We Are Up All Night

The only thing I am moved to write about these days is the perplexing limbo of post-graduate life. I'm not wild about the retread either, but do you know what happens if I don't write about it? I listen to slow music and lie down and just think about it for hours. I can't afford to lose that kind of productivity to pent up preoccupation. I'm trying to revamp myself here.

I am trying to map out a path through the rest of my life and they all seem more daunting and unlikely with each second. Some of them even have deadlines. I know I want to write, because I don't want to sell you fax machines for a living, but I don't know what type of equally unsuccessful field I should pursue. In terms of recent developments, I have an alphanumeric filing test tomorrow to qualify for an interview at a decent paying office job, and I have just come off my first stint as a PA on a student film, which I will have to write about at length sometime later. The short version is this: Being a PA is rough, rough work and full of long hours that I could only handle if I was getting paid, which I wasn't. I had second thoughts.

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No Key No Plan

Two years ago, when I was still in college, I decided to put graduate school off for a year. I wasn't wild about a master's degree, I wanted a break, but in this economy, another degree seemed increasingly necessary depending on your field.

For me, that meant a Master of Fine Arts Degree, which sounds important as all hell until you found out what it really is. I worked a bit in that interim year, relaxed, took a road trip and basked in the endless vacation and crippling fear of my uncertain future. When application cycles came around in late 2009, I narrowed down my prospects to 4 California schools. Of those 4, I got into one, where the tuition and fees were so high that it was enough to actually buy you love. The Beatles would've freaked.

So I didn't go, I planned to take another year off, work some more, wallow in limbo, etcetera. It's September again, and application holes have been open for a few weeks. Now is the time that I should get serious, re-editing my edits, thinking, printing and feeling bad. But I'm afraid I'm not so sold on graduate school anymore.

I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my writing is good, or at least, good enough. I can recognize that there is a whole different higher plane of quality that I have not attained in order to be publishable or capable of getting into any school on this Top 50 MFA Programs list that came in my latest issue of Poets & Writers. This is not self-deprecation, or false humility, this is just a realistic evaluation that I have grown to comfortably accept.

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Jetpack Future

I am listening as I write, to poet John Berryman talk about Anna Karenina in a 1967 interview on YouTube. He died by way of horrific, dramatic suicide in 1972 (bridge, missed water) but when I click out of this tab, I can see him in grainy black and white footage in a small box that measures 5 inches by 4 inches. He has a thick, scholarly beard that I wouldn't have imagined on him, and he moves a lot when he talks. When he recites a piece, he fidgets and turns enough to remind me of Michael J. Fox.

He speaks with a incisive forcefulness; not loud, just very sternly. He seems to emphasize every hard sound, even hitting the silence of line breaks with steel stops. It's weird to watch old footage on YouTube, the contrast of the black-speckled film and the clean Web 2.0 layout. Nothing makes me feel like I'm living in the future more than meaningful, old, archival footage easily pulled up and squirted into my brain.

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The Severity of My Issues

I had the weirdest fucking dream a week ago and had to record it, and yes, even publish it, while I still had such vivid detail trapped in my nightmare skull. And this was before I saw INCEPTION. I know dream blogging is not the most creative, original exercise, but we all have to hit the cliches at least once, right? It went something like this:

First, my parent's bedroom had recently become filled with poorly caged animals. As in, they were not being stocked correctly. For whatever reason, they had a cage filled to the brim with snakes, plenty of cages full of cats, mouse cages where the mice were easily walking and out of the grating, and generally chaotic.

Also, there was Marmaduke.

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Blogging Too Hard

What year is it? 2010? Holy shit. I've been on this blog for four years.

In just over four years, I've written nearly 100 long essay-style posts, 111 posts in total including videos and early bullshit, and have drastically changed the layout/graphics of the site at least 5 times. It all started because I wanted a place to type.

I feel like I should explain something about this blog, first. It is narcissistic, but not because I want all eyes on me and my words and lookathowmuchIcantype. No. It is narcissistic because it purely serves me, my needs and whims. It is my brain dump and mindpressure valve. Sure, I could just keep all this in a secret text file on my flash drive. But then I wouldn't have the fear.

