cxv

"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

-Orson Welles

            It’s not very healthy to be nostalgic.

            But, health be damned, because that’s exactly what I’ve been the past week or so, pouring over old yearbooks and the photos that are falling off of my wall. Most of my friends have already gone back to their respective colleges, forcing me to spend my days either focusing on the past or sitting cross-legged in front of my laptop, watching the "classic" movies that I have only pretended to see before.

            There was still snow residue on the ground today, the weather too cold and dreary for me to be putting my pants on, let alone for me to go outside, which is exactly what my little brother wanted me to do. I had to try and argue with him the importance of staying in and culturing oneself with the untarnishable, perfectineveryway Netflix queue. He quickly saw the value and recommended Paranormal Activity.

            I can’t normally bring myself to watch horror movies and today would, again, be no exception to that rule.  I already have way too much stuff in my life that I am worried about, that I am scared of, for me to be frightened by a man in a mask jumping out and spraying blood all over the 13” LCD screen of my MacBook.  And, whether it is the future or relationships or grades or doing laundry, movies have always been the best way for me to forget, for at least an hour-and-a-half.

            And so I would have to argue that a full Netflix queue is one of the purest forms of beauty on this earth, letting my afternoons be filled with, consecutively, The Shawshank Redemption, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Pulp Fiction. Over the past few months, though, I have found myself becoming less and less involved with the characters and the plot of films and more and more focused on the technical side, on what I can find wrong with the film. It’s not a very good trait to have. And so, if you combine heavy bouts of nostalgia and a developing movie snobbery, along with the (apparently) extraordinarily egotistical persona that I put off, I’m slowly becoming a person that’s not so much fun to be around.

            Excellent.

cxiv

“A world in white gets underway/

I want to be with you/

Be with you night and day/

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.”

-Bono, humanitarian and Certified Badass

            I’m really not a big fan of these society-mandated “NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS,” if only for the fact that I can’t seem to stick to them for more than two months after their hurried initiation. Attribute it to my two-year-old attention span or my consistent belief that I am already perfect and need to change nothing about myself if you must, but making secret little promises to work out or make better grades has never really appealed to me.

            I guess I’m just very comfortable with my life as it already is: collecting over-priced comic books, making inappropriate jokes, eating unhealthy quantities of equally unhealthy food. I could have relatively easily predicted my life at the end of last year’s bitterly cold December, with me still obsessed with Star Wars, still singing to the steering wheel along with the radio, and still writing crammed little pieces of poetry into crammed little notebooks.

            This all being said, there are a few things that I would like to accomplish in the next twelve months. And so I would like to introduce:

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth-and-Fourteenth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: A new year can inspire both hope in the future, and disappointment in the past. Unless you are me, in which case you just are excited to be alive, and don’t even believe in the Gregorian calendar. That being said, this next “year” I swear I will:

                                                                       

·      1. Figure out where I stand politically: I assume that I am conservative, if only for the fact that I grew up that way. But I need to figure out why I believe what I do, having not paid enough (or any) attention in Government class (apologies to my wonderful teacher.) I hope to all that is holy that I’m not liberal.

·      2. Write a book: Why the hell not?

·      3. Continue to play with toys: I have copied this resolution from a scrap of paragraph in my writing journal. This really means that I will be “buying toys in mint condition and never opening them, storing them in my closet back home where they will slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.”

·      4. Actually learning how to play guitar and harmonica: No more of this basic chord crap. Now that I know how to relatively play these instruments, I might as well get good at it.

·      5. Read more: I still haven’t finished the book that I started on the first day of the semester. As a self-proclaimed “avid reader”, I really don’t do any reading at all. My latest discovery is historical memoirs, so hopefully that both helps me boost my daily literary patterns, and helps me figure out 1.

·      6. Stop cursing: Nah...fuck it.

·      7. Stop drinking so much Mountain Dew: More generally, eating healthier because, let’s be honest, relying on Easy-Mac, Oreos, and Gatorade as my three main sources of sustenance won’t be doing miracles for my physique in the long run.

            This year I am most thankful for both the friends I have made in BIGCOLLEGETOWN and the friends that I have held onto and gotten even closer to here back home. Every year, I find myself looking back and realizing how much I’ve matured and grown as a person, which I can only attribute to the influence of those around me. And, whether other people can tell or not, I have been improving in leaps and bounds throughout the past few years. But I can mature only up to a point: everything past acting like a ten-year-old is no fun at all.

            So now let’s take this 365 days of white to see if my inner ten-year-old let’s me actually finish these seven NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS.

cxiii

“Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off.”

