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Question of the Day 12-31-17

If you could trade in a year of your life for $70,000, how many would you trade in?

Not a goddamn one, and I’ll be honest, there was one or two of them that were pretty shit. However, I believe that every experience makes us who we are, and I would hate to miss any of those experiences because I’d kinda hate being different. Who knows how events might have unfolded without other events informing them in my life.

So bottom line, nope, not a single year I would trade in, regardless the amount of money. Not even those younger years that I can barely remember now. I wouldn’t trade in a moment, not one single moment. For the most part, I like who I am, and I like my life. Why go changing that?

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Unsent #1: Marcus

So like I said earlier, I though it’d be interesting to write unsent letters to my ex-boyfriends. I couldn’t figure out an easier way of breaking it down than by doing them in chronological order, starting with Marcus at age 18.

Dear Marcus,

Wow...so it’s been over a decade, at least. I’m not sure of how the exact math goes, but it has been quite awhile. There’s nothing malicious in the amount of time we haven’t spoken, our lives just moved on from one another and we’ve never found our lives intersecting, simple as that.

I guess the first thing I wanted to say was, Hi! I hope this letter finds you well, and if you’re trying to figure out the motive behind it, I just wanted to say some things we never did, obvious things that weren’t so obvious back then. The most pressing of which being, I don’t think we were actually in love.

Not romantically, anyway. I think we cared deeply for each other, more so as friends, but I’m confident in saying that you and I were never romantically in love. It’s for the best really, as we were never really right for each other to begin with.

That’s not to say that our time together wasn’t important for both of us. I was your first boyfriend, and you mine. We had been friends for years before anything romantic happened and now that I look back on it all, I see that we were just taking that next step in our friendship. We helped each other through a lot, but we were never IN love with each other.

However, we did everything else though, didn’t we. It was more like a series of experiments than it was a relationship. You were my first kiss, my first sexual encounter, my first practically everything that I’m not going to go into graphic detail about, but you know what I’m talking about. We did everything, we tried everything, and for that I am eternally grateful. In my life, I might have had these firsts with someone I knew less than I knew you, it could have been hilarious and embarrassing, but since we were each other’s guinea pigs, the embarrassment was minimal. 

I felt so comfortable and safe with you. I wanted to apologize for those last few months. Since we’ve last talked I’ve discovered I have schizo-affective disorder bi-polar type. Explains a lot, right? I was deep in a depression slump partnered with high anxiety and paranoia. However, the things I expected of you were unfairly a lot, but most of all I wanted to apologize for the letter. In it I implied that it was your fault, and that was incredibly uncool of me. I shouldn’t have put that shit on you, regardless of how I felt at the moment I wrote it and left it on your car.

That was the beginning of the end for us, wasn’t it? The suicide letter? Yeah, I thought it was.

I still remember the phone conversation where we broke up, I remember crying, I remember you crying. In the years since I go back to this moment and perceive it differently. Sometimes I believe you were actually crying, other times I think you were faking it. Right now, today, I think they were real tears. We may have never really been in love, but we meant a lot to each other. You will always be my first in so many categories.

I hope this letter finds you well, I hope I didn’t fuck you up beyond repair when it comes to intimacy with another human being, but most importantly I forgive you, as I hope you do me.

Thank you

[anamateurtries-blog]

Question of the Day 12-27-17

Would you rather always be 10 minutes late or 20 minutes early to everything?

I would rather be 10 minutes late to everything. Because personal experience has taught me that there is not much to be gained by being early to things, especially 20 minutes.

I’m a very punctual person and I more often than not arrive early for everything. It’s super frustrating, too, because a lot of those things don’t start until a few minutes late anyway, so to be 20 minutes early to everything would just be hell because I’d be waiting around 25 minutes most of the time. Being 10 minutes late sounds much more doable. Granted I don’t like being late, but 10 minutes late is better than 20 minutes early, from my experience.

Doctor appointments start late, I’m always the first to arrive at parties and other functions, then there’s that awkward time waiting for more people to get there. So yes, definitely would rather be 10 minutes late to things than 20 minutes early, no contest.

