Marculations

I just got back into town.

What a long drive. GAWD.

I arrived home to a letter from my bank telling me that disclosure errors had been made on my car loan, and as per truth-in-lending, they were notifying me that my payment is actually lower than they had originally said.

OH NOES! LOWER?! Whatever will I doOoOOoo?

I logged in to Cingular.com today to pay my wireless bill.

It was a few months overdue. Whoops.

Once I got that paid, I decided to swing on over to the “Upgrade Phone” page and see what kind of cool new phone I could nab on the cheap, since I am under contract with Cingular for two years. See, when I got the phone I’m currently carrying, I got it for like $20, because I signed a two year contract and switched from AT&T Wireless to Cingular.

It helps to have a little backstory on that: I switched in the midst of the AT&T Wireless/Cingular merger, and they were having a hell of a time getting people moved over. The employees of the AT&T Wireless kiosks didn’t know how to work the Cingular system, and they completely screwed up my migration. It took Cingular over a week to get it fixed.

Which brings me back to the Upgrade Phone page. It shows you how long you have until your current contract expires.

Mine is rather more exciting than that. It simply states “No Contract”.

Wow. They messed up that migration BAD.

Now I’m at T-Mobile.com.

I managed to get to bed before eleven last night. Before ten-thirty, even. It was quite an achievement for me. Of course, once you get to sleep that early, you tend to wake up early. Much earlier than you’d expect to.

I popped awake at quarter till five.

Ugh.

I tossed and I turned for ten minutes. I rolled over and stared at the clock. I swear it was staring back at me. Five minutes till five. Deep in my brain, buried somewhere inaccessible this early in the morning, I knew the clock was fast, by about ten minutes. That just made things worse.

This ordeal dragged on for about twenty minutes. Finally, I decided to give up and surrender myself to the morning. I rolled over and pawed around on the bedstand until I found the remote to the TV. It zapped to life.

Flip flip flip. Infomercials. Flip flip flip. What the hell? I hear music. I squint to try and make out what I’m watching. I see people dancing and playing instruments. What is this? I reach out for my glasses, and accidentally slide them right onto the floor. Wonderful. I can recognize the song now, but I’m still a little confused as to what’s happening. I get my glasses up off of the floor and onto my face, and stare right at the TV. I can’t believe it. It’s not possible.

This is MTV.

And they are playing a music video.

I sit up in bed and realize that today is not going to be an ordinary day.

After sitting, enthralled at the sheer audacity of MTV playing music vieos for about fifteen minutes, I decided to take a shower and get ready for work. This may have been related to a Kayne West video coming on.

When I have a lot of free time in the morning, no good can come of it. I paced around my hotel room for a good amount of time, dressed for work, wondering what to do. I stopped and looked at the clock. Six twenty-five. Yes. That’s fantastic. I don’t have a specific time I have to be at work, but noone is in the building until around seven-thirty, and the bulk of the team doesn’t arrive until around or a little bit after eight. What the hell am I going to do until eight?

When I was at Ivy’s a few days before I went out of town, she asked me “Why do you wear your pants so high?” I didn’t know what she meant; I was drunk at the time. I’m pretty sure she was too. This morning I realized — I wear my pants too high. I adjusted them a little bit, and sure enough. I think I’ve been doing it to hide my stomach flab.

During the course of this self-realization, I also noticed that all of my pants are two sizes too big in the waist. I can manage to squeeze into a size thirty-two waist, but all of my slacks and jeans are size thirty-six. Most of my shirts are too big as well. Woops. I think all of my clothes are too big. At least I’ve got an extensive wardrobe of fat clothes for my impending metabolism slowdown.

After standing in front of the mirror in my hotel room in a fashion crisis that can only be described as “Bravo-esque”, I decided to slip down the stairs and out to my car.

I got to work at quarter till seven. Nobody was there yet. Crap. They don’t hand out the alarm and door codes to contractors. Looks like I get to wait. What now?

I let loose into Niceville, looking for a good time. Suddenly, it hits me. Subway offers breakfast now! I’m going to get me a nice big sub sandwich, stuffed fat with eggs, and sausage, and green peppers! Oh my!

The Subway was closed.

Determined to not let that get me down, I jaunted across the street to the supermarket, which was markedly more open than Subway. Strolling through the aisles, I remembered reading an article about how starting your day with fruit can greatly increase your ability to … think. There was a fancy medical term in the article that escapes me right now. I walked over to the produce section and grabbed a big plastic tub of cantaloupe with some strawberries in it. What a weird combination.

I ended up back in the parking lot of my office at quarter till eight. Only two people had made it there, but that was enough to get me in the building.

After having my delicious cantaloupe breakfast, I decided to write this. The fact that I can’t remember that fancy medical term totally kills the whole “you think better if you eat fruit” thing for me.

I’m going to drink some orange juice. Maybe it’ll come to me.

We need to do another short film.

I haven’t gotten to do any filming since I’ve been up here in Crestview, and it’s been making me antsy. We definitely need to film something. I just didn’t know what until this past weekend.

I was talking with The Tim, and he mentioned us needing to film “the original short script, that first one, not the new one.” He’s referring to revision 1 of Addict, a thirty-ish page nightmare of choppy dialogue and scenes that don’t quite link up. When he said that, I figured, why not shoot it? It’s good practice, the script wasn’t that bad, and it has a built-in audience (of one.) The only thing I’d need to do is get my hands on a copy of the script while I’m up here, polish it, and I might be able to shoot a few of the scenes on my handheld camera before I leave. The rest can be shot when I get back down to West Palm Beach, if I can sucker convince my illustrious roommate and some other members of the b-i crew to help out.

