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that's it
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Jul. 17th, 2008 @ 09:54 am
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The outline is finished. Now it's just time to fill in the blanks. Right? Right?
Yeah, right.
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By some random miracle I found a couple of Rosso's EP's [it was hard enough to find all two of their album releases]. 1000 Tambourines and Outsider, and damn if the B sides don't do something for me that none of Thee Michelle Gun Elephant's ever did. Now I have to look for The Birthday's EPs and see if gritty radness like "Saxophone Baby" is something Yuusuke made a habit.
Summer's got about a third of itself left for me, and I'm now employed as a [my own kind of] housekeeper as well as a candy vendor. Not bad, really! It'll help out a lot for when a drop everything and go back to class. Well, there'll be lots of classes, but the only things I can think about anymore for then is -
a. Copy editing The Phoenix. I read most of Tim Rogers' review of Earthbound/Mother 2 this morning. Hadn't read it before, for all the spoilers. Can't finish reading it until I finish the game. Still, it's full of great observations. For instance, he first establishes Shigesato Itoi as having a background as a self-proclaimed "journalist", and then likens his work on the game as a copy editor's. Putting the pieces together - making sure they equal [at least] the sum of their parts by the time the credits roll. He calls the game "literature", because it accomplishes something only true literature can, mostly, in the the brain stem-shattering catharsis of its ending.
I like that the payoff comes after and without all or most the self-effacing humor of the game. When Ness dug around in a trash can before, and "oh, guess what, (he) found only handfuls of garbage", it came as one of the funniest, unexpected jokes I've found in a video game. I was almost disappointed when I'd find a hamburger or something later. So I have to wonder, when the game is over - and Ness goes on his cathartic journey home - is there only garbage in the garbage cans? Or is there nothing but cans of fruit juice and hamburgers? For some reason, I can only imagine it being one or the other. I hope it's the former, though I still have to find out.
b. The novel. I split off about eight pages from what I had. That'll be turning into a long short story. Rambo Town stays in the book. When the time to introduce Wine Country and the pages I wrote at the beginning come, I keep thinking it should be like North By Northwest. So... Rambo Town comes later? I don't know. I thought this thing was gonna be about Kelowna. Maybe it will be! I sure as shit can't really bring myself to write something about Kelowna as Kelowna. It should have stages - and bosses! Oh hell yeah! For all that, though, it needs a MacGuffin. That'll take me a while to think up [even though it doesn't really matter what it is, a MacGuffin should at least contribute something].
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Kind of pissed that I'm working all through the last Party Army night at O'Flannigans and The Dark Knight premiere. Still got a month left of heat and debauchery though.
I kind of miss everyone, though.
There's a lot of them.
And it took all but the worst thing in the world to happen for me to find them again.
I always thought I'd have to move away - over an ocean, even - to lose everyone and find new people like that. "The city is where you get to reinvent yourself," a guy told me a few months ago on the bus. Did it just take me this long to start living in my own city? There sure as hell aren't any orchards around me anymore.Tunes: ROSSO - Sayonara Sally |
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Too Tired to Sleep
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Jun. 6th, 2008 @ 03:21 am
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The best and worst thing in the world is venting a thousand words onto a journal entry [the first in several months], and then realizing with a sudden, thick atmosphere that all this stuff gets auto-copied to Facebook.
Man, internet. This internet thing. Man.
The internet gets old too, though. I tried watching a movie I'm semi-expected to watch. "Jumper." It was pretty terrible! When I think about what it must've been like to write it, all I can think of is a Marvel comic book fan writing what he thinks is just this really awesome first issue about People Who Can Teleport. During this process, he watches every episode of "The Hills." Then, in a coke-addled haze of re-writing, he turns his thiry-two page comic script into a ninety minute movie script. Perhaps he makes twenty thousand dollars from it.
I'm just gonna keep hitting keys until eyelids start dropping. This is ridiculous. I think maybe I might need some kind of egg timer stasis thing to just knock me out and then shock me awake when the alarm goes off. I'm looking at you, Taser engineers.
Actually, I just remembered a really great trick for insomnia. Apart from just exhausting oneself [which I suppose I do too often, and which doesn't seem to be working at the moment], somebody once told me to just tense up really tight and then relax. Bit by bit, from head to toes, or toes to head, or there and back again, respectively. It helps quite a bit. That and valerian root. Melatonin is nice except for when trying to wake up on time [and the jarringly fucked up dreams].
Oh - there they go. Goodnight, then.Emotions:  drained Tunes: Boards of Canada - Turquoise Hexagon Sun |
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i'm wearing a pretty damn fancy suit right now
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Jan. 20th, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
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The following is an e-mail letter I just wrote and did not send:
Hey man well um mom was all "write write write write" when I left but I can't think of anything to talk about so far that I want to mention to her so I am writing you a letter instead!!!111 Yeah man FUCK OTTAWA pretty much. Just fuck east enders.
