Stuff I wrote down at work.

There are at least five languages at the restaurant, maybe more.
There is English, Thai, Spanish, some sort of Burmese dialect, and the one that we all use which requires hands, numbers of fingers, and gratuitous English thank yous and universal smiles.
Thai is sounds from the throat. English is shapes through the mouth.
Ni says English words the same way she says Thai words and it sounds like off-key music and I cannot understand it, so I often ask her to repeat things.

Each morning we feed Buddha and his compadres. On a shelf behind the counter of each restaurant sits several effigies. There is a bird that gets brown rice, a house that gets rum, and everyone gets food, which is placed in little cups. Jejie held me by the elbow one day and said one tofu, one vegetable, one chicken, one noodle, each cup.
After the offering is made Jejie prays. If business is slow, Jejie compulsively stops in front of Buddha throughout the day and claps her hands together over her head and mutters a short prayer. I once heard a woman whisper to her husband wow, look at that.
Part of the Buddha offerings is given to a small wooden house that sits on the shelf of each restaurant. It is the only one that gets rum.
I asked Ni who lives in the house. She asked why you need to know?
I said because it’s interesting, so she told me about the ancestors who owned the land and how we borrowed it from them for a while.
It was just a girl coworker and I opening the restaurant in Mesa. Jejie wasn’t there yet, so after we finished placing the offerings I clapped my hands together over my head and said thank you Buddha. I said it with a smile but I kind of meant it and the way the girl looked at me let me know that she knew.

While reading a book behind the counter of the to-go place I hear a crash from outside. I look up but do not see anything. It is not until I am returning from the bathroom that I notice our American flag, knocked over by the wind. It is prostrate and spread out across the sidewalk and I know that you are supposed to burn it now. I imagine myself outside with a book of matches in one hand and a fist full of flag in the other. People stop their cars to yell at me, but I just yell back it’s okay, it fell down.

On my way to work I saw a silver Lexus SUV and a cop car stopped in the road. There was a man standing next to the open drivers door of the Lexus. A young blond woman stood behind him. She had on big sunglasses but I could tell from her scrunched up face that she was crying. I couldn’t understand why she was crying. Everyone seemed okay, there was no damage to the car, and then I pulled forward a bit. A homeless man was lying facedown in the grass just off the road. He was alone so I assumed that he was dead. I hope that he was dead.

Changing...always.

2 things.

I can no longer rationalize abortion.

I’m a vegetarian.

What?

Yeah.

Life values its self. I value my life and I intend to keep it for a while. If a fetus had the cognitive capacity to answer whether or not it wanted to live or die, I believe that it would also choose to stick around. I cannot justify the extinguishment of a life because it is better for society. Abortion is a symptom of a larger issue. Consider this, if we were to kill every homeless person on the planet, some types of crime would almost certainly drop, at least for a little while. But people wouldn’t stop becoming homeless. We’d have to keep killing them. A better way to deal with this issue is to examine the very large and very complicated question of ‘why do people become homeless in the first place?’ And there are a lot of people who do just that. I believe that it is the same with abortion.

Animals have thoughts, emotions and inclinations. It is no longer necessary for myself or most other people to eat meat to survive. I eat meat because it tastes good. I’ve evolved to think so. I’m evolving again, right now, and saying that I don’t require it anymore. Don’t worry; I’m not about to become some sort of vegevangelist. It’s just the way I see things.

Beginning.

I have not kept one of these in quite a while. I feel like I should. This will undoubtedly be filled with random anecdotes and general ruminations about this or that.

I sincerely hope that it doesn’t become some depressing lament about the pathetic woes of my life. It is definitely going to occur from time to time.

We all take ourselves so seriously, but who else is going to?

The general state of the current Me (so interesting!):

I’m a student. Arizona State University. English and Film. All very artsy-fartsy.

Motivationally speaking, on any given day I lie somewhere between Garfield and Lance Armstrong. This seems to be different from most people that I have encountered, who are either resolute and determined, or apathetic and lethargic. I am the same person who has twice packed his life up and moved across the country, and who has also spent whole days without pants on, eating and reading Wikipedia articles. I really like the latter of those types of days and I rarely feel guilty about them. Plus, I know lots about things like Killer Whales and the lives of famous writers.

I am a reckless self-saboteur who has an amazing ability to not see, or to at least ignore the nature of, an obviously bad decision prior to actually making it.

It’s all very trial by fire. But I mean all of it. So much.

I see Life as a big unintentional cosmic joke, of which we are at once perpetrators and audience.

Most of us are at one time or another witness to incredibly beautiful things, as well as horrible things. I’m no different. This seems to be the nature of life, with all of us finding ourselves subjected to intense highs and seemingly impossible lows. Every baby born has a counterpart who dies…and so on.

On the subject of that incredibly human question that we all get around to wondering about: Carl Sagan once said that we are “a way for the cosmos to know itself” and that’s good enough for me.

On the subject of that other question: Nope. Maybe there’s a God, but I really don’t want it to be one that requires me to love him in order to not be burned for eternity, or trapped in an endless cycle of suffering… or some other sort of unreasonable nonsense.

I think the best thing that anyone can do is to try really hard to Love everyone and ease the suffering of a fellow audience member whenever you get the chance.

I fall drastically short of that. So do you. It’s okay.

Alright. Half assed, irrelevant introduction completed.

Now to make good on that randomness.

Try this on for size: A dispassionate infomercial exec sets out to get a tattoo as a minor rebellion, but when he meets his free-spirited tattoo artist, his life is thrown into revolution. – Parlor Games.

Eh? Eh?

That’s the logline for a screenplay that a friend and I are collaborating on. It’s coming along nicely. The premise is purposely simplistic and completely writable.

It’s our first screenplay, so we wanted to start out with something that we could wrap our minds around and actually complete without too many bumps in the road. Naturally, we settled on a pretty stock rom-com.

The whole process has just been so much fun. My primary goal with this first effort is to learn about the finer points of how screenplays are written, from concept to final draft.

I’ve found that I really enjoy collaboration. I think it helps that my partner and I dont generally agree on much, so out of these little mini disputes we come up with decent stuff.

That's our storyboard so far. Each notecard represents a scene. We need around forty. Act three isn't quite finished. Once it is, we have to go back over each scene and add things like a stated conflict and emotional change. That's before we even get around to writing the sucker.

It's a lot more work than what it looks like. What we have thus far is the product of a few several hours long sessions.