five deadly everythings...

New Year's Resolutions...I got a lot of them. They're cliches, every one of them, but they're all things I seriously need to start tending to. I'm trying to keep things realistic but essential. No, I'm not going back to martial arts, or becoming a gym rat, but I am going to get healthier. I'm probably not gonna write more, but I certainly can read more. I'm not gonna beat depression, but I am going to talk and build more with the people around me. I don't think I'll be increasing my meditation or going to temple but I am going to try and remember and reflect on why I became a buddhist in the first place. Cuz I lost that.

"after reading about it, or talking about it with your friends...how about living it?...wow, crazy idea."

-Gavin Sheppard,
on his motherfucking myspace page of all places.

peace.

Labels: general

Posted by Scene -- at 11:50:00 p.m. | Permalink

So this is Christmas. I hope you had fun. While there was lots of last-minute madness, I somehow lucked out and avoided any self-important idiots that happened to be at the mall the same time I was (that goes for staff and customers). Heads were nice and cool this year.

I realize my last post may be a bit misleading in it's portrayal of my pops. He's a nice dude -- when it came to sporting events he was far from a hardline asshole...but he wasn't a cheerleader either. He was a sports fan, regardless of the fact that one of the players was his flesh and blood.

That said, the man also braved the crowd at the Apple Store to buy his daughter an iMac laptop that he can't really afford and that he knew full well she doesn't really need, just for the fact that it might make her smile for once. Which she did, and he did as well, and they have been doing ever since she unwrapped the thing yesterday morning. Which is huge given that they've exchanged maybe two full sentences of conversation in the last two years.

Also, there is nothing more precious in the world than watching your senior-citizen dad attempt to feed food to your hobbled, half-dead senior-citizen family dog. They're losing their hair colour and their hips together.

Thanks to everyone for the text-message greetings. I know some people hate the holidays and find that shit annoying. I'm not the hugest fan of it either but I always appreciate those kind of gestures -- even the mass messages and preachy emails. (I can't get mad at the religious ecards cuz really, all signs point to me being a good Roman Catholic anyways...)

I think what really made my Christmas though was seeing the piece by Leslie Scrivener in the Star on Christian hip-hop that I helped her research. It was cool seeing it all come together, how she localized the story, and how the contacts I gave her ended up influencing the angle she eventually took.

There's more to post about, but right now I've got to go help our house lower its roast beef/empty stomach ratio. After that it's off to the store to duel with the caffeine-deprived hoardes of boxing day. I'll wish you a merry christmas, and you wish me luck...deal?

peace.

Labels: family, general

Posted by Scene -- at 1:36:00 p.m. | Permalink

Today, for the first time, my dad watched a tape of me kickboxing. I used to be deep into mixed martial arts, I worked and trained at the gym and so I was spending six days out of the week either learning or watching, from my desk, different martial arts styles.

My dad's always been a big fight fan, boxing especially but in recent years mixed-martial arts as well. As a fight fan he knew all about boxers getting brain damage as they got older, or cauliflower ears, broken noses, etc. All the debilitations and disfigurements that come with the game. While he didn't mind me learning how to fight, he was pretty vocal with his disapproval of fighting competitively.

I've always had a healthy fear of my father -- he's small but has sharp teeth and long toenails -- so when the time came for my first competitive kickboxing match I kept it secret. Plus he knows alot and there's nothing worse than a back-seat kickboxer. "Use your left! Move your head!"

I just wanted to get one fight under my belt. I couldn't live with myself if I never stepped in the ring.

The fight was a draw.

My opponent starts strong in the first round, playing ping-pong with my head, but I dominate in the second like a fleet of big Russian women. The third round is a toss-up though he does get the last good shot in.

I figured it was time to let my dad watch the tape. I'm older and grown now, my own man, and who knows, maybe the old man might show a hint of pride at seeing his non-gay son punching the crap out of someone.

But when the fight reaches its end and I put my hands up in victory (I made it through alive!) my dad, mistaken about the outcome, yells at the screen:

"You WON?!?! No way, YOU CHEATED!! YOU HAVE CONNECTIONS AT THAT GYM."

Come to think of it, I never did invite my dad to any of my sporting events...AND NOW I REMEMBER WHY.

Labels: family, general, martial arts

Posted by Scene -- at 4:44:00 p.m. | Permalink

One of the things I like about Suzan (not Suzanne) is her ability to say really harsh things and not make you hate her. I still can't decide if she's very perceptive or if she just makes a lot of assumptions about people and the law of averages dictates that she's eerily dead-on at least half the time.

One of the first times I experienced this was when she confronted me about not volunteering to read/anchor the news during broadcast class.

"Why is that?" she asked. "I'm curious about that. Why you never want to participate in anything and are always hiding in the shadows."

This caught me off guard because in j-school, more than anywhere else, I'm pretty damn social. Plus at this point we barely knew each other and I don't see how she
got that vibe off me. There simply was no evidence to back this up, and I wanted to fight it but couldn't because she was right.



