I've been writing a lot for my film blog if you've been wondering where I went.

Life is well, all is well. Summer is here and I'm struggling to find a yob. Interview in seven hours at coffee bean. Wish me luck.

Click here to go to said "Film Blog"

Faith

Where do I stand on my faith in Christ?

I have no fucking clue about it anymore. At this point in my life, I've become so turned away from the whole idea of organized religion that I cannot say what I believe anymore.

Except that there is a god. And I pray to him some nights in the quiet.

And I'm willing to believe that if God is that loving then there is no correct path, no right way, no straight and narrow. Just a faith that, yea, there's something beyond on the chaos.

Worship is simple physics: when there are harmonious tones surrounding you, and you are singing, then you feel peace. It's the same concept as when you sing along to a song. Harmony rides with peace. But religions have been able to capitalize on worship and mantras for far too long.

I feel too much like I would be led down a corridor for the prospect of a great tasting wine (Amontillado) only to get buried alive.

But the wrench in the cog of this whole faith-based crisis is my innate fear of hell.

Just a Great Fucking Day.

I'm 2\5ths done with my finals. And, suddenly, they seem manageable.

My Behavioral Bio final was easy as pie for the most part, and I got most of the extra credit questions right so I'm pretty much set on a solid grade in that class.

My World Religions final was a joke. Hell, the class itself was a fucking joke. I'm glad it's over. I'll probably escape with a C. Whatever, I'm done studying religion.

But the best parts of the day were as such: Finding half a pack of cigarettes in the room where I had my first final... Just sitting on the table... Awesome.

Finding Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. Awesome.

Finding a lid for my Brita filter while rummaging through the shit people are donating. Awesome.

Today has been good. Tomorrow should be easy except for the bits of studying I still have to do for Hinduism and Geology. But tomorrow is just Journalism so it'll be an easy day in the way of finals.

Peace and Love.

And I got to Paris....

I skipped geology to take a nap today--it turned out the class was cancelled. Either way, the dream I had was epiphanic and completely worth the nap.

From what I remember, I had spent three months at something called a quarterly polytechnic school or something, and I had become severely depressed, slipping into dreams that I couldn't awake from--dreams where the point was to find something that wasn't actually there. And I kept not being able to wake up. Instead, I just talked to people in the real world, but I was caught in this dream... The whole liminal aspect was something that wasn't even part of the epiphany, but it was still interesting. I called my parents up because I wanted nothing more than to kill myself. The only thing that kept me going was a girl who I only saw every once in awhile. It wasn't Kelley but I'm damn sure it represented her.

And when I finally woke up into my dorm room, I looked at the time to see why my alarm didn't go off--I thought that I had just slept for three months. And the time was correct, right on time: 3:09, but the date said February 11th. I couldn't figure out what had happened, so I checked my computer and the date was the same: Feb. 11th. 2\11\08 and I started to freak out that I have to relive this entire semester again.

And then I finally, actually, completely woke up to May 6th. And that's when it hit me. The last part of the dream where I was stuck in February. The smallest part but the biggest impact.

From it, I realized that, although this semester has had its ups and downs and lefts and rights, I wouldn't change a goddam thing. I wouldn't change any of it because of who I've become of it, who the people around me have become of it. To change it would be to change the changes that have occurred. And all the changes from the ups and [beat]downs have been great changes--in myself and others. And I wouldn't change it for anything.

I am content for once. I can finally say I'm okay with a lot of things I'm usually not okay with.

Well there goes my tomorrow.

five am. wide fuckin' awake. Awesome not possum. Maybe I can sleep. My mind races refuses to stop.

Things I wonder about not worth wondering about. That's usually how it is. Turn out the light, turn off the music. Lay there.

But then it starts again and I am back again and I am bored again and I cannot find you.

Forget the papers, forget your musical dreams.

I think I'm growing again. I'm suffering from the same fatigue that happened the last time. A fatigue that nothing but sleep can help. I wake up with random parts of my body hurting--yesterday my shoulders, two days ago my biceps, my legs, elbows. On back it goes. And it's hitting me at the very wrong time. Right now I feel like I could crawl in bed and sleep for three plus hours even though I just slept for seven and had a solid cup of black coffee. When I wake up, I am still in some deep area of sleep, where my brain is repairing and my body is working. So deep that it is hard to move when I do have to wake up. So deep that my day begins in anger at myself for going through this again. I was beginning to be content with being five foot eight and now I'm going through the growing thing again right before finals.

