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| Expected readership for this entry: zero. I’m pretty sure there was a different person in the White House last time I graced these pages. It was inevitobe, I suppose - my abandonment of this diary. Internet media is ever changing, and blogs and sites fall out of date faster than you can say “hey, look at me.” Furthermore, I am older, wiser, and much less whiney than I used to be. Somehow in the past four years the appeal of professing my endless grief to a random website became slighted. It is interesting to think back to those days, a time when each and every day I could muster enough inner pain and anguish to fill a blog entry. Oh how dramatic we are when we’re young. Anyway, it was actually a rather odd coincidence that brought me back for an update. Back in my prime Xanga days I used to keep rather consistent online company with several other bloggers. (If you’re reading this, you know who you are.) Among those was Jeni, or ‘inaurate,’ as was her Xanga identity. Jeni lives in Las Vegas, and Jeni and I are going to meet up when I fly down there on June 1. Not only that, she coincidentally happens to work for the company that owns my hotel, so she might even be able to pull me some sweet favours. I knew all this media-ing would pay off someday. Regardless, it's exciting that I finally get to meet her. As we made plans for our rendezvous on facebook, I found myself compelled to return and relive all the messaging and corresponding we did back in the mid 00’s. It was actually a much deeper relationship than I recalled. It’s interesting how you can become so invested, so engrossed in another person’s life simply by typing endless words. Yet, we did it. We’ve never spoken orally, we’ve never met in person, but we were close – strangely close. So much so that I found myself asking… What happened to that guy? ….that Matt. That version of me. He all but vanished into thin air. I used to be a very emotionally invested person. A very conversation driven, very therapeutic person. And then….nothing. What happened? Well, certainly I’m a happier person than I once was. And I mean that in a very day-to-day way. I’m not much further along in life, per say. I have not accomplished my dreams and have not found love. But my daily life is much less intense and much more stable than it used to be, and that seems to be a legitimate accomplishment. I used to think that my anti-depressants played a strong role in my creating a more relaxed and straightforward existence for myself, and that was certainly true in part, but I have now been off them for about six months and things have not declined at all. There was a rough transition period, perhaps, but as soon as I got my new job and got my feet on the ground, I managed to maintain my focus, my energy, and my emotional stability, all of which were things I was supremely lacking in my early twenties. Could it be that somewhere in my five years of medicated stability I actually managed to grow up? Yes, we calm down the older we get - in pretty much every way. For the first time, I understand why they call it "settling down." Not only am I more emotionally calm, I'm more ideologically calm and more socially calm. All good things, I guess. Still, every once in a while I fall into a fit of nostalgia and miss the old days. Not the "dark days," mind you, the times when I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed. No, I miss the excitable days, the days when friends and socializing gave me a unique high, the days when idealistic backwardness (as I will call it) made my blood boil, and the days when a girl, or a crush, could provide a feeling of unequaled intensity. Nowadays, everything is good; but that's the point, sometimes good can be the same as "blah." (Sort of like how Canada is such a good country that it is also endlessly boring.) There is something to take from it: I'm settling down, thus maybe the new spice in my life needs to come from the things on which settling down is measured. Namely, a house, a career, and, most importantly, a girl. I'm always happy being on my own, I always take pride in my independence, but at the same time I look around and I see it - friends getting married, friends having children, friends discovering that life for themselves. I used to laugh and shake my head and people who did it too early, people who forgot to live a little bit before entering the real world, but my wild and crazy days are fast becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, I'm looking at Vegas as one last blowout. This blog became a relic because that part of my life seems to be over, the days when I manged to attain a small sense of therapy from letting my thoughts and feelings manifest on paper. I still love to write, and emotions still play a role in it, I just prefer to engrain them in something more creative and less in-your-face. I'm not saying goodbye, I'm just saying that maybe I should be. | | |
