Fishy Fishy

I had some fish not too long ago that has been playing games with my digestive system. The fish in question was escolar. It tasted quite good, but I don't think the end results are worth it. In this way it is the long island ice tea of the fish world.

According to Google Translate, "escolar" in Spanish means "school." I actually think it's a verb meaning "to poop forever and ever."

I've been struggling with writing lately. I've always found it rather difficult to sit down and start. I think that's partially because there are no concrete dates with my personal writing – at least not at this point in my life. There's also the fear of getting stuck in the middle of it, which tends to happen when I become conscious of what I'm doing. It's like in Looney Tunes when a character walks off the edge of a cliff: the moment they look down and realize there's nothing beneath them, they start to fall.

The fear of writing something terrible is also a little bit of a problem, though it's not as big of a fear for me as it is for a lot of other writers I know. I'm generally pretty good about going, "Okay, this sucks, but who cares right now, you're going to revise later so keep writing dammit." Every now and then, I come to a realization that I'm going to have to actually confront whatever awfulness I may have written and revise it. That frightens me a bit.

I wish escolar did for my writing system what it does for my excretory system. Except I'd rather that it make me produce a nonstop stream of awesome words instead of shit.

Foot to Butt

I swear that this post isn't as graphic as the title suggests.

My sister is graduating tomorrow afternoon. So tomorrow I'm going to an unexciting ceremony at the (fittingly named) Knapp Center and listen to a tag-team of teachers and administrators reciting names that they're undoubtedly hoping to God that they don't mispronounce for fear of being whipped by Mr. Phomvisay. It's going to be a good opportunity to get some reading done.

At the tutoring center on Wednesday, I was helping one of the kids with their reading log homework. The book he chose was The Foot Book. I think he was in first grade. He did a pretty good job with it, though he'd occasionally read the word "foot" as "feet" and vice versa.

The whole time I had to restrain myself from laughing. See, back when I was in first grade, when my sister and I read The Foot Book, we'd verbally substitute "foot" with "butt." And so it'd become The Butt Book.


It was a pretty clever bit of juvenilia if I do say so myself. Some of it still makes me smirk in a restrain-yourself-dammit-how-old-are-you-again sort of way. Especially the two pages that go:

His butt.
Her butt.
Fuzzy fur butt.

My sister was in preschool when we did this. Now she is going to college. And I think that she would still find The Butt Book funny.

I Got Hacked

My apologies if you got a weird email from my old account last night. I may have given you advice about working from home. I may have asked you whether or not you were truly happy and how you could find out if you were. The thing is that it wasn't really me.

I got hacked. Not exactly sure how. It might have been because I logged into a public computer and forgot to log out. It might have been because I used a simple password – no digits, no crazy symbols – that didn't take long for a dictionary crawling utility to figure out.

Anyway, however they did it, someone – or some program – had access to my primary Google account. I don't use the email address associated with it any longer, but it still contains access to a lot of services that I use on a regular basis. Among them are Reader, Docs, YouTube and this blog.

Google disabled the account not long after their system realized I was sending a bunch of spam emails in a very short period of time. A good move on their part, but kind of scary. I got a message that my account was locked, but I wasn't sure how long it'd be, or if my data was still available. I was afraid that I might never have access to any of my stuff ever again. That means that I wouldn't be able to upload new videos to my YouTube account, for instance. And no access to Blogger would mean that this blog – at this particular address, at least – would effectively die.

Luckily, Google got back to me about an hour after I sent in a support ticket. I promptly changed my password and took a nice big sigh of relief.

But I'm still a little unsettled by the event. Not so much that my account was compromised; more because I realized that with Google, I put a lot of my eggs in one basket. That's risky enough as is, but as it turns out, it isn't necessarily a basket that I have a lot of control over.

I like a lot of the services that Google provides – I mean, duh, that's why I use them – but I've realized that it makes a lot more sense for my sanity, privacy and security for me to spread my stuff around. Maybe use different accounts for different services. Or use different services altogether.

I haven't really come to any conclusions yet. And I'm thankful that everything was returned to me promptly and with minimal fuss. (Though it is a little awkward explaining to some people that I didn't really send them that email about working from home. Like screaming something in a restaurant and having to explain that you have Tourette's.) But I'm feeling a little insecure – datawise, at least – after this little crisis.

The Jetsons, The Surface

Okay, so. The Jetsons.

The people FutureJetsonsLand spend their time in the sky. They have cars that fly. They have buildings that look a little like flying saucers balanced on poles, buildings that stretch waaay up into the sky.

Every now and then something goes wrong in FutureJetsonsLand and a flying car'll run out of gas/plutonium/magic and plummet through the sky. Or George might slip off a porch from one of the flying saucer houses (which you think would be so easy to prevent – isn't there some futuristic force-field equivalent to a screened-in porch?) and fall and fall.

But no one ever falls to their death. The flying car starts itself up again. George lands on the roof of Mr. Spacely's car. I guess that makes sense – precious few kids shows have scenes where characters die of a sudden impact brought about by a prolonged fall – but it's a little frustrating. Because you never see what the ground looks like in FutureJetsonsLand.

