Response to video

Before I deleted it, I wrote a post describing the influences of the video. I mentioned the unanswerable questions of beliefs and religion, and I thought a lot about the great beyond. Originally, the video was going to be about a dying girl's conception of Heaven and an afterlife, thoughts and speculations about what's to come. In most ways it doesn't matter whether we're young or old, we're all uncertain about death. Death doesn't just happen a lot of the time, it always happens.

As I continued writing and editing, I realized the story wasn't about death but about being alive for the last time. A long time ago, I heard a radio program about a man who deeply pretended to only have a year to live, and instead of skydiving or traveling the world, he chose to move in with his parents and tried to reconnect with them. I think that's the ultimate way of realizing your priorities, an honest wish list of things to do before it all ends.

Finding and experiencing love, spending time with family and loved ones, and enjoying the simply, subtle things in life; these are the things that I project onto a dieing character.

Life's just one small attempt to rest in peace.

...because after I read it, I felt slightly depressed, and hungry.

Drinks and a Movie

I’m currently drinking instant apple cider, and it’s better than I expected. On the front of the pouch it proudly proclaimed, ‘A Rich Source of Vitamin C,’ and on the back, it cautioned in thick bold letters, ‘Contains 0% Juice.’

I think I need vitamin C because my gums hurt and I’m worried that I might have scurvy. Sometimes I think I know too much. Whenever I wrote a report on scurvy, they said severe cases can have blood spots on the buttocks and hemorrhoid around the eyes. It could be the other way around, but I wouldn’t want either. While I read through several scientific journals, there were papers that mentioned less severe vitamin C deficiencies can be common among single males who live alone and don’t cook. They may suffer from common malaise, which means generally not feeling well, tiredness, and depression.

It’s like they’re watching me.

The instant apple cider packets were left behind by my previous roommate along with a few packets of pasta, a sack of rice, a can of cream corn, and a bag of pinto beans, most of which we couldn’t cook because we didn’t own any pots to use our stove. I still don’t have an oven pan for the biscuit batter that he left in the refrigerator. He moved out two months ago, and I don’t think he’s coming back for pasta and instant apple cider.

I just finished the cup of apple cider, and I already feel better. Given, the pouch of ‘apple dust’ also included 20 grams of sugar.

I think I’m severally deprived in folic acid, also known as natural green stuff. Usually I acquire my daily serving of vitamin C from fruit cups, but I don’t think they make vegetable cups with light veggie syrups … and cherries.

I thought about walking to the nearest fast food restaurant to buy a teriyaki bowl for some carrots and broccoli. And I don’t know how you gauge your nutritional standards, but when you’re legitimately considering a substantial diet from a fast food chain, you’re not doing so well.

I’m currently watching ‘Grave of the Fireflies,’ and it’s very hard to imagine that it was in a double feature with ‘My Neighborhood Totoro.’ I wonder how we’re affected by the movies that we watched throughout our childhood. It’s odd to imagine a generation without hand drawn Disney movies. A while ago we tried to give our little cousins a box of Disney movies on VHS, but they said that they don’t have a tape player anymore. I think good children’s movies transcend generations; it’s like sharing a memory because we can all remember how the movie originally affected us.

I guess it depends on the movie because I remember watching ‘Dr. Doolittle’ with my other cousins, and after the movie was over and the lights turned on in the theater, they asked when the animal movie was starting. Maybe it is a generational gap, but I desperately hope it isn’t. Plus, it was only ‘Dr. Doolittle.’

Sometimes I wonder which personal characteristics are trivial and what’s actually important. Whenever I want to get to know someone, I usually ask them what’s they’re favorite Disney movie. It’s like asking them about their childhood dreams or aspirations before they even considered them goals or fantasies. It’s like finding out what spurred their sense of wonder and magic, and it’s like sharing something literal, something with substance and matter. The more I think about it, I don’t know if it matters what you ask someone, whether you ask someone their favorite color or song or movie. I think it’s the attempt that matters the most; it’s the interest and the vain feeling that we can truly know someone.

More instant apple cider, please.