My hands feel bigger, too. My body aches and I am not sick. I don't like this. I wouldn't mind if it had occurred during the summer, when I can sleep for longer and not have to worry about missing much.

Though, speaking of summer, I have applied for as many internships at Movie Houses that I could find. MGM, Fox, Sony, RSA Productions. So we'll see if any of them respond. That would be a cool thing to do this summer. Much more acute to what I plan on doing than working at a Target or a Borders.

My phone has been on the fritz ever since I got back from Spring Break. Not sending text messages, not receiving them. And, today, it's beginning to overheat unless I plug it in. the battery's completely shot to hell, I hate technology. It'd probably help if I weren't dropping it all the damn time, but what can you do--I've got butter fingers (on the note of butter, when I was little, I used to actually lick the stick in the fridge when no one was looking. Sorry family.).

On another note, I've been struck with this great idea for a movie. I've begun outlining it but I won't state it here because of my paranoia. You know how it is. Tentatively called the Coma, though that's a bit non-subtle.

I had an interesting dream last night about watching this movie where this guy was caught in a pyramid scheme, trying to sell another guy chocolate. And then, later, you see him with bad acne, and I turned to Kelley and said, "He's just been eating the chocolate!" My dreams have become more vivid and paranoid as of late. It worries me because that means that there's something churning inside me that I'm scared of. I know this because last time dreams like the current ones happened, I was getting ready to come up to Humboldt. But, now, I don't know why they're happening. There's something going on and I don't know what it is. Maybe finals coming up, maybe the research paper or the other paper I've already finished. Who knows. I'll figure it out and get back to you.

The winter's overr

So.

School is well, classes are well. I have a geology midterm tomorrow that I've been studying for all week so I'm none too worried about it. Paper due soon in World Religions, big fat greek research paper due in Hinduism at the end of the Semester which is sooner than you'd think.

Movies watched recently: The Boondock Saints, Platoon, the Darjeeling Limited, Groundhog Day, Back to the Future part I, Part II, Part III, Where the Buffalo Roam, Raging Bull. Follow the links to my reviews of said films...

I'm not too worried about much right now, everything is coasting along real well.

Yesterday fever, tomorrow Saint Peter

I find it interesting that, with each step we take, we leave a little piece of the sole of our shoes. That is why the tread wears down, we've left little pieces behind with every step and our soles can only take so many steps before they need to be renewed. Boy, no wonder sole and soul are homonyms. We step on both, we leave pieces of each behind in all places--those English-makin' folks knew what they were doing in this case.

Knew and new I haven't figured out yet. Or why there's two to and too. Or there their and they're. But the latter's connections are within context--and contexually fixed words aren't generally very meaningful by themselves. They're filler for their own devices over there in their little world they've created. But and butt is another one--one t means you've got something else to say and sometimes its bad. Butt means ass-end of something. Probably from buttock.

English is one fucked up language.

Filmic Pulp

So, yea, I deleted my Dodgers blog and started a movie review blog called Filmic Pulp. That's a funny word, filmic. It's a synonym for cinematic. But more terse and just kind of weird.

Check it out. If you're a frequenter of this site then there's nothing new there since I just culled all my reviews from here and put them there, but there will be new ones in the future! And they will all go there... And lord knows what'll wind up here.

I love you all. And I've decided, officially, to take a hiatus from the Religious Studies program to see what the Film Minor program is like. So I'll be taking Film Making I next semester. W00!

Peace and love.

Magnolia\ Ghost Dog

Magnolia
After I saw There will be Blood, I knew I had to see another Paul Thomas Anderson film. Blood was so beautiful and so rich that it seemed like Anderson had the potential to have other movies as great and effecting as that.

So my first venture into his older films was his 2000 film Magnolia, a three-hour film about the semi-intersecting lives of six people in the San Fernando Valley.

