Go after inspiration with a club and a plane ticket

I've been whining a lot about not writing. Hey, I'll call it what it is. I'll blame anything, too, from a gaggle of seven year olds to the felicitous and all consuming holiday season. But I was secretly hoping that if I'm meant to be a writer, if I will enjoy working in "the Industry," I'd have an enlightening experience at the silver screen Mecca.

We didn't do the Hollywood thing until our last day in LA. I was psyched. The only thing we had done remotely movie-like was drive Mulholland Drive. Which I found a little disturbing at first. Thanks, David Lynch.


Let me tell you, "Hollywood" isn't actually the nicest part of LA. But it is awesome. I could have walked up and down the star studded Walk of Fame again and again. I tiptoed through Grauman's Chinese Theatre forecourt as is on hallowed ground. From Cary Grant to Johnny Depp to Rita Hayworth. The Industry's greatest and most mythical. Waltzing through the Kodak Theatre's odd shopping mall area, the pillars decked out with each year and the film that won Best Picture.

It. Was. Awesome.


And it got me excited about writing again. I don't know. Maybe that's kind of kitschy because the likelihood of me getting anywhere near Kodak again is if I pay for the guided tour (which I so will at some point). I'm not a starry-eyed screenwriting starlet. But it wasn't so much about the fame of Hollywood as it was about the realization of the stories. I mean, you pound on your keyboard and daydream about stories and movies and slave jobs I will have in LA. It's nice to have something to remind you that all that isolation can translate into something tangible. Especially cool when I saw "Out of Africa" up there on the Kodak's pillar. Know who wrote that? Kurt Luedtke, Michigan grad.

A few days prior to this we had visited a cemetery where stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Farrah Fawcett are buried. Billy Wilder's grave was there also, with his infamous epitaph, "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect."

Imperfection, here I come.

Coast to Coast and Back Again

Tonight, I walked into my house after 3.5 hours of sleep on a couch, 5 hours on a plane, and 2500 miles. I devoured dinner and collapsed on the couch until my family's excitement for the Jets roused me. After that, apparently there's nothing to do but blog.

On Monday I locked up my house and took my overpacked suitcase and traipsed by bus and subway and train to Connecticut where my friend D lives. On Tuesday we got up in the wee hours of the morning to drive to the airport where fifteen hours of travel and one surprisingly snowy layover in Salt Lake City later we arrived in Las Vegas. This was the farthest west I've ever been. The terrain was absolutely gorgeous, and Vegas itself was just so... sparkly.

D and I have traveled together before. We went to England and Edinburgh spring break last year. Sometimes we forget to add in time for jetlag and travel recovery. No matter we had been up since 4:30 am eastern time, we endure! We persevere! We oogled all the casinos. We walked up and down the strip in insensible shoes. We collectively lost $8, though I was winning money back on the quarter slots for a little while. We checked out a couple wedding chapels, but unfortunately no elopement is complete without a groom. And that would have been such a good story. We only made it until about 12:30, so I feel like we missed half of Vegas' night life, but by that time we had been up almost 24 hours.

Oh, Vegas. I will return. If only to see the MGM lions that apparently have a very early bedtime.

Some guy laughed as we snapped this. I bet he laughed more when I couldn't figure out how to play.

The next morning we woke up and jumped on the bed as I tend to do in hotels (oops), left the glamorous side of Vegas, and taxied down to the sketchy side of town where the Greyhound bus station is always located. We were not riding the Greyhound. We took an Amtrak bus. After almost being stranded in the Detroit bus station overnight because of Greyhound's sloppy management, I swore never to take them again, but apparently I can't evade them completely. After a delayed start and an exciting rest stop where two passengers had to chase the bus to get back on, we arrived in Los Angeles around 6 pm on what our friend A said was only the third rainy day since he'd moved there. Dude, all I have to say is that I have a new found respect for the covered wagon pioneers.

Oregon Trail was never so real.

So I mentioned earlier that this trip to LA would be like a little dry run. Would I like it enough to want to move there eventually? Would the rumored death-trap traffic daunt me? How would I restrain myself from getting into physical fights with the OSU fans in town for the Rose Bowl? (This I did not realize until we had gotten there and we saw lots of old people milling around with OSU gear. Why were the majority of the fans old? I don't know, but it was especially difficult not to mock the woman wearing the knitted OSU sweater vest. However, in the end we were all silenced because we weren't sure how we'd be able to answer their return mockery. Hey, we're proud, not in denial.) So what sort of impression did LA make on me?

