Jane Eyre and Orson Welles

Why do I love Jane Eyre so much? I've only read it all the way through once. I love Jane, but I am not really much like her, excepting that we are both intelligent. She is much more humble and quiet than I will ever be. I would love to have that subtle sort of sophistication, but what class I do have must be brash. I must aspire to be like Mark Twain. Hm. For all my oddities, there is no escaping the fact that I am really quite American.
I think I have become more casual about romantic love in my own life, and I wonder what it means in terms of my own identity. Have I given up on something, or have I simply recognized that life does not always align itself with narrative archetypes? Maybe this love I've has for Jane Eyre these past two years is a symptom of this. It presents me with a love story for the ages that belongs to a character who is very much set, if not in reality, at least with her feet on the ground. Jane Eyre brings together to dramatic and the romantic with the plain and sensible. Maybe that is why the story has endured so well, and why so many people are caught by it.

I have just finished watching Citizen Kane for the first time. In spite (and perhaps because) of being told repeatedly that it is supposed to be the greatest film ever made, I think I was expecting to be a bit bored by it. Not that I wanted to be. But it's definitely an experience I've had with certain film masterpieces (as I said earlier, I am insufficiently sophisticated. Insufficiently for what? I don't know. I do a mean impression of a baby dinosaur though.) Anyway, the point is, I thought Citizen Kane really was fantastic. The way it's shot is amazing. The lighting and composition whore in my heart kept swooning and making come hither motions to Orson Welles, who incidentally I have decided looks like Cameron White, only not as good looking. Stupid Cameron. (I think well of Cameron and am slightly confused by him. Sssssh!) It was wonderfully acted all over the place and well written. It really is a masterpiece. Who knew!
Everyone but me, apparently.
I don't know. A lot of people have also told me that they think it is highly over-rated. I do not feel qualified to say. Ask me again in a week. I liked it, though. It's a damned fine piece of cinema.
Dear Lord in Heaven, if you exist, please help me do reasonably well on my film quiz tomorrow and save me from losing credit in my film lecture in spite of being a lazy bum who doesn't do her homework or go to class. Please, please, please. For all my faults, I am well intentioned. Also, I want my parents to be proud of me, because I love them. Please, please, please.
Amen.

A drunken musing on faith

Yo there be raaaain outside my window. I once blogged under the influence of ambien. tonight I am doing it under the influence of sonataaaaaaaa. bobobobobobwwwwwwwwwwwwwoo. Did you know that this is true? Life is incredibly profound, because life is narrative. People worship god because they need things to mean something. The fact of the matter is, things mean something whether we like it or not, though we cannot always gleanm, and there is certainly something under the fabric of existence that gives it this poignancy, but I don't know about this whole god thing. There are patterns. There is the rise and fall and the rise and fall and the rise. The great swell. In short, there is story. It is the only thing I can have unalienable faith in. I believe that I exist. I believe that the people around me exists. I even believe my imagination exists, but imaginarily so. God? What is god? I do not know what people are asking me when the ask me if I believe in god. If there is a god of my world, he would be the great storyteller, who's words for things are the things themselves, so perfect are his words. But I do not know that there is such a conciousness. I know only that there are stories and that I am in one.

On Anger and Spoiled

I'm not very good at anger. I never used to think of this as a problem, but now I am starting to wonder. I can rail against people very well when they are not present and I tend to speak my mind no matter the company (a failing and a virtue both), but when actually confronted with the source of my anger... well.
Part of the problem: Most of the time, the people who make me angry are people I love. I may want justice, but in the end I WANT to forgive the people I love. Life is really much nicer that way.
A note about the grudges I have held in my life, which are few but deep: they were a betrayal of love, in some form. If not love, at least trust, and I rarely trust with out at least some small measure of love. If not love, respect.
Hm.

I did a naughty thing today.
What did you do Carla?
Oh, now, I really shouldn't say...
Oh no, now you HAVE to tell...
Well, if you really want to know...
Out with it!
I threw a carton of spoiled milk out my window, which is, by the way, on the third story. In the middle of campus. If I were a properly behaved, responsible, and environmental person, I would simply have put it in the trash bin. Alas, it was not to be! Not only did I loathe the notion of having to carry the repugnant carton down the stairs and outside to the trash when I wasn't even wearing any pants yet, but the carton was... inflated. With some sort of gas, I think. There was only one course of action. I HAD to, don't you see? For SCIENCE.
So I flung it out the window. And you know what happened when it hit the ground? IT WENT BOOM. I mean it. There was an actual "BOOM" sound, a big one, as milk sprayed and spread across the grass in a deformed puddle that looked like nothing so much as the white blood of my enemies. I looked down triumphantly at the pathetic carton who had moments ago been so puffed up with pride and noxious gas. Victory was mine.