What's going on down there? What does the surface look like in the world of The Jetsons?

Theories:

1. It's an environmental disaster. Think Wall-E. The people of PastJetsonsLand – is that us? – polluted the beloved surface to death. Or maybe Al Gore was right. The polar icecaps melt, the world's flooded, everyone gets all mad at God: "Hey, remember what you said when you invented rainbows?" And so there's nowhere to go but up.
2. It's not Earth. The people of FutureJetsonsLand have moved to another planet? Why? Could be exploration. Could be the aforementioned disaster thing. Whatever the reason is, it doesn't matter. Maybe the show's creators didn't want to make us children unsettled, showing the surface of an alien (but still blue-skied) planet. And then there's my favorite one:
3. It's a result of an extreme dystopia brought about by class-warfare. There is a surface. And it is still hospitable. Well, barely. Just enough for the have-nots that live on the surface, who confront theft, cannibalism, brutal violence, and general immoral badness more times in one day than little Elroy Jetson will ever have to confront in a lifetime. Since the show takes place from the perspective of The Jetsons, we never see the surface. We don't even think about the surface. The surface? People down there? Ha ha ha. That's a good one. Next thing you'll try to tell me that a four-year old with detached thumbs made my pair of blue jeans.

Your theories are welcome. Evidence that the surface was indeed portrayed in The Jetsons is equally welcome.

Bus Lady

I'd just left a friend's housewarming party in Hyde Park. As far as neighborhood location goes, Hyde Park gets a Chicago Award for weirdness. A neighborhood that houses one of most prestigious universities in the world, surrounded by the South Side of Chicago – the result of hyper-segregation, where stickers on poles discouraging you from participating in gun violence are not an uncommon sight. It's not exactly Harvard Yard.

Which, I thought, was probably why the woman on the bus approached me. And asked me if I was alright.

Totally understandable. Look at me. A lost and confused white boy, probably the only one in a .25-mile radius, staring off at nothing in particular.

I told her I was okay.

"You know," she said, "you've got good knees. The way they're bent...the energy. The energy they give."
I nod. I'm curious where this is going to go.
"You know," she says – there's the faint outlines of a smile creeping across her lips – "I was in a hospital. On the West Side. They, you see, they gave me a tetanus shot."

She shakes her head. "But, the thing – the thing about it. The tetanus shot is actually vinegar."

I continue nodding. It is just now dawning on me that this woman is crazy. I have been doing my best to mirror her facial expressions. I smile when she's jovial. I furrow my brow, nod more slowly when she's getting serious.

"The shot is vinegar," she continues. "And vinegar? It's actually – it's Ohio. Vinegar's just Ohio."

Silence. I think I'm supposed to say something. Good journalists and documentarians have this trick where, if they don't know what to say next, if they think that their subject might even maybe possibly have more to say, they just stare at the other person. Inevitably they keep talking. (Hence Lady One Question.)

But it doesn't work here. The woman gives me this look like, "You are so goddamn stupid. You don't understand a word I'm saying."


And she says, "I have to get off of this bus." She rushes to the front of the bus, pulls on the cord. The bus stops. She looks back at me, waves goodbye. She even blows me a kiss, except without the kiss part. She just kind of puts her hand to her face and gestures at me.

Wrapping Up, Pastoralia

Last week of classes. Almost done with the film I've been working on over the past few months, Toothbrush is Jealous. Which is good, since it's due on Tuesday at 8:30 AM sharp. Because of length and pacing considerations, I ended up cutting about three pages from the original script. (Not such a big deal in the world of feature length scripts, but it means a lot when your (so-called) final draft is initially seven pages.) A lot of film filmmakers don't like having to cut material that they've written and/or filmed; I'm not among them. I take a strange sort of joy in throwing out all unnecessary footage from a film. Maybe that's because it's the closest I can get to doing any sort of meaningful revision.

The annoying thing about making movies is that they're harder to revise. Trimming stuff and post-production magic are options, but they're pretty limited when compared to the kinds of revisions a writer is allowed to make. (You can also shoot additional footage in case of technical disasters/realizing you missed something totally important, but that requires getting everyone back together again to shoot something that you feel like you should have got right the first time around, which is no fun for anyone.) A writer can write a second draft that builds upon and yet bears no resemblance to the first, but in the process of editing a film, you are, to a certain extent, stuck with what you've got.

This is probably among the many reasons as to why I've become so frustrated with directing over the past few months. I feel to a certain extent that directing is getting in the way of my ability to tell stories. On top of that – again, for many reasons that we won't get into here – I just don't feel like directing is My Thing™ as much as writing.

Speaking of writing: I read George Saunders's Pastoralia a few days ago. The man's a very funny, very imaginative writer. He's very Vonnegut-y; he writes in this wonderful off-the-cuff kind of way that makes his stories seem very oral. (No Freudian analysis intended with that prior statement.) It's the kind of work that makes you go this is utterly fantastic I must keep reading and oh God what's the point of writing anymore this guy is so good all at once, like you're on some sort of weird bipolar roller coaster. The creative self-doubt that it may or may not inspire aside, I really dug it.