I went home this weekend to see the spring show at my High School. They changed things up this year and did two musicals instead of a straight play in the spring. The show they chose for this spring was "Little Shop of Horrors." For those who aren't familiar with it, it's about a guy who works in a plant shop downtown in this down-trodden city. One day he finds a "strange and interesting" plant and buys it for the shop. As it turns out, the plant requires a special kind of food. Namely blood. It grows really big, and eventually starts talking and making demands. And therein lies the rub. The show was quite good, and the guy who did the voice of the plant was awesome. A couple of the guys actually stuck my name in at one point, which they got yelled at for, even though we always do it to alumni when they come back. I can guarantee that nobody noticed except for those people who had been involved in theater in the past. I was kind of surprised as to how few other alumni I saw at the show, but I figured they were coming other nights, and I know the spring show never draws people like the fall musical does.
I also watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in months, and was glad I did, because I saw two of the funniest sketches I have seen on that show in a long time. Christopher Walken hosted, and the first of the two sketches was titled: "Indoor Gardening Tips from a Man who is Very Scared of Plants." The entire sketch was him showing how he had glued "googly-eyes" to all of his plants. He said that he felt much more comfortable around them if he could look them in the eyes, like people. He kept saying, "I know where I stand with this plant." He put these giant eyes on a palm tree, and just sprinkled a bunch of eyes on a patch of grass, which he didn't like. The second sketch was a parody of Top Chef, in which the contestants had to make a Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza using only certain ingredients, which were naturally ridiculous. 3 of the contestants immediately went to work and started cooking stuff, but Walken just sounded confused and complained about all the limitation of the show: the time limit, the need to share materials, the strange ingredients. By the end everyone else had cooked some crazy looking crap, but Walken didn't have anything. He was just really flustered.
Other than that stuff, the weekend was really pretty boring. Not much else to say. Other than, that is, the explanation of the title of this post, which I thought was pretty funny. I think it was two years ago, my family took a trip over to Michigan to go camping up in Sleeping Bear Dunes. We took the car ferry across Lake Michigan. While my Dad was in line to get tickets, the guy in front of him was talking to the girl working the office. She said that he needed to pay a fuel surcharge because of the high gas prices, to which the guy replied, "Gas prices!? This thing burns coal!" I thought that was funny. Maybe it was just me. Maybe you had to be there.
4.28.2008
4.18.2008
Some Mother****** Always Trying to Ice Skate Uphill
In my opinion, the coolest thing that ever happens to any superhero is when they are brought to the brink of death and something happens that makes them come back to completely full strength, and often times far beyond their original strength. I say this because I just watched Blade, and there is that whole ending sequence where Blade gets bled to summon the blood god and what-not, and then drinks the blood of that doctor chick and proceeds to kick vampire ass for the rest of the movie, most notably by roundhouse kicking the vial of vampire-exploding serum into Deacon Frost's forehead.
We just finished up our unit on Der Besuch der Alten Dame in my German class, and it was definitely a pretty sweet book. Quick summary of the plot: There's this town, Güllen, that is totally shot. Bankrupt, run-down, forgotten, pretty much gone straight to Hell. So this crazy old bitch shows up and promises to give the town a billion dollars. Yes, literally a billion dollars (I say dollars here, although the unit of currency is never actually given). The catch? The town has to present her with the dead body of her former lover, Alfred Ill. Chaos ensues.
The thing is, Der Besuch (which is actually a stageplay) resembles a black comedy more than anything else I can think of. It's not your typical black comedy, though, because I never actually found myself laughing out loud while reading it. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the author, describes the show as a "tragic comedy," even though the storyline doesn't contain many of the hallmarks of a comedy at all. What it does contain are many features of a tragedy. For starters, the main character DIES at the end (sorry if you wanted to read it for yourself). Now, I've seen some black comedies in which the main character dies, but again, these are typically shows or movies where I am laughing almost continuously throughout. Not only does the main character die, but nobody else is really happy at all by the end. The townspeople get all the money they were promised, but they all kind of simultaneously realize that they gave up everything that made them human for comfort and wealth. For a town that is obsessed with "moral right" throughout the entire show, they are remarkably willing to set aside any semblance of morals when it promises to better their lives. Perhaps what is even more notable about the behavior of the townspeople is that, initially, they don't actively pursue the murder of Ill. What they do is completely alter their lifestyles, as if they are sure that they will soon come into a ton of money from some unstated source. They start buying things (every single character buys a new pair of shoes!) on credit that they could never normally afford. Not only that, they buy the stuff from Ill's own store! They basically adopt new lives, assuming that Ill will soon be dead! This could be seen as a sort of acceptance that Ill is essentially doomed to die, but there is a clear level of hostility in their actions that makes it seem more like a kind of passive aggression. In actuality, though, it doesn't matter which it is. The city is enabling the murder of this man in either case! The only character who stands up for Ill through most of the story eventually gets driven to alcoholism by his realization that he is powerless to stop the death of the man. Even Claire Zachanassian, the woman who offers the money in the first place, is largely unsatisfied with the end result. She leaves the city and returns to her home in Algeria, a billion dollars poorer and with little to show for but the dead body of her former lover, a man who had reformed long ago and had become one of the most respected members of the town. Of course, this may have been what motivated Claire's offer in the first place.
