You just won't know until it comes to get you.
So, a few days ago we weighed me. I was under the assumption that since August's drop from 135 lbs. to 125 lbs. (unclothed) I havn't lost any more weight. As of a few days ago my clothed weight was 120 lbs. approximating my unclothed weight at 118. We've tried to fatten me up as much as possible over the week, and we're going to weigh me before I leave tomorrow. It's a little scary, in all honesty.
During my stay here in Utah I've noticed some rather odd things. The state just got their transit system for the Olympics a few years ago (at least the train system and much of the bus system, a small bus system was in place prior) and is still very uncomfortable using it. The busses run in odd configurations to odd points with few stops. On the busses they have 1940's pulp-cartoon style advertisements informing riders about the basic etiquette of transit, particularly in relation to the train and how a bus pass works. The LRT itself is designed like a cross between a commuter train (it stretches from Salt Lake to Sandy) and a street car (the platforms are about the same hight of a normal curb and you step up three steps when you get on the train). The other thing I've noticed is the state's grasp of the internet leaves them like troglydites crawling around in a technological murk. Pretty generally people are paying more for less, more money for inferior, slower service. It's late at night and thesee thoughts aren't really well formed.
I've taken some great pictures, will post when I get them on my computer.
So, a few months ago I cleaned up some hard drive space by deleting some redundant movie project files. I wasn't planning on altering the projects any further and had already published them out to .mov files. So I thought. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the files that used to work on their own now seem hungry for all the source files, and are only 30k in size (certainly not quite what you'd expect of a 6minute full screen video). So, I'm suspecting, that I inadvertantly deleted the entire project and the published file, keeping the key file only. Fun. Looks like I'll have to do a new project for the film festival in, oh, a week.
I cleaned my room this morning, including a re-organizing of dresser drawers. In one that was stuffed full of old uniforms, at the bottom I found four things that made me stop and really think for a bit. I found a letter Erin, my first girlfriend, wrote to me near the end of our short relationship, I found a letter Kelsey, my second girlfriend, wrote to me near the end of our relationship, I found my missionary tags and white handbook, warped and bent from being soaked so many times by rain, and I found a pair of Adrianna's earings. the only thing missing would have been a momento of Brenda and I would have had sitting before me an almost perfect representation of the past five years of my life. Between all those things and moments exist volumes about the growth I've been through since High School. I know I still have a long way to go. I'm still rather arrogant about a lot of things, and I could stand to be less confrontational. For much of my mission my goal was to be a more mellow person, to take things in stride more, to get less worked up over things that would go wrong, to be less confrontational, to argue less, to be more open with sharing myself, to be more secure with my own feelings. It was the end of Kelsey's letter that really caught my attention. The letter was written in journal format, then mailed ot me as an afterthought because she didn't want to keep it, knowing she would lose it and never continue it. This was almost a year before I left for Virginia.
"Maybe he is afraid of getting help. I think he is afraid of having fun. I can't even tell if he is ever happy. He has hope, but it is burried under his worry. I know I have hope that I will be okay... or maybe I just know I'll be okay... eventually. He shelters himself away from everybody... dropping no more than a few breadcrumbs as to who he might actually be. I need to know. I hate not knowing, and maybe it is perfection in knowing... my perfection. My perfection is peace and love with everything attached... I think I just figured out why that phrase always stuck with me.
"I want to talk to him, but I think he's hidden himself too well. He has to discover how to be visable again... since he hasn't in so long. I want to talk to him, but I don't know what to say anymore."
It's been almost four years since that was written and I now sit here and wonder how much progress I've made from that point.
At work we have this really really irritating way of processig the clothing that comes through. First we pull the pallets off the truck, then break them down. The boxes, however, are mixed in their contents, so we'll have things for four or five different departments in one box. So we'll go through every box and remove all the accessories, then stack the boxes up. Once the boxes have all been rifled through we tehn go through them again, taking all the plastic wrapping off, and sorting them out on a conveyor belt according to department. Then, once that's done, we'll go through and tag them all with thsoe anti-theft tags. Then we hang them on their hangers. But wait, there's more. We also get stuff in that's already on hangers, so we hang these all up at the same time as taking the acessories out, strip the plastic off them, tag them, take them off their hangers, then hang them on our hangers. A normal shipment of two to three pallets will take all day to process, and a big shipment we may have started theft-tagging by the end of the day. It's a horribly slow process, mostly because of the number of times we handle the merchandise before it goes anywhere. A number of times we've suggested processing straight out of the box, with someone sorting, stripping, tagging, and hanging in an assembly line. At the very least, we could save a ton of time if we just combined all the sorting tasks into one, instead of unpacking and repacking everything first. This is fairly obvious to anyone who works in the warehouse, the incredible ammount of time wasted by tripple, quadruple handling. A new girl was back there with us today and she asked me why we do it the way we do. My only real response: company policy. I've asked and got no real answer. About 40 minutes later the store manager comes in, and she asks him. The first time he talks right over her, and just tells her it'll be faster if she moves the box she's unpacking closer to her. So she asks again. In a very low, unconvinced voice "well, this is the faster way of doing it..."
