Writing about writing, and about writing on this weblog specifically. kind of pretentious and self-involved, but oh well!

Hmmm, each entry here been significantly longer than the one that came before it, an alarming trend that threatens flood the internet with overwrought, introspective text if it continues! (although this probably happened long ago, and with little help from me.) I had a similar problem with my first weblogthing, but it eventually slowed down to a regular pace, and then eventually to an infrequent crawl.
Today, I'm attempting to get things down to a manageable level early so that I'll be able to keep churning out something every day.
Soon I will also stop talking about this silly weblogthing and hopefully arrange words in a much more interesting sequence.
However, that day ain't today.
Instead I'm going to talk about why I picked "slowseason" as the address for this page. It won't take long.
The main reason was that apokalipsis.blogspot.com, nottheend.blogspot.com, endtimes.blogspot.com and other title-appropriate names were already taken. I briefly considered taking a name with a number in it, like my roommates Ed (twelvegates.blogspot.com) and Grant (50fifty.blogspot.com), but I sort of hate numbers a little bit. And anyways, there are too many weird numbers associated with The Apocalypse already.
So I just started throwing words together in my mind, and slowseason stuck. I don't really like it much now, but it's the address, and changing it would just make me harder to find again.
To me slowseason is kind of about California, where it's basically all one long springsummer, with none of the wild variance Erin and I saw coming across the Northern U.S. It also ties in with my feelings about an apocalypse or revelation -- they don't usually come all at once in a big climactic burst like in the movies. Mostly things unfold so slowly it's hard to notice, but things are happening, things are changing and the revolution, the revelation, is blooming right in front of us, even when we feel stagnant and like we're going nowhere. Everything's building, and that's life. That's the slowseason

. . . dot blogspot dot com.

In which I reveal the reasons for the name of this blog. and talk about some other stuff, probably.
When I studied in Granada, all my classes were taught in Spanish, and at the very beginning of my grammar course we were learning how to talk about time -- "how long since," "how long until," etc. For homework we had to construct sentences using these phrases and then we went around the room and each read one of them.
I was drawing a creative blank while working on the assignment, most likely due to the fact that I was starting it five minutes before class, and wrote a lot of trite, uninteresting sentences -- "I have been in Spain for a month," that sort of thing. But I managed to come up with one that had a glimmer of promise, and that was the one that I read in class.
"How long until the apocalypse?" is the rough translation of what I meant to say in Spanish.
But I changed a crucial A to an E, and it came out as "When do I become the apocalypse?"
Which is still technically correct grammatically, but that didn't stop my teacher from having a bit of a field day. My name for the rest of the semester became Apokalipsis. And not just to her, either! Other kids picked it up and I would sometimes here, "Oye, Apokalipsis!" in the streets.
My teacher never learned my real name, and had trouble passing back my tests because I didn't write "Apokalipsis" on the top of them. Sometimes she would slip and call me Atilla, the nickname a friend of mine in the class had adopted around the age of 13, and a few times suggested that we could shorten my name to Apako, or maybe just Paco.
The name grew on me, but that's not the only reason I chose it for this blog.
...
The word apocalypse get wrapped up in most peoples' minds with the book of Revelation from the Bible, and the prophesies in there about the End Times, and all that, even though it doesn't appear anywhere in most English translations. In pop culture and the general consciousness, it seems to have gotten connected to Armageddon, which appears in Revelation as the battlefield for the final battle between good and evil. Most people tend to think of the terms as sort of the same thing -- Armageddon will occur on the apocalypse, or the apocalypse will occur at Armageddon or Armageddon and the apocalypse will go out to lunch together, decide that it's entirely too difficult to spell their names and subsequently destroy existence as we know it.
We've got Apocalypse Now, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, X-Men: Ages of Apocalypse, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, even Ninja Apocalypse, not to mention dozens of rock bands named after its various misspellings, and zillions of Christian websites extolling prophesy and imminent destruction.
If nothing else the word conjures up images of a complete, rapid and catastrophic change. After the Apocalypse, nothing will be the same.
It's a provocative word, for sure. But it didn't start out as being the sort of word one would use for a summer blockbuster.
In Spanish, the book we call The Revelation to John is called John's Apokalipsis, and the two words mean roughly the same thing, an unveiling, a revealing, an epiphany. My cousin Jon happened to touch on this a while back. It may seem like a small thing when compared to the fiery destruction of the earth, but really, even the tiniest revelation has the ability to turn your whole world on its head. A revelation, an apocalypse, is a breakthrough to a new sort of understanding, a destruction of an old reality. It could change everything.
My birthday also happens to be on January 6th, the Day of Epiphany (also known as the 12 Day of Christmas), which doesn't mean a lot of the USA, but is traditionally celebrated as the day the Magi came to visit a young Jesus. So here's a revelation: I was born on Epiphany, and later christened as Apokalipsis. Now I don't really think that means a lot, but I do think it's kind of cool.
And it's more or less where the name of this blog comes from.
Also, I'm in a class this semester studying apocalyptic literature, and I've always sort of been fascinated by the idea of the End of the World . . . it could come any day.