I really liked it. It didn't exactly match my expectations, but mostly in good ways. Even during the holidays and non peak hours, the roads seemed manageable (people don't believe this, but Jersey driving prepares you for anything.), and the geography was more beautiful than I expected. I got to stick my feet in the Pacific Ocean. I took a stupid amount of pictures in Grauman's Chinese Theatre forecourt. We brought in the New Year with pancakes and mimosas and the news reruns of the New York ball drop (apparently LA doesn't have a news worthy New Year's Eve celebration?). I found out that Crumbs' cupcakes are beyond delicious and warrant a trip into the city to find the original bakery. D and A spotted Joshua Jackson, and I spotted the back of his head.

Sunset at Santa Monica. Also, my new camera is brilliant.

And then last night D and I packed up, showered, dressed in our travel clothes, and crashed on the couch to fall asleep to Pride and Prejudice. Because we were leaving for the airport at 3:30 in the morning, and there's absolutely no reason to let yourself get snuggled up and comfortable in bed if you won't be able to leave it when the time comes. I slept for a couple hours here and there, and then we left A's lovely apartment and drove through LA in the early hours to arrive at the airport and queue up before check in had even opened. Our 6:10 flight left before the sun had risen, which is mind boggling when you hadn't really gone to sleep the night before. The LA-NYC flight was rather speedy. I finally watched the Time Traveler's Wife, which I knew was a dangerous move in public since I tend to turn into a waterworks during movies. We touched down in JFK's only crappy terminal, we collected our luggage, and D and I parted ways.

A pretty good trip. It's nice to have finally traveled coast to coast. For all the traveling I've done in Europe, it seemed a bit sad to me that the farthest I remember traveling west was St. Louis (my sister told me we went to Montana or Colorado when I was little, but I don't remember). My pseudo-nap on the couch has me feeling better, despite having less than a quarter night's sleep last night, but I know better. I am grateful to have a job where I still have Christmas break, but school does start again tomorrow, and after Vegas and LA and two planes and a bus and 5000 miles I still have to find enough energy to match 23 second graders returning from their own breaks.

You say you can now get caffeine in pills? What about straight up IVs?

George Lucas has smaller feet than I imagined. Not that I imagined his feet at all.

I don't know what it is about me that screams well-informed native, but on my routine jaunt around town, two people stopped me to ask for directions. Little do they know that my working knowledge of how our area is laid out, the bus routes, and the direction of the nearest highway is pretty much nil.

I proved this by, after giving these helpless strangers muttered and vague directions, making poor travel decisions. There's a large mall some ways away from my house, but I was already out at a coffee house and decided that it was much too early to head in. So I decided to see if I could find out a good way to get to the mall from the coffee shop. I don't know; back roads may work, but only when there's not a river between you and your objective. And I seem to have a knack for picking the side of the road with the most unkempt sidewalk. If there is a sidewalk.

The thing is, I don't have a bad sense of direction. I kept a pretty good mental map of where I was in relation to the mall - even when I was passing it and walking far beyond it on the wrong side of the river. And I could have given up, easily turned around and walked back to the house or maybe to the library where I could be sure of air conditioning and wireless, but once I set my mind to go somewhere, I'm not easily deterred. First I just wanted to get over that bloody river. Once I had crossed the river, I had won. But once I had finally found a road over the river, I knew I was close to the mall. And once I was that close to the mall, there was no way I was going to give up and turn around. Even though the site of a Cinnabon almost broke my determination down. Moral of the story? Even though it's not always fun to be a pedestrian walking along major roads boarding major highways, the back roads are not always quicker or easier.

So I made it to the mall. But it's actually a pretty boring mall. Quite upscale and out of my price range, so that as I wander around with my flip flops and Steve Madden backpack, I feel like I have to be watch out for the security guards who look more like policemen, just in case they might throw a vagabond like me out.

The redeeming quality? A Barnes and Noble. Where I plan on spending plenty of time happily perusing books I'll buy later on Half.com until I call my dad and see if he can drive over a couple towns to pick me up...

There are a lot of things I wish to blog about: Billy Mernit's thoughts on 27 Dresses and my response, blogging, blogging and Hollywood, feminist film theory in real life and proof of our patriarchal mindset, what I'm going to write next, the disappearance of M's more eligible bachelor, my year in review, and lots and lots of other things.