The fear is that someone might read these 100 post I've written up at late hours of the night in different years of my life. But that fear also forces me to put some quality control on these posts. I write better knowing that someone out there, likely someone I know, is watching. Make no mistake: everything posted here is a first draft. But I think these writing exercises have made my first drafts better.

Additionally, hearing from people in real life that they read this blog is both gratifying and terrifying.

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Reason, Gone Mad

You know, for all my talk about how much I love comedy, I've never been to a real stand-up show. I have a feeling that's common among people just coming into their adult lives. I don't know why. I imagine it's the same reason I didn't see a concert until Bright Eyes at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in 2005. It just never occurred to me that the people I like seeing on the hollowed tube of my television, I could also see in 3D. You hear about tour dates and visits, you see posters, but you never actually envision yourself there, lining up, sitting with other fans, and enjoying the live presence of a famous funny person. The difference is that most people come to accept concerts as part of their lives and possibilities for the night. Not enough of us realize the value and availability of solid jokes in every major city.

That, at last, changed a couple of nights ago when I was in Pasadena with Jimmy and Ray -- You know Jimmy and Ray -- with nothing to do. On a fluke, we stumbled upon a listing for Comedy Death Ray, a weekly night of high quality stand-up at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater that I had always heard about but never investigated. Much like all stand-up. I looked at the flier and recognized names worth the $5 and more.

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Best Last Hopes

I finally did it. I finished my last two writing samples, got my statements together, wrote a check or two, threw them into a couple of big manila envelopes and sent them off to my last two MFA writing programs.

Pursuing an MFA has been stabbing my brain parts.

I started with 7 schools. I took out Austin because I didn't think I had enough time to deal with their deadline and the GRE scores. Then I took out SDSU because it was the only school on my list that needed a GRE score, and that means paying $150 just for a school that wasn't even one of my top choices. Then, I took out University of San Francisco because the deadline snuck up on me, and I rationalized that the living expenses, plus the expenses of USF, plus the fact that it's a Jesuit school (no I don't know why that matters but it made sense when I was trying to explain away not applying there.)

So that four schools in Southern California. Oh, a couple of days ago I got rejected from UC San Diego. So that leaves three schools.

Of those, UC Irvine is my school of choice, what with it being one of the top creative writing schools in the nation, but after re-reading what I sent, I can't believe they would give it more than a moment's consideration. Plus, if my writing was bad enough to be rejected from UCSD, then it must be a spilled coffee rag for UCI.

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Decade in Decibels

Here we are! Look upon this new decade! The Tens are upon us, and all else is old! With that, here are the 10 albums from 2000 to 2009 that rocked my rocker, which in truth isn't all that notable, since I only started seriously listening to music in 2000 anyway. I mean, I was 12 years old. It's hard to develop any specific affinity for types of music before then.

Included is a handy, inaccurate metaphor that I haphazardly wrote up without a second thought. So if you're looking for an experience to correlate with listening to this hour of emotionally engaging music, maybe this add to your experience! Or maybe it will make no sense, and you will be weirded out, but then you look it up anyway because you have to know, that's just the type of person you are, always seeking, always curious.

I count a decade as '00 to '09, and save '10 through '19 for the next decade. I know years didn't start with zero, thus the first decade was 1 through 10. But 1970 was part of the 70's, not the 60's.

Whatever. List:

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PCN Workblog 5: Epilogue

Credit: Nicholas Lee

It is done.

Although the first workblog was written roughly 300 days before PCN, the official PCN day count ended at 348, just short of a year. But if I want to be honest with myself, planning for PCN began in the very back parts of my brainspace two years ago. Back when I was attending script meetings to figure out what PCN 2008 was going to be, ideas kept trickling in that would later become PCN 2009. I wrote them in my notebook. I fleshed them out on the drive home. I transferred them to a notepad file.

Then later it was there, on stage, in costume and awash in a light special. It's a strange process. From incubation to fertilization to the violent birth pangs until eventually and finally, it is done. Something so introverted, so personal, is outside of my heart. It exploded out of my chest like so many alien parasites and has hopefully burrowed into yours.

