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Tuck Everlasting – movie review

I learned only a couple of weeks ago that Tuck Everlasting is a “classic American novel” that I was probably supposed to have read somewhere along the way. I haven’t even bothered to try to locate the book to read it, I just went to see the movie instead. I may go find the book some other time. See if there’s a little more to it than they were able to put into the movie. In this review I’ll probably give away the entire story, but since it’s a “classic”, you probably already know.

As you may or may not be aware, Tuck Everlasting is a story about the Tuck family who have stumbled upon immortality, and the events surrounding their being found out by the world. Figuring at the center of the story is a young woman named Winnifred who stumbles just as haphazardly into the everlasting lives of the Tuck family as they did into immortality. The Tucks can’t let her just run off; they have to learn that they can trust her not to reveal their secret. In the days and weeks that pass where Winnie is hanging out in the forest, falling in love with a forever 17-year-old, having the time of her life, her family and the townspeople assume the worst and do everything they can to try to find her. Eventually someone does find her, and the Tucks, and the Tuck family has to run off into the night to escape, leaving Winnie with her family. That’s it.

The whole story. Girl is frustrated with her home life, runs off into the woods and spends a couple of weeks with some immortals who teach her the importance of living life and the danger of cheating death, girl returns to her family. I guess I was hoping for something more.

There was a little intrigue with a mischievous character who knew the Tucks’ secret & was trying to track them down so he could make a fortune selling immortality, but very little of it, and it ended weakly. There wasn’t much depth of philosophy about the nature and troubles of immortality, and much of the dialogue was poorly written. The exceptional cast did pretty well, considering what they had to work with. Oh, and plenty of good cinematography, but nothing to write home about.

Perhaps if you loved the book you’ll find more here than I did, because you’ll know the rest of the story. It just seemed a little short and a little empty to me.

Movies, movies, job?

So I have a couple of minor things to ponder as I go to bed in a few minutes… well, one isn’t so minor, but … I’ve been pondering it for over a week now, so…

Anyway, there are not less than 6 movies opening tomorrow, 5 of which I would like to see. Except that even at $6 a pop (Student admission plus $1 soda refill) that’s $30, and I don’t have a job. I have what amounts to regular pay from Realink through mid-November due to the normal delay on all paychecks, paid vacation time, and a severance offer I accepted (but am legally prevented from discussing), so can theoretically afford to go see 5 movies as normal, so long as I get a job that pays at least (now what did I say last?) $13+/hour by about the end of the month, I’ll be fine.

Except I’m so intimidated by job listings for tech jobs that I’ll likely end up taking the job Marie thinks I should over at … wherever it is she works. The base rate is half what I need, but theoretically I can make up the difference with commissions. Except that the idea of depending on the spending habits of insomniacs in an “economic downturn” seems almost s stressful as not having a job at all.

So here are my late-night (actually all week, and probably until I end up getting a job) ponderings: Do I go see the movies I want to see, and do I take the job over at wherever?

Continue reading Movies, movies, job?

Happy NDSD, everybody!

Happy National Depression Screening Day!

A committment to anxiety

This was originally going to be a comment on my post about my perspective assignment in drawing class. You don’t really need to read it to understand. Most of it.

If it takes them a semester to teach you what a skillet is, you’re going to the wrong cooking school. Or you have ridiculously stupid classmates.

Still, I understand. I didn’t say I was quitting. I can be very committed to something, through thick and thin. This happens to be a point where the work is thick and the learning is thin. I am difinitely committed to ASU’s Art program for not less than another year, that is, until I have completed at least one painting class and the appropriate prerequisites. I’m not sure what my criteria will be for continuing at that point, but I think it will have to do with my personal satisfaction guaged against expense in time and money and energy to get wherever I am artistically by then.

Definitively what I am committed to is my art. Whether ASU’s program can teach me what I want to know or not, I am committed to trying to excell at creating art. (This includes writing fiction & poetry.) I hope within the next year to be able to get a handle on a lot of other details in my life. Right now I’m trying to really properly reconsider where I want to be in the work force while I work on learning art. I’m committed to a certain level of expenses for the next 9 months, until my lease is up, and at that time I will certainly have a lot more options available to me regarding cost of living, requirements of compensation, location, etc… There are important factors in my emotional life that seem to be telling me that that may be a time of great flux, as well. It looks like I will be buying a house and taking on roommates at that time (unless a lot of things change in the next 9 months), which would commit me more than anything I’m attached to right now.

To a certain degree I am struggling with something like a fear of committment right now. My art teacher chided me a little for not being committed to the shading. If I get another tech job in a call center in Tempe, or if I ge a job that doesn’t pay enough or that pays much more than I was making before, what does that do to the factors available for change in 9 months? Do I want to put myself in a job I won’t want to leave when I have another opportunity because it’s comfortable or pays well or seems “stable”? What decisions am I making now that might clode the doors to opportunities down the road? If I get a job with which I can just barely get by and I don’t have any money at the end of this lease to move to the other side of town or the other side of the country or to pay for tuition or … so many things to worry about. I want to have options, and I want to feel stable at the same time.

I worry. I worry about not having enough experience with the right things, about not having enough education in the right areas, about not looking right or dressing right or being the right person for the job, any job. I worry about transportation and politics and the economic downturn effecting my sales commissions before I ever get a job I have to get to with politics I have to cope with or commissions to earn. I worry that taking this drawing class that feels like it doesn’t apply much to what I want to be doing is really, really off course from the “making a living right now” course.