Unfortunately, I cannot blog about any of these things. Because I have to go to bed. At midnight in the summer - I know! But tomorrow I'll be embarking on a grand road trip from our little college town down to the Great Smokey Mountains where I will be spending the week camping and hiking. I think I've packed everything, but of course will not know for sure until three hours into the trip when I will suddenly realize I left something vitally important at the house. It will be glorious and adventurous and refreshing - and apparently dangerous. I have been given dire warnings by two of my family members about the dangers of four girls camping by themselves. I'm not sure which is more worrisome - the mountain bears or the mountain men, carrying their women away a la Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I'm waiting until the day that my own daughter is off trekking through Latin America or backpacking through Europe before I tell my mom all the stories I have from traveling in Europe.

I'm really excited. I'm going with girls I love but haven't seen enough of this past year. I've heard the Smokey Mountains are beautiful. And there are no showers at the state park campground, so the only way to get clean is to swim in the waterfall pools - which is probably illegal but oh well. Not that I do a lot of illegal things, of course.

Oh, and one of the other girls is also a film major. So of course we're bringing cameras.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I watched Waitress tonight. My moral doubts about this movie aside (can you put such things aside when evaluating a story?), I thought it was great. It made something click for me about how I view relationships, illustrated some theories I was developing, helped me realize some things about my current love life. Then I listened to Coldplay's Swallowed in the Sea and danced around the bathroom while brushing my teeth.

I've left the forbidden tundra that is enemy territory and forged ahead to brighter skies. I'm staying with Aunt March (I wish I had enough knowledge of literature to name all my friends and family after literary characters), which should be enjoyable, despite the amount of work I realized that I should get done before Wednesday. As I was in the airport this afternoon, I thought how great it would be to get called over the loudspeaker just once, to be paged for your flight as one of those "Southwest Airlines is paging passenger John Frost, final boarding call." But I thought about how worried I would be about actually missing my flight, so worried that the only way I would let such a paging happen would be if I were actually in the waiting area by the gate, and how weird that would be if I was so paged and then stood up to board the plane. I thought, therefore, that such a thing would never happen. Well, lucky me, after passing through security, I went for breakfast at the ever-tempting Cinnabon and got distracted by the fact that there was actually free Wi-Fi. Before I knew it, I had twenty minutes before my flight left, ten before they closed the plane door, and my gate was the farthest away from Cinnabon. I packed up my stuff and discretely sprinted away, and just as I came within view of my gate, the attendant picked up the microphone to give the final boarding call, rattling off the names of the tardy customers who had yet to board.

My name wrapped up the list.

He'll Spring Break Your Legs.

Reporting from enemy territory. I'm enjoying a cup of tea, throwing furtive looks around the Panera as my college bag branding me as someone who should be stoned is stuffed safely in the corner of my booth (it's an engineering bag anyway; I got it from work. And yes, I feel like such a poser, and I'm proud of it, in a stick it to the man sort of way). Part of me wants to flaunt my college football affiliation, but I feel like the fact that I saw someone wearing a hat for the opposition made me feel like starting a fight is a sign that I should keep all this on the DL.

I never cared about college rivalries before I transfered.

My nightmare bus ride finally ended last night, about twelve hours after I initially arrived at my departing station. I almost got stranded overnight at afore mentioned scary transfer city, and our driver actually drove past our destination city before getting on the PA system and asking if anyone knew how to get to the bus station because he had faulty directions. Oh geez.

I saw Definitely Maybe last night, which Billy Mernit talks about here. I liked Billy's post, that included questions with the writer/director, but as for the movie... It was enjoyable, and I'd recommend it if you're looking for a good rom com. I didn't laugh as loud or hard as I have in other movies I've seen recently, and I think that I found it unbelievable that the male protagonist could sustain such intense feelings for all three female leads in the given timeline. Maybe that's just me, though. I feel like every movie I see now a days makes me want to cry, no matter how cheesy it is. The trip to the movie theatre also included a picture with Patrick Dempsey advertising for his upcoming movie Made of Honor. Which is, incidentally, a movie that I will gauge my eyes out before seeing. Ok, that's probably not true, but I will protest loudly and fervently on principle if such occasion arises.

I don't get to watch the Oscars tonight. My friend and I thought about TiVoing it and throwing an Oscar party after break (ok, well, really that was all my scheme. He just wanted an excuse to throw a party). I even just bought a great sparkly dress that would have been perfect for the occasion. Oh well, I don't have a good track record with the Oscars. I think I used them as an excuse to get out of something last year, and then fell asleep before all the major awards were announced.

I don't like ordering anything "creme de menthe" because it sounds like "creme de meth" and I don't do drugs.