| Radiohead famously said, "Meeting people is easy" (or at least famously to Radiohead fans). Call it a reference to their days of intense fame, in which they would shake hands with countless interviewers every day, and yet feel and increasing apathy, even disdain for these people as the days went on. In my travels I have met lots of people. LOTS of people. Some I would get to know rather well, some I would spend no more than a day in their company, some I would shake hands with, leave the room, and then never see again. The lives that criss-cross while you backpack, the chance meetings, the unexpected relationships, they come down to nothing more than a click on the computer, a decision to stay at this hostel over that one, the choice to take this train over a later one. Meeting people is easy. Yet I'm kind of tired of meeting people. In some hostels I show up and think to myself, I have to be antisocial, I need a day of no introductions, no small talk, no 'where you from, mate?' But I'm in the Balkans. Meeting people is so easy. I don't mean to be out for beers with the people from my hostel, then suddenly I am. I mean to be in bed by 10, suddenly it's one in the morning and we're all up chatting on the patio. Meeting people wasn't as easy in Western Europe. Sure, I met people. Plenty of them. But for the most part I had to make all the effort. As a lone traveler, you have to be the instigator, the aggressor, the 'where you from, mate?' guy. People in the west, the cliche travelers, as I like to call them, can be more reserved, even more snobby. They are here to see Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague. They are here to drink into the night and then do a free walking tour by day. The girls, the backpacking, twenty-something girls, often from Australia, often with the same blond, tanned, princessy mien, can be especially dismissive, wishing to keep to themselves, wishing to bar-star their way to prince charming. (Prince charming, by the way, is often nothing more than a rabid 'going-out-to-get-laid-guy,' or so Louis CK called them). The guys, they can be fun. They will engage in fun and shallow 'guy talk.' You know, like "Hey Matt, check out that babe." Yes, she is attractive in an I-smoke-too-much-so-my-face-is-now-disgusting sort of way. But then there is the Balkans. With the exception of maybe Croatia and Greece, the Balkans are reserved for the TRUE backpackers. And by 'true' I mean pretentious and overambitious. People who think they understand a struggling country far more than they do. People like me. And I love it. They are slightly older, slightly wiser, and waaaay more inclusive. Part of that is because they, like me, are often lone travelers, people who's traveling ambitions are often too unique to entice any of their friends. Part of it is because their journey is more culture driven than tourist driven, thus they are all about talking to diverse people. And even more refreshing, most of them are past that whole I-can-save-the-world-when-I'm-20 championing. Those folks, God bless em. Take a picture of yourself holding a shovel and then go home and post it on facebook under the caption "Me helping a family buried in a landslide." Whenever I confront backpackers like that, I want to start shouting surely lyrics at them, "Around here our ambition hurts more than it helps. Around here our ambition puts a non-perishable item in the donation bin at Christmas and then pats itself on the back because it thinks it's done something decent." Oh who am I to talk? I used to be one of those people. At this point in my trip, I am faced with a burning question: should I have reversed my itinerary? On the one hand, I figured that the decidedly "harder" traveling one encounters in the Balkans, both emotionally and logistically, would be made easier by the backpacking experience I've garnered in the West. On the other hand, that same experience also means I have less energy. Would this part of the world have been easier, and more exciting, had I gone into fresh and vibrant? Furthermore, would the joy of meeting all these great travelers have been enhanced had I not done it during a case of intense meeting-people burn out? It is a shame, because these amazing people don't deserve the slight indifference I now present to them. Then again, over here, meeting people is easy. Perhaps it's better to be burnt out at a time when others are willing to do the work for you. | | |
| I've seen it. And my mind was blown. I don't have the energy to mount a whole rundown right now. But I'll leave just a few first impressiony things... 1) It was slightly different than I was expecting. It broke with formala, and had a bit more of a modern edge to it. 2) They gave waaaay to much away in the previews. The scares were drastically lowered because of that. In fact in almost every action scene you knew exactly when Ghostface was going to appear. 3) The ending is the most shocking yet. More to come. | | |