Usually, I don't enjoy films about semi-intersecting lives. To name a few, I did not like Crash, Babel, or Amores Perros. These were films that tried desperately to get you to see that all our lives are connected. To see that our actions effect the lives of others. We get it.

But the beauty of Magnolia is that this film only uses those coincidental intersections for cohesion, not to show that our actions effect others, not to show that all our actions mean something. Instead, this movie is a character study about these people who are slowly descending into loneliness and madness. And, because of these intersections, the movie becomes a movie instead of six vignettes--instead of something along the lines of Coffee and Cigarettes. And the cohesion sinks deeper than accidents, it is a chain and a link that is evident through the characters' pain and their personalities. Their stubbornness to reveal the past (for example, we only find out about the past of John C. Reilly's cop character in the last third of the film), their desperation, their sadness. Each character has their own poignant scene that shows just what they are feeling. And what they are feeling is what the other five people are feeling. And maybe, just maybe, it's what someone in the audience has felt. That's how you make a connection--through emotion since we are all the same at the bottom of everything.

Magnolia hosts an all-star cast featuring the likes of William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Alfred Molina, John C. Reilly (Surprisingly, only once I thought, "Dewey Cox is a cop?!"), and many others. No matter how much I hate his acting abilities, Tom Cruise's character was one that was so well-written to the person that it is scary.

Cruise's character is a sexual-motivational speaker under the mantra of "Respect the cock and tame the cunt." He's a hardass who's showing you how to get any woman you want. His character is a heartless, soulless, bastard... For awhile. See, that's where it starts to break down. During an interview scene, the character begins to crack and suddenly Cruise's acting abilities come into question. He is an actor who simply cannot show sadness. Blame it on L. Ron Hubbard, whatever. He's one who can do pensive, angry, and other emotions that one would associate with the color red. However, when he gets into the blue emotions--sadness, depression et al--Cruise begins to crack and his on-screen presence begins to pull you out of the film.

Luckily, he's only one-sixth of this film. And one-sixth of three hours is only 30 minutes. And he's only blue for about fifteen of them. So for the other 165 minutes, you've got other actors who can do blue and red swimmingly. And you've got a director who knows how to cull the best from most actors. You can tell that these people are genuinely sad and genuinely guilty and genuinely unfit for life.

But the problem with a film of this scope and length is that there's only so much sadness that a person can take before the apathy and the boredom sets in. And that's usually around the 90-minute mark. So what Anderson has done rather brilliantly, is to offset some of the sadder moments with music in the background--like a scene where William H. Macy is in a bar, drinking himself silly and bearing his soul to those who will listen. It's an effecting scene, but one that is overlaid by what is pouring from the jukebox which is typical barroom fare. By doing so, the watcher is allowed a bit of a rest from all the Kafka-esque deprivation and the spiraling towards hell that this film deals with.

There is so much more I could write about Magnolia, but it's so layered and so thick that to explain it would be like giving someone the bottom layer of a wedding cake without the wedding and without the rest of the cake. You have to see this film to truly appreciate its beauty and depth.


--

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

When I first heard of this movie as a senior, I was intrigued. But I never saw it. Why? Because I'm a lazy cunt when it comes to seeing films sometimes. And I also get obsessed with seeing only one director's films.

But I finally saw it. Forest Whitaker playing a black samurai mafia hitman with a score done by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. It sounds like a pitch for the latest Chris Tucker film, but this is a film that, much like Jim Jarmusch likes to do, allows for lingering shots of the emotion in one's face and the oft boredom of life.

Throughout the movie, we follow his character and are intersected with him reading sections from the Samurai for Dummies book Hagakure. What starts as a mafia film quickly becomes a revenge film. The mafia's out to get Ghost Dog but they sure as shit ain't gonna get him. They don't know where he lives because they've never followed the pigeons that he uses as his only contact with them. They don't know his real name. They don't know what he looks like except that he's black.

So they start killing every black guy on a roof wrangling pigeons, which is apparently only one. And I think it was the dad from "Family Matters".

Anyway, Ghost Dog realizes that he suddenly has to protect his master, his retainer, Louie, who they are going to kill because Ghost Dog was his guy and Ghost Dog fucked up.