Response to video

I like writing. When I was younger, I wrote a couple hundred pages documenting skewed memories of the previous school year. A lot of it was irrelevant inside jokes and stories told between friends; most of it was dialog. Some people thought it was a journal, but the facts and details were distorted in hindsight; I knew others would read the story so I was bias toward certain characters and events. I’ve always been reserved and I think writing helped process and organize my thoughts, but looking back on the documents and short stories, I was probably trying to lie to myself. I was trying to convince myself that everything happened rationally through the eyes and mindset of different characters and through my own eyes. A lot people thought I wrote it to get attention, and they were partly right, but I wanted all of my memories and thoughts to mean something; I wanted them to be somewhere other than in my mind, where they were passing thoughts that slowly faded. Writing always helped validate my thoughts as more than just a fleeting waste of time.

If you haven’t noticed, majority of my videos have been inspired by a girl, and normally that would be a complement. Hundreds of sappy love songs and whimsical poems have been inspired by the profound love of certain girls, but on the other spectrum, just as many self deprecating break up songs and suicide notes have mentioned previous loved ones. Unfortunately, most of my videos have leaned toward the latter. There were several nights where I regretted meeting her at all, and needless to say, I had a lot of baggage when I first started making videos.

And if you haven’t watched a lot of my videos, I never blame the girl. In the end of the videos, the girl turns out prominent or successful, and that’s the ending that I desperately hope will occur. What’s real in majority of the videos, at least emotionally, is the guilt and regret that the guy usually experiences.

In real life, I think that I ruined her and she just had to continue living her life. We were a few years apart, and I feel like I took advantage of her trust; I feel like I should have raised her better and appreciated her more, but it’s all in the past. Whenever I think about her, I feel regret, and it's the same emotion that I experience when I watch several of my videos.

I look back on that relationship and all I can think about is how much I messed her up, like every detail that went wrong and how I could have done it better. It’s so easy to forget and appreciate how much I helped her through a few rough times in her life, and that I was supportive, and that I loved her. We were happy once or twice too.

Everyone needs to walk that fine line between remembering all that we’ve done to from some sort of self identity and purging a lot of things to stop living in the past. The video’s about someone who wanted to experience a time when he affected someone, when he felt more than just bare and melancholy. When he remembered the girl, he vaguely remembered the good parts and regressed back to how they first met. And the girl said to remember her, which signifies that you should remember all of it, even the good parts. Forgetting the bad parts isn’t worth entirely forgetting the person who you loved, how they made you feel, and how much you affected them, good and bad.

Take the good with the bad, breathe in and out, and repeat.

'It's Kind of a Funny Story' by Ned Vizzini

Lately, I've been a dork with too much free time.

Lets be honest, if a friend heard me say that, they would assure me, 'Oh come on, Ryan, you usually study too much to have too much free time ... and just forget about the other thing, someday someone's going to like you for who you really are.'

I feel sidetracked and mildly depressed.

Anyway, whenever I finish reading a book, I normally search for more information regarding the novel through a combination of Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and Youtube. Usually, I browse through other readers' impressions and reviews; I read through general background information and the writing process; and I watch interview clips and the author's readings on videos, because I'm cool that way. Well yesterday, I spent from 5:00 pm to 3:30 am reading It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but afterward, I lacked the stamina for my several hour routine of finding every little detail there's possible to know about the book and/or author on the internet.

Apparently, Ned Vizzini has a Youtube page, and guess what? I have more subscribers than him. Yeah, he can go on writing amazing books and being a successful novelist, but at this particular moment in time, I have a dozen more strangers watching my random videos compared to his random videos. Plus, I have less uploaded than him; that's right.

I like how I just reiterated my first simple sentence with three heavily supportive paragraphs; I spent roughly eleven hours reading a book on a Friday night and I'm happy that I have more subscribers than a successful young adult novelist, who posts random videos about his dogs on the internet.

I'm being ironical because the book's about a kid with depression, I think.

It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini fully encapsulates the tone and feel of our current generation of teenagers, who feels stressed and inadequate for their daily lives. Craig, the protagonist, narrates how his severe depression eventually leads him to a brief stay at a psychiatric ward, where he meets an assortment of colorful mental patients and he deals with his life and issues.

The writing is crisp with a dry, witty sense of humor and an enduring flow that makes the story believable and engaging. All of the novel's characters feel developed and well-rounded, and the dialog and interactions between characters feels personal and real.

It's a great book; I loved it.

Also, the protagonist seems sad and self-deprecating, but he's hopeful that things will get better; you know who else is like that? Eeyore. I hate people who say Eeyore's pessimistic; he's clearly a optimistic realist since he knows things can't possibly get worse.

