I wasted my Christmas vacation for the most part, and I'm not entirely disappointed with that, though I feel like maybe I should be. Ate a lot of chocolate, logged too many hours on the futon and in the video-editing/sound-mixing/Internet surfing captain's chair, and generally didn't see anyone at all. Many of my colleagues will be coming back with tans, gleaming darkly against the backdrop of alternately freezing and melting snow we've been treated to lately. No doubt I've caught a bit of Diablo "trying being white trash purely as a hobby is fun, kids" Cody's KEW-UL writing! style! by proxy, and will have that work its way out over the next few sentences until I am a wandery, imageless and verbose pedant again. No surprise that I'm tempted to write a tiny bit like her, as I got sucked into her blog and spent some of Saturday evening and much of today reading a couple of years' worth of entries.
Here's how that happened: Friday I picked up a discount bin deal on Juno, a movie I really like, and listened to the commentary on it. The screenplay was listed as having been written by "Diablo Cody" and I had before wondered at the audacity of someone to name themselves something like that and then want to be taken seriously. I have trouble taking it with a straight face when people make up their own names, genders and/or accents. Why not, though, right? One time I had to write a cheque for a girl, only to have her tell me she needed me to write it out to a completely different name (Amanda) from the one she'd introduced herself to me with (Riley) when I hired her to help me edit my European vacation footage back in 1999. You can tell it was some time ago due to the fact that I was writing her a cheque, and that I wasn't just doing my own video editing, which I never seem to stop doing nowadays.
Anyway, I was certain Diablo Cody must have written Juno because she got pregnant in high school. It seemed too heartfelt and personal for it to be otherwise. Apparently, she didn't, and just made the whole story up. Of course, I also expected her to be bookish and obese, as she IS a writer with a tiny actress playing her alter ego. When I looked her up, I found that she wasn't trying to hide her real name (Brooke Busey) and that she'd been raised overly religiously, and responded to this by walking out of a perfectly good office job to work as a stripper. How typical. She proved to have spirit, and it needed to finally, one day, escape SOMEhow. She wanted to explore her "inner whore," and wanted to do it the whole nine yards. A few years of that, then she wrote a book about it, then was asked to write a screenplay, and Juno was born. I think it's cool that, after a book purposely exploring and revelling ironically and viscerally in the squalor of that life, her screenplay is about teenage innocence, and how to preserve it in the face of very adult realities. The "heartfelt" quality I guess came from the fact that the innocent baby daddy character in Juno is based on her high school male best friend, whom she teased mercilessly.
Her blog made me think about what kind of girls I like. I like "firecrackers" with wit and wisdom, whereas I attract huge, oafish mannish things who tend to be foolish, loud and vulgar. (Or crazies. Pretty much anyone married, too. Not you. I don't mean you, I mean other people.) A girl with a rapier wit, who exercised it amusingly, but wasn't loud and crass all the time? There would be a treasure indeed. It also made me think about people who grow up so steeped in religion, and how they seem to need such extreme measures to become real people, rather than cogs in the McGod Machine. I suppose I'm lucky I'm not selling crack in Vegas. Of course, my spirit isn't exactly flourishing, and figuratively running naked through the fields, either. It never is.
On the subject of beliefs, someone recently expressed discomfort at how to exactly characterize my beliefs. He said "You're not a Satanist, but you're very anti-religious." He's a lapsed Catholic, so he's handicapped about such things. What I am, confusing as it is for people, is someone who is trying futiley to overcome a "Christian" upbringing so I can exemplify the virtues, spirit and methods of Jesus Christ, something I found completely impossible to do while trotting down the Bible Camp Trail, or setting my sights on some kind of "Christian Ministry" instead of actually being a guy who lives a life, and it shows signs of getting Jesus in some ways. Mostly I only really do a good job of "Angry, railing against religious assholes and how they screw up everyone else's day and feel better than everyone and want to be treated as more pious" Jesus.
I got extremely hyper (for me) after spending most of the day online, and couldn't raise anyone on the phone again. Getting used to that. No doubt I will not sleep tonight. It's freezing rain outside, but I think that will stop long before morning, so chances of school being cancelled (for students) are slim for tomorrow. The very idea of going in to school and planning the impending end of the three courses I am teaching for another couple of weeks is intoxicating, but, sadly, probably only a dream.
Maybe I'll give a couple of late-night friends a call again. Is there anybody...out-there (out there, out there, out there)
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