And by protecting him, I mean taking out the entire goddam mob in "The Industrial State."

And that's definitely something I noted while watching one scene where license plates are changed: the states. In the film, there are two of them: "The Industrial State," and the "Highway State." So we're set in an alternate reality which allows us to dismiss the police for the most part--which is good because otherwise I'd be wondering why they weren't doing dick to stop these guys.

So that's one difference from a typical, cliche, mafia film. I made a list of some others:

• Aside from narrations, we don't hear Ghost Dog speak directly to anyone until 35 minutes into the movie. He talks to a little girl in the park who he later gives the Hagakure to (which, along with one other character, definitely allowed for Ghost Dog 2).
• All the Japanese references. Rashomon parallels and the like.
  
• The fact that Ghost Dog is a fucking samurai. How awesome is that.

Also, what's interesting is that the readings from the Hagakure first only reflect the actions of the mafia. That is, loyalty to their master and such. Because of the somehow botched hit, and the way that the hit was filmed, we are led to believe that he fucked up and disobeyed his master. But then we realize that these readings reflect both Ghost Dog and the mafia in either parallels or in interchanging pieces. Some only symbolize the mafia. And some only represent Ghost Dog. It's pretty cool.

Jim Jarmusch did an excellent job with this film. The way that it was edited and shot allowed for the room of emotions. It's not taut and ready to burst at the seems with what wants to go on. It allows for the movie to act for itself and to think for itself. And that's the sign of a good director: an autonomous film like this one.

Pocket Map to Heaven

I had a revelation in Vietnam last night.

While I was watching Apocalypse Now (easily one of my new favorite films), I realized that I really do want to try out the film minor. So my RS major will be on a hiatus for a semester while I see what I like or don't like about it.

And if I realize that I miss the religious studies program, then I can always go back. It's just an experiment. And I'll be taking on more Journalism classes so that I can even things out if I choose to go back to the RS major.

It's been something I've mulled over for a little while. I talked to my mom about it. And it finally hit me that it's something I want to try. I want to see what it's like to be introduced to how to create a movie. I want to know what to do and all that jazz.

It just seems rather strange to me that I come up here for the Religion program and I immediately abandon it. It almost seems wrong. But not to my soul at the moment. I want to find out, I want to know, I want to be certain that Religious Studies is what I want. And maybe it's not. Maybe this filmmaking class is something I really enjoy.

Life is well. I found a room mate and I will be moving off campus next semester. Wahoo! Things are looking up and my previous depression was a direct result of me wanting everything in a now-fashion--the fashion of my generation. But patience is key in life and baseball, so that's what's happened. Patience. Peace. Serenity.

This ship is taking me.

One of those nights.

I was ready for bed by 1130, wanting to sleep.

Turned out the lights, got into bed, and my mind was off to the races.

About what, you ask? The list: next semester, registering, wondering how my first semester up here will turn out knowing that my first quarters\semesters anywhere usually turn into shit because I'm trying adjust and find my place foremost and I can't help it when academics fall to the wayside but I have six weeks left in the quarter and the paper I'm most worried about will get some consulting tomorrow when I see the professor and what am I gonna do about my religious studies major? Do I still want it? Should I take Intro to Christianity or the Hebrew Bible next semester just to give it one last chance? I'm excited about the Cinematography course, but I'm also leery of the 6 hour filming sessions... Do I want to take photojournalism or do I want to take magazine writing? What the fuck is a Freshman Interest Group and why is it a prerequisite for one of the classes I need? Will there be a seat for me in either of the biology classes? If not, then what about botany? If not then how the hell am I going to fulfill that GE? Why is college always so hard for me? Even harder than sleep? What if I take radio production, have a radio show, what would be the first song I play? The pain in my throat that last timed manifested on my tongue is back but on my gum and it almost feels like a tooth is growing in for some reason. I'm not worried much this time around. I'm more concerned with my overall health. I eat too much junk food. I worry too much about acting suave and cool and trying to impress others when the shit should just come naturally and fuck the rest who don't enjoy my company. I think I'm a homophobe, in part, at heart. Maybe in the same way I'm afraid of Mormons--that they'll try and convert me and am I strong enough to say no? All of this adds and adds and adds and builds and builds and builds so I come clamoring onto the internet to read about the classes and email the teachers and try to go back to reading about Islam for my World Religions class. Paper due on the 25th. Housing lottery on this friday at 9AM. Wake up, stammer and stamp. Say I want a single because I feel bad for having a room mate when I'm awake at three AM hammering keys like some crazed man who meanders out of the building for a cigarette only to look over through the windows of the dining commons to see ghosts moving around, eating, talking. Then to see small cars down below moving around and returning from some night I'll never know about. Never know about it like this post won't know paragraph breaks.

