Because he demanded it . . .

Here's a pictures of my roommate Grant!!!



isn't he cute?
and by "cute," I mean "a ferret?"
and by "a ferret" I mean "why in the world is that man cuddling him so close to his bossom??!!"

:(

Math party + pictures!

I have three tests next week, so I am looking for ways to make studying fun. Tonight we got In N Out and had a math party, which basically means we ate In N Out, did math for two hours, and then broke open a real honest-to-goodness coconut and ate a bunch of it. Then I played some Mario Kart. Now people are downstairs watching The Princess Bride and I will try and do math until they get to the part where he's on a torture machine or something like that, because I've never seen the movie past that point.

To make up for this possibly non-interesting post, I am also including more (also possibly non-interesting) photos from San Diego. These are the people I traveled with that day.


Ed. We drove his car, we saw his turf.


AC. He's now in Austria, but before he left, he, Ed and I were all sharing a room. Now that he's moved out, I get to sleep on the bed, hooray! But he's cool, and the kind of guy I would totally sleep on the floor for.


Kirsten. AC's girlfriend, also now in Austria. Also cool. If you look closely, you can see making a cameo appearance in AC's picture!


Emily. I met her recently, the day after she had a horrible skateboarding accident and she looked like someone punched her in the face with the pavement. But she had mostly healed by for our trip. I think the whole thing was her idea, actually.


Me, and don't I look contemplative! The ocean can do that to me, as can looking away from the camera as I take my own picture. I don't usually say this sort of thing, but it was decided on this trip that I own ALL the money.

The trip was rad. My friend are radder. I don't want to do math any more, and will probably go downstairs and watch the cool Princess B. swordfight for a while.

Halfway done

The thing I needed to do most today . . .

was my laundry.


Book: Demo - The 12 Original Scripts
Music: Ed sleeping.

That one spy show

Tonight I watched my third episode of Alias, that spy show that everyone loves, and I guess I can see the appeal, but I can’t really enjoy it without rolling my eyes every couple of minutes and how contrived it all seems. Perhaps film school has ruined such things for me, or perhaps I just don’t like TV very much, but I have a hard time getting into it. There are elements that I like – I get kind of a kick out of all the spies getting together and going shopping or bowling once in a while, and the fact that the main character works with her sister on a spy team run by her dad and her sister’s dad (who is probably evil??), which conveniently allows for a lot of father-daughter angst, but somehow I can’t get past the artificiality of it all.
The supporting characters all hit their requisite sinister or quirky beats, there’s lots of talk about mysterious plots and prophesies (to be covered in future episodes one assumes), a mission or two inter-cut with lots of kind of boring office/headquarters scenes, and a couple of good spoonfuls of sex and violence.
I used to think that the commercials were what kept me from watching television, but tonight’s episode was the first I watched that hadn’t been Tivo’d, and it was actually the one I enjoyed the most. I think television shows are actually paced for commercials, and although they’re annoying and it is always disturbing to me to hear my friends singing joyfully along with the jingles for life insurance, it seems like shows lose a lot of their punch and tension if you can watch them all in one chunk.
No, I think what keeps me from watching television shows, especially dramas, is the sameness of it all.
Except for the spy-specific elements, the episodes of Alias I saw were not that different from the episode and a half of The O.C. I watched one time – very pretty, entertaining enough to keep you through the commercials, and always promises more of the same the next week. I guess that’s what’s considered good television, but to me it just seems like so much going through the motions. Each episode is like a remix of the same pop song, or at least another pop song by the same artist. Nothing is revealed without setting up something else to come back for the next week, there’s little creative risk-taking involved, no permanent lessons learned by the characters, and with no end in sight there isn’t much of a reason to keep watching for me. I think that without some sort of ending, most stories are robbed of their meaning or purpose. Each episode has some sort of end, but really enjoying the show means you have to keep tuning in next week to find out what happens to the characters! But even with all the exciting cliffhangers and such, I can’t help feeling that whatever happens to them will just be . . . something else. Again.
Last year I took a television writing class at Chapman, one of the best classes I’ve taken anywhere, and our prof frequently brought in guest lecturers from the industry. One of them, the oldest, warned us that his job was not for the light of heart or the idealistic, and he cautioned us about getting into the TV business. “When you get right down to it,” he said, “television is all about numbing or shocking the viewer into sticking around for the commercials. And that’s it.”
And I don’t think I’ve really enjoyed television since then.