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Question of the Day 12-23-17

If you could put your brain in a robot and live indefinitely, would you?

Abso-fucking-lutely. And there’s a whole humorous line of typing I could go down, but it could best be summed up by the first episode of Sealab 2021

I’d have the strength of ten gorillas, or just one Adirenne Barbeau-bot.

I see life as a collection of experiences, as long as my brain was still receiving the information from those experiences, regardless of what they are, I would totally do it. 

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Unsent Project

So last night, as I was writing out my Question of the Day answer for 12-22-17, I was listening to music on my iPhone as I usually do. A song comes on, Unsent by Alanis Morissette. 

If you’re not familiar with the song, the lyrics are comprised of the bodies of letters she wrote to ex-boyfriends, but never sent, and I got an idea. In my life, including my husband, I have had 5 boyfriends, 3 of which were serious relationships, and one which ended up in my marriage. I thought it would be interesting if I wrote out a letter to each of my four ex-boyfriends saying the things I never got to say that I either wanted to say, or have since wanted to say thanks to time and distance. So be looking out for my own Unsent series coming up in the next couple of weeks. Names shall be changed to protect the innocent.

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Question of the Day 12-22-17

What movie trope do you hate most?

I’m not sure how well this fits ‘trope’ exactly, but I do have something about the movies that really bugs me, and it couldn’t be better timed because I just finished watching ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’

Like I said, this isn’t necessarily a trope as much as a condemnation of an entire genre...kinda sorta. Let me explain.

‘Valerian’ fits into this special category of sci-fi. There’s sci-fi like ‘Alien’

where there is some future tech involved and situations we couldn’t fathom our ability to find ourselves achieving at the time, but on the whole, ‘Alien’ is very rooted in a sense of reality. It merely takes a familiar thing and spins it. That’s the kind of sci-fi I like, but then there’s sci-fi out there like ‘Valerian’, like ‘The Fifth Element’

where the vision of the world is bold and almost completely created in the mind of it’s creator. ‘Valerian’ (granted it’s based on a comic, so there were already some design stuff going in) isn’t content with spinning something familiar in a sci-fi way, the damn thing wants to reinvent the wheel. Challenging our concepts of architecture, humanity, alien species, technology, dimensions, etc. These are movies where everything is pretty much built from creative scratch.

On one hand, this is commendable. To envision something so unique and stylish and be able to translate that vision and share it with an audience. That takes a lot of creative juices. However, on the other hand, these kinds of films irk me because for all their creativity, there does seem to be a sense of laziness to their storytelling.

Yes, they tell huge and complex stories, but all the events are of no real consequence because they aren’t rooted in a chain of logic of reality. ‘Valerian’ is the type of movie that defies convention, where 2 plus 2 equals 15, kind of thing is what I’m typing about. 

And the endless ‘good thing that exists’ props in these type of films. For example, in one scene of ‘Valerian’ the star has to run across an expanse of space with no floor, but he must get from one end to the other. Impossible, yes? Well, good thing that he just so happens to have a device which creates free-floating platforms under your feet if there’s no ground to step on. Yes, it’s a very cool idea, but what’s the point of it other than to show of that you thought up something cool while conceiving your film? The device isn’t explained at all in the film, it just exists, serves its purpose, overcomes the obstacle, and is never spoken of or seen again.

I guess what I’m saying is that high concept sci-fi films built from the ground up have a tendency to lack tension because anything can be overcome by creating an answer that needs no explanation other than “because it’s the future”. It feels like lazy storytelling. Instead of really thinking of how to get the characters out of the corner they painted themselves into, they pull out the ‘good thing that exists’ prop and move on to the next situation, which is likely solved by its own ‘good thing that exists’ prop or solution.

It feels like the creator of the film spent all their time thinking up a cool, mind-blowing story, full of cool, mind-blowing visuals, that they don’t have time to solve problems either in plot or in character. 

And that’s the thing I’m griping about today. I hope that made sense. I’m not knocking on visionaries for being visionaries. I’m just saying that it feels like they spend so much time coming up with situation A, B, C and D, that they don’t have the creativity left over to figure out how to get from A to B to C to D, and that kinda annoys me. 

