Chapter 4: You used to exist

Boy, it was a crazy-ass weekend.

It was so crazy that it barely even ended on Tuesday night. The craziness, not the weekend. although the length of the weekend itself was unusual as well, by my own doing.

Partly it was my fault. Slipping back into bad habits, I had been putting off writing my Cinema Studies essay. See, I was all ready to get it written for the 2nd. It had come up a bit quick, but I was prepared. I had watched Reservoir Dogs, I had my copy of Down By Law sitting on my coffee table waiting for an opportunity, and my copy of "Narration in the Fiction Film" by David Bordwell to plunder for quotes. It was going to be a bummer, but I was prepared to write it over a weekend.

Then MacKenzie decided to do everyone a favour and push it back a week. Good intentions...

So I got lazy. I put it off a week. This coincided with my drama paper on Glengarry Glen Ross. How like me. Falling somewhat into some negative study habits.

Saturday, I get to work and I find out the next day we have inventory, and I've been elected to come in at 7:30. Fair enough, this is work after all, things must be done. But I'm trying to budget my time so as to be sane, with only a bit of notice. So here's me, starting my cinema studies paper at 10:00 on Saturday night, outlining all my points and trying to rig up a coherent structure in about 2 hours, so I can get a half-decent night's sleep.

Sunday was uneventful at work, other than the 4 hour spent in near-total silence while I followed the inventory-takers around the store double-counting their work. We barely got in under the wire of opening the store, followed by 4 hours of the usual Sunday looky-loos and old folks.

It was in my interest to get out early, which I barely did, but did thanks to some understanding by Matt, because we had Aunt Karen's birthday in Toronto that night.

It's a funny background story with Aunt K's birthday. It always, always sneaks up on me. I always expect it to be later in the month, but it's not. So, most especially in even-numbered years, something comes up to mess with my head and make me almost miss it. In 2008, I was hanging out with Ryan and Chris Ferg, having slept at Ferg's place after a monstrous snowstorm, then gone down with him to get Smash Bros. Brawl, and spending all morning playing it with him and RyLai. This was in the days before I had a cell phone (imagine!) so they had no way of knowing where I was or when I'd get home. I didn't check in, because, not knowing it was a birthday, I thought I had the whole day to myself.

Two years before that, I was hanging out with Robyn. In both cases I had to go over to Grandma's, where it was held, on my own. The 2006 day was nice weather, the 2008 was not (I mentioned some kind of snowstorm earlier...?)

So this year, I got out in half-decent time and we drove out to Toronto, because for whatever reason, it was opted to have the event at Aunt Lori's. Personally, my preference is for events at Grandma's, because there's a big open space to play around, and Cam and Ali can bring whatever toys they please, but not feel like it's their territory and thus entitled to make demands. At our place, it's a bit of a bummer because there are fewer options. At Cam's place, it's a huge drag, because he has a million different things he can potentially drag out to ask us to play with.

Man. They say, guys, this is your payback for all the attention the aunts paid you as kids. But you know what? When I was a kid, I remember waiting for the aunts to come over so they'd read with me. CAn't get these kids to look at a book, we're just there to wrestle with Cam, and to make Ali feel left out because she doesn't like to wrestle but Cam is too demanding to want anything but a monopoly over our attention.

I'll be so damn relieved when they're awkward preteens who don't want to hang out with us anymore. By the time Cam's 12, I'll be 28, effectively an adult, part of a different world. And I won't say "It's such a shame, Cam doesn't want to play with me anymore, he's growing up," because I'll hopefully understand and remember how I felt at the time.

Ali, I don't know about. I already don't know, so when she reaches the double-digits it will be far beyond my understanding.

It's always been about the kids, man. Ever since they were ambulatory, it's been up to me and my brothers to entertain them. We are able to do little else at family gatherings, so it's understandable how it is not something we get really excited about. Cam... I love the kid, he's precocious and everything, but Pokemon is warping his little mind. He's becoming that kid who makes up the rules so that he always wins. He bosses Ali around, "NO Ali," is his catchphrase, "I dodged your attack!" "I'm invincible!"

When I was a kid - a bit older than Cam, sure, but this starts young - I was playing games with my friends where we teamed up to fight invisible monsters. His imagination is engaged by re-envisioning Pokemon battles, to win at all costs.

I want to change him.

So that took up the bulk of the evening. We got home at 9, at which point logic dictates I finished off that essay I'd begun yesterday. Instead, I watched the Oscars - even the uninteresting parts (and there were many) - and let the cursor blink.

I ended up finishing the essay at 2 AM that night, producing a level of work that was either inspired or madness, I won't know until the end of the semester. It's either the culmination of a semester of tight focus on my studies, or evidence that I have reached the end of my rope and am no a babbling incoherent. For what it's worth, I think I did some good work. I think the points I made were cogent, and that I made them rather eloquently. Not succinctly, mind you. This is the first paper I've ever written that was at the high end of the word count allotment, at 2700 words. Usually I'm trying to decide how far under I can get before it becomes noticeable. In this case, I could hardly stop myself talking about the two movies, although I may have wound up getting redundant. Form has never been my strong suit in academic writing. The most common remarks I got in my second-year paper was "You make some very good points, but in a slightly disorganized way." I have a tendency to speak extemporaneously in organizing my thoughts. That's the entire concept of SWP, after all. In the paper, I wrote a short list of dot jots to branch out my arguments, it just happens that those dot jots all begot long, spiraling paragraphs.