Well okay it's not that bad but I need to get something out of my system here. Every evening since we've gotten here everyone has gotten less and less sleep and has gotten drunker and drunker and DRUNKER. At first it was all good. Day two [of drinking hard liquor from breakfast to early morning the next day] was pushing it just a little, but the end result was sweet sweet adventures. Post-adventure shenanigans were sketchy, sad, and soppy. Today is the first day in three days straight that I and [to a degree] we haven't really gotten drinking on at all [with the exception of a vodka and cranberry juice at the gala in Parliament tonight oh godddd that place so amazing when you walk up and see everything but so incredibly depressing and suffocating when you fill a square "neo-gothic" ballroom with a few hundred student journalists, set up a fucking BEER GARDEN and call it a "gala"].
But I digress.
I've met a lot of amazing people here who I like and would love to hang out with, but hanging out is a lost art I guess. I feel like I've connected with our News Team here and some sincerity has been had, but all this bullshit gets in the way. Tonight, for example. I was hella sketching all through the awards ceremony due to the air being RIFE with bullshit. I had to get out. So did the team, mostly. Me and Alexi took a cab back to the hotel, and I feel like I would've loved to just walk around downtown and hit up a restaurant or something and chat but nooo everyone wants to go to Helsinki, a hip-hop bar. When I say 'everyone' I mean 'no one really', but no one wanted to be a party pooper either and mess it up for the people who they think actually want to go to a freaking hip-hop bar.
I know it's just the post-alcohol binge but I'm just depressed as hell over here. Alexi seems the same, though she's gotten sick now too.
Rob and I had a dream. We had a dream to strut up to the Peace Flame that eternally burns in the center of the fountain in front of Parliament, surrounded by plaques bearing the coat of arms for all the provinces, commemorating their joining to unify Canada, and use it as a lighter. We tried, oh lord did we try, but it just didn't work.
No one smokes weed here. If you ask them, or if you just bring the topic up, you will get the stink eye.
Everyone does blow instead.
PS - the cab drivers here are TOTAL JERKS. ...i mean they have been complete and total dicks [except for one]
PPS - The city view is beautiful here.Emotions:  discontent |
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g-g-g-g-ghost!
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Dec. 11th, 2007 @ 12:13 am
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I'm thinking maybe I should just get someone to ghost write this journal thing for me
I could supply all the themes and flashy events of my daily life in bullet form! He or she or it could elaborate.Emotions:  complacent Tunes: Do Make Say Think - Highway 420 |
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i've been busy. or just dead.
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Aug. 10th, 2007 @ 01:33 am
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So, it's back to the journal for a little while again. It's been a while, and I've been up to various things. I guess one of the bigger things I've done socially is get a job at a local video store here, and so much of my time now is spent doing nothing especially contructive, though my bank account has now sprung to action! Really now, there's just so many different numbers running through it. I check it [online! how novel!] almost as often as I check my e-mail, though not nearly as often as I check the Select Button forums.
Having money and lots of... things and bits of things that can combine to make huge, expensive things is alright I guess, though as I thought it might, it hasn't really changed me. Usually in the context of money I hear this said as if it was a good thing, though really I think I need a change. Something in me, something in those constantly recycling cells and stir-crazy moods of mine requires it. I hardly thought about money before I had a job, except when I needed it. Now, I need it to open doors I can't afford to open and I love the idea of it in that context, but I'm somehow learning to hate it in every other sense.
Man, I thought this post was just gonna be take a minute and a few sentences. I hardly have so much to say, I can't write it all right now though, so here it is:
I can either come to grips with the fact that I am an incredibly normal, average person, or I can run around in circles trying to be different without being the same as people trying to be different. Since I was six years old, this has been on my mind in one form or another, and it seems to me now that every few years, I tackle the same existential wall from a different angle.
I'd like to plan out my approach a little more carefully now. I think I'm capable of that, considering all the different trajectories I know of I that I can choose from.
There are people I've admired, rather foolishly, for both being "cool" and leading "cool", seemingly eventful lives and lifestyles. However, from my understanding of what makes something cool under these very different aspects depends on how miserable they are, and someone can't be very cool and be miserable at the same time. That life can look like something worth living, until you're in it, just wanting nothing else but some rest and peace in exchange for some of the craaazy stories you could have to tell.
I'm going into my early twenties come this fall, and all my heroes have grown up. If there's one thing that's led me into this place, it's whatever extra perspective the internet has given me over the years.
It worries me that I can only seem to get the motivation, the drive to make something when I'm caught up in someone else's makings.
It worries me that more and more I only act on what's left of the drive when sleep has left me. [a non-friend of many years said recently that he expects my raccoon-like circled eyes to always be like that]
I could stop worrying, because, after all; whenever I give my situations a calm think or two, I realize I have nothing to really worry about at all.
And now I remember how a man from a city said he went to a small town, and everything there was clean, and appeared to work properly. The weather was nice, and the people were polite. And right around then that man began to become very, very worried.Tunes: Ambulance - Hey! Beat Takeshi |
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