Once again, I find it is after midnight and I have class tomorrow. A quick summary of the big events of my weekend:
We just finished up our unit on Der Besuch der Alten Dame in my German class, and it was definitely a pretty sweet book. Quick summary of the plot: There's this town, Güllen, that is totally shot. Bankrupt, run-down, forgotten, pretty much gone straight to Hell. So this crazy old bitch shows up and promises to give the town a billion dollars. Yes, literally a billion dollars (I say dollars here, although the unit of currency is never actually given). The catch? The town has to present her with the dead body of her former lover, Alfred Ill. Chaos ensues.
The thing is, Der Besuch (which is actually a stageplay) resembles a black comedy more than anything else I can think of. It's not your typical black comedy, though, because I never actually found myself laughing out loud while reading it. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the author, describes the show as a "tragic comedy," even though the storyline doesn't contain many of the hallmarks of a comedy at all. What it does contain are many features of a tragedy. For starters, the main character DIES at the end (sorry if you wanted to read it for yourself). Now, I've seen some black comedies in which the main character dies, but again, these are typically shows or movies where I am laughing almost continuously throughout. Not only does the main character die, but nobody else is really happy at all by the end. The townspeople get all the money they were promised, but they all kind of simultaneously realize that they gave up everything that made them human for comfort and wealth. For a town that is obsessed with "moral right" throughout the entire show, they are remarkably willing to set aside any semblance of morals when it promises to better their lives. Perhaps what is even more notable about the behavior of the townspeople is that, initially, they don't actively pursue the murder of Ill. What they do is completely alter their lifestyles, as if they are sure that they will soon come into a ton of money from some unstated source. They start buying things (every single character buys a new pair of shoes!) on credit that they could never normally afford. Not only that, they buy the stuff from Ill's own store! They basically adopt new lives, assuming that Ill will soon be dead! This could be seen as a sort of acceptance that Ill is essentially doomed to die, but there is a clear level of hostility in their actions that makes it seem more like a kind of passive aggression. In actuality, though, it doesn't matter which it is. The city is enabling the murder of this man in either case! The only character who stands up for Ill through most of the story eventually gets driven to alcoholism by his realization that he is powerless to stop the death of the man. Even Claire Zachanassian, the woman who offers the money in the first place, is largely unsatisfied with the end result. She leaves the city and returns to her home in Algeria, a billion dollars poorer and with little to show for but the dead body of her former lover, a man who had reformed long ago and had become one of the most respected members of the town. Of course, this may have been what motivated Claire's offer in the first place.
Once again, I find it is after midnight and I have class tomorrow. A quick summary of the big events of my weekend:
- MadHatters Formal, complete with Party Bus and dance party at UNO's
- No Hangover, which was nice
- 750 word German paper resembling what I talked about above, cranked out in 5 hours.
- CentSports balance holding at $1.16 after a relatively rough weekend
First Inaugural Address
The first thing I notice on this page is the example labels for each post. The first one is "scooters." Really? Scooters? Are the labels based off the kind of web traffic they get? Top search scooters, next highest turtlenecks, and so on. I suppose there could be a lot of people writing about scooters. I mean, they're great, don't get me wrong. Good mileage, the exhilaration of seeing the road flying past below you, breakneck speeds of 40 mph. I have a moped, and it has treated me well. My point is, I can't imagine anybody thinking they need to go and consult a blog or two because they want to know of others' opinions on scooters. It is, of course, entirely possible that I am wrong about the whole thing. Maybe it's a marketing ploy. Yeah, that's probably it. It's all about advertising on these sites. Needless to say, I will be tagging this post with "scooters."
As far as blogs go, I'm not sure what this one is going to turn out as. It mostly just started as an impulse, as something to do on the internet when every other site seems old or stagnant. Plus it is admittedly nice to be able to write in a casual, vernacular format like this. At the same time, I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish by doing it. I could just as easily keep a private diary in some ragged notebook, but the stigma that carries isn't something I want to have, even if it is a ridiculous distinction between private, internal contemplation of your thoughts and putting them down on paper. Personally, writing something down and reading it back seems more concrete, more distinct than just staring at the ceiling and thinking about it. Written communication must have some sort of allure, because this blog scene has absolutely exploded since its first appearance. It seems that people have a craving for self expression of any kind, which is actually comforting in a way.