I work best in a casual mode, a mode that is not particularly academic (SWP.) If I were to write about how Down By Law and Reservoir Dogs embodies the independent aesthetic, I could probably do so here in a way that would make sense, enlighten, amuse, and contain a umber of dick jokes. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon in University writing.

But if you had to ask: The films take from classical narration the concept of the goal-oriented protagonist, providing for that character obstacles not material in nature, but psychological (an attribute it has in common with art cinema.) In Reservoir Dogs, the goal is to learn who is the rat: the obstacle is Mr. White's trust in Mr. Orange. For the escaped crooks in Down By Law, it is the uncertainty of the Louisiana swamp. The cause-and-effect progression of classical cinema is also disrupted, largely be factors of chance. Special attention is also usually paid to use of form: see Orange's "commode story" narration, in which a flashback contains a flashback, which is a visualized representation of a fictional event, and the obscure mise en scene at the beginning of Down By Law. The blending of art and classical elements, especially the unity of form and content, embodies a postmodernist impulse that embodies the independent aesthetic: a blend of influences that self-consciously incorporates without mocking or criticizing.

Now, obviously that paragraph can't be a paper, but it's the Cole's Notes version. You have to know about the content of Down By Law (and Reservoir Dogs, which is more likely,) in order to see what I'm getting at clearly, but it's all there.

Even if you don't know what classical cinema looks like, you know what it is. Back To The Future is the best modern example of a classical screenplay. Everything in that screenplay falls into place. Not a spare thread. It's a work of brilliance. Art cinema is tougher to divine, because it's a trend that has largely died out due to art cinema not being very profitable, my generation not being very good at art, and the trend moving toward the aforementioned indie aesthetic in recent decades.

I say my generation is not very good at art. I mean, we're not a generation of Fellinis and Bergmans and Antonionis. I am not particularly interested in seeing filmmakers of the current day and age attempt to express themselves in the same manor as those filmmakers, with all the self-examination and obscurity that entails. We're instead a generation of Tarantinos and Sofia Coppolas and Charlie Kaufmans and Jason Reitmans, who understand the value of narrative to drive an artistic aspiration along. There's no way to say "this is good art" but an artistic interpretation of an entertainment mode, I think, has the highest cultural currency.

So that paper was done Sunday night, and then there was the matter of my drama paper, due the same day, several hours later. And also the matter of my having to work Monday night. So having at least a little bit of self-awareness, I stayed home that day and wrote as much as I could.

It wasn't much. I barely scraped my way to the halfway point before suffering burnout. I then went to work, where I spent 5 hours doing nothing of consequence.

Something funny did happen, though: Alan had helped a couple of ditzy teenage girls find a Euro Mix CD, but when he turned around to help another customer at cash, they were gone, and he had no idea where they had left the CD.

The obvious conclusion was that they had stolen it. We tested another copy of the CD, and it did not set off the anti-theft device. I was annoyed by how audacious the theft was. We were standing right there, there was no guarantee the alarm wouldn't go off, we had made contact with them. Fuck. Fuck them.

Then a few hours later I found it sitting on the shelf with Jay-Z. So there you go.

It was one of those "you had to be there" things. Or else, it's getting late and I just wanna wrap up so I can get to bed.

I was smart enough to know I'd be too tired/distracted by How I Met Your Mother after getting home from work to do anything for the paper, so I had to put my faith in the gap between classes from 1 to 4. The gap is actually between 1 and 6, but at 4 I meet up with my friend Emily to read whatever play we're studying.

I managed to get it written, more or less to my satisfaction (after having a fairly productive semester I seem to be faltering a bit here at the end.) Emily was feeling down forschool-related reasons I don't care to reveal. Sometimes you just feel the weight of it all, lord knows I've been there. I didn't offer much i the way of comfort, because I'm not the kind of guy who is good at making people feel like I feel their pain. So I sat there a while, talked her through it - not like a counselor or a therapist, but like a conversationalist, like a friend, making jokes and trying to be reassuring without being all "Everything's going to be okay, I totally know what you're going through." She did cool down after a bit of that so I guess it worked.

I think I'm a half-decent shoulder to cry on, because I will sit there and listen to anything. Anybody's problems. Because I've been blessed with friends, over the years, who would listen to my incredibly trivial bullshit (ex: you're reading this right now) and while I appreciated their ear, nothing they said to be explicitly comforting ever really worked. And as I've said, what I fond most effective was actually one of the harshest things ever said to me. and I don't have it in me to be harsh.

So I'm really just a "tell me about it, here's some cocoa" guy, except I don't hve cocoa, but that would be awesome.

Class was tedious, and we got into an irksome discussion of Oscar Wilde. Lot of assumptions were made. Characteristically, I mostly just listened.

Afterward, LOST at Vasa's. Great little ritual there. Always brightens my evening.

I need to cool down, it's 3 AM and of course there's school tomorrow. Me and my bad habits. Sigh.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto