And The Headphones Climbed Up The Hill

I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day. Right now I am taking a fiction workshop with Craig Lesley. Lesley is an Oregon author, and has published a handful of acclaimed novels. He is an excellent teacher, and I have had him a few times before. I workshopped a story on tuesday, and on thursday morning I was rushing to leave the house before class and I was digging through my backpack looking for the story we were going to be workshopping. I came a across a piece of paper that had a few sentences on it written in Craig's handwriting. At first I thought that it was a sheet with extra comments one my story, but then I read it. It was a few sentences of a scene from something he is currently working on. I recognized some of the characters in the piece, there were three characters mentioned in five sentences, from his first novel Winterkill. He said at the beginning of the class that he is working on a new novel with those old characters, and this piece of paper was part of it. I had a dilemma on my hands. He had given me the paper by accident, so it was a safe bet that he didn't know I had it. If his new novel, a hand written piece of which I had, were to win the Pulitzer and Craig went on the be a Nobel Prize winner, then it was possible that the piece of paper I had could be worth millions. On the other hand this might have been a very important short little scene and he might be looking frantically for it. I've heard, and believe that its true, that if you lose something that you write it is almost impossible to recreate it exactly. In the end I decided to return the paper to Craig after class. He was grateful for it. When I told Bobby about it, he said I should have made a photocopy and given that to Craig, keeping the original for myself. Lizzy brought up an interesting point too, though, that the piece of paper was an insight into Craig's process. Process for a writer can sometimes be very personal, and it was pretty cool to see something in progress from a professional writer. I know that some day I will look back on this incident and think that I let a gold mine slip through my fingers. But I hope that if something like that were to happen to me, if I gave a note on an unfinished book to one of my students by accident, that they would do the same thing that I did. I guess that sometimes ethics are more important than millions.

I am reading Slate right now, and they have an article about Miley Cyrus. I think the article is excellent and brings up a lot of good points about image and branding and consumerism. My question is: Do people really care that much. Hannah Montana is pure shlock, I'm sure but I've never seen it, but its still really really popular. Even if people knew all the details about how stupid and fake Miley Cyrus is in real life I'm not sure that that would make them turn off the show. You can beat people over the head with facts about how stupid the shit on TV they love is, and they will still watch it. People are stupid, and Disney knows that, probably better than anyone. Miley Cyrus will go the way of Brittany Spears, and in a few years she will be totally irrelevant, but there will be someone else for sure. I feel like commenting on Miley Cyrus, as good as that commentary is, is useless. Obviously nobody cares, or at least not enough people care. All the intellectual people can sit around and talk shit about Miley Cyrus, and watch shows like Deadwood or Six Feet Under, and have a much more evolved understanding of art. All that does is make other people think that being smart is the same as being a snob. They share lots of traits, but they are not one and the same thing. My advice is to ignore Miley Cyrus. She isn't going to be around that long, so what's the point wasting all that energy writing about her. Focus instead on the things that are good. Things like Friday Night Lights.

I know that I said the other day that Spring in Portland is amazing, but I am going to say it again. One thing that is great about the spring is that the winter is pretty crappy. Any non rain weather after three months of rain is an improvement. I went to the store today, and while I was walking I thought about just how wonderful Portland is.

I know that I am echoing Lizzy and Slate so I am not the first person to talk about this, but I too have been taken in by MTV's new little project "The Paper". I've watched all three posted episodes, and I feel like this could be a good show. At first I thought that finally all the newspaper nerds of the world were going to have their moment in the sun, and there are a few moments in the first episode that tease you that way. I especially love when Amanda likes the gray scale but Alex and the In-Chief don't like it and get it thrown out. That kind of stuff I want to see more of. I think this show is really about the kids. Just like the Laguna Beach, these kids are insanely wealthy. They don't have normal lives, but there are some similarities that exist because high school is the same pretty much anywhere. I feel for Alex when he doesn't make Editor-In-Chief, I've been there buddy and its a tough pill to swallow. My advice is just don't let it hang over you for too long. I lost both Senior Class President and Editor-In-Chief my senior year. If I had had those under my belt I might be something other than a broke grad student at PSU. I might be ruler of the universe. I most certainly would have been Mr. Spartan, capturing the much sought after CHS tri-fecta. Whatever happens in this show, I want to see how this paper comes together. I know how hard the High-O-Scope was to put together and at our biggest we had a staff of twenty. When I was a junior there were less than ten people putting the paper together. That was fun, and tough. I imagine that a staff of seventy is impossible to handle. What I like most about the show is that some of the kids seem pretty stoked to be working on the newspaper. Junior year there were a lot of people like that on HOS. Senior year there were less, and it wasn't as fun. High school newspapers are the beginning of great things, look at Kurt Vonnegut or Joan Acker, and that tradition needs to be celebrated.

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This is Amanda. Editor-In-Chief. Slate summed her up pretty well as the Tracy Flick of high school journalism. If you don't understand the reference see Election, or see it anyway because its a really great movie.

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This is Alex. He's a pretty good dude. Trying to be both friends with Amanda and friends with everyone else who hate Amanda. Texting a girl to ask her out is a classy move. I don't care who you are. That's on tape buddy, and you are going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life.

Speaking of Editor's-In-Chief, I ran into my old "boss", from junior year, Molly Sullivan. She works at a movie theater downtown. I haven't seen her since graduation, and I'm sure she didn't recognize me. We weren't friends. In fact junior year most of the paper staff did everything in their power to keep her hands off the paper. Not unlike the Amanda situation. I still remember, though, that one of my friends said, to my face, that the paper was only as good as her writing. He was talking about an issue that I had at least one story in, quite possibly more. To this day that still hurts, and I think about it every time I sit down to write. If Molly is so much better than me maybe she should be in grad school and I should be taking tickets for Regal Cinemas. Who knows, maybe she is researching a story or a novel. More likely she's stupid, but I'm not bitter, I promise.

One more thing about "The Paper". I think its pretty sweet that most of the kids in the show are Jewish. Its nice to see some of my people getting a little love from MTV. It hurts, though, to think that there are places where the kids go to Hebrew school and get to hang out with a bunch of other Jews. In Corvallis I never felt discriminated against or anything like that, but being a quarter Jewish was enough for people to refer to me as a Jew, which by the way is not in and of itself a derogatory term. Maybe if I had gone to Hebrew school I would have some sweet stories to write like Phillip Roth.

In news not about "The Paper", but from a paper, the LA Times, the discoverer of LSD died. He was 102 years old. I've never taken acid, and i really have no opinion about the drug in either way, but it really seems like a drug that defined a culture. I've read some stuff that really made me dislike Timothy Leary, but for the most part the acid generation was pretty hip. I'm pretty sure some of the best American writers were into LSD. Its kind of a sad day. But to the guys credit one-hundred and two years is a pretty good chunk of time.  

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I don't know if you've spent much time in Portland, but if you have then you know that Spring is AMAZING. Winter can get pretty freaking dull and gray, but once its over it is so beautiful outside. I've celebrated today by staying inside all day. My TV class got cancelled, so I've spent the day reading stories for my workshop class, and trying to finish this story I'm writing about missing hikers. I think its pretty good, but I'm having a little bit of trouble describing nature. I think its because I'm spent so much time in the city. I'm pretty good at describing the city. I probably should go to PA and do some research, but I don't really have the time. Craig, my workshop teacher, said that it is a good idea to take pictures when you're working on something. It helps when you are describing something. I took some pictures just now to help illustrate what I mean by Portland being really pretty.

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I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall yesterday and I have to say that it was better than both Knocked Up and Superbad. It wasn't as funny as Superbad, but its plot was a little more clear. I would say that it tied with Superbad, because Sarah Marshall didn't even have a cameo from Michael Sera. After watching this movie, and letting it digest a little bit, I figured out what it is that I don't like about Judd Apatow. In his recent films his characters are almost totally un-relatable. The female star in Knocked Up was an up and coming E! news anchor, you know like a lot of people in this country are, and Sarah Marshall is a rising star in television. Seth Rogen's character in Knocked Up isn't about to become famous, but he is able to find a job instantly when its pretty obvious he has no qualifications. Sarah Marshall goes one step further. Jason Segel's character writes the music for the TV show Sarah Marshall is in. He is also a semi brilliant musician. These are not real people! Even the kids in Superbad are so different than the kids in Freaks in Geeks. Could you see Nick Andopolis stressing out about whether or not he got into Dartmouth? Probably not. One thing that makes Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and 40 Year Old Virgin infinitely better than Apatow's last three movies is that the characters could be real people. One thing I've learned from fiction writing is that the author is in total control of developing his/her characters. There is no reason that a character has to be a movie star and not a waitress. That decision is totally the author's. Granted Apatow didn't write or direct Sarah Marshall, but all those guys have really let success go to their heads. They've forgotten how to create life like characters. Or at least they've gone away from using realistic characters as leads. In Knocked Up, as well as Sarah Marshall, there are a lot of supporting characters that are just normal people, but obviously they are not interesting enough to carry a film.

Turns out yesterday I was supposed to report for jury duty. I remembered around 11:30 pm and promptly freaked out. There is a notice in the summons that says if you fail to appear for duty they can find you in contempt of court and fine or arrest you. I hate police and authority figures. I always feel like I am going to get in trouble for something, even when I haven't done anything. Yesterday I was sure that I was on the verge of spending some serious time in the big house. Luckily for me I called my intelligent big sister this morning and she told me to call the court house. I did, and I got rescheduled for jury duty. Now I'm a free man, and looking forward to June 4th, my day in court. After the whole ordeal ended this morning I talked to a few different people about jury duty related incidents. A couple people I talked to said they had received summons and just blown them off. Both of them are still walking the streets. I think maybe my freak out was a little premature. I probably could have skated on this one, but as I always say, better safe than sorry.

Today I got my new computer in the mail, and that means that at this very moment I am writing on it. That also means that I am now the owner of two Mac laptops. I am planning on selling the one that doesn't work, but until I do I hope you are jealous. I am in the middle of updating all my music on iTunes. After that I am going to transfer over my pictures, and then tomorrow I will install the new version of Office, which I also bought. I have a lot of homework to do in the next couple of days, and it is going to be nice to have a brand new computer to work on. The best part about the whole thing is that now my computer is portable again. For the last year or so I have had to deal with the fact that if my computer was unplugged in would not work. That meant that I would always have to be very careful not to pull out the plug while I was working on something. Because the people at Mac are so forward thinking and made the new plug a magnet, I was always having to save just in case the magnet came out. Now that is a worry of the past. My present worry is that something like what happened to my last computer will happen to this one. Some how there was some sort of moisture that got into my last computer and fried the connection between the battery and the logic board. This didn't kill the computer, but it rendered it non-portable. I think that using it in that condition may have led to the meltdown that happened last week. Hopefully that meltdown will hold off on this new machine until at least after I finish my thesis.

I know that that is a Gillian Welch song, but it is what I am listening to this very moment while I write a quick post about the Wailin' Jennies, so deal with it.

I just got back to Portland from a weekend spent, for no real reason, in Corvallis. Every time I go down there something amazing happens. This time it was at one of the many new chic downtown c-town bars, I guess nobody told people in Corvallis that they weren't classy or upscale. Bobby and Martin and I were bored so we went to this bar called Downward Dog, you know like the yoga position, see Corvallis is no only hip but very humorous. While there I saw my friend Sara, who really lives in Portland but is on an extended vacation from some of her more harmful extracurricular activities, and she was talking to this guy in a huge cowboy hat and boots et al. I figured it was someone Sara knew, she knows all kinds of strange people, and he got up and started talking to me and Martin and Bobby. He was very animated and interested in his chosen topic of conversation. He is in the Air Force, and is soon to be shipped to Korea. In the middle of his epic speech on the many different types of people that are in the Air Force, and what said people do when they are posted to somewhere remote like Korea, I realized that I knew this man. I asked him if he had ever gone to Harding elementary school. Indeed he had. In fact he and I had been in the same fourth and fifth grade classes. Its possible that we were also in the same third grade class. He went to Philomath for middle school and high school, and I haven't seen him since the last day of fifth grade. That was 1995, thirteen years ago. I have a good memory, especially for names and faces, but this one even shocked me a little bit. It turns out he was not there with Sara. He had kind of invaded their group, and I think that my talking to him made it harder for her and her friends to ditch him.