I'm sorry for everything I've ever done and will do. It always feels like my fault. That I'm the one who started hocking shit around only to have it come back and bite me in the ass. I feel sick in the head, I need to see a therapist but I can never feel comfortable with them. I wish I could. And they rape your paychecks by saying to come back every week for twenty years. Even though I guess it's more effective than medication though most Psychiatrists only do med checks anymore. I miss my family. I miss my own room. My headphones cracked and I need a new pair. Probably from sleeping on the one ear bud. I don't know. Ever since I got up here, those headphones have been deteriorating.

And then there's the applicable question of why am I still a virgin? Would it solve some of these problems? Should I heed the advice of some of the younger guys around me and lose it to some drunk girl? Or should I wait it out for the perfect one? I don't know anymore, it's so frustrating when everyone else joneses for it and you have no idea how to relate in this jones fest. Maybe I'm just atavistic, anachronistic--from a different time, plopped into the 21st century on accident for a purpose.

And what if I die tomorrow knowing not the highest form of passion between genders? Knowing only the soul's highest passion of faith.

I feel like I've wasted my life on precepts and I shouldn't have tried so hard for some things that never panned out. The apologies will falter the marksman's shot and the guillotine will miss by only inches, but you will still be alive and forgiven and placed among the holiest crowned and robed in purple.

--

And what, suddenly, was supposed to be a release, has only sparked more and more and more questions within my restless mind. I can't shut down. I hate this.

Crack your skull open. Re-form. Remiss. Caught in a stalemate, knowing you can't win no matter the stalwart. Keep breathing keep thinking keep knowing. Come to pass. Known unknown. Cramped up and wrinkled and broken and sincere and vile and complacent and pragmatic and knowing knowing knowing that something will come someday keeping the boulder from flailing you to the ground. Dichotomous mind wanting to stay afloat yet wanting to sink. Boulder versus mind. Heart weighing ten thousand pounds. Mind knowing yet no buoyancy can save thee.

Shit.

s
i
n
k
i
n
g
,,,

i will know.

There's a snake in my boot.

Can't sleep. Four midterms, one quiz, and a spot on my tongue that may be from all this goddam coughing or from smoking (probably the latter.) has gotten me really stressed out. To the point that I can only really sleep during the day when the night of unrest has really caught up with me. And the I end up having crazy-ass dreams about getting high and falling asleep and having a dream that my hands and feet are missing only to wake up into the first dream to find out I'm at some sort of resort, sleeping in a fancy hotel where the doors don't completely lock and the elevator goes sideways and my mom has spread a bunch of small church pencils all over one of the rooms for some reason.

And then I met Flavor Flav. And somewhere in there I started talking in my sleep and having a mid-dream that I was in my dorm, stumbling around looking for my journal so I could write all these other dreams down. Or maybe that wasn't a dream but sleep-searching or something.... All I know is that I can't sleep right now and I'm almost afraid to if I'm going to run into Flavor Flav again.

Over on Dodger Blues they posted a link to the mySpace of Eliot Spitzer's hooker. You can tell she's not a cheap one because she doesn't have platinum blonde hair and tweaked-out teeth.

I finished reading the Plague before I fell asleep. It was good but you could tell there were times that Camus was simply using his characters to spout off his personal existentialistic views. Though the idea of a plague happening is rather interesting and scary as shit.

