eateggs

nyYAAAAAAaar! … Or, I mean, how else does one say, “the semester’s over. For better, and for worse, the semester’s over.” How else does one say, “why didn’t I study those extra three hours? How does McCarty justify such draconian and capricious paper grades?” … does one say, “I’ve been a T.A., films chair, and student. And now I’m not (a T.A. or student, anyway). … does one say, “I didn’t invest in to any relationships this fall. I feel like I should have–in a “blah, blah, relationships are important, blah” sense–but don’t feel bad that I didn’t.” … does one say, “I’m a ruthless and capricious bastard. A power-mongering megalomaniac. A megalomaniac…”

In some ways, it’s a good thing that the semester is over. So many facets of life have been approaching critical mass–the point where they reach density and size enough to become volatile, explosive. Things like the house. God, it’s a mess. It’s a pig-sty, or worse. It disgusts me, and is a thorough embarrassment. But I can’t even blame my roommates–or, at least entirely: I haven’t done any more cleaning than they have, for the last 6 weeks. I want to call them on their bullshit–“I don’t have time to clean today/this week/ever.“–when they sit down to play hours of video games. (And “they” is an unfairly homogenizing term. It’s not all three that have been way, way too busy to clean.) But, again, I’ve done no more than they have, in terms of cleaning. It’s a stupid line to walk: trying to balance between wanting things clean, and so just cleaning it myself, and refusing to clean because they should take some responsibility and initiative.

It’s like when we ran out of dish soap last week. Is it my responsibility to buy dish soap for the house? No, it’s not. But I have been the one who has purchased soap for the house, ever since we moved in. So, we ran out of dish soap. We could all see it coming. It was a busy week for me, and I hadn’t been to the store in some days, and wasn’t planning on going any time soon. The soap finally ran out on Ben’s day to do dishes. I hadn’t purchased more soap, nor had anyone else. Needing to wash the dishes, Ben took initiative: he went … well, no, not to the store, but rather to the bathroom, where he retrieved my bottle of shampoo, and then returned to the kitchen. And washed the dishes with shampoo. Because we didn’t have any dish soap.

Two days later, I went to the store and bought dish soap.

And I guess that’s the critical feature: I’m not the house mom. It’s not my responsibility to buy dish soap. But if I want the dishes that I use to be cleaned adequately with soap, not shampoo, it’s going to be up to me to buy dish soap. Because, apparently, everyone else is just too fucking helpless.

Anyhow. Critical mass. The house has reached a critical mass point of being absolutely filthy. So, I’m going to clean. A lot. And in a few day’s time, the house will be presentable again. For a while, anyway.

Critical mass. Sleep.

When I finally crashed, on Friday night (well, Saturday morning), I’d been up for 41 hours. After three weeks of sporadic sleep– three, four hour nights, for days in succession. Well, I crashed Friday night. Since then, I’ve been all but unable to get out of bed. I woke up Saturday night at 6:30 pm– without even seeing the light of day. I crashed again, 10 hours later, and slept until 4:45 pm on Sunday. I crashed again, Sunday night, and slept until 2:00 pm today. And it’s felt completely necessary. A “detox” period, if you will, after a semester of fitful and limited sleep.

Someone asked me, at some point this fall, if I had any trouble sleeping. “The only trouble,” I replied, “is finding time for it.”

And it’s not just the sleep. I’ve felt–not sick, but–unwell for how many weeks, now. For however many weeks since I last ran. Since I last climbed. Since I last slept eight hours, and woke up, refreshed.

Critical mass: being a person.

I’ve come up terribly short on that other set of “important things.” Like making phone calls. Talking to family. Friends. Like … making a point of doing fun things. Playing my guitar, or piano. Reading books, other than “Intermediate Macroeconomics”. Important stuff like that. And, in a sense, I feel like a bit of a shell. I think I’ve put a couple good bullets on my resume, but no memories in the photo album, and no treasures in my personal treasure chest. Life in the desert is hard. It’s arid. Dry. Lifeless. The land grows parched, after too many days in the relentless summer sun. Dry, caked and cracked. Becomes so much dust in the cracks of crinkled and barren soil. It’s economical. And lifeless.

Goethe once said, “Man can stand anything, except an endless succession of beautiful days.”