One of my friends once asked me what was the most effective way to approach a random girl and successfully come back with her number. After careful thought and personal, if reluctant, experiments, I have my answer:

There is none.

That situation never works out like it does in the movies.

Lost last night was amazing. I had to miss last week's because of Valentine's Day, and streaming wasn't working when I tried to watch it which made me probably a little more upset than warranted, but this week's episode was way worth it.

The madness is finally over and I'm able to breathe. School is not all it's cracked up to be. However, as charged up as I was to start my ten day, two state, three stop, five friend spring break tour, all that charged adrenaline that comes from having to hurry back from work, finish packing, grab lunch and stop at Border's to get a book (it's hard to find a cheap one these days), and then lug an immensely packed duffle bag across town came crashing down and then froze out when it was announced that our bus was two hours delayed. After sitting in an hour in the freezing, stuck in the 70s one room bus stop with a guitar-playing pseudo Canadian, one of those overly friendly woman who just comes across as a middle aged flirt, and the guy sitting next to me reading Neil Gaiman and blasting opera from his headphones, I realized that I had rested enough from my initial trek out and that I might be able to make it to a coffee shop for warmth and the appearance of middle class yuppy normalcy for a while. One of the chains that proliferates campus is just a couple of blocks from the station, and I've found it to be much chicer than the undergraduate versions as the floor is carpeted and I'm sitting at a cute little round table (they're mostly square on campus) drinking Ruby Fruit tea out of a real mug and listening to the soundtrack of Chicago delightfully playing in the background. Probably because it's on "Main Street."

I went it for extra advice on my screenplay because I had to present my inciting incident (doesn't that seem redundant to you, "inciting incident?" However, you can't just say, inciter or incident. It wouldn't make sense) and I wanted to make sure it was really good. Also, my screenwriting class is competition based to get into the next level, so a little extra advice is warranted now and again. He did have some helpful suggestions that definitely made the pages stronger. I also got to drop it in there that this will be my fourth completed first draft. Of course, that could come back to bite me if it proves that after writing three other screenplays, taking one through a second draft, I still can't write or structure, but I hope instead that it will prove to him that I'm dedicated to this craft and want to pursue it.

While I'm on break I'm hoping to spend one of my luxurious lazy days in Florida thinking about my future in the industry. Not that I'm set in entering it (it's just what I tell people), but if I do, I have bigger plans than the be a script reader-sell a screenplay-slowly make connections-make a short-go to grad school, all culminating in the getting paid to stay at home and write dream. Not that that wouldn't be great, I just have some... different ideas.

Over break I'm also going to scheme a way to get one of my shorts made before the end of the semester. Find a crew, find a cast, hammer out a production schedule, draft another version of the script, etc. etc. If it works, I finally might have a reason to get that website my brother's been trying to convince me that I want just so that he can design it.

I've also decided to explore the idea of writing a short "season" of websoides. It sounds challenging and therefore fun. How to add that on top of writing a feature screenplay, directing/producing a short, and the most draining academic semester I've had? Maybe I'll let the idea percolate for a little while.

I have to change buses in the nearby metro "city." People talk about this city being scary, and, having been homegrown on the West Side of Manhattan myself, I've always disparaged such comments. However, bus terminals in general are just a bit sketchy.

Here's to hoping I find some good stories, just not any life threatening ones. More updates from the airport/train station/retired persons community club coming soon.

I think we lost Hawk

Normally, it doesn't take 2 days to travel from Indiana to Albany. Apparently, I am just the special exception.

When I got back, all the Explorer counselors ran out of Pooh Corner saying "Capri! Capri!" and jumping up and down. It was precious. And the girls in my tent had punkd my bed with tulle and given me cute craft presents (as CILTS they have to give away all the crafts they make. Lucky CILT counselor! :) )

It's my last week of camp. It's sorta a strange week. We have a drama camp, and instead of counseling the few few girls we actually have attending, I'm on the "core staff" for drama week. It'll be interesting.

I'm starting to write a little more. Getting back into the habit. Trying to find my voice and style, which is what I think I've been struggling with the past couple of projects and why I've been so unsatisfied with them.

This is the last normal day off I'm going to have. It makes me a little sad, but I've also pretty much decided today that the default plan for next summer is to come back. It's that awesome.

Firsts

First canceled flight ever. Like staying overnight in the airport in England, not nearly as romantic as I had hoped it'd be. Still, with a few connections and quick phone calls, I'm staying in one of the nicest hotels in Washington DC. Thanks, Shonda! : )