Reviews of terrible movies are pretty fun. Day 19.

Written for L.A. Youth

So there we were, waiting for our friend Anthony to get there so we could see a movie (it didn't really matter which one because we were going to heartlessly mock it regardless). We were all up for Book of Eli until we found out the next showing was in four hours. The only other girl in our group and I convinced the rest of the guys to go see Valentine's Day, seeing as it was the next one playing. I had hopes! The movie follows about eight hundred faces you've seen a million times before as they interact in every possible way, and I usually like those. It looked sort of like "Love, Actually" but in L.A.

These hopes were totally unjustified. Sure, there was a scene with someone running to the airport to stop someone else from leaving for another someone, and the Clerk Who Has To Delay The Runner To Cause Dramatic Tension even made a self-conscious comment, meaning that the writers KNEW they were being cliche and thought they could get away with it by pretending it was ironic.

But the lovesick young boy had no charming British accent! No crush his own age (Jennifer Garner's elementary school teacher character, you tried to brush it off as charming and innocent but you know you were a little creeped out! A little?) I wish Hollywood would drop the child-actor obsession. I guess they have to get practice somehow but hey, my elementary school put on plays about the sea, the gold rush, and the rainforest. Anyway, after some not-adorable, cringe-inducing child acting from the otherwise adorable eight year olds, there was a scene where Brad Pitt's football star bashes George Lopez's florist van from behind. The next scene we see him in, he's announcing he's gay at a press conference where everyone only wants to know if he's going to retire. He wants more time to have a family, so-- Nope! He's staying in the game! Makes perfect sense! The only conclusion I could draw was that George Lopez turned him gay and addled his brain with love. And for a movie that is perfectly fine with showing EIGHT THOUSAND mushy scenes of heterosexual couples, they sure held back on the one homosexual relationship. In the the only scene of them together, Bradley Cooper pats Pitt's head in what could be father-son affection.

I guess I should mention the Taylors, Swift and Lautner, who performed their one-sided characters (ditz and jock) satisfactorily in their three minutes of allotted screen time.

That's not to say it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever; the scenes with Anne Hathaway as a phone sex operator had us all quoting out of the theater. And it was pretty cool seeing familiar buildings and landmarks-- the camera panning over the Bienvenido Gustavo poster on the Walt Disney Concert Hall made me smile. But overall, it felt like the movie was running on a checklist of things people who go to chick flicks expect to see: Rude waiter? Check. Someone with a thick accent put in only for comedy? Check. Reference to the black character as chocolate? Check.

Hysterical, neurotic Type-A female character? Check. Queen Latifah owning everyone? Check. Sugary music playing when one character realizes they love another character while talking to a stranger? Check. Omnipresent narrator providing tired quotes and cheesy lines? Check. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but then again I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended to be.

Day 18

i took art history

no,

it took me

places faces times and changes

and throughout i did not realize why i loved it--

the words.

it has always been the words, how

when i look at ter Brugghen's

Saint Sebastian Being Tended by Saint Irene,

i see in language.

cold iron skin made new again, hungry for color.

shadows the signs where unknowable secrets have pierced.

I picture ter Brugghen's brush crying paint, his canvas seeping tears.

Sweet relief.

My mind springs into sound, into these

attempts of

odes and elegies

unforming, the stories like

fragile twirls of orange peel, scripted off into

circles, the way my best friend does it , into spherical perfection

--i touch it and, like most things, it falls apart

i took biology

no it took me--

stories of anansi

here comes papa spider, tapping on the web

letting mama know it's him, it's him

the death knell--

mr. honda crouches down.

like whispering to get your attention

tells stories.

seventh grade science, he taught me wonder.

i loved science rabidly.

the paramecium i saw

with the funny line through it-- dividing--

it was sacrilege! this was pornographic! creation, lived out on my scale, and could it be

i saw it?

i opened my eyes wide, wider, like it could float into my brain that way

as if each microscopic line in my irises

were a doorway to everything

there was to know.

i loved words first.

the aching planes of scapula, the cauldron-bell sound of patella, that's how i learned

what keeps us

inside us.

i took the newspaper,

read the reviews

when people talk about modern art, they feel it with words,

each shape grasped with them, and the music reviews

you want to taste, raw and leaping and the ridges in your teeth

how germane, how profane,

to say lothario, to think it.

don't make me decide where i want to go--

i only follow the words, since--

life grabbed me by the words

they're what i know.

Day 17

prompt was description-- fear, anger and relief in three paragraphs, without using those words

part d.

He grabs the match, his fingers shaking. When he tries to strike the blaze, he fumbles, it falls. Desperation turns his breathing into ragged cacophony. There's an ocean in his stomach extinguishing whatever sparks he planned on having. That was so long ago. This shakiness has lasted eons. He cannot clearly remember anything else.