| Anticpiation of this magnitude is stressful. I keep counting "four days," "three days," forgetting that going to the movies is a process, sometimes an unfriendly one. For example, I remember very clearly the instance when I saw Scream 3, I think for the third time, and the guy behind me guessed the twist and said it rather loud to his date. I, naturally, already knew it, so was undisturbed, but still, 1) why ruin it for the person he was with? and 2) why say it so loud? In short, jerks like that could be out in force at my screening of Scream 4. And not just "ruiners," but the basic abnxious bunch who talk and obscure throughout the film, a trait that is getting more predominant at the movies. I don't know what it is? Maybe the increasing home theatre attributes have taken away the out-and-about tact that people used to employ at theatres. Either way, I will be forced to kill anyone who spoils this experience. I'm not reading any reviews before friday, but I did notice that EW gave it a B-. I wish I hadn't seen that. My trust in EW is pretty consistent these days, so it would have been nice to see the same A- they assigned the first two installments. Then again, critical objectivity isn't really something that takes away from a good slasher-flick. And at least it's not a bad review. As long as they thought it was decent, usually that means my potential for loving it is strong. The countdown has been equally stressful this week due to my work load. But I cranked out a whole paper today, so I'm on course to being finished everything by the end of tomorrow. So, I hand everything in on friday and hit the theatres in the evening. A perfect reward for finishing my degree. | | |
| To get myself in the mood, I indulged in two horror flick this past week. The first, Amusement, was pretty bad. It featured one sequence that was decently creepy, in which a guy dressed as a clown pretends to be part of a family's clown collection. Still, that concept was clearly crooked from another story which I have heard before. I don't know if it really happened to someone or if it was just an urban legend, but I've definitely heard it before. Either way, it was the only decent part in a fright flick that, well, kinda sucked. The second was Reeker, a movie I've been hearing about for a while but never managed to see. Critics liked it for what it was, and I liked it too, I just wish it wasn't as low-bug as it ended up being. The trailer even makes it look somewhat stylish, but the actual product is full of those ugly straight-to-video attributes - corny music, cheesy visuals, and plain bad staging. The acting was...serviceable, but nothing special. And it's all a shame, because the plot and ultimate resolution was ingenious. The twist at the end was one that is somewhat overdone, but I can always forgive that as long as it is competantly plotted and actually makes sense. "Sense" is the key word when it comes to twist endings, as so many of them blatantly fail in that regard. So over all, worth seeing, but damn if better production value would have brought its huge potential to fruition. As for Scream, yes, I re-watched the first three, something I've been planning to do for a while in honour of the upcoming Scream 4. You know, I need to give Wes Craven his due credit as a director. Despite having created one truly outstanding film, I've never thought of him as an infallible director. He's certainly made his share of turds, although in a way I almost feel like studio intervention might have played a part in that. He seems like the kind of guy who could truly make something special if given complete free reign to, I dunno, got nuts. That's what he seemed to be able to do with the first Scream. The studio surely had no idea about the success the film would be, thus they kinda just let him do his own thing. The same, however, cannot be said about the other two, and certainly not about the new one. But he actually has a terrific visual style, and he choreographs the scare scenes with near perfect precision, often shooting with one continuous shot. I think more than any other horror movie I can think of, you really almost feel like you're watching real life with the Scream films. Lastly, trust EW to have scooped the first official interview with Kevin Williamson since the whole re-write debacle. The scribe has been infamously silent for almost a year since he left the production last June. But he finally spoke, and from what he said, I'm a little bit less apprehensive. I think Scream 4 is gonna be good regardless, but if they truly are going to continue with a new trilogy, I will be officially off-put if Kevin is not involved with the rest of it. However, he sounds game; as long as the 4th is a success, that is. I never really understood how such creative differences could start anyway, especially since they more or less scrapped Kevin's outline for Scream 3 and went ahead with a script that many fans ended up hating. He is, after all, the man to trust with Scream. In the interview he said, "Everyone was second-guessing everything because everyone wanted it to be so perfect. That’s exactly what happened." What's strange about that is that Williamson famously cranked out the first Scream script in just three days, and that original draft was almost exactly the movie that got made. And, lo and behold, the original is still the best one. Thus, sometimes haste can be your best friend in these situations. So the fact that they would bring in Ehrin Kruger to work on the dialogue seems rather redundant. In short, just trust Kevin. Either way, apparently his concept and, thank the lord, his ending, are completely in tact. Kruger just mostly worked on the words. Fine, but it's going to be annoying not knowing how much of the dialogue is actually Kevin's. At the end of the day, I'm gonna keep on saying, "Kevin probably could have written that line better." | | |
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