my breakdown of Farenheit 9/11. While those aren't exactly pillars of grandure, showing off my writing ability, they are not very long in the sceme of things. Not having to sit and mindlessly gabble on about whatever it is I choose to see, simply to fill space, is certainly a relief. the only fear I have is that it may be too easy to go well over the mark when doing a full breakdown. We'll see.

As for Communications, it's going to require a little more focus and discipline.

Blame it on the Tetons

I should have seen this coming from a mile away. I have the day off from work, but still have school this afternoon. Im my mind I was going to be able to get all sorts of things done today, including some good progress on the website, my laundry, and some work on the book. Instead I slept unitl 11 and have to leave for class at 2. There's still time, I just won't be able to get very much done that I had planned. Whatever, I needed the sleep.

On another note, I have a lesion on the inside of my cheek, right at the very back next to my wisdom teeth (which are poking through) in the little spot that gets perpetually bitten. I've had it for about a week right now, and it really hurts. I need to stop off at the store on my way to school and buy some mouthwash.

I Didn't Take Everything, Just the Heart Shaped Piece

Well, my second Film lecture was far more entertaining than the first one. We actually covered some film theory. I'm probably going to be the guy that everyone hates because they have an answer to every question. Honestly, some teachers made me very self-conscious about that in HS, but I've decided (as of about 20 seconds ago) that I'm not going to care. I have answers and contributions to make for everything the teacher says. I know this stuff. It's in my blood.

Story Time: In grade 11 my English teacher pulled me aside after a class and politely asked me to shut my damn mouth in class because I was frustrating the other students and at least five people had individually complained about me. By name. She told me that while my appreciation of higher literary theory was a good thing, it had no place in a class where the majority of students are struggling to understand what a "plot" is. Outwardly I didn't give a flying hoot about what she said, but inwardly I found it actually affecting me over the process of time. I didn't stop contributing to class, but I grew very self conscious about answering "too many" questions.

I suspect that my new goal to allow myself to be a know-it-all will probably incur some backlash from other students, but I'm four years older than these kids, their opinion of me is the last thing I'm concerned about. Plus I can probably make some money off them when cram time comes. Ah, sweet capitalism: exploiting the needy since 1327.

In the Aftermath of the Supernova

I was a little disappointed at what happened after my film class: everyone got up and left as fast as they could. No sitting around, no chit-chat, no discourse on the merits of the film, just up and gone. It'd be great if a bunch of people started going out for like dinner or something afterwards and discussed the film just viewed.

You beg me to stop, but I was never that nice

I'm at school right now. I got out of my lecture about an hour early, because it's the first class so we basically just covered the usual "If you plagiarize, I will kick you @$$" that first week consists of. Now I know where all my classes are physically located, so I shouldn't have any more days of wandering around aimlessly wishing I had actually looked this crap up a week ago like I intended on doing.

In other news: I have Hunger. It's a condition that generally goes into temporary remission after treatments, but never entirely leaves your system. I was officially diagnosed early in life and have lived with it almost consistantly since then. Every now and then I'll remain in remission for days at a time, but htis remission is actually a false feeling where the condition has set in particularly hard and is in the process of doing much harm to your system, like the guy at the concert with one too many beers in his gut and one hundred too many pounds on his frame.

Aswell, if I walk around with my headphones on and no music, I can pick up just about every electrical field that I walk through. Those security detectors at the entrance to the library? I know when they're just joshing you. If thins is power, then we have nothing to fear from the world at large.

The Polls are in...

...Hotcakes aren't a big seller.

I went swimming this evening and had a chance to use the scale at the athletic centre. To clarify something, it's rare the I have the chance to weigh myself. We're not exactly a family that's overly concerned with our weight so when our bathroom scale broke when I was 10 (as a result of me and my brothers jumping on it to see how many times we could get the needle to go around the dial) it was never replaced. Earlier in the year I had a chance to weigh myself at the doctor's office and came in at just under 140 pounds, a reasonable weight and up from my several year average of 135. Tonight I weighed in at 124.6 pounds.

Photoliscious

I decided to scan in a bunch of pictures from my recent trip.