When he looks up, his eyes in the mirror have all wolf instincts. Strangely, the expression on his face is a nervy grin-- the omega wolf trying to back out of the fight, the fire tasting the air before exploding into a form too big too hold. It's not even bravado. It's dying smiling, each shiny tooth an excuse, a con.

Run, his legs sing-scream, and his mouth almost echoes.

The match? His last.

His stomach turns. The ocean becomes a bubbling pit. He feels it eating at his innards, slowly, like a buzzard choosing which juicy parts to consume, and his realizing only fuels its hunger. He notices all the small unfortunes, and they snowballing him into madness-- here his shoe slips on the gasoline soaked carpet, there his elbow catches the door. His mind forms only fragments, each accented and painfully crescendoing. He cannot catalogue all the exact places his head splits. There is fire in failure, if it is felt right.

The rain falls quietly at first, so he doesn't realize. It's a way out. Like the games he played as a kid, rock paper scissors, only rain beats fire, and only he beats his heart, telling him truths. He lets the drops course down every part of him, body relaxing as his dazed mind shuts down. A fire burns slowly, kindling some warmer part of him into life. He lopes. He breathes to assure himself he's still there and not floating away.

Day 16.

Part C. Dialogue.

C. A woman (Melanie) and a boy (Charlie) are sitting on a beach somewhere in California. The boy sifts sand through his fingers and stares at the waves; the woman, who is sitting on her jacket, flips through a large medical textbook.

MELANIE: Honey, don't play with sand, it has fleas and disease

CHARLIE: Mom, it's just sand.

MELANIE: Do you have my med bag? I feel nauseous....

Nauseated, not nauseous...and that'd be my driving, Mom, just wait for it to pass.

MELANIE: Nause-- Na-- Nnn (she pages through the book)

With dizziness and fatigue: Altitude sickness.

CHARLIE: Oh, for the love of -- Mom, we're at sea level. Going lower than this is called drowning. You can look that up in The Book. D-R-O-W-N-I--

MELANIE: That's enough. How are you feeling?

CHARLIE: Fine, as are you.

MELANIE: You don't believe me.

CHARLIE: Mom, what do you want me to say?

MELANIE: I trust how I feel. How else do you know what you're feeling is real at all?

CHARLIE: For you, it's not! You're not perceptive, you're delusional. Look up hypochondria in The Book, mom.

MELANIE: You don't think people ever get sick?

CHARLIE: Not as often as you seem to! It's all in the mind, they've done studies, it's all psychosomatic. You look at a picture of someone's eyes watering and your eyes suddenly itch and tear. It's all sympathy.

MELANIE: God forbid you be sympathetic.

CHARLIE: Mom, you get on the airplane and the guy who has the misfortune to sneezeas he's sitting next to you has to deal with you making a big show of Amish shunning him for the rest of the eight hour flight. (pause)

It's going to rain soon. We should go.

MELANIE: Wait. I just--if you were sick. How would you know you weren't making it up?

CHARLIE: I'd know, that's all.

MELANIE: Charlie, we didn't make this trip to the specialty doctor for me.

*she unfolds a piece of paper*

These are the results of your blood tests, when I thought I had Huntington's and was worried you had it too. Since you never go for checkups, I told them to run every test they could.

CHARLIE: Do I!?

MELANIE: No. You have--

CHARLIE: What?

MELANIE: Cancer.

We're going to figure this out. We are. How are you feeling?

CHARLIE: (he laughs, a little strangely) Who knows?

Day 15.

Hey hey so after MUCH ANGST and procrastination, CSSSA* app is in, not postmarked on the right date but in nonetheless.

*arty camp i applied to in 9th grade and got rejected but i applied again because i never learn! also i have backup plans. :D

So.

Part A. (SOOO PRETENTIOUS YOU GUYS. Forgive meh.)

I read because others have said it better and always will. I write because I need creation. But I want more-- want immersion in it. I want to make sense. I want to expand my words from the confines of my journal, i want to think about what I want to say before I say it, I want to consider carefully, thoughtfully.

But no, that's all a lie.

I want to take leaps of sentences. I want to jump off the cliff of a paragraph.

I am Whitman's contradictions, I am Salinger clinging onto his words, hiding them because the risk was to hurt. But I'm ready for upfront writing. Face to face. Characters like a slap in the face driven by love. I am, as Vonnegut would have agreed, whoever I pretend to be-- whoever I write.

I am looking for ways to turn restlessness into relatability.

I am looking for Neruda's oceans, thick with meaning, heavy with salt, frothy with joy.

I am looking for the myths of Neil Gaiman, laced with mead and time.

I am looking for e. e. cumming's unrestrained teenage soul, leaking letters, spare thoughts, typing how his thoughts traveled

down

the

page.

I am looking to learn more than mimicry, less than not sounding ridiculous, no more and no less than writing, pure and complex.