Recently, she was writing a piece about seasonal affective disorder, and I confessed to her that I suffer from depression, and especially so during the winter time.

Instead of listening to my little sob-story with puppy-dog eyes she very dryly said, "you should see someone about that. It can be pretty shitty."

"I do alright by myself," I said, defensively.

She gave me skeptical look but thankfully dropped the subject.

She's right though. Winter time is rough, for me and those around me, as I'm sure you know if you've ever read more than three posts on this blog. I do my best to stay busy -- I make plans and set goals and make a huge-ass reading list and try to go out alot during the day -- but inevitably I end up curled under the sheets listening to some really emotional music and sleeping alot.

Yesterday I had a migraine (my other seasonal affliction) which knocked me out for a good ten hours of so. Not good. The slightest sign of illness always gives me the excuse to lay in bed and wallow.

While in bed I remembered alot of the personal traumas my friends have gone through. I'm a pretty firm believer in doing things for other people that you want done for yourself, and so, since I appreciate when friends remember that I suffer from depression and adjust their social expectations of me accordingly, I do my best to remember the shit they've been through.

I remembered especially one time I went to my friend's house in early highschool. We'll call him Brian. Brian had told us a year before that his dad moved out and went overseas for business. But that night while we were playing video games in the basement, Brian's mom stormed into the room and started yelling at him. She was mad that Brian still talking to his dad, and was trying to get him to sign some sort of letter, I think for legal purposes, that would entitle him to financial aid but sever ties between him and his father.

Apparently Brian's dad had run out on him and his mom, whom Brian's dad had cheated on. There was never any business trip overseas. He was still in town, living somehwhere within driving distance. She was pulling the guilt card, saying things like, "do you love him more than me?" And "don't you love me?" And "are you going to let him do this to your mother?"

That must be a hard thing, to have someone use your sense of manhood as a weapon against your father figure. That's a lot of baggage to unload on a kid.

Then she started calling him stupid, saying "you're so stupid Brian, you're so stupid." Which has hard because Brian wasn't the best student.

Brian's mom is a great woman, don't get me wrong. I love her and how she is with him. It was just this instance where she stopped being his mother and started being a normal person, which is something parents can't really be.



Eventually he took her out of the room and they both disappeared for awhile and when he came back finally he acted as if nothing had happened. As if it were perfectly logical that I was so engrossed with the game that I hadn't heard a goddman thing.

I could tell he didn't want me to press-on about it so I played along, and we had a lot of fun that day, like we always did, we shot a lot of people and released our agression and were rewarded for it by the tidy system of points and levels.

If only real life were that neat and easy, I'd be on to bigger and better things by now, new challenges, new surroundings, and new gadgets to help me deal with the darkness.

But I'm not on to anything bigger, I'm in bed. And it's the same bed, and this is the same blog.

Labels: depression, general

Posted by Scene -- at 8:33:00 p.m. | Permalink

Awhile back on the busride to school I listened the the new Game album and the new AZ album back-to-back. It was an interesting contrast in west coast/east coast hiphop, from two artists who go out of their way (especially in Game's case) to represent the sound of their coast. Both pretty much balk at attempts to fold the music into regionless, monolithic music, and instead go the route of extreme localization, both in form and content.

Even when out-of-town producers are on board, such as WillIam or Hi-Tek (though Tek rolls with Doc Dre now, so he may not count), Game makes unmistakeable west coast bangers. With AZ it's boombap and soul loops, and his flow is oh-so NY, cramped and verbose.

I'm not a huge fan of either album, though neither one is bad. My favourite moment on Game's Doctor's Advocate is the title track. Whether intentionally or not, it's a culmination of many of the album's themes, tackling head-on the glaring omission of Dr. Dre's beats. Game namedrops Dre about a gabillion times on the album, but only on this track does he go into any sort of depth about what went on between the two.

Interesting that the song is both a dismissal of Dre and a pledge of allegiance. It features what I think is one of the best lines -- or at least one of the only ones that caught my attention -- delivered by Game on the album, a refreshingly subtle diss of 50 Cent (and perhaps an even subtler diss of Dre too):

I'm not asking you to take my side in the beef
But you told me it was okay to say 'Fuck the Police'

The best part of the song, though, is the chorus:

I didn't mean to walk away
But I hear every word they say
I guess my mind just drew a blank like la la la....

It's the "la la la" part, whether intentional or not (and probably not), that makes it art. It highlights Dr Dre's absence and endearingly makes the song childish and emotional in its longing for both a melody and a mentor. It's a track that apes Dre's sound, where Game gets real emotional about missing Dre -- it gets down to the business of Game and his music feeling lost, and it also just sounds real nice.

peace.