It is my personal opinion that this is the best picture I have ever taken.

Two kids making out at the back of the bus was our entertainment from Sudbury Ontario to Sault Saint Marie.

My riding the ferry from Vancouver to victoria. Incidentally the guy in the make out picture is the guy taking this picture.

Niagara Falls. It was a long walk from the bus depot to here.

A long time friend in Montreal, Kim. everyone loves Kim.

An interesting shot of people on the bus.

Yah, there we go.

Waste of Space

I was just walking away from my film studies class when I heard the guy in front of me say "Yah I'm really going to drop this class." His girlfried walking next to him says "Why, don't you wan tto see North By Northwest?" "No, not really. They're not showing any Tarentino."
I am a fan of Quentin Tarantino, make no mistake, but this is the same mentality that I rage against over his films and also films like the Matrix: they attract widespread attention, grap the public interest, and enter the mainstream lexicon where everyone promptly ignores how they fit into the bigger sceme of things. My anger is that these film do not open a wide new world of film making and film apreciation to the general public, they form toxic little bubbles of talent and cheap rip-offs. this is the reason why I'm aprehensive about Sky Captain. I want to see a movie with such a novel idea succeed (the entire film was shot against a blue sceen) for concept alone, similar to the way that I was rooting for the re-make of Psycho to be good. But I also want to see it tank like nothing else so that 2006 will not see us staring down the barrel of 20 films shot on blue screen only.

Coming in From Everywhere

I use Re_Invigorate to track the visitors to this site, and I've noticed that recently I've gotten some visitors to the site who I don't personally know. One from California was referred here through a link that I can no longer find, and I've received a number of hits from somewhere in the west Pacific. Aswell, I did a quick google of "Lemonfrosted" and found that I was linked by a guy whos Blog is titled "The Disney Blog." He quoted a portion of my ponderings on "The Nightmare Before Christmas" then added a short little comment of his own. It felt good to think that there are total strangers who see my websites.

As a quick update, the job is going well. It's monotonous, and the warehouse iss backed up beyond reason (about a month worth of shipments have yet to be processed) essentially because of supply problems (they keep sending us more stuff than the store has room for) rather than processing problems. Just yesterday I cleared out seven or eight racks that were still sitting out on the sales floor by the time I went home. Even if we process everything in the warehouse, there's nowhere in the store to put it all. Aside from that, I just need to show up and get a lot of work done. I don't need to deal with customers or any of that crap.

Also, I'm currently working on a few new Blog templates and have started a test blog http://goingforaspin.blogspot.com/ to display said templates and get feedback before applying them to real Blogs. There's nothing there right now, as far as something new. I'll work on it tonight.

Salvation is at hand for the traveling man

So, I went back tot he clothing store that I might have mentioned a while ago, and got hte job in the warehouse. I start tomorrow at 8:30, then have my first class at 3:00. then I think we're going to a reading tomorrow night as well. It'll be interesting. At the reading last night Mark asked me to "draw a kitty" so I did.

I'd say don't wait for it, but there's not much you can do

I possibly just had the worst night ever. My parents made borscht yesterday. The whole house smelled of it pretty strongly. At a little after three I woke up because of the smell, but didn't figure out that the smell was the reason for another couple hours. Opened my window and by sometime after seven it was cleared out enough that I was able to get to sleep. Something tells me it's going to be a long, tired day.

It's not actually an orriginal idea...

... I just plagiarized something you don't recognize.

I spent some time rifling through my boxes in the basement looking for an old copy of Chart Magazine with Matthew Good on the cover. I didn't find the magazine, but did manage to find a whole bunch of very odd things in the mess of my former life. One was a sheet of paper with scribbled writing all over both sides. Normally I'm averse to finding these sorts of things because I have no idea what to expect out of it. I could have been on a streak that week and managed to write something of weight that I just never was able to do anything significant with, or I dribbled schlock and garbage out of my mouth and it stained the page beyond repair. this one is a mix. From a two liner that became the title for this post, to this attempt at comprehending my mental illness:

My brain doesn't like me. I'm not my chemical imbalance, but it's one of my defining characteristics. As for my brain, the rest of me is expendable as long as it can keep doing it's thing.

