I am sometimes jealous of people who can have caffeine just because I loved Cherry Coke so much. I drank a lot of it, before I started having chest pains and found out I had mitral valve prolapse, and now I don’t have any. But I went to Dairy Queen for lunch and got a chicken sandwich and three fingers of it, treating it much like an alcohol, having barely enough, because by the time my chest hurts, it’s too late. I start feeling buzzed, half cocked, a headache, sleepy, out of control, unconscious of my own actions. I used to drink a lot of caffeine and now I drink none.
I have been writing a book lately, non-fiction about the period of my life from March 2005 until July 2006, when I was 22 years old, and everything was awful. I’m having a hard time figuring out the order I want to put everything in or the tense to use. I’m writing it in present tense and in episodes, but I don’t know if that’s the best plan. I’m in my school’s computer lab right now and the guy next to me is putting on his contacts at his desk. That’s almost hilarious.
So because I’m writing about a horrible failed relationship where the guy was controlling and abusive, I reread this book called Killing Me Softly by Nicci French. It’s not an amazing book, but it’s tolerable and interesting and there are very scary and strange moments. But in it, the main character, Alice, is walking down the street and sees this guy. He sees her. They both stop in the street and stare at each other without speaking a word. And from that, they fall in love, they go off and sleep together without knowing each other’s names. I can see how this is possible, but it makes me look at everyone who walks by, wondering if there is someone out there who could make me feel like that.
Creepy but it’s not something new for me: I tend to have these unexplainable and impossible fantasies that I don’t know if I really want to have come true.
I want to write a little bit about this without spoiling too much of the book/movie, but it’s kind of impossible. I’ll probably have to get at least a little specific.
A page of script is about a minute of film time, give or take, but a book page has way more content than any page in script format. Unless a story is around 80 pages long, it’s obviously going to have way too much information in it than you need or can use for a script. Usually characters are removed or plot details can be changed. That’s ok. Movies are adaptations of books. They cannot be perfectly the same.
The problem I have with Hollywood is that since the beginning of time, stories have had completely tragic endings where everyone dies, but Hollywood does not accept this. In The Ruins, a group of tourists end up in an unescapable situation and all of them die. The movie (which I haven’t seen, I’ve just read a detailed synopsis) has a person survive. It bothers me, not only because I love the tragic and fatal, but because I have seen this happen in many movies.
Sometimes it’s nice to read a story where no one is happy and everyone dies. Sometimes I want to read a story where the cycle isn’t broken, where nothing is out of the ordinary for their situation, but only for us. I see there’s no way out, and it’s comforting for me to watch them attempt it.
Last night, Dan, Tim, and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. It was pretty good. I’m a fan of the books vastly more than the movies because obviously there’s a lot of story — sometimes my favorite parts — that has to be cut. I know it has to be done, but the back stories of my two favorite characters is cut from from the movies.
Neville Longbottom has been my favorite character, by far, since (I think it was) the fifth book, where they find out that the prophecy of who could kill Voldemort could refer to either Harry or Neville. Neville starts off as a timid young boy who has problems even casting a spell correctly and then ends up as the only person who is strong enough to physically help Harry in the final moments of his fight against the Dark Lord. He is your friend who always lurks in the back corner but is the only one who knows how to reprogram the Wii to get the other remote to work again. Removing his book threads from the movies kind of also seems to make the two forms of media blur together in my head. I’m unsure what’s in the movies because I remember the books much better.
The other character I really like is Snape (go figure). It’s funny to me that Rowling can write such intricate characters and have such a interconnected and deep storyline but such horrible writing skills. But I digress and could write a whole other blog entry about that. Snape is much more than the movies show: his character is delicate and flawed in a superfluous way. He doesn’t have to be the way he is, and the book readers know this, but the line between “is he evil or good?” can’t be walked so finely with the amount of back story given in the movies. If I had only seen the movies, I would assume differently.
I’m sure watching the movie will give me a few other ideas for blog entries, as I’m already formulating some in my head.
Recently, a friend of mine recommended that I read Sphere by Michael Crichton, the guy who wrote Jurassic Park. Dan owned a copy and I remember him telling me to read it a few years ago. The words “time travel” came out of my friend’s mouth and I picked it up right away.
I started to read. Everything felt familiar, but I couldn’t remember what would happen next. With each plot event, I thought, “I kind of feel like I’ve read this, but I don’t know what’s going to happen next!” I kept thinking that it was possible that when Dan recommended the book to me that I read a synopsis and that’s why it seemed familiar, because otherwise, I would have remembered a lot more of the book.
I have read a lot of books and forgotten I had read them, but once I started reading, I’d remember the whole plot. With Sphere, somehow I had forgotten everything and while that sounds annoying, I was really great. I got to enjoy a book twice.
The book was good, fast, and just like Crichton’s other novels. Kind of scienc-y, kind of realistic, but with that twist of the fi in sci-fi. I am perfectly okay with him following that formula because the subject matter is so varied in his books.
Then I watched the movie, which took away one of my favorite aspects of the book (I’ll refrain from mentioning it since it’s a plot point), and that was kind of silly, but the movie was also good. The cast was great: Samuel Jackson, Sharon Stone (I had no idea what a great actress she is), and Dustin Hoffman.
My mom recommended a book to me that she knew I’d like: Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer. The back cover says that he’s Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton and it shows. This is a good thing, however, because it means he’s pretty meticulous in his details.
What I love about sci-fi is when it’s made real through explanation. Solaris really had that going for it, devoting chapters to the explanation of how the planet worked. I really liked the science in Sawyer’s novel also.
Without giving too much away, it’s obviously a “time travel” book, and by that I mean this: when an experiment is done by a Swiss lab, it causes each human to jump forward 21 years in consciousness for two minutes, with no ability to change the movements of the elder version of themselves. Those who are dead in 21 years see nothing. The whole book is devoted to how a few specific individuals and the world reacts to that situation.
Explaining much more would give a lot away and you really don’t need to know more about the book than that. The book toys with morality, free will vs. destiny, and does both in multiple ways because of the many characters in the novel.
Definitely a quick fun read and I’d suggest it to anyone who likes sci-fi. There’s also going to be a television show this fall that Sawyer is involved in so it looks like it might have some hope. I’ll be watching it, for sure.
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About As a poet, I feel like any photography I do will always be a reflection of the words I use. When I think, I think in words, not images, unlike visual artists. This site houses a minimalist dream log, my poetry including poems from You May Waltz To Your Doom In Sanguine Stained Shoes, my photography, and a blog with Let's Play related entries.
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