Another day, another obsession, another challenge, or: go watch Awake

Life presses on.  Unfortunately tonight I don't offer much in terms of cohesion: I always feel as if I'm abusing my power as a writer when I publish these disjointed and subheading-laden posts, but I fear that the cocktail that is a mixture of the itch to write something with a bunch of semi-topics floating around in my head (all pressing enough to be written though not significant enough to stand alone) proves to be a little bit too toxic for me and my creative standstill to handle.  My antidote, then, is this: voila.  (besides, I think this lets me get lighthearted and silly if I intend for these little snippets of my borderline obsessive-compulsive - though always illuminatingly charming - thought process to exist on the basis of humour, anyways)


It has happened.

My obsession with this girl is so, so far gone.  In fact, scroll down the main page of my blog and you'll see not one but two images of the beauty (two out of three, if you count Madonna's endless tripping.  Silly, silly Madonna), and here's a third.  Rejoice!

I'm still very aware that Lana Del Rey has an extremely polarizing effect: you will love her voice, or you will hate it; you will love her songs, or you will hate them; you will see her as a travesty live, or you will see her as refreshing.  (I'll say that I think she's got some work to do when singing live but I won't hold some inexperience and nerves against her) Yeah, yeah, I drone on about her.  She's commandeered my iTunes, especially now that I've downloaded demos and unreleased songs and her first unofficial and unreleased full length album on top of Born to Die which was only released a month ago.  Point is, she's my new it when it comes to music; suffice to say I got myself a little bit sick of Lady Gaga and the obsession I've had for her - still love her, not to worry - but as she's faded from the forefront for now and her music's grown really stale for me (BTW, unfortunately, does not have a lasting effect, and I'm patiently waiting for what's next), I desperately needed something else.  Now I've gone and went gaga over another.

An update from the land of television

Speaking of things I've let get a hold on me this year: my love for television, the love that gets me through my single, free-time ridden nights here holed up in my room on residence.  (doesn't help I've gone into the deep end when it comes to torrents, and they are now my entire existence) The Walking Dead's latest offing had me staring at shock upon my computer screen, and though I blame Twitter's trending topics for spoiling the massive character for me minutes before I started my video, I was still taken aback by the violent manner of this character's end as well as feeling slightly affected (although I didn't like them at all) by the brutal emotion from the rest of the cast of characters as they came across the devastation.  Well done, cast.  As for Smash, I'm coming off of an emotionally charged episode aired only tonight with a sizable shocker in its final minutes, and I'd really implore anyone with an inkling of interest in Broadway (and I don't even mean you need to love it; just a flare for the performance) to watch it, because the performances are incredible and I'm impressed at the quality of writing for an NBC show.  On a related note: stop what you are doing right now and watch Awake.  If you haven't heard of it, it only just premiered on Thursday, and the basic concept is a man, after getting in a car accident with his wife and son, experiences two separate realities on an alternating daily basis where out of his wife and son one is alive and the other is dead, and vice versa.  The mystery of the show is the thinking that: is one a dream?  Are both real?  Neither?  The psychology is interesting, as is the fact that the two cases the protagonist works - he's a cop with two different partners depending on the "world" - begin to overlap with each other.  Quality at its finest, I promise you.  Finally, working off of "quality," I recently watched the Canadian miniseries Bomb Girls on suggestion from a friend, six episodes dealing with the women workers of a bomb factory during World War II.  Great television, especially for a Canadian production: I'd wager that, in recent memory, I have not adhered to characters as quickly as I did with this series - specifically a tomboyish worker and her growing attachment to another, a meek runaway - and the finale is heartbreaking.  Interesting on the historical side and compelling in terms of the drama.

But go watch Awake.  Now.  If it means not reading on, so be it - I've already got your page visits. ;)

A personal challenge

You may think to yourself that, damn, I must have a ton of free time on my hands to watch as much television as I do (all of the aforementioned plus many more), and you'd be right.  In the final haul of the semester, I only have three essays to turn in - the first, I've finished; the second has an alternative creative assignment option I might take heed of; the third is based on Watchmen, so let's all laugh out loud at the ease this will pose for me - and just two final tests in the last week, both in film classes which knock on wood aren't a grand challenge for me.  And so, with all this free time: I'm sure you recall my venture into the world of fiction once again with my attempt at NaNoWriMo this past November, so I thought to myself, "why not make things full circle and do it again for the final third of my semester?"  It's true that my November was relatively stress-free regardless of the sheer amount of work I had to do, but I attribute that entirely to having a creative outlet.  I recently reread what I managed in November and I've decided I've fallen out of love with my concept; and yet, reading the words made me yearn for that output once more.  This brings us to now, as I sit on top of a solid concept with an actual direction this time as well as a brief 3000 words under my belt.  Naturally, there's no time constraint this time, which I think might encourage my ongoing writing past the close of my semester.


