Out of the Jungle, into the frying pan

I’m writing this on 5/25/05, but it’s in response to the events that occurred to me yesterday on 5/24/05. Over the weekend, I spent as much time as possible to study for a test that I thought was on Friday, but turned out to be Monday. A FINAL EXAM, to be more exact, in my Anthropology Lab class. This left me very little time to study for my Philosophy final which I could have sworn was on Thursday, but turned out to be on Tuesday. You can imagine how messed up my head must be if I got those that mixed up.

So on Monday night, I was up late studying for Philosophy. I called a small group of study buddies to collaborate on studying. The final was the following morning at 8:00 AM, so we agreed to meet the following morning at 6:30 to go over the material. Tuesday morning, I hardly awoke to the very loud sounds of my alarm clock which is set to sound like church bells. After spending six minutes in the magical land between sleep and awake, I heard my mom pounding on my door and jerked out of bed. I got ready in 30 minutes, which is probably a record for me. One of my study buddies, Alex, agreed to pick me up at around 6:15 at a certain meeting spot that we both knew, so I ran like hell to meet up with him there.

Now my greatest fear about traveling with Alex to school was that I knew he was a stoner and I would probably wind up in his car with him smoking the place up. I was afraid of this because just last week, I found myself in the car with two stoners smoking a pipe and one of them happened to be driving. For the record, marijuana smells like sh*t and the thought of smelling like it with a driver who made me think he was going to crash the car isn’t comforting. Alex was not like that though. He was kind enough to bring me to the study place and that was all.

So I had a crash study of a lifetime, realized how little I knew about philosophers throughout history and had an average test. And let me tell you it felt GREAT to get my first taste of the freedom of summer. It was a breath of fresh air. I was out of all of my troubles. But right when things start looking good, something else comes along.

You see, my boss, the man in the wheelchair, has had trouble agreeing with me on the work schedule for this summer. I worked three days a week with him last summer and his mom ran out of money to pay me with. I couldn’t work anymore until she was able to pay me back what she owed me. A few weeks ago, the same thing happened again, only I worked just 1 day a week during the school year. She had others to pay though.

Now my boss wants me to work three days a week again this summer. I told him over a week ago that I couldn’t because his mom didn’t have the money and I needed to get paid. He told me that she did have the money, but I’ve heard that one before from her. It’s not that I don’t trust her. It’s just that she always has trouble getting me money when this sort of thing comes around. So I suggested that I only work one day a week. We negotiated and said we’d work at least two.

I agreed to two, but I can’t afford to put them through the same thing that happened last summer, let alone myself. Especially since I got a second job this summer working on my movie “Amber” for money. I’m working three days a week in that job and two in my other job as a caretaker. I have my dream job and my job with one of the best friends I’ve ever had. However, my boss in the caretaking job is freaking out about only losing one day of time with me this summer and is probably still thinking of things to say to get me to work three days a week again.

So here I am glad to be out of school , but afraid that I just put one of the best jobs in the world in jeopardy. I just hope the situation clears out smoothly.

Oh yeah, and I think my song for the Wolf Movie contest has a pretty good chance of getting put on CD. The director got back to me, said she liked the song and had me do some changes. I just hope I make it.

In-Fectin

It never fails. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, you’ll find people like this guy. A guy who called himself Fectin has decided that it’s a good idea to whine and bitch at everyone who disagrees with him, even if he’s plain wrong. The name “Fectin” is a misspelled variation on the German word “fechtin,” which means “to fence.” Either it’s because he likes to fence himself in with all of his negativity, or he likes to fence as in sword fighting. Either way, it suits him well because he’s being a real jerk.

For a brief rundown, let me tell you what happened with him. He’d been bugging Lee on www.right-thinking.com for a long time. Then when he bugged another fellow called Drumwaster with a really nasty e-mail tossing insults and whining about how immature everyone else is, he got, as they say on the Internet, “owned.” Lee, as I understand it, only uses foul language when someone else forces him to resort to it. So when I check out Fectin’s blogsite with all of it’s oh so mature way of dealing with things, I see this

Absolutely stunning. Although I mostly agree with Fectin on the Schiavo case, you do not act this way period. That’s my opinion at least. Whose side are you on?