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PCN Workblog 4: Sleepless

I am, you might say, in the thick of things. I'm at the part where the work starts to drain you, just a little bit. Most of the drain comes from keeping all the work in mind. What you still need to do, what you need to prepare, what you need to buy: these are the things that dominate my head in a vicious cycle. The actual act of directing and deconstructing? That's fine. Sometimes, doing it for four hours straight is a bit mentally exhausting, but I've survived so far. The weight of everything else, well, I'm starting to get sick of that.

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PCN Workblog 3: Wet Clay

There's that feeling you get the night before school when you lie in your bed. Or when the handle bars come down on the roller coaster. Or when you cast your line into the black ocean at night, and wait. For me, that feeling has been going for 203 days now, and it will continue for a few more.

As I write this, the second, but never final, draft of the script has been submitted to my cast. Did I mention that I have a cast? It's a strange, odd feeling to attach voices and faces to these roles that I had previously attached to other voices and faces. Ones that I could never cast, like Hugh Laurie or amalgamations of several people I know. At the risk of sounding demeaning, it's like having new toys to play with. But I still have a month before I get to really break them.

The meatiest work begins, and it begins soon. Sometimes,when I'm alone with my mind, I run through the game plan over and over again. Research the insurance. Call the stage hands union. Solicit from Chancellors, Vice Chancellors. Invite faculty. Write press releases. Send contract. Cut checks. Buy props. Solicit from corporations. Create sponsorship packets. Meet with local business.

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PCN Workblog 2: Shitty First Draft

As I type, at long last, "THE END" on the 85th page of my first draft, I realize I am in deep, deep trouble.

This is gluttony. This is excessive ambition. This is building skyscrapers in the basement.

I got my script software to compile the statistics of my first draft just to make myself feel crazy. Almost 17,000 words, including descriptions, stage direction and titles. 30 scenes, which is 4 more scenes than last year when including dances. 797 lines of dialogue for the poor souls of actors. 27 characters of varying sizes. 6 curse words, 4 of which are "damn." 5 stories.

Obviously, it's not going to stay this way. In order to at least be comparable in size to last year's script, I am going to have to cut about 30 pages, which can't be done just by making the dialogue snappier. I really am going to have to dismantle it with a crowbar until it fits in my trunk.

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PCN Workblog 1: Germinal

I have 10 months to plan and organize an entire night of story about the Philippine culture. The script is my responsibility, it's the burden I chose to take, and I've decided to chronicle all the whizzing (and non-whizzing) of the gears in my head as I go through this long, soul-draining process. I know it will be painful, it will be exhausting, and I may lose spirit a few times over. But it's all part of the job. You do it for the 1300 people in the seats and the 70 people behind the curtain. You do it because you'll never get the chance to do it again.

I've officially been working on the first draft of the script for just over one month. Not every day, but for big chunks of time when I do. I sit and I stir and I do my best impression of a Serious Writer. It's not all daisies, but I've learned enough in 3 years of Creative Writing courses that the first draft isn't supposed to be. It's going to be turds from which daisies will hopefully grow by the fourth or fifth draft. It's also really long - If there were no dances, I could probably write a whole night's worth of story. But essentially, I have to write somewhere between one half and 3/4ths of a show. The plan is to write the first draft to be exactly as I envision it, raw guts and everything, as long as it needs to be. Then I'm going to take a crowbar to it and dismantle the piece of shit until I can fit it in my trunk.

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Speak Easy

When I was in the Philippines last summer, when I sat among family and watched the way they spoke instead of listening to the words, I often yearned to take Tagalog class in the Fall. When I felt isolated during the post-dinner conversations, surrounded by relatives, I would reinforce my will to whittle away at this language barrier, somehow.

It hasn't been as easy as I expected. Ever since those years of French in High School, I've come to suspect that learning languages is not one of my strengths. Even when it comes to vague definitions of "language" like HTML and Javascript, I often stop just before I reach any level of usefulness. It would be easy to blame it on the wiring of my brain, some natural order of things beyond my control. But as a Creative Writing major, someone who thrives on the word engine and the craft of language, taking Tagalog has been a lot like getting shot in the kneecap. Four days a week for one or two hours, I fall to the ground and grit my teeth through the pain.