In the absence of human emotion, I turn on Damien Rice, like rains turned on the desert. More like bottled water– a bottled, overturned on to the desert floor. It pours out, revitalizes and replenishes the soil … but no sooner is the soil sated than drying again … the sun’s parching heat intensified, magnified by the focusing lens of a thousand plastic bottles, empty, strewn about… I turn on The Format. Placebo. It doesn’t have to be good. It just needs to be drenched in human emotion.

The SUB Theatre projection booth redesign began today.

…

It’s curious– the above probably means very little to all except for one or two. But for me … it means the world. For me, the above is … ah. It’s for me. And I’ll leave it at that. And I’ll sleep oh-so-well tonight. (That is, if I ever get to bed…)

—

Saw No Country for Old Men again yesterday. And it seems that I was right: it’s one hell of a movie.

The semester is starting to wrap up. I have one more take-home final to finish, a final exam to proctor at 8 am on Wednesday, and a final exam to take on Friday. Certainly, this semester hasn’t been an unequivocal success. I think last fall was… but not this semester.

Nevertheless, I’ll have a few things I’m proud of. And a few regrets to remember, or forget. But I’ll take that.

—

Andrew seemed to be fighting with his dinner tonight, as it fried in that frying pan that never seems to leave the stove. “You doin’ alright, Andrew” I asked. “Cooking is a battle,” he told me, as he managed to flip his egg–with a bit of a “hurrah!” “They told me to read The Joy of Cooking,” he continued, after a minute. “But I read The Art of War instead.”

I can’t stop thinking about No Country For Old Men. I need to see it again.

My consistent criticism of Westerns–regardless of their “greatness”–is their abject failure to conjure a sense of the “plains”, of the “west” … that sense of a foreboding eternity … of beautiful and rollings hills covered with sage and grasses … hills that are utterly indifferent to the plight or suffering of any who wander there. That sense of something so much greater than ourselves… that subtle reminder that, no matter the degree of our mastery of nature, it’s still inadequate. The reminder that, really, we’ve not even begun to conquer nature. That we’re guests. Transient. Finite, on an infinite stage. And powerfully alone. Powerfully alone on life’s infinite stage…

No Country does that. It creates a sense of the landscape. Of Texas … of its wide-open plains. It’s more than just a motif … it’s the leitmotif. It drives the movie. It underlies the movie.

The film’s “gritty realism” … is based on the land. It’s fear, the lasting sense of unease, worry … derived from the land. And it’s not “gritty realism” like Taxi Driver, where dingy lighting and dismal scenarios form its claim to realism … rather, No Country‘s grit comes from the stubble on Tommy Lee Jones’ face … from the texture of grasses, blowing in the wind.

I’ve never seen a more convincing … period piece. Admittedly, set in the early 80’s, it’s not far removed from 2007– but at the same time, it is. No Country is at once familiar … and far more alien than Marie Antoinette. More alien than Lord of the Rings–the the extent that LOTR is based on familiar human archetypes. It’s fantastic–yet familiar. We’re allowed–an indeed, encouraged to–identify with Legolas, Frodo, Aragorn. I think Tolkein intended, in some way, to edify, to instruct. And if that may be allowed, then the Coen brothers intended to terrify. To meditate on the horrors of modernity… We, at the viewers, are denied any sense of identification. With any of the characters. They’re characters of a different breed, a different generation.

The film closes with the description of two dreams. It’s such a simple scene–husband, retired, and wife, over the breakfast table. The scene is flushed with the light of early morning. And he relates his dream, he just describes it, in his slow, textured, Texan drawl. No visual indicators, representation. And, in so doing … creates a visual image that remains in my mind as poignant as anything I’ve seen in cinema.

EVERY aspect of the film is so rich in details … so many layers… I love the shot of the tile floor in the sheriff’s office: tile, thatched with the scuffs of a countless many cowboy boots. I love the sound design … there’s always a barely-audible layer of music from some ambient source…

Jesus. I just need to see the movie again. I don’t have time this afternoon … but I somehow get the sense that I may be going anyway.

It seems I survived the week. Whoo!

Actually, in terms of academics, this was a rather uninteresting dead week. That’s fortunate, though.