1/2 'Jussic Park' by Michael Crichton

I know the one person who reads the blog is going, 'Oh no, not Jurassic Park again.'

For anyone else who happens to stumble on this post, let me say that this isn't an unbiased review. I love Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Jurassic Park. It's the reason I wanted to become a paleontologist, until I realized they don't make any money. There are very few movies that inspire a generation of children to believe anything is possible, and I haven't seen a movie since the first Jurassic Park that displays the depth and realism of living, breathing dinosaurs.

Yeah, I'm bias, and you know what, Jurassic Park novel? You let me down.

I read reviews of the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (because I watched the movie seventeen years ago, what are they going to ruin?). And there are avid fans of the book that honestly believe the novel is better than the movie, and I'm okay with it. What makes me cringe is the thought of someone reading the book's four hundred pages, and saying, "Wow, that was a really bad book. I'm glad I didn't spend a few bucks and rent the movie ten years ago."

There was literally a review that said, 'I somehow resisted the Jurassic Park craze whenever it was in theaters, but I finally read the book and I thought it was okay. I'm just glad I got to see what all the hype was about.'

Really, pretentious much?

I want to mention that I only read half of the novel before I was swamped with exams, but I'll probably check it out of the library pretty soon just to finish it. On a lighter note, did you know The Incredible Journey, which was remade into Homeward Bound, was also based on a novel with the same name? I don't know if I need to remind you, but the animals didn't talk in The Incredible Journey so I might read it out of curiosity.

Reviewers mentioned that the Jurassic Park novel goes into more detail and it does, tediously. The underlining suspense of the first one hundred pages relies on the readers inability to presume that John Hammond, the rich billionaire, constructed an island full of dinosaurs, which shouldn't be very suspenseful since the title of the book is Jurassic Park. The characters were more developed since they weren't restricted for a PG audience, but the character's interactions with each other felt wooden. And although they had more dialog and you got to know them better, they were still one dimensional stereotypes. Also, I'm a biology major and they glossed over a lot of the genetics, ibid the novel included more about the science than the movie, but it would have been nice if the mentioned the polymerase chain reaction or used some type of scientific terminologies. Given, I'm not sure if the book was written before PCR.

Like any bias book/movie review, I rented the movie after two hundred pages and I believe the critics underestimate the alterations from the books as improvements. Steven Spielberg is infamously known for overly sentimental movies such as E.T. and War of the Worlds, but it seemed appropriate and almost necessary for him to eject more emotion between the characters from the adults' interactions with the children to the concern of the grandfather's worry over his grandchildren; it felt needed for the viewers to empathize and relate to the characters on a level beyond, 'dude, that would suck to be them.' Also, the film's pacing was more enjoyable than the novel. If you haven't seen the movie, the first ten minutes might not make a whole lot of sense. It's okay, it's a two hour movie; you'll get over it. The novel takes one hundred pages to get on the island, and a lot of it was an unnecessary attempt to climax on the character's arrival. Lastly, the premise of dinosaurs attacking people just works better as a movie. It's such a simple story that requires cinematic flare to make it something amazing, something grand and unconceivable right in front of your eyes, dinosaurs towering over ant-like people and a T-rex roaring overhead. It's something made for movies.

Yeah, it's rare, but the movie's better than the book.

'Ender's Game' by Orson Scott Card

I read this book awhile ago, but I haven't wrote a review/summery. It's probably easier to write about a book in hindsight because if you liked it, the memorable parts stay with you and everything else fades away.

It's a good book, a very good book; it might be the best science fiction novel I've ever read, and if you know me, you'd know how little that means. The story follows the development of Ender, the protagonist, from his childhood to his exponential maturity into the world's greatest commander. As you might know, Ender's Game is the first in a twelve book series, but the novel can easily stand alone as its own futuristic adventure with a satisfying resolution. The narrative was quick and concise, and the pacing was riveting with suspense and intrigue.

I had a few minor grips, and I'm sure it's just me since I usually don't read science fiction. A few of the characters felt one dimensional, but maybe that's why there are twelve books in the series. Lastly, I'm lame, but whenever I read ... anything, I expect there to be some type of love interest between the protagonist and another lead character. I know its usually just tacked on and it wouldn't have contributed to the story, but its weird without it.

I recommend it.

Is it bad that every time they mentioned the aliens' army I thought of Halo?