I saw the Savages the other night. I don't know if I liked it or just thought it was kind of okay. My main problem was with the ending because it's setup as this movie that's solely about two siblings taking care of their father as he slowly fades into nothingness with dementia. Nowhere is there a tonal shift to suggest that the movie's central focus was actually the two siblings and their problems. Instead, I thought it was about the father and their relationship and coping with it, etcetera. However, when the father dies, and they say to each other, "So this is it..." the movie doesn't end. It seemed like the ending, it felt like the ending, it should have probably been the ending. Especially since, directly afterwards they go into some montaged shots of the city of Buffalo (i think) which would have made the movie have perfect bookends since it started with interesting, almost Lynch-esque shots of Sun City, Arizona. Instead, though, the movie carries on to show the ambiguous, partial successes and codas of the siblings. Everything after the montage of Buffalo seemed superfluous given that the movie wasn't about the siblings but about how fucked up their lives were because of their father.

I think it's time for bed, finally.

Fish hands running from rain

I realize now why I hung out with girls. I'm effeminate and I care about emotions. I care about reality.

I don't think I was made for this reality. Probably a different one. I'm just so unhappy and far too often it stems from interacting with other people. People who aren't in my family or my other family (Kelley, JP, Jasmine, Brad, Rachael and Ashley by default) who don't know me, don't understand me.

People who, once I've "eased in the weird," still don't get me. The final straw was tonight because usually, one of the litmus tests is playing this really nasty\funny song by Dirty Sanchez called "Dig it." And they didn't think it as funny and called me a homo and I'm completely done because of it. They failed my litmus test. And every time I try and mention something, well, meaningful, it gets shot down in a series of "Dudes" and "dicks" and "dawgs." Goes down in fucking flames.

But I know that, at the end of the day, I enjoy my existence much more than they probably enjoy theirs--caught in the loop of classes and drugs and parties on weekends. Constantly caught in a loop of a single climax per week on the ends. Why can't they have the same type of fun without the parties or the booze or the drugs? I ask myself that. I don't understand how anyone could do drugs when there's so much to figure out in this world already without altering it. I know that if I ever did Acid, LSD or shrooms, my head would explode.

Maybe I'm just being a paranoid android, I dunno. What I do know is that I can't take it much longer.

I do know that I feel caught in a crisis because I know I have to stick this out since I'm getting the education I desire. I just wish the good experience in the classroom would extend outwards.

It'll come. These things take time. Be rational. "Don't get butt-hurt."

All I know is all I know and sometimes it's not enough.

That's been said by someone but now by me and I'm pretty sure I'm still the first to say it. I like to make my own pithy statements and then use them under titles like "Cassavettes" or "The Purple Calligrapher" or "Unknown," because I don't want to tout my own statements even though I really am.

Whatever. School is well, life is well. I'm figuring out where I want to live next year. I really don't want to deal with meeting and dealing with another new room mate. I know Mario, my current room mate, plans on moving off-campus and that's fine by me. I don't want to move off-campus because I moved up here to live on campus. Plus, when I'm 21, I can drink in the dorms if I so choose so there's really no need to move off campus lest I feel like driving to school again--which I don't.

You should listen to Beirut. Bradley recommended them to me a little while back and they're already in my top 10 on last.fm.

I don't have much to comment on. I don't have a TV so I haven't been watching anything though it's frustrating because I know there's TVs around and I have access to none of them. I haven't seen any movies lately because I've been in the poor house.

OH! That's what I could talk about: Eyes Wide Shut. I finally got around to watching the movie last night because I've been slowly getting through the Kubrick catalog even though he's not one of my favorites but he has his merit and his ways.

And any film maker who is as meticulous and perfectionist as he is deserves to be watched. And Eyes Wide Shut took 400 days to shoot. That's not even including post-production and everything else. I can now understand why he didn't pump out movies like Woody Allen. He was too engulfed and swallowed up by details to do that.

And Eyes Wide Shut is no exception. It's very intense and silly in the ways that Kubrick is known for. It's like he knew this would be his last film, so he went hog wild with it. He created New York in London because he hates traveling and he probably chose the names of all the shops on the sets and all the signs in the windows of those shops and the street names and everything.

