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I watched Easy Rider last night. It joins an increasingly long list of movies I’ve been getting through Netflix because they’re ‘classics’ or ‘great’ or ‘groundbreaking’ movies which just disappoint me. Movies which I find unimpressive and uninteresting and which do not grab or hold my interest. I’ll have to go home and look at the list of movies I’ve watched to give you a full recounting, but the list includes Easy Rider, Deliverance, Miller’s Crossing, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, A Few Good Men, and uhhh… a couple others which were apparently so un-memorable that I’ve forgotten watching them.

I can’t wait until I start going even further back in time to see movies from James Dean and Elvis, then further back to movies like Casablanca and Breakfast at Tiffany’s… I’m guessing that it just gets worse the more ‘classic’ a movie is. Well… I’ve seen Citizen Kane once or twice and I didn’t hate that, but … I have yet to see why so many people consider it the best movie ever.

Ooh! And Netflix just got copies of Godfather II in, finally, so I’ll bump that trilogy towards the top of my Queue soon – I’ve never seen those. I always try to have high expectations for these movies, I don’t want them to suck. But then they do.

I got to the end of Easy Rider and they just died all of a sudden and … nothing had happened the entire movie, there was no point at all, it was a complete waste of my time and … well, if it hadn’t made them a lot of money and fame, I’d say it was a waste of the film crew’s time, too. I watched the little making-of video they put on the DVD, and I could see that they obviously had a good time making it, but man… I just can’t see why it became a phenomenon. If it were made today it would be lucky to get diistribution at all, and then would be killed by word of mouth. Terrance Malick (sp?) makes more engaging films!

Anyway, I ought to be working.

Update: Looking at my NetFlix history, additional movies which disappointed: Rain Man, Glengarry Glen Ross, Far and Away, Network, and … and … I had to put in an email request for my full history, and it wasn’t instant. Sigh.

Last week the lightning from a storm set fire to my neighborhood.

Tonight the storm downed several trees in the area and broke a large branch off the tree in our front yard and tore one of the sheds in our yard free from the ground and tore it up and whipped a sheet or two of the as-yet-unstuccoed styrofoam insulation from the side of the house and knocked out power to the entire neighborhood for … well, estimates around 6 hours, or until around 12:30AM.

Now it’s possible I missed a sand-storm, but I figure if I missed it it wasn’t catastrophic enough. So we should have sand or stones or “earth” otherwise attacking the neighborhood soon, and flooding. Fire and Air have already attacked.

Hopefully after that there’ll be catastrophic love in the neighborhood. That … that is a mess I don’t mind cleaning up after.

A lot of the music on my iPod that is the most played and the highest rated is music about being lonely, about missing someone or losing someone or never even really having the chance to be with someone, or even just about being alone and wishing there was someone out there to be with. And for a long time, this was reasonable, something I felt, something I identified strongly with, there were people I missed, longed to be with, and lamented the loss of. And these songs would come on and the emotions would well up inside me and it was a good thing, because I like feeling.

But now I’m thinking I need to figure out how I want to re-arrange my music, because I don’t have that longing anymore, I don’t miss any of those people any more. I hear the songs, I still like many of them, but the emotional response simply isn’t there any longer. There are still songs on my iPod I have an emotional response to, but … I’m finding more and more of the songs I used to respond to, songs about love and longing and distance and missing, just don’t do anything for me anymore, and there’s a lot of them.

There’s a storm a’brew’in.

Outside and in.

I guess I had to settle in just a little more to trigger my dad: he told me, the very next time he was in town after I hung my art, that regardless of what other things happen I’ve got to find new living arrangements at the end of the year…

Anyway, in thinking about where I might go, I considered renting or buying a place here in town, probably near work… but it occurrs to me that really there’s nothing tying me to Phoenix right now. Which is not precisely to say that I don’t have ties here, or that my family is unimportant, but rather that … the ties I have here are very flexible. My family is still my family, no matter how far from them I get, and I’m sure I’ll return to them time after time, and a few years here or there or elsewhere isn’t going to break those ties.

My first non-phoenix inclination was to go live in New York City. I realize it’s “more expensive” to live there than anywhere else in the US, but there are certainly millions of unskilled and entry-level workers working and living in and around the city, and I don’t see why I couldn’t become one of them. I don’t have a family and I’m certainly willing to sacrifice my ‘standard of living’ for a new experience – not that my standard of living is very high right now anyway, compared to the “average” Arizonan… I have wanted to live in New York City (staying at least for a couple of years, perhaps as long as ten) for at least as far back as I’ve been making lists of long-term goals. It’s on my lists from college, from high school, and many in between.

The bulk of the US publishing industry is based out of NYC, which might be a nice avenue to look down for an entry level job. I can certainly work in a mail room or in a basic administrative capacity, and perhaps from inside the industry I could get a better idea of how it all works. (Which reminds me that I haven’t been keeping up on my personal goal to find 5 new agents every week to consider querying… I shall have to make myself a goal for this weekend to catch up.)

It occurred to me today that I also might like to live in Washington, D.C.. Other locations, mostly international, have also occurred to me, but NYC and DC top the list in my mind right now, and Phoenix is still in the top ten somewhere. So my plan going forward seems to be to plan to move … someplace else after the end of the year, and I’ll keep my mind/heart/spirit open to suggestions and clues about where I ought to go, in case there’s someplace else I’m needed or desired. But I’ll re-organise my financial goals to aim for a drastic move.

Anyone want to buy some furniture and appliances? I’m not sure it makes sense to try to bring all my ‘stuff’ with me, and the money might help with moving expenses. I’ll think about it, and probably post more detailed ‘stuff’ lists later. Or maybe I’ll rent a one-way truck rather than going the bohemian route… it all depends too much on unknowns right now, so this is all just brainstorming.

I was fooling around with numbers yesterday, and noticed the following things about November, National Novel Writing Month:

November has 30 days.
30 days is 720 hours.
If one didn’t sleep, that’s a LOT of time to work on novels.
IF one could use modafinil continuously without dying or anything for a month… wow.
Taking 200mg every 7 hours (to avoid that lull during the 8th hour), one would need about 103 200mg pills to cover the full month.
100 200mg doses of modafinil is only about $120. I paid that much for coffee during the month of November last year.

On the many occassions when I have been able to write continuously for 8 hours or more, I have averaged nearly 1000 words per hour. This includes appropriate eating, drinking, and bathroom breaks, plus time for daydreaming and brainstorming and (usually, because these sessions have typically occurred in coffee houses) a fair amount of chit-chat with baristas and other patrons. So 1000 words per hour that I am not trying to do anything else is reasonable, and allows me to not starve to death.

If I didn’t have any other responsibilities, didn’t have a job, didn’t go to church or the movies or shopping, in 720 hours I could reasonably expect to write something approaching 700,000 words. Perhaps as little as 650,000 words, but that would still represent fully double the number of words contained in my four completed novels. If I wrote novels between 50k and 65k words in length, that would allow for ten to twelve or even fourteen full novels. In a month. Ridiculous!

Continue reading Let’s set the bar too high