Yeah, they have your soul, admit it and we'll have pity on you.
I just finished reading an essay on the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple in relation to neo-noir, and just can't shake the feeling that the analysist missed the point somewhere along the line, like he has some point he wanted to make, and this movie could be abducted for that purpose. I don't know why these analists bother me, but they do. I'll read their essays and find myself frequently thinking that they just said something right, but then go on to dwell on the immaterial part of the idea, like people who go at length about symbols of "patriarchal corruption" then carry on for another page about patriarchy as the problem, instead of the (oh no, that'd be too obvious, it can't be the problem) corruption. In those cases (I've read numerous papers that all use that train of thought) I find it funny because of the unspoken implication that non-patriarchy is inherently less corrupt. Perhapse it is my upbringing, but I don't find gender to be as big a deal as so many people make it out to be as I've seen just as much corruption, violence, domination, abuse, greed, selfishness, and horror from members of both sexes, and in equal measures a distribution of all the opposing virtues. Call me simple, but we're all in this together, so let's focus on the problem.
I'm perhaps a first-class jerk for this idea that I've got, but I'm thinking for this semester's term paper I'm going to find something that destroys the common mold of film analysis as much as possible. I frankly dislike my instructor's desire to eliminate all consideration of wether or not a film is "good" or "bad" as failure to incorporate that yeaids very dubious material. Blood simple may be a Coen Brothers film, but it's honestly just "okay". The acting is passable, the story is on the high side of decent, and the pacing (this one we argued about) is poor. With the pacing, later films of theirs, Fargo comes to mind quickly, also use a very slow, hollow pacing but Fargo shows a lot more deliberation and skill in using it. Also, Blood Simple is their first film, and it's become almost an axiom that first films suffer in their pacing. Every book I've read on advice for first-time directors, producers, or script writers heavily emphasizes that pacing is very very hard to get right, that what you think is a quick pace,a nd what you intend to be a quick pace, may actually be dragging unbearably. Add to this that the Coen Brothers have also showed a certain love affair with quick, sharp pacing (The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thous) and the quick-moving developments of the last 20 minutes of Blood Simple, it's quite possible that the deliberation my essayist dwells on was really just inexperianced film making. With all that, for this terms essay I'm going to try as hard as possible to use a film such as Leprichaun in the Hood, Modern Vampires, or even Starship Troopers 2. I suspect that the essay will be based in some way around genre, so finding someting inept to maul into an essay should not be hard with the mass quantities of dreck availible.
So today has been a very strange day. I woke up in sheer disbelief over the fact that you weren't here in the city, that no ammount of wishing would fabricate the ability to get together with you tonight and do something. I was late for work again (I just can't seem to make it to those 8:30 shifts on time) but they don't seem to notice and are just pleased that I come at all. As I walked to work I saw a large rock ont he side of the road and came up with an odd idea for a story, that I'll get to. Then I got to the last intersection before work and my phone rang, but it was a wrong number. When I got to work I found a scrap piece of paper and scratched down three ideas, all thought up during the walk to work. Rocks off the Overpass. Wrong Number. What you've got in your hand. All morning all I wanted to do was go home and cry/work on my persona projects. After several hours of drowning myself in monotony and pain, I got overmyself and accepted the fate of the rest of the day. I really had the motivation this morning to call up the publishers in town and talk about their submission requirements. That small dream was crushed in its pupid form by a thousand metric pounds of depression. I think I've changed my mind about my camera. I think I'm going to go for a DV camera first. I may not be able to afford the one I'd love to have, but I'll certainly be able to get much better quality video out of a small DV cam than out of a 5mp digital. Now the problem comes in to finding one that I can afford that won't leave me wishing I'd gotten the Sony A95 anyway.
Back to the ideas. Rocks off the Overpass. There's this thing in society that a lot of us refuse to admit. A lot of us are fascinated with destruction. We're a curious people and frankly a lot of us do, at times, wonder what would happen if you took that fist sized rock and threw it in the path of an oncoming semi-truck.
Wrong Number. All the calls I get are wrong numbers.
What You 've Got in your Hands. What you're holding in your hands is a collection of what?