Of course, I also worry about worrying too much for no reason. I nearly had an anxiety attack in class tonight. In a class I keep saying I hardly care about. Imagine how frozen with fear I am of actually going out and trying to get a job. Of facing HR people. Of being turned down. Again and again and again. I have friends who have gone through periods as long as eight months trying to get job after job after job and not being able to secure a job until one day they finally do and within days they hate it, or within weeks they’re fired. I’ve never really looked for a job before. This feels like a great weakness to me. My first job I got immediately; I was out for the first time, just picking up applications from every store at PV Mall to fill out and come back with, I ran into a friend working there who said they were hiring, took me back to the store, introduced me to the boss, and before I finished filling out the application I had the job. Zoe referred me to my second job; I went down to apply for a tech job, which they happened to have none of that week, and ended up getting a customer service job that I was overqualified for since I wasn’t picky and they needed warm bodies. I worked mostly in tech departments within that company for almost 30 months. On the day I was leaving that job, before I left the building, I called a manager I had been friends with within the company who was not hiring tech jobs at another. I had the job and started three days later at Realink, the company I’ve just left. In the last few days I’ve called all my friends and it turns out that most of them have asked me that if I do find a good job that pays what i need it to pay, I should let them know. Their workplaces aren’t hiring, they’re downsizing. They don’t get paid enough and they work too hard. Any ideas they have for jobs are because they were already looking for work themselves. I was just beginning to stop being paranoid about losing my job at Realink.

I’ve never looked for work. I’ve barely applied for jobs. I have no idea what I’m about to get myself into. I am freaking out. It’s like a constant, low-level panic attack. I’ve been in a few interviews, mostly for internal shifts in position, and I’ve never been this nervous. I’m told my calmness has helped me get those jobs/promotions, and right now, no interviewer in sight, hardly a company in sight, and I feel like my blood is an acid eating away at me slowly from the inside. I don’t know what to do about it.

I’m not giving up, I’m going to go out there and try to get a good job, I’m just … stressed out quite a bit about it.

Drawing class – perspective

So, due to my Maui vacation, I missed two of the three classes where the teacher actually went over perspective in class. Still, I’ve had a good understanding of perspective since elementary school, so I was able to understand what he was teaching by looking at the other students drawings. The only difficulty was the “busy work” that took up all of my weekend with doing careful drawing after careful drawing. We also had a “final” basic perspective drawing that was due today that combined the elements that we learned from the other assignments. (For those of you paying attention, this means that I did the final assignment that comprised what I learned from the other assignments before I began the other assignments, since its deadline had not yet passed and was thus the most important, temporally.) About half an hour before the end of class last Wednesday the teacher advised us that he would like to see shading on the “final” drawing, and ran through about 5 minutes “teaching” shading. He said we wouldn’t be graded on our shading. We should begin actually learning how to do shading in two or three weeks.

So, I did the perspective work, no problem. I was very careful to have a clean drawing with no smudges or unintended marks on the page, which can be quite difficult when working with a giant triangle and T-square resting on your drawing the whole time. I went over everything more than once, with increasingly soft leaded pencils, so that I could remove any early mistakes and only emphasize the lines that were good. Then I timidly followed his basic shading instructions, not wanting to make my 6-8 hours of careful perspective work to be ruined by my untrained inability to shade.

Today in class, we all hung our thumbnail drawings and final drawings on the wall and had to discuss what we had trouble with, and what we didn’t like about our own drawings, and then the rest of the class would try to find something they liked. Due to random selection of the side of the wall to start with, my drawing was next to last, and I got to hear the teacher spend most of his comments focusing on people’s shading. My blood pressure was rising, my mouth becoming dry, my heart racing as every new thing someone could have done better was something I saw in my own work, often by design. Had I made all the wrong choices going in? Was I supposed to somehow teaach myself proper shading in my “spare time“? One or two comments about perspective or composition came from the teacher, but even the comments about composition seemed to be attacking my use of negative space! I wasn’ sure I’d be able to open my mouth when it got to me. He even made jokes about some people’s circles not being round, something I feel I have particular trouble with, right after not being able to draw a straight line.

We finally got to my drawing after over 85 minutes of drawn out discussion, where even the most impressively-shaded drawings were getting negative feedback about their shading. I said I had tried to emphasize negative space and that I had tried to de-emphasize shading to focus on the perspective work and composition. I pointed out that I had one round sphere, but that I have a lot of trouble making circles round. I pointed out something that I had actually thought I could have done better, and then the teacher started by saying that he really liked that part of it. He was impressed by the roundness of my circle, and thought I had real control of perspective. He even said that I had a good grasp on the beginnings of shading, but that I should go back through and darken it up. The only thing he said I could work on was that it didn’t make him feel dizzy enough.

That was it, he moved on. One other student started to say that the shapes were too crowded, but when he walked up to it to point at where it was too crowded and could see it better, he stopped himself. I don’t know what feels worse; the anticipation of getting negative feedback or not getting any real feedback. Every other student had 5-10 minutes spent on their drawing. A couple that came after mine were even compared to mine (“Try to get a feeling for light vs. dark when shading, like Teel’s here.”) during the process. I get almost nothing. “Keep up the good work.” “Try a little harder on the stuff you haven’t learned yet, but are still good at.” It frustrates me.

It frustrates me because I paid $420 tuition for this class, plus most of the $350 I’ve spent so far on supplies has been for this class. If I’m just going to be told to draw without being taught to draw, then is it worth it? Another year and I should be in Painting I, which is where I want to be. I have to get through this semester, then an entire semester of “Color” and “3D Design“. Oh, and I have to find a job (or two) that I can do at the same time I’m taking classes, that pays enough to cover living expenses and classes. Which at these prices and at this rate of classes, raises what I need to earn per hour by almost $0.74, to $13.36/hr. Crap.