Labels: hip-hop, music

Posted by Scene -- at 12:29:00 a.m. | Permalink

I'm loving Bone. The comic you idiot. It's one of those books that I just never got around to reading. I bought the collected edition and it reads so wonderfully and well-paced that I can't imagine reading this thing in single issues over the span of years. It starts cutesy and cartoonish, but about a quarter into it, events hinge and there's a whole section in darkness, in a thunder storm, and Fone bleeds from his head and Thorn cuts an arm off one of the rat creatures. Granma Ben goes nuts. The change in tone is seamless and logical, but also abrupt and stern.

I can't get over how easily story conventions are flexed and then made flexible. My favourite writers are those that play within existing genres and traditional story structure. Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughn, Michael Chabon, Orson Scott Card's good stuff, Charlie Kaufmann. (The Kaufmann one is debatable, but I'd argue that -- Adaptation aside -- he's more oldschool conventional than appears on the surface. Which is why I think he works so well.) It's so disciplined. Cats like Dave Eggers write beautiful sentences and break conventions but it's suspect whether or not they can tell a solid story. If they can only write post-modern and convoluted and in their own first-person voice.

This is my problem. I really used to get off on the experimental, post-modern shit. Actually I still do. And I got used to writing in that style, and while I can freestyle a poem for you with fancy metaphors and wordplay in tact, I can't tell you a solid story with a beginning, middle, and end. An end that is both logical and satisfying.

In any case (back to Bone), writer/artist Jeff Smith makes great use of stark black and white images and knows how to use the space between his panels. Check this out:



And speaking of favourite writers -- I'm downloading the new Nas album as I type.

peace.

Labels: comics, writing

Posted by Scene -- at 12:56:00 a.m. | Permalink

My brother and I are very similar. Aside from the obvious age difference, depending on how you look at it, my brother is either me without the depression, or I am my brother without the having-sex-with-guys. That said, we're kinda the same person. Last time he came home for the Holidays we discovered we owned the exact same pair of shoes. And that same brown golf-shirt from Old Navy, though that one doesn't count because there's nothing rare about golf shirts from Old Navy.

While we both like to talk back to the TV and have a love for disaposable pop culture, I'm noticing this time around that my brother watches a lot of fucking TV. And not just any TV. ALL TV. Whatever is on. Today he was watching some celebrity show on STAR...about celebrities who drink wine. And by celebrities, I mean Jason Priestly. And the Barenaked Ladies.

Yesterday he watched Ellen and Oprah and Dr. Phil. Don't get me wrong. My brother doesn't like these shows. He downright loathes them. I think it's loathing things that my brother loves. I like comic books. My sister likes vegetables. My brother? Loathing.

Anyways, so my brother was wrapping gifts that his boyfriend Andrew is giving to his (Andrew's) little brother. They were a bunch of comics books that Andrew copped at a garage sale. I couldn't believe the finds. The lowest end of the spectrum were a bunch of first issues from the 90s heyday of Image. WildCATS, etc. But the great find was the entire original run of Crisis on Infinite Earths, in great condition too. The death of Supergirl and Flash. Comics worth a lot, and in more ways than just monetary.

"I thought they were all as worthless as a bunch of Richie Rich books," he said, refusing to blink in case I stole them while his lids were shut.

I always go to garage sales looking for cool shit, but all I ever pick up are dead people's diaries and weird children's books.

Labels: comics, family

Posted by Scene -- at 11:14:00 p.m. | Permalink

Hmmm ok I'm trying out this new beta-blogger business. Hopefully over the break I'll be able to "design" a new template and get this mug going again. (Design is in quotes because I just take existing templates and tweak em for my own tastes.)

Here's an update of sorts:

-salem was in the hospital after not eating/drinking for two days. she was there overnight hooked to an i.v. The vet said she might pull through, but that even if she does it's probably time for us to start "thinking about the hard decisions." She's back home now but she looks like a prostitute's drunken poodle.

-yesterday was the last day of classes. we handed in our page layouts then went to CAPS and got shitfaced. I was drunk by 2pm. I was throwing up by 6pm. Not so much because of the beer, but especially much because of the butter chicken I mixed it with. I'll actually miss these kids over the break.

-Jeremy and I made a pact to each write a feature-length screenplay over the break, or 3 short scripts. I saw Jose last Monday and I promised him I'd get it done by spring. Which, judging by the freakish weather...was last week. Who knows, I might actually have a movie done in the next two years.

-Noli is home for the break, and so is his dog, Banjo. Banjo is incredibly sweet but he's being eclipsed by Salem's health problems. Sorry Banj. Nothing personal. I feel bad for by bro because he's pretty much home alone until everyone goes on Christmas break.

-Although classes are done, I've got two more assignments to finish up. Makes yesterday's celebrations a little anti-climactic, but hey, that's life.



Happy Rohatsu.

peace.

Labels: Salem, updates, writing

Posted by Scene -- at 2:41:00 p.m. | Permalink