Tis my life.  I eat a lot of cafeteria food because of the amount of money left on my meal plan, and I cackle in my room at the anomalies of my life with my trusted fellow assholes a swift text message away, beer in hand optional.  Oh, and Lana's probably playing.  She is now.

Mr. Brightside

Life's a funny thing.  Could I be any more melodramatic?  (could I be any more like Chandler Bing right now?  Probably..)

Here's a story.  My mom works downtown at a women's clothing boutique and she's essentially second-in-command; she runs the store when the owner (her boss) isn't there, and she has traveled with her boss to New York and Miami to see various fashion shows and conventions with fashion vendors to consider what to buy for and sell at their store.  Last week, my reading week, my mom was to go to New York with her boss, and she would've left on the Wednesday in the middle of the week.  In the end she declined the offer to go a few days before the trip would've been because she said she'd feel bad missing my time home from school.  Wednesday evening, her boss calls her from the side of the highway.  She was driving to the airport to catch the flight to New York, and she was behind a pick-up truck with lumber tied down in the bed in the back.  As she was driving, a block of wood dislodged itself from the truck, fell from the truck and flew through my mom's boss's windshield.  The block of wood missed her, but she was slightly wounded from the windshield shattering.  The block of wood, instead, flew through the passenger side and collided with the passenger seat.  Had my mom decided to go to New York, her boss would've picked her up to go to the airport, and she would have been sitting in the passenger seat.  My mom was really shaken up after the phone call from her boss, and to be honest, the story shook me, too.

Just yesterday, there was a train derailment back at home (and I was still there for the Oscars, which - sidebar - were very boring but all hail Meryl).  I'm unclear on if there were any details revealed today - when I'm back at school I'm quite literally cut off from the rest of the world and the only sort of news I absorb is pop culture related - so I can't with certainty say the reason for the derailment, but I suppose now as I type I really should inform myself and promptly will once I'm finished writing this.  The extent of my knowledge from yesterday was that three Via Rail employees lost their lives; that countless other passengers were injured with varying degrees of severity; and that I believe it was five out of the six cars derailed.  My family and I kept it on the news for a large part of the day yesterday, so the image of the train on its side as well as the emergency responders in the immediate area is somewhat still clear to me.  The train derailment occurred directly behind my parents' friends' house, and I'm very familiar with the area.  They called yesterday saying that they could see the entire accident from the second floor of the house.  Of course, nobody in the surrounding residential area was injured, but I was again reminded by the capacity of accident hitting close to oneself.  This was only furthered by the influx of Facebook statuses appearing all over my news feed, all from students who could very well have been on that very Via train to travel back to school at the end of reading week but missed their train departure or were scheduled for the following train or were staying home for the night.  Again: what could have been.  My thoughts are with everyone who was somehow involved in that, whether it be a victim or the network of secondhand victims existing as families and friends.

I can't help but think of the Hollywood trash that is the Final Destination film franchise that hinges on the idea of wrong place, wrong time with respect to freak accidents.  (of course, then, the whole mystique of those movies is to watch the supposed survivors get killed in even freaker accidents, and while I liked the first few they've become horrible and this reference is rather irrelevant to the tone of what I've been writing) I guess my point of talking about instances where accidents hit a little too close to home is to mention just that: that anything could happen at any moment to anyone.  Things become real when you can physically extend a connection to something; I can't count the amount of times I've seen stories on the news about tragedies and thought, That will never happen to me!, much like I do about, say, breast cancer occurring in the family or getting the winning lottery ticket.  It's a simple thing to say "that doesn't affect me" until it really does, and with that idea, the gravity of possibility has been resonating with me for the past few days.

In reality, life is extremely fragile.  I take for granted the fact that we, as human beings, are truly physically weak to everything around us: I don't give a second thought to the dangers of the road whenever I jump in my car to even drive to the grocery store down the street; I never think of the chance that any appliance in my house, any knife in my hand, has the capacity to inflict unmeasurable or even fatal damage upon myself, but I've been cultured to assume safety in my repeated use of a properly working stove or a carefully handled serrated edge.  In fact, I go through entire days without thinking of death, and even in the times I'm exposed to it as being championed in works of fiction, I never apply it to myself.  No; I subconsciously affirm myself that I will live a very long life and die at an old age, but I honestly have no idea what the future has for me in store, and my surroundings hold infinite possibility.

With that in mind, I suppose my "epiphany" if anything is to stop taking my safety and, on a larger and more melodramatic scale, my life for granted from day to day: it is certainly an easier thing to say than do, but I'm hopefully looking forward to at least stop complaining about how horrible my living situation is or how bad my feet hurt after seven hours of class or how much work I have to do before the end of the semester and just stop, take a deep breath, and be thankful to be alive.