Major props though to the visionaries out there. Luc Besson’s ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ was a visual feast, a real treat for the eyes, but without substance to go along with it, I’m left with half a film.

Think of it this way, this being Christmas and all. Imagine you have a beautifully wrapped gift to open. Elaborate and beautiful to look at, and when you open it, you find it empty. That’s how I feel about films like ‘Valerian’ and ‘The Fifth Element’ and ‘The Cell’. They’re very cool, but only half of a filmwatching experience. 

Oh, and I actually hated ‘The Cell’, blech.

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Question of the Day 12-20-17

What childish thing do you still enjoy?

Does watching cartoons count? Cuz I love me some cartoons. Adult cartoons, yes, but I still love kid cartoons as well. Just kid cartoons from when I was a kid, though, stuff like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Well, I guess I like some current kid cartoons, like SpongeBob Squarepants.

I find that one pretty amusing, although from what I understand it has crossover appeal for both kids and adults.

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Dawsonmas 2017 (part 1)

Dawsonmas 2017 has come and gone. Six seasons in eleven days (there was a trip to the emergency room in there that added some time to Dawsonmas 2017) and what a journey it was. Filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, lots of Joey shrugs and looks worth a thousand words, miscommunication, friendship, betrayal, and of course, growing up.

I love this show, as I’ve stated in an earlier QOTD somewhere on this blog, but in that blog I mentioned one day I’d talk more about why, well here ya go.

I was roughly the same age as the Creek kids, errr....maybe one or two years older, I can’t quite remember, but I was damn close, and therefore there were a lot of shared experiences from my own life that paralleled the characters in the show. 

The love started because it was a weekly series created by Kevin Williamson, who was a hot commodity at the time as he had written the screenplay for ‘Scream’

which was a highly influential film. Not just in the horror genre, but in my life. It’s the movie that made me want to actually MAKE movies now, not wait until film school and after to do it. The first script I ever wrote was an amateur sequel to ‘Scream’. I can’t really look back on it now as no evidence of it exist, but I can recall memories, and boy was it terrible. I had no idea how to write a script, how to string together scenes. pretty much do anything on the page. We did shoot a few pages of it, and those went well, at least that part I was good at. However, like I wrote, no evidence of it ever existing can no longer be found.

So enter a series for my age range, not only created by my hero at-the-time, but also about a teenager who desperately wants to be a filmmaker, of course that was a show that appealed to everything me. It’s almost like Kevin Williamson knew I was out there and tailored the show specifically for me.

That’s what started my love of Dawson’s Creek, but what kept me there? What kept me coming back for more every Wednesday was partly that I saw parts of myself in the characters. Just knowing that this was kind of like a map, a guide for adolescence from someone who made it through, kept me coming back. 

With the second season was the addition of two new main characters, each of them held a key to my life, something I was dealing with at the same time. First up, Andie McPhee.

About halfway through season two we discover that Andie has a mental illness. I was going through some pretty serious stuff at the time with bi-polar disorder, too (that diagnosis kept flexing and changing and getting bigger and worse as I went into my twenties). Her illness didn’t feel like a prop, though. It felt like it was a valid storypoint, a serious subject given serious consideration. Just seeing some of what I was going through reflected out in the real world, even if a televised version in the real world, it meant so much to me. I didn’t feel alone, I didn’t feel like I couldn’t handle it, even though there were several times when it got out of control, I always knew that it could get back, it could get better. The character of Andie McPhee was a big part of that.

And the other season two addition that got me through high school and beyond was Andie’s brother, Jack McPhee

Spoiler alert for anyone that hasn’t seen the series. Episode 14 of Season 2 it is revealed that Jack is gay. As a gay youth, growing up terrified in the closet in the middle of Montana, Jack was a breath of fresh air and a saving grace. To see a gay character on television that wasn’t a prop, but instead a fully-fledged, multi-dimensional character, meant as much as a character like Andie for mental illness.

In both these instances, Dawson’s Creek felt like an umbrella on a rainy day, a shield at times. It wasn’t just a show, it was an important coping tool.