There's some rambling on the page about the nature of art, something really weird about ciphers and riddles, which I actually think I'll write out:

The cipher lies in the numbers and riddles. The patterns are the riddles and the numbers are yes and no: completely down 0 - 100 and the same for the stranger. Likewise wholeness is found from [0] to [1001] because grass is greener on the other side from the fence and (the words 'left' and 'right' are written overtop of each other here) again. This requires a reconciliation and amalgamation. 0 - 100 is too limited and the old must be abandoned and expanded. Zero is still 0.

There are number of points inside that piece where there are random letters in between lines and some letters are circled. I think the letters spell out the word "right" but I'm not certain of that. Something tickles my memory and says that this was part of some more complex visual piece. It's not in my portfolio, so I don't know what happened to the rest. To try and date this I can guess that it's going to be after September 2000 because of the references to "complete strangers" a phrase I didn't start using until after the Tegan and Sara concert where I snuck backstage. Two pieces on here use that word phrase, one which occupies the entire front and another titled Stalker.

Stalker
You don't know me
I'm a complete stranger
I saw you on the train yesterday
You never saw me looking at you
You don't know me
I know you
Or like to think I do

Complete Stranger
I'm a complete stranger
Standing in the distance I see everything
I'm a silent radar
Scratching chicken on paper in the dark
I'm dragging nothing in your bag of tricks
My bag of tricks is yellow and green
I'm colours foreign to your heart
We're old souls in bodies too young to die
We're the illegible pen marks on a cocktail napkin
We're the ideas hacked out of clay in between thoughts
We're the things you never see coming
We're the confusion over where the best prawns are served
We're sushi in the afternoon
We're a bag of cookies and a can of whipped cream at 2-am
We're dancing reindeer and Santa in Florida
We're the commercials they didn't show you
We're inflatable pool chairs in shark infested waters
We're one step ahead of ourselves
We're inspired
We're pawn to our muses
What are we again?
we adore you/we want to be you/we want wholeness/everything together as one piece of scrap metal/the junkyard tied to itself/forgotten and unseen/fully completely/people you don't know/taking count of everything/you have never known

Cost Confirmed

So, my dad got home from vacation and I showed him my new headphones. He said that he used to have a pair exactly like them, just green, back when he was a teenager. He paid $13 for his and earned at his job $1.75/hr. that equals out to about ten hours of work, so, in terms of purchasing power, the equivalent would be going out and buying a $70-$80 pair of headphones.

Overwhelming Loss of Consciousness

I'm in a pretty bad state physically right now. My insides have been twitching all day long, like I got some kind of barbed metal ball stuck in there and I keep jolting it, resulting on the barbs pulling my entrails and other vital organs out of place. Add to that that I haven't been eating well, and somewhere in the past three months I managed to lose ten precious pounds. I should clarify there for any strangers reading this (I know there are none, I check my stats) that I don't have many pounds free to lose. At the beginning of the summer I was 135. I am now 125 lbs. and 5'11" tall. I'm already below the recommended weight for my age and height, so losing is not a good thing. So, now I think I'm going to go scrounge the cupboards to see if I can find some caloric-intake possibly definable as "tasty."

Small Pleasures

I went to Value Village today and aquired a pair of old headphones for $2.00. They're the Old style headphones. they actually look alot like the pair in this picture, but are slightly different.
The old, massive sized stereo plug was a little beat up (and incompatable with most current hardware) so I bought replacement plugs (1/8" mini) from Radio Shack and spent the majority of the afternoon trying to cull my grade ten soldering skills out of the closet. I was never that good at soldering to begin with, so this was about as arduous a process as you can find for a regular saturday afternoon. However, in the end, I, with alot of help from a friend, was able to get everything pieced together and now have a working pair of orriginal retro headphones, fitted for modern devices, without paying the $90 stores are asking for the new replicas.