-Website that popped up when I typed in “Counting Down Quotes” on Google

            It is 12:15, the first fifteen minutes of the last month of the year and I am counting down to the end of the school week, to the end of finals and the long semester, to the end of 2010.

            I am counting down to the end of the year, and looking very much forward to the beginning of the next one.

cxii

“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”

-William Goldman

            A self-realization: I write about not writing, too often. I’ll scroll through the digital trove of poems and paragraphs, finding snippets of snarky complaining about writer’s block in most every corner. It happens.

            Hypothetically, an entire month can go by before I can motivate myself to write a quick sentence or even jot down a quick midnight thought. I can go for weeks at a time, letting my thoughts build up and up and up and up and up until finally they disappear in a sort of neural anti-climax, where I will be left with narrow nothings to fill the white digi-space.

            Sort of like this.

cxi

“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere...”

-Yoda

I am a director. Or, at least, I like to think of me as a director, small time in the corner of my dorm room, splicing together low definition cuts with cheap software.

I’ve been technically making movies since I was four years old, roughly moving the plastic limbs of my stormtroopers, jerkily stopping the camera to create a strange illusion of motion.  And as I would attach thin threads of floss to heavy starships (to make them fly on film), I discovered very early in my life that there is something graceful about being “behind the scenes,” that there is nothing more frustrating or humbling than sitting at a computer, trying to edit down a sequence of scenes to utter exactness.

You lose track of all time as you try to breathe life and believability into frames of digital captures. I’ve learned about patience and humility from these quiet hours, slowly mastering the art of OCD-fueled cutting, editing, perfecting.

When other kids were growing up, they idolized quarterbacks and goalies, hung up posters of Patrick Ewing (I think) and Troy Aikman in their rooms, living vicariously through their hard-court buzzer-beaters, their game-winning touchdown passes. But I was that one weird little kid, who enjoyed the bonus features at the end of the movies, who read every single “Making Of” book that the small public library had to offer, who wanted to someday be like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson, my idols.

            And today one of my idols died: Irvin Kershner, director of, not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but easily my favorite film of all time: The Empire Strikes Back. This was the movie, with its snow battles and duels, that ignited my love for storytelling, my love for creating new somethings. (And it even happened on the very day I was about to mail him a replica clapboard from to autograph, which will now sit in front of me forever, unsigned, acting as a motivator for my future: my future writing, my future directing, my future being.)

            I had the honor of hearing him giving a talk a few years ago, hearing him gently remembering how he created the latex puppets and steaming vents, hearing him making the audience laugh and reminiscence with him, taking them on one final journey back down the film strip.

He was speaking about the importance of inquisitiveness to a child, another four-year-old stop-motion-God-in-the-making when he said:

"Good. You keep asking those questions. Don't ever think that something isn't important enough to ask your dad about, son. That's how you learn. That's how we all learn. Maybe your dad won't have all the answers, but those questions you can figure out together."

            So today I will watch his movie as a bittersweet homage , mouthing the words to every memorized line with a pathetically teary grin, answering some of these questions with him, and sending him off to the all-surrounding, all-binding Force with some style.

cx

“Yeah, Mom, I just got back home. I’m unpacking now.”

-Anonymous Handsome Devil

            It’s weird that I consider this poorly-lit, falling-apart, too-cold room to be my “home” now. 

            And now I am back, sideways-squatting in this narrow bed, getting used to it again after sleeping in my old, wide, beautiful bed back in Dallas for half of a week. And I can't shut my body down for the night because of the beating mechanics of my heart and the wiry conflicts and emotions swirling around in the deep whatevers of my brain. And all I can really do is let the noise of the almost-broken air-conditioner to waft over me, and let me sleep.

            I miss my home. My other home.

cix

“A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting.” 

-Terri Guillemets


            Napping has officially taken over my life. Feeling “rested” is my daily quest, brought on by the consistently recurring cycle of goingtobedlate and wakingupwaytooearly. My countable afternoons are being wasted and slowly disappearing with the change of the wall calendar; entire evenings disappear because of a poorly-placed three-hour “four o’clock rest”, sleeping through my phone alarm, sleeping through the day around me.

            Today I woke up at 1:51, the afternoon sky shining feebly into my blinds, my entire day (and a certain astronomy class) gone forever. And it was raining. At least, I think it was raining. From my bed it took me a good two minutes to mentally register the quiet crashing sounds outside my window as a thunderstorm, the rhythmic percussions slowly drawing me back and back and back to sleep.

            And so my eyes were and are lullabied shut into another nap cycle. Not that this is a problem: tonight wouldn’t have been productive, anyway.