It's not bad. It's a fun class, great teacher, great classmates. It just takes away from me what I'm supposed to be good at: articulation. I built up this knowledge bank of words, of ways of expressing and communicating and conveying and whenever I take this class it's taken away from me. My tools are gone and I am still asked to build a house. It's an odd feeling, one that I'm not yet accustomed to. I am honestly one of the least knowledgeable people in the class. I've never been this close to the bottom, but it's humbling and awakening.

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Bound by Symmetry

The worst part about being a junior in college is that it is the beginning of the countdown. You are past the halfway point, and everything from here on is a two year exit. You are no longer going into the forest.

Most of what dominates my mind these days has been on the subject of my future. Who I'm becoming, what I will be doing, and who will be around me when it happens. This is all an assumption that I'm around to see the future, but that's not really what I loaded up the browser to talk about.

I got an e-mail from the past around New Year's.

See, there's this website, futureme.org, where the whole idea is to send a message to your future self. You type it in, put in an e-mail that you will hopefully still have, and then the machine will store it and send it out during the date you assigned. Apparently, I had told the site to send the message to me in one year. So, in the closing days of 2007, I recieved a message to myself from the closing days of 2006.

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I Will Never Make Anything This Good

The way most Creative Writing classes work is that you write something, a story or poem or essay, and then you "workshop" it. That is, you show up to class, full of anxiety, pass out the story that's been incubating in the deepest ventricle of your heart and then wait for people to rip it up. My first workshop was nerve-wracking. My second was full of regret. My third was interesting and fulfilling.

My fourth is tomorrow.

The thing is, I've still got to workshop a couple of stories by my peers before I pass out mine. The worst part, the part that makes me so fucking wrecked that I had to type it up on my goddamn childish blog, is that it's so fucking good. It's like a lightning speed guitar solo that bleeds emotion. It's so good and astounding that it makes you cringe. And I have to follow that! It raised the bar and I have to follow it.

See, I believe us Creative Writing majors keep tabs on each other. We bare our souls and personalities and vulnerabilities in our work, a side that others don't normally get to see. So we make notes on who's great, who's not, who is pretentious and who drops way too many references. There was this one person, who's been in a couple of my classes, that I've always thought was uniquely talented and usually had the best story in the class. This time around, that person had a good story - but not great. Kind of obviously flawed in certain areas. It was comforting that someone that I held in pretty high regard was as fallible as the rest of us.
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I Just Failed My Novel

I haven't written anything this month because I was busy. There was so much writing to do this month. There's my short story for my workshop, which I ended up revising and sending in to a magazine as a manuscript, and the first 30 pages of a screenplay for another class. Then there was my novel. My NaNoWriMo novel.

NaNoWriMo is the odd abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It is, essentially, a marathon for writers. You have 30 days to write a novel. Go. Some people liken it to a religious experience for writers. There is no real, tangible prize or any recognition. There is just a community. This is for writers and their own benefit. So, how are you supposed to write a novel in 30 days? How could you expect quality to come from such a rush job?

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An Aside From Home

I'm home. The TV is on tonight's network news, and I'm typing away at my laptop on this makeshift desk/dinner table. The reporter is doing a piece on a new website where girls can write about guys who cheat on them, thereby warning other women about him. They go from person to person in some fancy Los Angeles bar asking seemingly random people for opinions, and I wonder what the point of this piece is. Perhaps it's time filler, or perhaps I'm just being grumpy  because my house has been cut in half and I have to shimmy around piles of stuff to get to my room.

My house has been reduced to about three rooms because the entire downstairs is being slowly torn apart by a crooked subcontractor who isn't getting the cabinets and counter tops as soon as he promised. The walls, the floors, everything's been ripped out, exposing either the planks that used to be walls, or the dusty cement below. Everything that was once down there (dozens of blankets that filled our storage, entire racks of coats, some pieces of furniture) has been crammed in every nook and cranny upstairs. This includes my room, which basically leaves my bed as the only place to sit, what with the center being occupied by our old kitchen.

Luckily, it will most likely be done by the end of the month. March the 31st -- The day I'm going back to school. Meanwhile, the Kahlua/Kilusan line is having some kind of group dinner back in Riverside, hopefully having lots of fun. It is one of those times where you miss out on some joy, so to deal with it, you sit in the weird uncomfortable melancholy of your home and blog about it. That's what blogs are for, right?

This is going to be my Spring Break when I'm at home -- or at least some semblance of it.