Valentine's Day and its Prequel

Erin has already re-capped both of these days, but I'll give it a shot too! Maybe our versions will be wildly divergent and sort of like a date version of Rashamon. I doubt it, but you never know!

Erin had given me specific instructions to come next door to her house at 7:19 AM on Valentine's Day, which was a convinient and meaningful time because she had to be at work by eight, and our anniversary is July 19. I kept waking up early, though. I was excited!
And my excitment was justified when I got over there and found her making waffles for me! We ate them with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, the parted ways until dinner time, when she cooked for me again!
I was expecting something fancy and weird, since she'd been planning the meal for about a week, some sort of exotic salad or pasta or something, but instead she'd orchestrated a meal of avant-gard comfort foods -- an open-faced cheese, turkey and bacon sandwich (with a much cooler name) and sweet potato french fries! She actually cut the potatos herself! For some reason that impressed me. I thought you could just buy them in the freezer section or something!
We spent the rest of the evening hanging out, playing card games and chatting. We watched "Down with Love," which was good, but a bit too self-aware. I know that romantic comedies are contrived and silly, and I usually would prefer those sorts of movies when they accept that fact and try and run with it. But it sort of ruins the movie when the filmmakers go completely out of their way to remind you that that movie is contrived and silly. Both the audience and the film deserve better.
Erin also made me pie.
Those of you who know me will realize that this is a huge deal. I think pies are the world's most perfect food (besides maybe sandwiches), and sometimes spend extended periods of time just thinking about how awesome pies are.
So Erin made me a pie, homemade crust and everything. It was peaches and cream, and I have been eatting the leftovers for breakfast. It was very good.

The day before Valentine's Day I took Erin to Balboa Park in San Diego. I planned out the entire day, which may have been a first for me, since when I schedule things, it usually looks like this:
1. show up.
2. see what happens!
3. eat pie!
4. see what else is happening!
5. hooray!
6. go to bed.
7. remember homework/other important things.
8. oh well.
9. go to sleep anyway.
10. repeat! or just see what happens!

Most of the time, it's a pretty good system, but I wanted to pack as much into V-Day as possible. So we drove down to beautiful seaside San Diego and headed to the nation's largest urban park (yes, bigger than Central Park in NYC). There was a lot of construction going on, and there were a few major streets running right though it, which interrupted the natural, if landscaped serenity I had been expecting, but there were also some cool early 20th Century buildings in a bit of a baroque-deco style (is that possible?), and I found it more comprable to a public theme park than a peaceful sanctuary. That said, it was still a lot of fun. We heard a giant organ concert, took a tour with a park ranger, visited a huge tree, and stopped by the Natural History Museum, where they had an exhibit on chocolate, including free samples of thick, drinkable chocolate and exotic chocolate on sale for relatively cheap. We also saw a cool movie about the underwater world by Baja, California which had cool footage of whales, crazy fish and giant sting rays. It talked about the whales and rays greeting humans who visit the reef, and welcoming whale-watching boats, which is pretty amazing considering how we had hunted them and destroyed their homes. To me it was a powerful example of reconcilation, and I was reminded of God's love for us all, no matter how many crappy, destructive things we've done, he'll gladly welcome us back when we're ready. That was cool.
We also went out to eat at a fancy Indian resturant and ate our fill of crazy, flavorful food. A waitresses came by put one of those little forehead decorations on Erin's brow before we got our food. We were almost finished before a woman in a sari came by and pointed out that she'd put it on upside down. She fixed it. We ate an awesome desert.
After that, we went back to Balboa where they were having cha-cha lessons and practice. Erin and I may have been the youngest people there, and I think I made her foot bleed (she was wearing sandles!), but we had a good time, and ended up just making up our own dances since we weren't exactly sure how to do it "properly."
Hoorah!
I also got a package from my parents with cookies and candy when I got home from school on Monday. So I'm happy for this holiday.
Hoorah again!

