I am random, and actors are lazy

Some people think in straight lines. I don’t. My thought process is rather erratic. It’s a lot like jumping from rock to rock to get across a river instead of wading through it. A lot of the time in class (usually Block) the teacher (usually Singleton) will ask the class a question (usually about themes/symbolism), and I’ll just sit there with a blank look on my face as the kids in the front (usually Sunny) wade through the stream and slowly unearth the meaning of the story.Well, the waders didn’t do the job today, and I couldn’t advance past the idea that Tom Harrison was actually the hitchhiker and seemed a lot like the angel Raphael, wandering around and helping people. This evening, I was laying in my bed reading “The Great Gatsby” when BAM! There it was! I suddenly understood what the story was about. Too late to impress Singleton (who thinks I’m a snot, but I guess I can’t blame her), but that’s all right, because I hope to understand it, and “The Great Gatsby” (RULES), even better come Tuesday.

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I forgot how long actors take to do things. I was at skit practice today, and I basically spent an hour sitting around, doing nothing, and missing a meeting, and twenty minutes actually doing things. Well, that’s all right. The realm of the theatre is no longer my own. It’s just interesting to be around a lot of somewhat disorganized and easygoing (a more cynical man might say “lethargic”) people. It was cool.

I’m a Graffiti Fan today

Some of you may think this is weird. It involves graffiti on public property and why I think it’s kind of cool. If this bothers you, feel free to keep scrolling down your friends list. Today, when I was in a restroom stall at Carmel, I saw, among other things scratched on the wall, this phrase:

“JUDAS’S BOWELS”

This really amused me. I love reading things scratched on bathroom walls, because it’s free, humorous, and mostly harmless expression by people who look normal but are really weird on the inside. Then I realized that the bathrooms at Carmel High School have been rotating “OUT OF ORDER” tape for the last week because the administration is replacing the current stalls with huge, black-and-white static wall/stalls that look really nice, but, as far as I can see, cannot be written on. This disappointed me a bit, but I imagine in will make the parents feel much better about themselves, and the administration will feel very happy and hope to be labeled a “Four-Star School” or some other meaningless award for improvement. Yes, the bathrooms will be much cleaner now, but I can’t help thinking that the darker edge of the human mind is being whitewashed. Well, at least people can still spray-paint anarchy symbols on mirrors, like they did my freshman year.

If you’re wondering, yes, I was busted for scratching my neighbor’s car with rocks when I was ten years old. My fatal mistake was writing “JAMES WAS HERE.” I repented – it really wasn’t a nice thing to do – and my grandpa was impressed that I came clean about it. “You’ve got to be honest,” he said. “If you’re not, it’ll catch up with you later in life.” That’s the last real conversation I had with him before Alzheimer’s started to cut into him. (He’s still alive, by the way.)

Oh, and another thing..graffiti is bilingual in Canada. That’s awesome.

Dissatisfaction with the Artistic Establishment

In this day and age, if a person wants to experience a wonderful new piece of literature that entertains them and provides a really deep message, they should go to an independent theatre and watch a movie. Sure, the movie industry has a lot of cash cows, and a production cost of several million dollars is commonplace now, but in the last 30 years, it seems there have a been a lot more great movies than great books. All the smashing young writers hoping to make a difference in the world seem to be booking it to Hollywood to make movie scripts. No, I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, but haven’t you thought about this before, too?What’s wrong with books? Why are the Harry Potter books the only really popular ones in the last seven years? I think the problem is that all the guys who aren’t out writing scripts are busy sitting in bookstore coffeehouses and drinking writer’s chai. “I’m a writer, mrh mrh,” they say in their asinine little way and then proceed not to write anything. Everyone wants to be a philosopher, but the only thing that a lot of people, and not just writers, can say about the human condition is “materialism sucks.” Yes, it sucks, but don’t you have anything else to say? Novels are stories, so novel writers should be great storytellers, but does anyone really care about telling a good yarn anymore? A lot of “genre writers” seem to, like Stephen King, but many of these people aren’t taken seriously. It’s depressing. Maybe the term “writer” should be abolished as an occupation and replaced by the title of “a person who writes.”

Maybe I am truly wrong in this criticism of the establishment. If so, I’d love to see some good proof. It’s highly possible that there are some really great stories being told on paper, and the establishment simply hasn’t found them yet. Bach, after all, was not discovered until about 150 years after he died, if I remember correctly. In the meantime, I am looking forward to watching some good movies in the next few years.

Our high school youth group is breaking in half

There are two kinds of people: the ones who have always had friends and the ones who haven’t. The people who have been alone have a kind of compassion that the others simply don’t have. Popular people can be really nice, but they can never quite be friends with the loners. It’s like trying to push two positive ends of a magnet together. When a large group of people comes together, they tend to split down the middle. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Honors Block, or even better, CRYPT. Our youth group is breaking in half, and I don’t like it. I wish I could make the other half understand, but it’s like they don’t want to. It would make them too uncomfortable. Well, screw comfort. Sooner or later, a person has to wake up and take a look at the person sitting next to them. I know I’ve been in a lot of situations where I registered someone’s existence but didn’t pay any attention to them. It’s all right to be reserved, but if I see them every single week for months and months, and I never do anything to reach out to them, then I’m not being Christian and, hell, I’m not even being human. It’s not right; it’s not right at all. If no one ever does anything to fix the leak, the crew will eventually have to throw stuff overboard or jump the ship. I don’t like that. Let’s fix the ship.

Carmel in Winter

This town seems so sterile sometimes. I think there’s something to it, though. It’s funny that everyone wants to get out of town, when they’ve never really thought about where they actually are. Carmel in winter reminds me of the covers of those old 70s albums where the person is sitting outside and being one with nature, and it’s supposed to look really beautiful, but the technicolor is rather flat, so instead you wonder if the people were as dim and fuzzy as the weather. (Here’s some examples if you don’t know what I’m talking about: 1 | 2) It’s times like these when I feel awfully old, as if I was actually alive during the 1970s, and I was out there sitting under the shade in the dull sunshine with John Lennon and walking through the grainy old city with Bob Dylan. I think that people a lot of people define their reality by how it looks on their television set. You may have laughed at Calvin’s Dad when he said that color wasn’t invented until the 1940s, and that artists were just insane, but in a way, he’s right. The general public thought in terms of black and white back then. The monochrome lobby is a distinct minority now. Most people would rather have a color television.