Misery

I just got done watching the movie “Misery,” with James Caan and Kathy Bates. Incredible. Is it just me or were there about a million parallels in that movie?

I got interested in watching the movie a month ago when I saw a clip from it on a TV special called “100 Scariest Movie Moments.” Or at least, I think that’s what it was called. They didn’t include half of the scariest movie moments, in my opinion. But the movie itself was based on a book written by Stephen King, the man notorious for writing some of the scariest novels in the world. In the film, a famous book author by the name of Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has just finished writing his latest book in a long chain of stories called the “Misery” series. On his way back from a hotel in the mountains, a blizzard comes along and hits him pretty hard. When he wakes up, he’s in a bed in a farmhouse with a broken arm and two broken legs. A nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) found him in the snow and took him back to her house.

The good news is that Paul is safe and he’s with a person who’s a big fan of his “Misery” novels. The bad news is she likes them a little bit too much. She’s one of those hardcore fans who freaks out if there’s a smidgen of something in his work that she doesn’t like. So when he let’s her read the manuscript for his latest unpublished novel, she’s in for a surprise: Misery, the title character of the book, dies at the end of this novel. Just something that Sheldon had to do because he was tired of writing the books.

Now Annie Wilkes does not like this. If Misery dies, she doesn’t have any other life to go to. Add that to the fact that she’s a crazy biatch, and you understand what happens next. Annie realizes that she now has Paul Sheldon where she wants him and she can force him to write the books the way that she wants. So she forces him to burn the manuscript because apparently “God does not like it” and write up a new book entirely from scratch.

So here’s the situation: Paul Sheldon has two busted legs and an arm that’s less than good. He’s in a farmhouse, out in the middle of nowhere and the phones apparently don’t work. He has no choice but to do the bidding of his most obsessed fan and write what she wants. This does have something to say about being famous. I wonder what happened to Stephen King that inspired him to write this story.

What do we expect from Stephen King? We expect psychological horror, visual horror, real horror and little girls asking daddy to come play with them. If a Stephen King fan was disappointed, King would most certainly feel it because he just lost a member of his fan base. That’s what happens when you get a fan base based on a formula. Someone gets disappointed if there’s one thing out of place, therefore the whole thing has to come down.

I heard once that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books in the 19th Century, got tired of doing Sherlock Holmes and decided to have him killed off in the last book, never to be seen again. Then people got pissed off at him and he wound up having to write the Sherlock Holmes books again years later, saying that Holmes didn’t really die at the end of the last book despite the fact that he fell off a FRIGGIN’ CLIFF. This is what fans’ll do to you. They either never want you to stop or never want you to kill off a hero, despite the fact that great heroes die. This is not the only time it’s happened either. As a member of the Sonic fandom, I remember roughly eight years ago when comic book scribe Ken Penders tried to have Sally killed off. She was the lead female character in the series and everybody though she was dead for several issues. Then several nasty e-mails to Ken Penders later and they were forced to bring her back to life with a freakishly lame plot twist.

For more recent examples on how this works, remember how pissed the entire planet got about the new Star Wars movies? Even though I can see why that happened. And how about with “The Matrix?” I mean sure, the sequels weren’t as high and mighty as the first one was, but when Neo and Trinity died in the third movie, the Matrix fan base mutated into a group of flesh-eating zombies who wanted the Wachowski Brothers’ heads on a pike. I mean, come on. If Neo was supposed to be a parallel to Jesus Christ, then what did you expect?

Stephen King must have felt the same way. He probably wrote himself into a position where he could only write what the fans wanted. He WAS Paul Sheldon in other words. And his fans…just another bunch of freaked out zombies. I wonder though: as a filmmaker, what would people begin to expect of me?