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.
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.
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.