Political

I like real-time counters. When I worked on the newspaper in high school we used to occationally get press kits from record lables and movie studios. One such packet included a "Count Down to Armageddon" clock that would tell us how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remained until the blockbuster Bruce Willis movie hit theatres. It was sort of mesmerizing. So is this. It's also kind of horrifying.

When nearly all domestic programs (uncluding education, transportation, health care for the eldertly) in the country are facing huge looming budget cuts, and we continue to spend more and more on security and forigen wars, you have to start wondering what happened to this country. As Americans we're facing a much lower quality of life than we've seen in years, our young people are fighting a war in a country we had no business invading in the first place, and our national debt is higher than it's ever been.

I'm not trying to be snide or ironic or anything when I say this, but truly, it does seem that the terrorists have won. They've managed to get our country to reroute all our funds, energy and attention on potential threats, both real and imagined, while at home things spiral further and further down the drain.

I hope that I don't need a new Armageddon count-down clock.

Writing about writing/Statement of purpose
Words need to come to me faster than they have been. I feel like my vocabulary has sort of packed up and started moving out of my brain. I look around for boxes that used to be in my mental garage, but the useful, precise words I used to keep there seem to have disapeared, only to be replaced by gaudy, anxious analogies (like this one) which are merely functional, not to mention messy and far too wordy.
Two years ago, I thought that I might like to be a prose writer and leave this whole movie-writing business behind. I found that I enjoyed editing together little sentences full of sparkle and flares of light much more than coming up with silly make-believe stories designed to glue folks to their chairs in a dark room while the sun was still shining. And anyway, I had like NO good ideas for scripts.
But now, after a few sequence-centric screenwriting classes, I've found that I can spin plots and scenarios with relative ease, outlining and diagraming more films than I could possibly write this semester in the space of a week -- and don't come in brainless bulk, these are all projects I would love to work more on.
But when I sit down to type a sentence, I find that I'm so out of practice I hardly know where the period goes. I need to generate over two hundred pages of finished script this semester, but I am not yet in that sort of shape.
So I plan to write here once a day, as practice in getting the fuzziness in my brain into sparkling little letters and words. It may not look very nice, and might be less than substantial, but it will be concrete. It will be production. And you're welcome to read it if you'd like.

Dating Status Awareness Day
No one seems to care much that it's Valentine's Day. There are new flowers in the girls' house, and Ed is out making similar deliveries to other houses, but perhaps because it's a Monday, no one seems that excited about this particular holiday.
Well, I am!
It's very hip to dis Valentine's Day. I know it's all very corporate, and an excuse to sell candy and greeting cards, and that like Earth Day, every day should be Valentine's Day and that love shouldn't be boxed in on a calender like an affectionate elephant that is kept in a cage only to be let out once a year to preform in a superficial circus event where everyone applauds and laughs and then . . . forgets.
So yeah, On the surface, it's a perfectly good day to boycott. One year Grant wore an upside down heart saftey-pinned to his shirt to commemorate the day, and I thought that was cool. Today in my screenwriting class a gothy guy came shirtless, with his nipples colored black and connected by lines of black makeup or greasepaint to an abstract heart he'd drawn in the middle of his chest with . . . well, I'm pretty sure it was his own blood. I did not think that was cool. I'm actually sort of worried about him.
Hmm, so now I'm still excited about it being Valentine's Day, but after talking about people literally scarring themselves over the holiday, I don't feel much like talking about it any more right now.

La la la?