The Notecard I Found

I picked up a copy of Bonnie Friedman's Writing Past Dark about a week ago. My creative writing teacher in high school, Ms. Downing, recommended it to her students. She was one of those teachers who really knew her stuff, one of the ones that really leave an impact on you. So reading it felt like an obligation, albeit a very pleasant sort of obligation. Like taking a warm bubble bath after not showering for a couple of days.

It didn't take me long to get through the book. It's wonderfully motivational without resorting to the sort of optimism that gets one's eyes rolling.

The first thing I saw when I opened the book was a notecard that someone had left in it:

"I fully accept and believe in myself just the way I am."

At first I thought that, at some point, Friedman would encourage all frustrated would-be writers to write these very words somewhere as a motivational exercise. But there was nothing like that in the book. Whoever wrote it just wrote it.

I like to think that they were going through some sort of personal crisis. And I also like to think that, when they got over it, they sold the book as some sort of symbolic gesture, totally forgetting about the notecard inside.

Palmer's

You are back home because you haven't been feeling very well lately. But you're feeling a little better now.

Part of the problem, you think, is that you haven't been eating very well. Your primary ingredients as of late have been ramen, fried food, and coffee. You've been using the visit home as an opportunity to change this.

You go to Palmer's, a local-ish sandwich shop that, speaking at the metro-area level, lacks any sort of parallel. You walk to the counter to order a sandwich.

Behind the counter is an African-American man. He is the only African-American man who works at this Palmer's. He may be the only African-American man who works at any Palmer's. Given that this is Des Moines, there is a chance that he is the only African-American man within this three-mile radius.

He is friendly. He has made you sandwiches before.

He looks up at you.
"Sandwich?" he says.
"Yes, please," you reply. "A Cowboy, please."

The Cowboy is your favorite sandwich. Marble rye, roast beef, spicy cheeses, and Western dressing. (The dressing is what makes it a Cowboy. It could probably still be a Cowboy if it had ranch – cowboys do stuff on ranches, right? – but it's unlikely it would remain a Cowboy if it had, say, Italian dressing. That could very well make it a Paisano instead. But back to the man.)

"A Cowboy," the man repeats.
"Yes," you say. "But no cheese and add lettuce and tomato."
"No cheese?" He doesn't look up at you.
"No," you say.
"You sure?" He glances at you for the first time.
"Yeah. I'm not a cheese person," you say.

He sighs, grimaces, and shakes his head. He is vaguely disappointed in you.

"Where you from?" he asks. You can't be from around here. You aren't a cheese person.
"Chicago," you say. Which is half-true.

"Chicago," he repeats. And then just as quickly: "Habla español?"
You shake your head. "No," you say. (Later you think about how paradoxical your response was. Sort of like asking, "What's your name, John?")

Silence.

He gives you your sandwich.
"Thank you very much," he says.
"Thank you," you reply. It is unlikely he will remember you.

Some Wonderful Things On The Internet Today

• Roger Ebert's TED Talk on losing his voice to cancer. There's the potential here for it to be super depressing, but it's amazingly uplifting – even funny at times. It hit me so hard that I instinctively put my hands together to applaud at the end.
• Rider Strong and Danielle Fishel – aka Shawn and Topenga from Boy Meets World – discuss how Rebecca Black's Friday is kind of a rip-off of the BMW intro. Which turns into a I-hadn't-thought-about-that-actually series of questions about the logic (or lack thereof) of the BMW intro.
• Okay, so it's not on the internet, but I just finished Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. Very engaging, very funny, very thought-provoking. You'll find at least one insight about your own medium of choice without even trying that hard. (And the pictures are pretty, too!)
• Finally: That Can Be My Next Tweet. Enter a Twitter username, get computer-generated tweets that take that user's Twitter vocabulary and turn it into borderline dada-ist poetry. Too much fun.

Why So Nostalgic?

So Nickelodeon announced plans to bring back its old shows – well, sort of. It's not that they're going to be making new episodes of old favorites; instead, they're just going to be running reruns of them during a new midnight to 2 AM time slot tentatively called The 90s Are All That.


It's a pretty brilliant move. For one thing, it's gonna be super cheap. And if it hits its target market – Gen Y twenty-somethings who spend way too much time reminiscing about the shows of their youth – it'll make for fantastic ad dollars. (I'd go as far as to say that it might even compete with Adult Swim, but there's a caveat with that: it's hard to guess how long Nickelodeon re-runs will hold my generation's attention. I'm picturing something that premieres with sky-high record breaking ratings that plummet shortly thereafter. That being said: this could make for an excellent lead-in to Nickelodeon attempting to create new, original content to go directly head-to-head with Adult Swim, but that's just speculation – Nick hasn't announced any plans to anything like that.)

Jordan and I were talking about this a while back. He remarked that, for as young as our generation is, it's remarkably nostalgic. That if things keep up the way they are, we might just be the most nostalgic generation that's ever existed.

I agreed. And then we both wondered why Gen Y is so filled with nostalgia. Did it have something to do with the way we were raised? Was it just that the stuff that we watched was incredibly awesome?

"Maybe," I said, "it's because our generation is the most media-saturated yet. Maybe the more content you're exposed to as a youngin' – and the more frequently you're exposed to it – the greater chance you have of being nostalgic. Because that means that you have more opportunities for nostalgia in the future."

"And if that's true," I added, "maybe that means that, once the generation that came after us gets a bit older, it'll supplant us as the most nostalgic generation." (Which implies that the generation after that one would be even more nostalgic – and so on and so on and so on, which seems a wee bit on the ridiculous side.)

So we thought about that. It was late and our minds were wandering, so we didn't give refutation a whole lot of thought. Instead, we changed our focus. We browsed through Jordan's instant queue on Netflix.

"What do you feel like watching?"
A brief thought. "Rugrats."
Click. "What season?"
Pause. "Three."
Click.

Cue the theme song that we'd heard at least a thousand times before.

The Exchange Film

On the left is what I recorded. On the right is what it was turned into.

I don't know if I've talked about the Exchange Film at all here. It's a project in the Film & Video department at Columbia that all of the first-years have to undertake in their second semester. Basically, you've got to make a three minute, dialogue-free film based on a script that someone else writes.

That's a little challenging in and of itself, but the really difficult part is that you've got to shoot it all on film. The cameras we're provided – old Bolex cameras – shoot on 16 mm film without the aid of electricity. Since there's no motor in the thing, you've got to wind it up manually before every time you want to film. And even after that, the thing only rolls for a maximum of twenty seconds, so your takes can't be any longer than that. Add the fact that you don't know whether or not you've messed up until you get the film back – which can take up to three weeks, as opposed to the instant gratification that working digitally provides – and you've got yourself kind of a scary project.

But my footage came out okay, thanks to two wonderful folks that I worked with who know a hell of a lot about lighting and cinematography.

And thankfully, instead of having to cut and splice actual film in editing our projects, we get to do it all in Final Cut, digitally. That saves a lot of time and stress. I think some students are disappointed about that – they want to go totally old school, they say – but by no means do I have the time to do that.

So this one's almost done. The next one will be about a toothbrush. I told my dentist about it and he got very excited.