A week in review

It's been forever since I've posted here, and for that, I am sorry: not just to you, the reader, but I commission that apology to myself, since I've let a true joy of mine slip into a busy obscurity.  But then again, I prefer having posts with legitimate quality over posting a large senseless quantity, so hopefully the reward is that much better.

As I mentioned: my week was just slightly hectic!  Given that all of my classes have moved past the introductory mechanisms onto actually course content, my nose is constantly in a book doing the assigned readings.  It doesn't help that I have four courses on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, three of them English courses; needless to say my Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights are busy.  Aside from my readings, though, I've somehow kept myself busy in and around campus, so my transformation into full time hermit has been yet again delayed.

Save me, Dr. Kate Winslet

Last Wednesday night, I saw Contagion with my roommate and one of our friends.  Really well done movie, highly entertaining.  The star power alone was nearly blinding, what with the likes of a woman I love, Kate Winslet (I wish she was given more to do - if you've seen it, you know what I mean, and if you haven't, go see it, and then you'll understand), and a woman I don't exactly love, Gwenyth Paltrow , gracing the screen, joining Matt Damon (Matt! Damon!) and Jude Law and Laurence Fishburne and Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle (don't recognize the name?  I didn't either; she was fantastic, and I was shocked to discover she was Elizabeth Bennett in the Pride & Prejudice miniseries starring Colin Firth - ahhh!).  I particularly liked the music: highly glacial and machine-like which fit the mood perfectly.  My biggest gripe, though, was that the movie made me extremely paranoid.  My one friend coughed throughout the movie (not as a joke, he was genuinely coughing), which was frightening, and looking back and thinking about the lingering shots of dirty surfaces and door handles made (and still makes) me squirm.

Thanks a lot, Contagion.  I'm going to die

I got sick over the weekend.  The height of my cold was yesterday, and after seeing a movie where a large amount of the world's population was wiped out by a sickness, I was extremely paranoid and was therefore writing my will and calling up local priests and nuns for my last rites.  Luckily, my throat remained unscathed, and I was able to actually drink water and eat without it tasting like ass.  My nose wasn't so lucky.  I have some sort of psychological block in my mind where, congestion-wise, I'm doing fine - until I get to class, where my nose literally runs nonstop and I sniffle or blow my nose to the disdain of my neighbours.  Upon my exit from class, then, my nose cackles at me, and clears up momentarily.  After sleeping for a good thirteen hours, I'm almost entirely better now.

There's no place like home!

As I outlined in my more recent blogposts, I haven't yet felt that my residence is 'home' to me - yes, I say things like "I'm going home after class," but I by no means consider this to be my home.  I'm surrounded by comfort in all aspects, but my home is and will always be, well, back home, at least until I sign a lease for my own place with my wife, two to three children and two to four Bernese mountain dogs in tow.  To my point: I went home over the weekend which was simply lovely.  It felt like absolutely nothing had changed - that is, aside from some of my favourite items being absent from my room, or my bed being made up of sheets and pillows we keep for guests.  My grandma's birthday was on Sunday (when I began to get sick), so I was able to see my whole family.  By luck, two of my best friends were home for the weekend, too, and I saw them both.  I blame them for my sickness, as they both were sick/were just coming off of a sickness.  You bitches.

The Boy Who is Obsessed with Some Girl with a Dragon Tattoo who Kicked a Hornet's Nest and Played with Fire

I read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo without time between chapters to breathe - it's SO DAMN GOOD.  I'm officially addicted to the Millennium series, and I hastily went out and bought the next two books.  I also watched the Swedish version of TGWTDT, and to be totally honest and blunt, I didn't overly like it as an adaption; as a movie, it was fine, but even still, the obnoxious differences from the book were a little too much for me (and I'm usually not a snobby book purist bitch) and the movie itself was slightly bland.  That being said - and given that I'm usually against remakes, especially those of foreign films because Americans can't be bothered to read subtitles (and yes I'm generalizing to Americans) - the remake coming out this Christmas by David Fincher looks bloody PHENOMENAL.  Greatest movie trailer I've ever seen.  Now that I've read the book, the glimpses are so not enough for me.

 

OH MY FUCK

I know it technically doesn't fall into the parameters of a week - uh, the True Blood finale last Sunday!?  HOLY SHIT.  And that's all I'll say.  (they killed four main characters.  GODDAMN!)

Now that I'm slowly getting a handle of my reading schedule, I'll do my damnedest to keep up to date with my blog - it seems like an empty promise, I know, since there have been many times where I've fallen off the face of the earth with deep regret.  But, like I said, if I were a reader, I'd prefer quality over senseless quantity, so hopefully this was everything you ever wanted and more.