I suppose the best way to start this damn thing is with a personal statement of some kind. So what I'm gonna lay out is my explanation of how damn sweet my life actually is, when I think about it. Here's what life consists of for me, right now:
So what else? I have never even really read one of these things before, so I'm not sure what common practice is. Of course, then I'd just being using the thoughts and expressions of someone else as a template. This might have its merits, since we're all presumably looking for the same thing in writings these things. I suppose I can't expect the mere fact that I started some web-based public diary to start my mind off in some profound direction previously unexplored. I can hope, I suppose, that just writing this stuff down will spark something along these lines, and some great life truth will be revealed to me in my own words. I think that was supposed to be the point of those assignments I had in high school, when we were instructed to just write without stopping for 10 or 15 minutes. I'm betting I wasn't the only one who found that to be difficult. But then, I think that's to be expected. The mind is so disjointed, so non-linear, that continuous writing about some arbitrary topic would be constantly interrupted by wandering lines of thought. In fact, I would occasionally try to follow the instructions without compromise by literally writing straight through for the entire time. There would invariably be certain words just repeated over and over for a line or two when I blanked, but it was undeniably amusing to look back later and be stumped by the complete lack of logical connections between topics on the page. Sometimes one would last for a half a page, sometimes they would just be single sentences, exclamations of some idea that popped into my head because linear thought was proving too exclusive, too narrow for a person who experiences pressures and influences from hundreds of different avenues every day. Like just now, I find myself thinking that I'm definitely getting away from the day-by-day structure I expected to find myself constructing.
It's 1:04 am, and my sleep schedule has been messed up enough already this week. Not to mention that this first post has surely gone far beyond the accepted length restriction for an independent personal blog. So I think a fitting conclusion would be: too long, didn't read.
As far as blogs go, I'm not sure what this one is going to turn out as. It mostly just started as an impulse, as something to do on the internet when every other site seems old or stagnant. Plus it is admittedly nice to be able to write in a casual, vernacular format like this. At the same time, I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish by doing it. I could just as easily keep a private diary in some ragged notebook, but the stigma that carries isn't something I want to have, even if it is a ridiculous distinction between private, internal contemplation of your thoughts and putting them down on paper. Personally, writing something down and reading it back seems more concrete, more distinct than just staring at the ceiling and thinking about it. Written communication must have some sort of allure, because this blog scene has absolutely exploded since its first appearance. It seems that people have a craving for self expression of any kind, which is actually comforting in a way.
I suppose the best way to start this damn thing is with a personal statement of some kind. So what I'm gonna lay out is my explanation of how damn sweet my life actually is, when I think about it. Here's what life consists of for me, right now:
- School, with a manageable amount of homework and even more manageable amount of studying, most of which concerns topics I am fully interested in.
- Madhatters, one of the most fun groups I have ever been a part of, where me and a bunch of my friends get together and sing for pretty girls, and occasionally become inebriated.
- Frisbee, often of the glow-in-the-dark variety
- Video Games, more often than not Bedtime Smash
- Watching, discussing, speculating about, and attempting to win money off of sports
So what else? I have never even really read one of these things before, so I'm not sure what common practice is. Of course, then I'd just being using the thoughts and expressions of someone else as a template. This might have its merits, since we're all presumably looking for the same thing in writings these things. I suppose I can't expect the mere fact that I started some web-based public diary to start my mind off in some profound direction previously unexplored. I can hope, I suppose, that just writing this stuff down will spark something along these lines, and some great life truth will be revealed to me in my own words. I think that was supposed to be the point of those assignments I had in high school, when we were instructed to just write without stopping for 10 or 15 minutes. I'm betting I wasn't the only one who found that to be difficult. But then, I think that's to be expected. The mind is so disjointed, so non-linear, that continuous writing about some arbitrary topic would be constantly interrupted by wandering lines of thought. In fact, I would occasionally try to follow the instructions without compromise by literally writing straight through for the entire time. There would invariably be certain words just repeated over and over for a line or two when I blanked, but it was undeniably amusing to look back later and be stumped by the complete lack of logical connections between topics on the page. Sometimes one would last for a half a page, sometimes they would just be single sentences, exclamations of some idea that popped into my head because linear thought was proving too exclusive, too narrow for a person who experiences pressures and influences from hundreds of different avenues every day. Like just now, I find myself thinking that I'm definitely getting away from the day-by-day structure I expected to find myself constructing.
It's 1:04 am, and my sleep schedule has been messed up enough already this week. Not to mention that this first post has surely gone far beyond the accepted length restriction for an independent personal blog. So I think a fitting conclusion would be: too long, didn't read.
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