This isn’t going to be a project that I spend a lot of time on. I’m thinking maybe one day a week at the most for shooting, three to four days of shooting at the most, and we should have it in the can (as it were.) Of course, things never really work out like that, but it’s a nice thought to have. Plus, it’s a longer script at thirty pages, which gives us experience trying to manage the continuity and schedule of a script that long.

The only problem I forsee is locations, but I think we can guerilla that without much of a problem. Screw permission; it’s easier to ask forgiveness.

Now that I think about it, maybe it’d be easier to just rewrite the script instead of digging up revision one and polishing it. I know the whole story, and that script already went through four revisions before being thrown away and completely reworked.

Let’s think back to some of the rave reviews the original draft of the script received:

“No character development”
“Completely dry drama”
“No clear genre; why am I watching this movie?”
“Flows like a documentary”

People who know me and know my editing style might say, hey Marc, no offense, but everything you make flows like a documentary. I think maybe I’m incapable of assembling something that’s fun to watch. My style sucks. Ugh. I wish I was better at editing. Will I get better with practice? Maybe. Who knows. I hope so. Maybe it won’t matter!

Dasani with Strawberry?

My life is now complete.

So, North Korea is demanding a light water nuclear reactor from us, or they won’t dismantle their nuclear weapons.

We won’t give them one, because they aren’t in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

They can’t be admitted into the treaty because they previously dropped out of it in order to make nuclear weapons. They would have to dismantle the nukes they built before they can re-enter.

Light water nuclear reactors are used for power and attempting to use them for weapons purposes would prove difficult.

We promised to build North Korea two of these reactors during the Clinton administration, and we never actually did it.

So. What exactly does this mean?

It means that because we had nukes already, when the treaty was signed, and North Korea didn’t, they can’t have them ever. They also can’t have nuclear power.

But we get to keep ours.

Oh and, we get to promise to build you a nuclear reactor, and then not do it, and then demand that you dismantle your weapons program. And if you do, well, we say we’ll build you a nuclear reactor.

Right. Because we built the first two so quickly.

Ever go to a restaurant and run into someone who works there that knows you? Ever run into relatives of your ex-girlfriend who work there? Ever stop and wonder at first if they are going to do anything to your food before it gets to you?

Phew. Neither do I. That’d just be paranoid.

Small town living really sucks. You can’t go anywhere without running into people you know, people that know you, people that know people that know you, people that know people that you hate, people that hate people that you know, and so on. I don’t live in a small town anymore, but I did. And I have to come back here every few months to do some contract work and pay my bills. And for that week or two that I’m in town, it’s hell. Everywhere I go, I see people I either knew in high school, or met in college (during my brief stint), or people see me and tell other people that I’m in town. I wasn’t even that popular in high school. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who were.

Of course, people who are popular in high school tend to not leave their small town. At least that’s how it works here.

I brought a small contingent of ants up with me from down south. They seem to have arrived via my briefcase. So, people of Northwest Florida, please give a warm welcome to the ants from my bedroom.

They’re mostly harmless. Just little black sugar ants. If they bite you, it must be ‘coz you’re so sweet and they heart you.

I think they climbed into my briefcase to escape the wrath of the lizard population in our kitchen. Our apartment is a wild and untamed ecosystem.

I’m addicted to MySpace, still. Don’t get a MySpace; it is the ruiner of lives.

The previous statement is libel.

The package carrying Selling The Faith on a MiniDV tape to the film festival people arrived a day before the deadline (which is today.) Now, we have to wait and see if we get accepted. No telling how long that will take. This is killing me.

Speaking of Selling The Faith. I still get a little feedback here and there from people who watch it on boredom-induced, and man, every time I do, it makes me want to shoot another short. Everybody seems to take something different away from it.

Has anybody noticed that the UK is having a fuel crisis, very similar to our own?

Once again, rumors of a possible shortage came from somewhere, people went crazy and started buying gas, and the fuel companies claimed to not be able to meet demand, which sent prices skyrocketing.

If I were a wild-eyed speculator, here’s what I’d say.

I’d say, the fuel companies saw into the near future, and realized that the oil bubble was going to burst, sending oil price-per-barrel falling rapidly. They knew that consumers would not tolerate these massively high gas prices if oil prices fell dramatically. So, as prices started to fall, the concept of the gasoline market was quickly introduced, and we, as consumers, were notified that now, it’s not the oil market causing the prices to climb, it’s the refined gasoline market. So now, oil prices can fall all they want, because gasoline is trading so high.

Fortunately, I’m not a wild-eyed speculator.

I’m in Niceville this week on business. It’s the good life.

I’m in what I like to describe as, “the smallest hotel room in the world.” They managed to fit two beds in this thing, as well as a desk, a counter with a sink, and a tiny bathroom with a shower and a toilet. As an added bonus, the hotel is full to capacity with Red Cross people and evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

This is quite possibly the most boring blog in the history of blogs.

I’m making a lot of overarching declaratives right now. Try to keep up as I mold your world with blanket statements.

I listened to a few cuts from the new Rolling Stones album, and I’m ready to commit my $12.99 to buy it. It’s nice to be able to buy music that isn’t “hardcore”, or “emocore”, or “punk”, or “neo punk”, or “post hardcore”, or “progressive deep-fried speed angst metal.” It’s just rock. Good old rock.

I’m a pop culture junkie. It sickens me.

The apartments I wanted to live in if I ever moved back to Niceville have been sold as condos. My friend is going to live in one.

I kill him.

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