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October 14, 2003I'm back!
I’ve not been terribly diligent about updating this journal lately, and my numbers for the month of October reflect that. Last month, I had 824 visits and 435 unique visitors. Actually, except for a freakishly well-attended April that left May looking anemic by comparison, my visits/visitors statistics have been rising each month without fail since this site’s inception.
Time to catch up, dammit!
Let’s see…where to begin? Whether as an act of intended irony or a simple mistake (all the more ironic), I received Metallica stickers and an application for the Metallica Club in yesterday’s mail. My only previous experience with the Metallica club was the e-mail I sent them about Metallica suing for chord copyright infringement before I knew it was an Unfaith hoax. I’m going to put my Metallica Club stickers on my file cabinet o’ ironies. Among other oddities, it already features two promotional stickers of defunct internet start-ups (iam.com and Kozmo.com, respectively) and a John McCain campaign sticker, circa 2000. I think my new stickers will fit in just fine.
I completed a PowerPoint spirit journey this afternoon. This maiden voyage into the Microsoft Office unknown started late Thursday night, and occupied a goodly chunk of my time each day since. I put together a presentation comparing Heian-era Japanese spirit possession with modern karaoke. I probably put way too much work into it, but I think I’m pretty pleased with the final result. Having weathered this particular storm, I may screw up the courage to take a second stab at Flash. My friend James tried to teach me Flash about five years ago, and it spanked me like an unruly tot in a Romanian orphanage—y’know, the orphanages where they don’t actually interact with the kids at all. You have to be bad to get a spanking in a place like that…
But I digress. James couldn’t teach me Flash, although it was no fault of his. My brain couldn’t handle the details. I’d forget some piddling command, and the whole thing would fall to pieces. I’m much more comfortable with words and essays, where I can twist the language to serve my purpose, no matter how outlandish of an opinion I must defend. James tried to teach me how to drive a manual transmission car, too. That also didn’t work out. I’ve had about five people try and teach me that, and nobody’s been able to do it. My feelings on stickshift cars are very Animal Farm: “Two pedals good, three pedals bad.”
In a very good piece of news, my girlfriend finally got her teaching job with LAUSD. The runaround they gave her was obscene. You’d think they were doing her a favor by hiring her, that there was no crisis in education and they were full up on good teachers. Fill out this form. Fill out that form. Oh, whoops—we gave you the wrong form, so you’ll have to start over. Take this here. Bring it back. Oh, whoops—we seem to have lost your file. Take this test. Take it again. Running out of money? Not our problem. You completed requirements X through Z? Great, but forms A and B just expired—start over again. I was waiting for them to ask her to retrieve the pieces of the Triforce or save Princess Toadstool. Hope’s life was just one huge game of “Super Mario Brothers,” minus the power-ups and coins. There were days when I wanted nothing more than to drive down to their office, pull the jawbone off the face of some theory-only sycophant and start raising some hell a la Samson. Sadly enough, as a local, Hope was one of the lucky ones. Many people not only quit their job but moved a considerable distance to take part in the L.A. Teaching Fellows program that painted LAUSD as such a land of employment milk and honey in the first place. The program is newly defunct, having had its funding guillotined by LAUSD, and many of the program’s participants are now left without a pot to piss in. It reminds me of the Children’s Crusade—“Hey, the survivors of our arduous walk across Europe finally reached the shore, but the sea didn’t part like they said it would. Wait…these ship owners seem nice enough. You’ll take us there for free? Hooray! Wait—we’re being sold into white slavery. Man, this sucks!”
On a totally unrelated note, I saw “House of the Dead” tonight. I went into it knowing it was going to be bad, but I was still surprised at thoroughly and completely a director could piss away millions of dollars with nary a redeeming moment. The plot was absent, the acting flat, the effects derivative and bland, and the banality of the dialogue made my ears want to recess into my head. Even the nudity was desperate. The movie tossed topless girl after topless girl onto the screen in the early part of the movie, as if trying to apologize in advance for what we’d have to sit through. It didn’t work. Director Uwe Boll thought it sure would be nifty to use footage from the video game itself as a cut-scene graphic. But after a while, he wasn’t bothering to wait for scene transitions—he’d just toss it in there willy-nilly. During the trailers, I was wishing the obnoxious frat boys in the row behind me would shut up. By the end of “House of the Dead,” I was grateful for their commentary. Without it and the screening of the “Matrix Revolutions” trailer before the film, there wouldn’t have been anything to enjoy.
It’s 3:11 a.m. right now, so I should probably wrap this up. I have to get up around 9 a.m. this morning, if I intend to sleep at all, and I have some homework reading to knock out before I call it a night. Yea, methinks tomorrow will pain me most mightily…
Posted by patrick at October 14, 2003 03:15 AM
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