And that’s gonna do it for tonight, as I’ve written plenty on the subject. Until next time, Happy Creeking!!!

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Question of the Day 12-16-17

Is there an app you hate but you use anyway?

Gonna sound odd, but I am not a big fan of Facebook.

I’m not even sure why I still use it. Well no, that’s not true, it is a good calendar app for friends birthdays. It’s pretty good at that. Other than that, it’s kind of useless to me.

Who knows. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t have the right Facebook friends, or enough friends, or whatever, but I find that a scroll through Facebook nets me ads and unfunny-to-moderately-funny memes posted by friends. Barely is there anything of substance on there. Like someone talking about their day, or the latest episode of that TV show everyone seems to have an opinion about. That’s not completely true, those are peppered in there, but they are few and far between.

I’m no better. I rarely post anything on Facebook. Last week, with the exception of my Dawson’s Creek-a-thon (which I called Dawsonmas) habits, and the news of being in the ER for a day and getting an appendectomy, I had nothing to post at all.

I love my friends, I really do, and my Facebook friends fall in that category as well. I’m not saying this is there fault. I’m just not a huge fan of my Facebook app. Too many ads, articles, and memes for my taste. Yet I scroll through it maybe once a day on the off chance that I catch something, and I often do, but like I said, the meh outweighs the good when it comes to Facebook.

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Question of the Day 12-15-17

What keeps you up at night?

Sleep apnea, mostly. Insomnia related to schizo-affective disorder bi-polar type plays a huge part in keeping me up at night. However, if you’re asking me what concepts make me lose sleep, I’ve got two.

The concept of death: Sometimes death sneaks into my mind as I’m trying to sleep, and I think not so much about dying, but what happens next. I’d like to believe there is something after death, I really would. However, I think it’s more likely that death is just the end, you blink out of existence and that’s it. What if death is just like when you sleep dreamlessly? This seemingly instantaneous time travel when you fall asleep, and the next moment it’s hours later and you’re awake. Is death like that, minus the waking bit? Just one moment you cease to be? I imagine that if you know that moment is coming for certain it must be terrifying. It freaks me out.

Sleep paralysis:

I’ve thankfully never had sleep paralysis, but some times as I’m drifting off to sleep I start thinking about the possibility of it. Oh God, that terrifies me to my core. My husband and I went and saw a movie called ‘The Nightmare’

a few years ago, not knowing exactly what it was about. Turns out it was an entire documentary about sleep paralysis and some of the nightmarish stories people who’ve had it had to share. I was so affected, that when we went home (and this was during a time in my life when the insomnia wasn’t very bad at all and before the sleep apnea), I didn’t sleep at all that night, instead I waited for the light of morning to hit, but even then I was scared to go to sleep because sleep paralysis can happen anytime day or night. So I stayed awake until sometime later in the afternoon, when I finally passed out from exhaustion. One thing they said in the documentary is that the victims of sleep paralysis had a higher probability when they were thinking about sleep paralysis. Which puts you in that paradoxical situation where you can’t be thinking about it when you sleep, but have you ever tried to not think of something? It’s damn near impossible because regardless of what you find to fill your mind, you inevitably come back to the thing you’re trying to not think of. Like you’re actively trying to think of other things, and it works as long as you’re trying, but you start to get sleepy and you drop your defenses and you stop working so hard and BAM, sleep paralysis enters your mind again. Fucking great, all this unpacking about it is going to make trying to sleep really hard now. So forgive me if I don’t go into it anymore and try to save myself some major grief and hardship later.

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Question of the Day 12-14-17

Would you rather be unable to use search engines, or social media?

Just wanted to quickly apologize first off. As I posted a few days ago, I had an emergency appendectomy and so I took a few days off, but I’m back now!!!

I’d of course rather use social media over using search engines, no contest. Although, strangely enough, other than writing on this Tumblr, I don’t really take advantage of social media. I don’t Twitter or Snapchat, and I rarely Facebook anything. In fact, I mostly just mindlessly scroll Facebook for a minute or two on my phone every once and a while. I’m not sure why, as I never really come across anything important. However, this Tumblr blog is pretty important to me. It keeps me writing and it keeps me thinking, and I need those things, otherwise I do very little with my day. Trying to change that, but it’s a slow process.

