Here's Looking At The Japanese Plum Tree In My Old Backyard

So you're all web-savvy, right? You've heard the news about maps.google.com, right? How it's all better than Mapquest and whatnot?

And I'm sure you knew about the satellite toggle button, right? Wherein you can look up an address, hit "satellite" and see a, well, satellite image of the spot. Like, your childhood home, or your friend's apartment in Manhatten, or your first apartment or your first dorm room or your elementary school or your parents' house or your old workplace or the track where you like to run?

You've all already found this and wasted a good hour playing around on it, right?

Just checking.

Soooo Meta

An exciting moment for my blog: it got blogged about!

It's Actually An Homage to Charlton Heston

So blogs are the new media, right? In which case I got press for my 508 film. This guy is apparently also a USC grad film student, but I haven't met him.

His backhanded compliments are very amusing, as is the use of the word "lady" and question of whether or not I have balls (surely he couldn't mean literally?).

It's number four. Enjoy.

(Last term, I had someone else tell me I had balls. I think that while the theme of my undergrad was to overhear myself described as "that girl" by people in my english classes, the theme of this degree will be to provoke people into telling me I have balls.)

Fetch The Smelling Salts

Right, I know telling people about your dreams is obnoxious, but yesterday I had the flu and had fever dreams and they weren't all that crazy but I fully and completely believed they were real, because even when I was awake I felt like I was dreaming.

So in my fever dream, my neighbour, Mrs. Rodriguez, sat on the edge of my bed with medication for me to take and I was overcome with happiness that someone motherly had come to take care of me in my hour of head-spinning need and she had little glossy red pills but they kept sliding off the cutting board, which was on my lap, and getting lost in the bedding and I was slightly embarrased that she was there, because I hardly know her, but she was being very kind and then I fell asleep again before I could get the little red pills in my mouth and I when I woke up again I realized that she had pinned each pill individually to my blanket with bent wire so that I wouldn't lose them.

There were others, but I will you spare you, dear reader, from them.

But yesterday was a weird day and my head hurt a lot and I slept for 31 or 32 out of 36 hours, which should make up for the all-nighter I pulled on Tuesday (Wednesday).

Today I felt much better and put air in my bike tires, which suddenly made it much easier to pedal, and a much bumpier ride.

Oh, and today I found out that I'm producing an intermediate graduate film in the fall. When I'm not so swamped with the work of this term, I'll feel excited about it. It being, yes, the mad amounts of work I'll have next term. And also the mirrored sunglasses, powersuit and smoking habit (and possibly the flippy kind of cell phone?) that TJ points out I now need to acquire.

Cure What Ails You

I once wrote a poem with this title for Ms. Gillian Gausboel.

Dear Janey and Doretta, thank you for teaching me how to make lemon-ginger-honey brew. My throat is on fiy-ah, but this hot sludge helps. When I'm back in town you'll have to teach me how to make congee.

I have always really liked the idea of offical mourning, particularly as represented in dress. Most particularly, the black armband. Mourning is such a strange sensation. When I'm doing it, I feel like the world should stop for a moment and acknowledge that something is gone from the world and it's a different place now. I feel like wearing some sort of sign around my neck? A sandwich board, perchance? I also like the idea the there is a mourning period, which, unless you are Queen Victoria, has a set time span of un-alright-ness that then turns into alright-ness.

It's not so much that I have faith in the remedies, but that I have faith in the faith in the remedies. Or: the value of ceremony.

University of Spoiled Children

Tonight, around midnight at the editing lab, the giddy madness this term has disintegrated into manifested itself in laughing at Alex and Mo's Crispin Glover-like actor and a fellow student who goes by the name "Showbiz" showing up wasted, wandering around saying extreme things and passing out at Avid number three.

It was all a bit much, so Davon, Mo and I retired to the loading dock where we drank Coor's Light in the backseat of Alex's car and discussed Justin Timberlake.

Born Under Punches

I got home last night and the neighbourhood looked so trashy. Broken safety glass all over the street and garbage and dead palm tree fronds flattened in the middle of the road and folks smoking outside their front gates. I mean, after dark, the place usually becomes more ghetto than it is by day, but last night was off the hook. It's like seeing a fairly slutty aquaintance wear something incredibly slutty. Surprising that she really had it in her, dismay, and a little titilation on the side.

Tonight my very great writing teacher chatted about "the biz", not just sharing the story of his friend who lived in someone's bathtub while writing a brilliant screenplay, but also giving us the Reality Begins Here speech.

(The phrase "Reality Ends Here" is the motto or something of USC Cinema-Television. It was grafitti from back in the day that is now inscribed in the cement at the doorways of various USC film buildings, including Marcia Lucas Post and the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. It's true in both the sense of "welcome to the world of making movies" and in the possibly unintended sense of "welcome to mistakenly believing that the kind of stuff you are doing here as a student will be the same kind of thing you will be able to do in the real world as a professional".)

We get the Reality Begins Here speech every few months. It follows this major theme: your chance of being a feature film director is as good as being struck by lightening, twice. We all know this, it's simple math, not to mention the math of how many students get pumped through USC. And hey, let's not discount the math of how many female feature film directors they are.

But it's really not the best time to be hearing it. Every day, these days, is a gaunlet to be run. The basic things you think would be necessary to daily life have been sacked in this hundred mile sprint to the finish line. Grooming, nutrition, sleep. I have to make an active decision to make sleeping a priority; it'd be too easy to make that dismissable luxury and the fall down dead in the middle of a shot, proving that "you can sleep when you're dead" can be more true than you ever thought possible and simultaneously exposing the film to unacceptable light leak through the eyepiece and ruining the shot.