Summer Questions

You meet your friends during the semester to ask "How's it going?" If you're good friends, you can be more specific but maybe what we're really asking is "Are you OK? Is there something especially good, bad or interesting that we can talk about?" That's when everyone is around. That's in person, when we can make use of tonal inflections and body language.
During the summer, over the phone, "How's it going?" may very well mean "How are you?" and "Are you OK?" and we might briefly check in sometimes to ask that. "You're doing all right?"
The answer has been more elusive lately.
It is still gorgeous here - I got to watch a thunderstorm make its way from across the valley, seeing the shades of rain and the occasional strike of lightning. Birds singing, sunlight streaming all the while where I was sitting. The hue of the grass shifted as the minutes ticked by, the wind carried whirring sounds past the leaves.
It was a good weekend. Larva called on her way from Iowa City to visit and we exercised social lifestyles - talking over beer, over fish, over whiskey, over coffee, over soup and burgers. With one friend's focus, and the coveted permission to ask elaborate and visceral questions - even if primarily to make sense of it to yourself, putting it up for approval - we got to describe the consecutive stages of our individual identities (student, graduate, teacher, assistant, friend, girlfriend, brother, daughter) and prescribe what we might've been, what we learned we wanted to be, what we're trying to be (leader, activist, artist).

And maybe what was easier and/or more appropriate to ask was "What exactly are you doing here?"

Because that was the grounded question of a lot of what we talked about. Who are our friends? What are they doing, what are they interested in? Who do we find we've surrounded ourselves with? And why? And what is it about those we used to love?
I meet with Linda Seger, a script consultant/author/speaker, in the mornings usually to discuss the new manuscript for her book Making A Good Script Great. (I think what we're working on is the seventh edition, but I may be mistaken.) What that means is a few new chapters, some elaboration, edits or additions to previous chapters on various tenets of scriptwriting.

Examples: montage, sub-plot, voice-over, flashback, thematic characters, thematic monologue, convincing voice and dialect, expository dialogue

Some of the work is simple - double check the names for the characters in The Usual Suspects. Pull off the opening monologue from Michael Clayton. Sometimes it's more of a challenge and she'll ask for a list of film examples to illustrate a love interest character or foreshadow/payoff and I'll scour my notes and imagine the films I left at home. The idea is to use recent (for the new edition after all) and successful films - the best way to understand these concepts is to walk through a film that you know well AKA films that have been seen by the general audience. I do that. I edit some little typos, I fill in the blanks, I come up with suggestions and watch about two films a night, adding on to the list of things to look out for...

Example from my notebook: Ch. 12
Ensemble casts - The Women, Babel, Crash, Lord of the Rings, The Royal Tenenbaums, Snatch, I'm Not There...
Catalyst Characters - Mrs. Robinson, The Graduate; Tyler Durden, Fight Club; The Joker, The Dark Knight; Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), Vicky Cristina Barcelona; shark, Jaws; demon, The Exorcist...

etc.

Most films contain a lot of these elements. Knowing this is frustrating, because it would sound easy to isolate this one piece of filmmaking in your mind and scroll through every film you've seen. That was a very mediocre road trip game actually. A long time ago, we went around the van and listed all the films we've seen one-by-one. Boggle style. So, if you said In Bruges, I couldn't say it on my turn, but I would think you were cooler. It's not that easy, and that was a long trip. I've found the most effective way is to try and keep just a few different look outs on my mind at a time.

Like this, reader. List five film examples for each idea (overlapping is allowed).
-Double protagonists
-Comic-relief characters
-Protagonist playing the skeptic against the film's plot, thereby becoming the lens through which the audience sees the film, thereby learning to suspend belief together

(You're not doing my job. I already went through this chapter... but if you come up with something good... who knows?)

Aside from that, I arrange flights and hotels, look up directions, make reservations and appointments, make/update facebook accounts, read memos on class-action lawsuits involving Google and see if other phone companies would be cheaper. Also, I know how to work a fax machine now. AND, there's an original piece by Impressionist painter Gustavo Arias Murueta that she wants to see what it could move for on eBay. Also, she wants me to set up an eBay account. I've tried to find out more information on him, and might have to look him up at the library. The internet has been little help. Isn't that weird?

When I'm not working... I read to prep. for Honduras course, recently finished some pages for Signet, research for some work to make up for Dengler's Early Brit. Lit. course, read Tolkien's thoughts on fairy stories for De Smith's Lit. Studies, write some letters, write some bad, undisciplined fiction, eat, drink, talk, laugh with Carol and Jerry, watch the lights of Colorado Springs and ask friends to come visit. (New Belgium Brewing Company is two hours from here.)

So. It's going well. But you can't expect that to really tell you anything, right?

Maybe I've got such a short attention span, or maybe I'd like to move my mind more, but I've been laying awake at night thinking about taking a weekend - the whole weekend from Friday to Sunday night - to walk through the thickest of urban Denver with the camera or taking better paper and charcoal to the park or... maybe it's just after watching so many films, and thinking and writing about creativity so much...

People have asked if I'm ready to leave Colorado. Almost. I have less than two weeks before a week in Sioux Center to move and pack and prep. before Honduras. And then, of course, Honduras, which will be a different day-to-day then here - travel with video and photo, with a handful of girls I know very little for a month and a half. Trying to dig up Spanish phrases and syntax from early high school, journeying with a heavy load and the constant, solo attempt to document with a bulky camera, an expensive one, AND a still when my ideal summer week would be one of those, and one or two good friends, and the country to explore.

I don't know that I was trying to get anything across this time but I'm tired now, and find much encouragement from reading of others' adventures. So here are mine.

ALSO. I changed the blog template. I noticed a lot of people have been using the white-on-black minima and it was getting hard to tell one from the other, mine from yours, etc. The list of you below now includes sloppy epithets, anecdotal character sketches and (in)accurate synopses. Fire away.