As far as search engines go, it’s easy to give them up because I barely use them. The last time I did was a few days ago to look up my dentist’s number, I couldn’t even tell you what the last thing I searched for before that was.

So, yeah, social media pretty much wins this one by a landslide.

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Today I had an appendicitis

Today there is no question of the day as I spent all day in the emergency room and finally had an appendectomy this afternoon. The rest of the day is about mending, not answering a question of the day. I’ll get back on schedule tomorrow, promise.

No worries, I’m completely fine.

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Question of the Day 12-10-17

What will immediately disqualify a potential significant other?

Well, I’m happily married for nearly two years now, my husband and I have been dating since 2005, so this question really has no meaning for me now, or even in the recent past. However, before my husband, I did have a set of three criteria for potential boyfriends, including him. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Must be taller than me: I’m not exactly sure why this is a thing, I think I just like having to angle up for a kiss or something, but this was a criteria. They didn’t need to be massively taller than me (I’m 6′0″ and my husband is a simple 3″ taller), but that was a big criteria.

2. Must at least LIKE the movie ‘Magnolia’:

Yeah, this one is just picky, but ‘Magnolia’ is one of my favorite all-time films. As so, I don’t wanna waste my time with someone who doesn’t appreciate this movie. I was willing to compromise on a lot of things, but when it came to ‘Magnolia’, there was no messing around. Either you like it, or we’re not going to work out. This is such a petty criteria, but it’s true.

3. I honestly can’t remember the third one, it was such a long time ago that I had the three criteria. I’m lucky that I even remembered two of them. Sorry for my shitty memory.

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Question of the Day 12-09-17

What do you want the inscription on your gravestone to say?

Beloved Husband, Son, and Friend. Accomplished great things.

Just real simple, just like that. I’d be happy with that.

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Question of the Day 12-08-17

If you could receive a salary to follow whatever passion you wanted to, what would you do?

This one is simple. 2D Flash Animation. I started it about a year and a half ago and I’ve grown leaps and bounds since I’ve started, but of course there is still tons of room for improvement. Yes, I’m aware that there are actual careers in this field but I can’t program to save my life, trust me, I barely eeked through a college course on basic programming and that was because my friend in the class dragged me kicking and screaming through all the assignments and I had a very understanding and forgiving professor. Quick aside to the two of them, without you both I would have not been able to graduate college. I am forever thankful.

I stopped animating about four months ago, which killed me inside. I posted the most recent episode of The Boom Boom Happy Fun Yum Yum Hour that week and absolutely nobody watched it. Not a single view, except for three from me over the months. I came to a decision that I put way too much work into these animated shorts to release them into the void. An average episode is anywhere from five to seven minutes and it takes around twenty hours of work just for one episode. I couldn’t keep giving that much of myself for no return.

However, were I to receive a salary for it, I would do it all day every day. Animating is fun, a lot of fun. I completely dig it and wish there were a reason for me to go back to it, but as of now...there’s no reason to start up again. I’m hoping that changes in the coming months. I am at my happiest when I’m animating. I would like to return to my happiness, but it’s so much work that I can’t justify doing it just for myself.

Hell, hopefully you who‘s reading this will watch the episodes I have uploaded so far. I’ve started linking to the YouTube pages for the individual episodes below in separate tumblr posts. They’re nice and short and a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy!!!

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This was one of my earliest animated shorts, I tried some new things out in this episode that I hadn’t in the previous episodes, to minimal success. It’s a bit clunky, but it comes from the heart!

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Question of the Day 12-07-17

What movie would be vastly improved if it were turned into a musical.

This film series is already good. Really good, actually. However, I think it would be a thousand times funnier and the second film in the series would be more interesting if ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy were turned into an epic, three-part musical extravaganza. 

As far as a real, thought-out answer to this question. I don’t really have one. I love musicals, and I mostly love movie musicals, but I can’t think of a film that needs the treatment in order to make it better.