Late Night TV on the Internet

The title says it.

You know what world? I like TV. There, I said it. Er, wrote it. DECLARED it. I loves me some True Blood, Dexter, Carnivale, Firefly, Glee, Mad Men, Buffy, Samurai Jack, Lost, 30 Rock, Pushing Daisies, etc. When done properly, it gives me much of the fun of a novel and a movie at the same time. WIN. Alas, there is a great deal of shitty TV one must dig through to get to the good stuff.
My bane: reality tv. However, I am not above looking at pieces from So You Think You Can Dance on youtube. You know why? Cause they really CAN dance, and that is a mighty fine thing to see. It takes talent. Athletisism. Passion. It is actually ART. And it's shiny.
Shiny. I will not pretend that I just enjoy the narrative structure and writing and stuff in proper television. Let's be frank. The people on television are easy on the eyes, and they like making out with one another. The hopeless romantic and the terrible lecher in me are able to bond at times like this, and thus able to reconcile themselves with eachother.
SHINY.
What I want to do: popularize the miniseries. I think, when done properly, it is my favorite form of video storytelling. You have the oppurtiny for depth of a longer series as well as the elegance of a shorter story arch. It strikes the perfect balance. Also, it is the best format for adaptation. For example: we all acknowledge that properly adapting Watchmen into a movie was impossible. Why? Insufficient time to plumb the delicious depths of the story, its plot and characters. So, you need more time. What is the perfect solution? THE MINISERIES, THAT'S WHAT.
Examples of wonderful miniseries: Slings and Arrows, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, North and South, 10th Kingdom (ok, that was a little silly, but I enjoyed it). Basically, England and Canada are all over this. Now it's our turn.

Speaking of which, I cannot stop thinking about going to London. LondonLondonLondon. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

This may be the silliest thing I have written on this blog. No one reads it though, so I suppose it doesn't really matter. Unless, of course, Kailyn is still checking it. Are you reading this Kailyn? It's very silly.

In other news: I think watching me play Jerry this summer caused a shift in my father's view of my acting. He was supportive before and thought I was good. Now, he is super bummed that he can;t see my show and has said so repeatedly. He is excited to see my growth as an artist. He doesn't merely support my being an actor, he actively WANTS me to be one now, he is excited about it. I think I must be the luckiest girl in the world.

Also, when I bowed tonight: The audience got louder. For me. For ME. It was wonderful.

But I am not satisfied yet. I was good, but still nowhere close to as good as I can be. I to,d that to my Dad and he said, "Good. That's the way to be." His voice radiated pride. He is proud of me for being an actor.

I am being redundant now. Life is a very occupied space.

Mired

I feel like one of the more problematic aspects of depression is that it works like quicksand. This makes it very difficult to get out.
I am getting more and more mired, but not in the traditional way. The last time I was depressed it was a more constant ailment. My current mental state has swung back and forth, with poor me helplessly strapped to the end of the pendulum, clinging for dear life and unable to move. Perhaps this lack of movement will allow me to survive long enough for someone to get me out of the quicksand.
I think this metaphor is getting messy.
Why do people cry when they are upset? I'm sure it's been asked before many times, but for some reason it only just occurred to me tonight. I asked Ilian, and he said that he doesn't think anybody knows. Curious.
An interesting fact: My eyes turn bright sea-green when I cry. I originally thought this was simply a trick of the light, a consequence of contrast with the red eyes that so often accompany tears, but I have found that the color persists when I cry even if my eyes aren't red. So. Something about how the excess water bends the light? I don't know. It looks kind of cool though.
Silver linings, right?
I should go to bed, but I'd like to exhaust my mind first. It has a habit of puttering about when I want it, just for a little while, for once, to just be silent. I can't turn myself off. I know that it has to do with my intelligence, and my mind's own unique way of working, and that, for all it's flaws, that this is part of what makes me interesting, but. Butbutbutbutbut. It is also part of what makes me insane. I'm not saying insane-good or insane-bad. I'm saying mild insanity, with what perks and detriments that entails. I hope it's a good sign, in some way. I've never heard of a sane genius, for example.
I like physical activity. It makes me feel awake, focused. I should try to be more physically active. Then I could be focused more, and then my brain would actually tired by bedtime.
Focus. Beautiful, glorious focus. My elusive holy grail, my cure-all. When I reach it, in those rare moments where it lingers a bit, I feel as if I actually am living, and the rest of the time I have been half-asleep, living in a daze. Bittersweet as fuck.
You've identified your problems Ms. Lerner, as well as the solutions for the majority of them. Why haven't you fixed them yet? Well??
I don't know. I'm sorry. Please stop looking at me. I mean, please, don't go away, I mean, leave me alone, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean.
I don't know. I'm trying though. I swear to God I'm trying.
"Do or do not," says Byron's voice in my ear, "there is no try."
Fuck off.