The Air We Breathe

Outside it smells like smoke. I got to the party and the first thing I did was went and looked for you. It's funny, in a sort of way, how everywhere I go I still expect to find you there. I'm not sure if that classifies as unhealthy or if it's just a sign of how much I gave of myself to you. It's funny how that works. How it's working out. I'm supposed to be sitting here trying to figure out what's best for me, and all I can think of is the same old feeling I've always felt: I don't know anyone here, and I don't fit in here. You made me fit in. I fit with you. We fit in. As much as people like us ever fit anywhere. Rightly so I was the square peg to a round hole once. I suppose that may be my lot in life. Do square pegs need to find square holes? Are there any square holes? Or do square pegs need to learn how to fit in round holes? Was I the one worth leaving? Questions. The only people who can answer these questions are the very people who are least equipped to do so. Heartache is foreign to anyone who isn't experiencing it at that very moment. The moment heartbreak leaves the memory of it fades and the intensity of the moment vanishes. Once it's gone we forget how all-consuming it is. We forget the small details of how it feels to wake up a million times a day to the fact that a part of your soul has just been removed with less-than-sharp instruments. It may be an illusion, a result of pride, or it may very well be a fact. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. It is fact. It is a part of the big picture. If those who see the big picture weep at loss, then how much more right have we to weep both at our loss and our ignorance? I said once that I, in some respects, enjoy crying. I said that with every time I cry a few motes and beams are washed out. I still stand by that. I've washed a lot out of my eyes lately, but there's still a lot in there. For now, I suppose I'm going to hide here until someone finds me. It's what I want. I want someone to come find me. I want someone to give me a reason. I'm not a good enough reason for myself. Maybe that's where I should start. I should start doing things because I'm a good enough reason to be a better person. Maybe I should start tonight. Go find someone and make a new friend. I'm scared. I'll admit that. I'm always scared. Well, maybe not always, but the idea of being alive, of being part of this all, is terrifying. It's only the good reasons in life that keep me going. I need to be a good enough reason. Once, many years ago, I counted out reasons to stay alive. The list was ten long (you were there), and all ten reasons were names. I wasn't a name on that list. Maybe I should be. I think that would be a good place to start. Ten good reasons to stay alive, and my name at the top. Or at least on there somewhere. I would ask you what you think. If you said put it at the top, it would be there before you finished and wouldn't come down for a very long time. I need to decide for myself where I belong on that list. Do I have the courage to put myself on that list and then stand by it? It's something in the air. The air smells like smoke, things burning. Forest fire sweeping across the sides of the mountains. We used to freak out a lot more when those would happen. We still do get really uptight about it. but only because we're not trees. We don't have the foresight or the experience of a tree. We don't know how a tree sees it's life. If like to believe that Father has given the trees a view of their existence that enables them to accept forest fires. They, in my mind, have much to teach us. They do not see the ashes of valuable trees wasted in the wake of the fire. They see precious nutrients, the remnants of their bodies, piled hight to feed their young. They see the sunlight, precious vital sunlight, and water freed up for the saplings growing gently in the ground. All that they had they have given up do that the future generations can have it and benefit from it. How much do we give up for others, and do we recognize how much others have given up for us? These questions are personal, I suppose, which would make the answers equally personal. I don't know what to do with them. Bank them away and hope they make sense some day.

Possibilities

You whispered possibilities of everything falling appart.
To be honest, somewhere inside me dreamed it would happen.
Then you could come back to me.
If that's even possible.