The “big” Procrastinator meeting happened Friday morning. I haven’t had a night where I was unable to sleep … for years. Literally. I think State Mock Trial, junior year, was probably the last night I wasn’t able to sleep because my mind wouldn’t stop churning away at the next day. But Thursday night, I didn’t sleep. I spent 6 hours in my bed… rolling over and looking at the clock, periodically… each time resolving that in another 15 minutes, if I wasn’t asleep, I’d pull out a book.

Then, it was 6:00 am and I was up … it was 7:15 am and I was in the ASMSU office with coffee, scones, piles of paper. It was 8:02 am, and Tegan and I were walking in to the conference room with all the Student Facilities Enhancement Project key players present, and the lead architect and AV consultant present, via teleconference. At 10:00 pm, I was walking out of the conference room … head muddied in a swirl of feelings: elation, concern, gratitude. The conclusion seemed firm: the “key players” were “on-board” to fix the projection booth. The architects were ready to go, and Tom Stump was ready, after a 10:30 am meeting, to “pull the trigger” to get them started.

Whether this happened or not, I haven’t been told not. Until then, I’m holding my breath. But hey– at least I get to be a student again. The last two weeks have averaged to 40 hrs / week with the Procrastinator.

—

Saw the new Coen brothers film last night– No Country For Old Men. I’m so glad that I saw it in theaters. The film has such incredible texture and rich detail–viewing on any less than a 40′ screen with 5.1 digital sound would deprive the film of much of its greatness. I didn’t enjoy the “plot line” very much, but the vast panoramas of Texan prairie, the intimate close-ups of faces rugged with stubble and years of struggle… yaar. It was good. It was better than good. It will certainly be nominated for best director, probably best actor and supporting actor… screen play (adapted), perhaps … cinematography?

that thought isn’t working. what-ev

Hey. Wait. What happened? How is it … 1:30 am? Wasn’t it just 9:00 a few minutes ago?

Herbert Hoover once wrote, “Bessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.“

Yaar! This theater is eating my life. Eating it whole and raw. My grades this semester are going to suffer, (suffer, suffering, suffered) accordingly. Last week, logging my hours, I came up to 59.5 between Monday and Friday evening. To date, I’m at 417 hours. Logged. Plus however many countless hours not logged, like tonight … reading forums. Learning about screen masking to keep things looking good when we show Flat prints (as opposed to Scope). Learning about lummens per square foot, about aperture sizes and the differences between a lamphouse and a console. Three-phase vs. single-phase power. Stereo vs Dolby Stereo SR (really cool, actually–encodes four channels of data into two analog audio tracks using phase-inversion, which is then extrapolated into six semi-discrete channels) vs Dolby Digital (six true discrete channels) vs Dolby Digital EX (7 discrete channels) vs DTS vs SDDS (8 discrete channels). About a thousand things that are unique and important to the theater industry … that 99% of the world doesn’t even know exists. And it just eats my life. Consumes hours and hours. It’s interesting. And, at times, applicable.

Mostly, I just wish that the people involved with planning and designing the new Procrastinator Theatre had spent a little time doing research … were moderately versed in the subject. Had SOME clue about the difference between a Scope print and a Flat print. Knew SOMETHING about projection booths. About … ghaa.

Oh. I wrote a term paper, the other day. Sat down at 8:00 pm. Finished at 9:00 am the next morning. Rocked steady, the whole night through. And the result … well, I hope my Prof finds it rather interesting, anyway. (Mostly, I suspect he’ll be thrilled by the time he gets to mine just to read complete, grammatically correct sentences…). Here’s the first paragraph:

In his The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche paints an image of the “noble classes” before the ascendancy of Christian morality. In this paper, I will broadly reconstruct this portrait, examine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a case study of this unfettered noble spirit, and put both works in a modern context relating to the War in Iraq.

Intrigued? Oh, I’m sure you are.

Here. Just for you. A link! …
https://eateggs.com/files/2007.12.04-PericlesInIraq.pdf

It’s a character study of Mr. Kurtz (The Heart of Darkness), operating from the framework of a Periclean “noble”, as described in The Genealogy of Morals. Man, it’s fascinating stuff. Let me tell you. Actually, you might find it slightly interesting if you’ve read both of the aforementioned works recently. Otherwise, it’s completely inane and academic. Actually, it’s not even that academic. But hey…

Along the way, I came across a quote that I rather like:

One skill is needed—lost today, unfortunately—for the practice of reading is an art: the skill to ruminate, which cows possess but modern man lacks.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

Clever, eh?