Hardly deserves a title

I haven't written here in a while. Hm. It's a good place to go when I grow bored with the internet, a very easy thing to do. It is late, my brother is aggravating, I am sleepy, my dinner was tasty and I am excited about my new art supplies, which I think I should use a little before bed.
Goodnight.

The Book of Flying

The Book of Flying by Keith Miller

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I finished it few days ago. Having allowed it to sit in my head for a bit, I think it is safe to say that this is my favorite book. Yes, my favorite.

The writing is the most superb combination of prose and poetic language I have ever seen. It is a pleasure to read and to speak out loud. The characters are beloved and entrancing, the world beautiful and fascinating, Pico's journey perfect and poignant. It is a story about stories, an ode to journeys, dreams, love, and flight in every form.

I loved it so much. Read it. You won't be sorry.


View all my reviews.

Odds, Bobs, and Tidbits.

I was supposed to be working on my Genetics essay. Instead, I was sifting through old files, things from high school I had forgotten about. I was expecting to shudder a lot. I didn't. A lot of it, I don't remember writing it. Most of the time, when I looked at my writing from high school in the past, it was much worse than I had thought at the time. Not so today. Did some of it need polishing? Duh. Were there mistakes there that I wouldn't have made now? Of course.
Nevertheless: it was actually quite good, a lot of it. Even with the hyper-unpolished stuff, the ideas were still solid. I had all sorts of tidbits floating around on old Sheila, scattered streams-of-conciousness and little pieces of prose.
It was cool.
Here is a tidbit I found. There file's name was Darkness.doc. No title is stated in the text. I can tell I wrote it, but don't remember doing so.

Wasn’t your usual absence-of-light sort of darkness, wasn’t nearly passive enough. Existed in its own right, like sun beams, but wasn’t as direct as light, coiled around everything, sought to fill as much space as possible, seeped into the marrow of things. Was alive. Could smell fear.

The girl stared at the wisps of shadow winding themselves around her ankles. Think of them as a blanket. A nice, soft, protective blanket. Keep moving. She closed her eyes, found her own darkness, took a deep breath, and slowly blew out her own smoky trail of dark. This one, warm and human, comforted, similar to the darkness of the womb or a deep sleep, but with a life of its own. Spirals moved around her, reminding the greater dark that she was not theirs.

The deeper dark moved in on the spirals, coating them, but not suffocating, like a large, dangerous dog deciding that you had it’s approval. Frightening but harmless, so long as she kept her head straight.

Not bad. I wonder where it came from.
Another tidbit, this one rather priceless and not in the least written by me. The file's name is Letter to Carla.doc. When you open it, your eyes get a nice shock, as the blank parts of the page, usually white, are now neon blue. The text is as follows.

Hey Carla it’s me Armand I just want to say I love you and am so happy that you're coming back!!!! You’re the best sister I ever hade!! Do you want to whach I am legend with Danielle and my Friend and I? IL never ferret you when your gone Carla. Has any one told you that you’re beautiful? Hi Yoshiro what’s up? Take care of her; don’t make her sad our some thing is going to Happen to you. Am watching you.

I like the fact that Happen is capitalized. Also, I love my little brother.
In other news, I actually did get work done today. Yay.
Also, I've realized why, even though I'm not going through a dry spell, I haven't had much to report to Kailyn. Sure I get lots of ideas, but unless I'm actively doing something with them, they drift off. I could try to formulate and plan my stories out, but that always makes for the stiff stuff. I mean, obviously that's important, you can't write a novel as you would a spontaneous scene. But. Butbutbut. All the good stuff I write... I just write it. I won't say I don't think when I do it, cause I do, but only as much as is necessary.
So, I'm just going to make things, and not worry about the fact that I don't have much to say at the story-telling pow-wows.
It's not like when I stopped working on my comic, because I am still storytelling.
The play felt good, and I can feel more stirring from where it came from.
Things are going to be picking up speed soon.