But I wanted to talk about the censorship of the movie. I viewed the censored version that was created for the MPAA that has, in the scenes at the orgy that Tom Cruise's character goes to, people digitally placed in front of the more graphic simulated acts. You can tell that they were placed after the final cut and everything because they're still and poorly done and they do not fit with the flow of everything else. It's as if they did it intentionally to make you realize that there's something going on and these goddam people shouldn't be here to ruin it. Like Tom Cruise's character. These digitally added people are the ones who showed up in taxis in a rented tuxedo.

And that's why I hate the ratings system. At times you begin to stop seeing the director's vision of the writer's script and you start seeing what the censor's idea of the scene should be. Are children going to be seeing this movie if it's rated R? Hell no. Adults are. It's a fucking Stanley Kubrick film. Nicole Kidman is half-naked in the one-sheet. Parents will know. So why do they censor R-rated films? Why is there even NC-17 but to send films into a nameless oblivion?

It's fucking stupid. Plain and simple. Most people have already lost their virginity by age 17 so what's a little bit of simulated sex going to hurt their integrity? It's frustrating. I can barely even put into words the sort of frustration and madness that the MPAA brings into my mind. It is a broken system and it needs to be rebuilt. That's about it. Everything else is a red haze right now. I'm gonna go take an elephant tranquilizer or two to calm me down now.

Everywhere I go.

Sick again. I went and saw the health clinic on campus yesterday, turns out I've got the flu. Whoopee! So they gave me some double strength Aleve or something and I've been taking that. Shivering and waking up with everything all damp from sweat and everything.

Otherwise, things have been going pretty well, I'd say. Went home last weekend, staying here this weekend, obviously.

Classes have continued to be interesting. I'm working on an essay comparing Christ and Krishna in their respective religions and hows Hindus and Christians view incarnation and the avatar (not the little picture on forums, silly). Should be fun, though I should probably start reading up on Krishna soon since the prospectus is due the thursday before spring break.

Anywho, I'm gonna crawl back into bed and sleep the day away, hoping to feel better.

Filipino Box Spring Hog

It's baseball season and, as with my previous hobby (roller coasters), I've started a sort of website in tandem with this one. Except it's just a blog. I don't want to deal with design and all that crap. It's here. Insofar, I don't have much to say, but once the season starts, it should get more interesting as I'll try and comment on every game.

Anywho, let's talk Oscars. On the bus ride home, Kelley was sending me results since I couldn't view the actual program. I'm glad that the Coen brothers finally won Best Director(s). It's an award they've deserved for almost every movie they've done (except the Ladykillers. What was that shit?!)

In the Best Supporting Actor category, I thought Paul Dano was nominated for his role as Eli Sunday in There Will be Blood. But he wasn't. And that was probably a good thing because it was already a hard enough category between Casey Affleck (one of my new favorite actors after Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and Javier Bardem. Both did a great job--I was rooting for Affleck more so than Bardem simply because of the last 45 minutes of TAOJJBTCRF truly break your heart. Affleck thought he'd be received as a celebrity. But instead it's the opposite. He's treated like scum because he killed a national star.

In Supporting Actress, I'm sad that Blanchett lost. She was an awesome Bob Dylan. And I love me some Bob Dylan (well, before his 80's phase. Reaganomics even turned the music into shit!).

The Best Score award was skewed because of Greenwood using, say, thirty seconds from his previous composition (Popcorn Superhet Receiver. It's actually pretty cool) in his score for There Will Be Blood. And that definitely was one of the best musical compositions for film I've heard in awhile.

But, as in previous years, at least one of my favorite films had to be completely ignored. Last year, it was The Fountain and Inland Empire. This year, it was the Darjeeling Limited.

And that's okay because the Academy doesn't make your opinions. You do.

Let's be reasonable.

I've been sick with some kind of sniffle or cough or chill since the week after I got up to HSU.

And also homesickness. It comes and goes, I try to forget about it--but that's what happens when you have great parents, I suppose. You miss them. It's sensible.

And you miss your dogs and your lawn and your privacy.

But it should pass as long as I bury myself in my studies. I have trouble meeting people, that goes without saying. So it'll come. Come to pass. Boredom will happen always. But whatever. I'm okay, I guess. I just miss everything. And I can't go to any other school because the RS program here is top notch.

Anyway, Spring Training has started, that's obvious by the last post, so there's something to take my mind off of everything else going on or not going on.