Go downtown, catch the early movie

I've always wanted to be in the situation where I was the only person in the theatre for the movie. That or just me and the people I'm with. I've come very, very close a few times in the past, where it's been my group of a few people, then one or two other small groups, or four individuals or so. When it's a couple other like-minded groups, then it's basically like being alone because they're heckling the movie as well. But there's something about being alone, you're not even overlapping heckling. Right now I'm in the theatre for King Arthur (look on LemonFrosted for my thoughts on the movie) and I'm the only one here. There's still a while before the movie starts, so there's a chance that someone else might come in, but part of the reason why I picked King Arthur is because I suspected that it would be pretty dang close to empty, especially for the noon show, which are primarily attended by families with small children and birthday parties. All this kind of junk I learned from working at a movie theatre for two years. If anyone does come in, I can bet nickels to dimes they'll be a group of three 15 year old boys trying to eek the last drops out of their summer vacation before school starts next week.
Oh, there we go, two fifteen year old boys. Off by a count of one.
I guess I should cover all bases and mention that the other, more rare, attendees at these movies is the "dirty middle-aged guy with no where to go" and the even less common are the people like me who'll go to just about any movie just because it's playing. Probably the only restriction that I'll put on that is any movie where the theatre is going to be filled with small children, or if The Prinz would fit seamlessly into the male lead.
Wow, unprecedented, a middle aged couple just came in, together. I'm going to guess that they didn't want to go to the same movie as the kids were going to, so they sent them in and then picked a movie they could see that would be ending around the same time.
Another group of four teenage boys.
A second drifting middle-aged man (one slipped in and sat at the very back earlier)
The theatre is now playing Michael Jackson's Billy Jean. Right on. It's all about pre-Dangerous MJ. I will honestly say in public that I wish I could dance like MJ. I try. Napoleon Dynamite just made me want to learn how to dance all the more.
Aw crap, things are starting to fill up. Not bad kind of full, but there's actually people here now. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get away with having my laptop open during the movie. Maybe next week, once school is back in, I'll be able to pull this off on a Wednesday, or Thursday. Still, the audience is over 50% teenage boys. The only females are the one in the middle-aged couple and a late-thirties woman sitting alone down the row from me. Oh, she's the vanguard for a group. And a senior couple just came in. One of the things that I found really, really odd was that one of the largest demographics attending The General's Daughter were senior women. I'm not sure what it was. The subject matter (rape, murder, more rape) wasn't exactly what I thought of as grandmother fare.
I wonder what will happen if I do just keep working on my laptop as the movie plays. Lights are dimming,

It just hurts that much

I wake in the morning and wonder why you're not there.
I go outside and wonder why you're not there.
I dial the phone and wonder why you're not there.
I travel the country and wonder why you're not there.
I come home and wonder why you're not there.
I go to your house and wonder why you're not there.
I visit our old haunts and wonder why you're not there.
I walk down the street and wonder why you're not there.
I stroll past our restaurant and wonder why you're not there.
I look out the window and wonder why you're not there.
I go to the movies and wonder why you're not there.
I sit in class and wonder why you're not there.
I fly to the moon and wonder why you're not there.
I come back to earth and wonder why you're not there.
I open my eyes and wonder why you're not there.
I fall asleep at night and wonder why you're not there.
I dream of being awake and wonder why you're not there.
I dream of being at your house and wonder why you're not there.
I dream of walking down the street and wonder why you're not there.
I dream of coming home and wonder why you're not there.
I wake in the morning and wonder why you're not there.

Work and the Ordinary World

The textbook for my film class came with a CD filled with video interview with successful producers, production designers, directors, and other people involved in the making of a movie, all talking about their job, and then their advice to independent and new film makers. It makes me want to have access to the resources I need to make all the little ideas that are floating around in my head. Then I remember that I don't have a normal job, let alone one that I fantasize about. I was offered a job at a local gas bar. It's easy. I've done it before. But, because I've done it before, I know that it sucks. A toy store that's not too far from here is hiring as well. I'm going to go check out the toy store.

School

Well, the wonders of having a laptop are becoming manifest, as I write this from the lobby of the University Library. I know that there's not really anyhting overly spectacular about that, but it's something special to me, to be back in school. Sure, school doesn't actaully start until next week, but until then I can enjoy coming down to campus and spending large ammounts of money on required textbooks and software.It's a sord of sadistic fun. Really, I've done everything I need to do down here, but I'm paying five dollars for my parking, so I'm going to eek as much time out of it as possible, taking amoment to write this and to comment on all the freshmen being paraded around campus by freak SU volunteers in yellow. Technically I should be in one of those groups right now, being led around like a grade schooler on a field trip. "Allright kids, everybody hold hand wioth their travel buddy." The reason why I'm not is because 100% of people polled said that orientation is a waste of time. Plus I'm four years older than most of these kids anyway.
I just spent about 40 minutes talking with a guy who came over to tell me I have an ice computer. He showed me a trick or two to use in Garage Band, so I'm excited to actually be able to use the program.