Writing is hard!

Being enrolled in two screenwriting classes means I have to come up with two stories worthy of being feature films and flesh them out in just a few weeks before starting to write pages. Nothing's worse for a writer than getting halfway into a project and realizing that not only do you not have anything more to say, you don't really care, and that no actually, nobody will care, because the entire piece was flawed from the start and utterly pointless -- and having to finish it anyway in order to pass the class.
So getting off the ground on the right foot is not just important, it's necessary. Now is the point in the semester where I'm running out of time to worry about which foot I'm on, and just start writing running with both feet forward (this is very difficult, as anyone who's tried running with both feet forward will tell you. or writing with both feet forward for that matter!).
I came into this semester with a lot of ideas, and began to develop a lot more, which is a blessing. The hardest part these last couple of weeks has been deciding which projects I want to develop and in which classes. I've jumped back and forth a lot, to the point where I've had conversations like this:
"So I was talking to Christina about how you always have such weird scripts."
"Oh yeah? Like which one? I don't always have weird scripts."
"Like that super hero one you're doing."
"Oh yeah, I'm not doing that one any more. That was a good idea though. Maybe I should write that one instead."

I switched scripts again this past weekend, and I think am I in for the long haul now. Which means I have to start plotting. I spent about four hours plotting today, and not even for anything devious, just for a movie! You'd think someone who spent that much time plotting would plot, I don't know, world domination, or a nuclear robot submarine or something, but no. I just plotted a movie. It does involve someone else plotting for more or less world domination, though, and that was the hardest part to figure out.

Is there a point here? Mostly that I need to keep writing, and keep writing more. Also, the point is that I made this point under my deadline of having it done today! So hooray writing. I'm just starting to realize there were better things to talk about, but it's almost midnight! Tomorrow, perhaps. I'm already plotting my next post.

Beware! mwahahahahahaahahahaha *ahem* ha ha.

Sandy Eggo

No time to write post! Must work on screenplay outlines!
Here are some pictures from last month's trip to San Diego!


My shadow, right before the tide came back in and swept it away.

Awesome secret door to the ocean.



Ed!

Pelicans!

More to come!

Sunday

It's been raining off and on like crazy down here the last couple of days, and I guess other parts of So. Cal have started flooding again. Yay global warming? The rain kept me in bed this morning because I kept hearing it and thinking it was Ed in the shower. Then I woke up 10 minutes before church and didn't have time for a shower!
Erin and I made lemonaide ice cubes today! You add one of them and some sugar to a cup of water for instant refreshment! (Although we haven't tried it yet.) We got a huge grocery bag full of lemons from out Bible study last Wednesday (I'm still not sure why) and today we squeezed the guts out of about a dozen of them. Since we didn't have a plastic juicer thing, we had to do it all by hand, although perhaps it's good for the skin? Anyway, the whole house smelled like lemons, to the point that Ed, upstairs on the computer, was trying to figure out if he'd somehow spilled something sour on his hands. We strained out the seeds and pulp and then I poured the juice into an ice cube tray, one cubespace at a time. We filled two trays and still had enough left for three of us to have lemonaide for lunch.
Erin hates most citrus things and certinally can't stand lemonaide, but the whole thing was her idea! It was fun! Now I suppose I should try and write more screenplay stuff.

Music: Ed's playlist. Formerly the Eels, but now it's Bush.
Reading: The Sketchbook Diaries vol. 4 by James Kochalka