"It Was Christmas, Dammit" Collabrotive memoir

The earliest visits all blur together.  The car ride there was always the same.  Me and my sister in the back seat, my grandma in the front, and mom driving.  The cold air always pierced right through the car for the first little while, and even when it would get hot, I would occasionally press my face against the window for a cool-down.  For most of the way, I’d play my GameBoy.  First Advance, then Advance SP.  I still remember the dorky plug-in light I had for my original Advance.  I probably still have it somewhere.  But while that happened, my sister would mind her own business, doing homework, reading, listening to her walkman CD player, or any combination of the three.  The entire time, my mom and grandma would talk up a storm.  Sometimes I would catch bits of their conversation, but most of the time, I was too enraptured by beating Mechagodzilla or getting Spyro to make that one jump.  You know the one.  The one that the glide misses by this much.  But once we actually got downtown, the game would get paused, saved, and put away.  I’d look up at all the buildings, some rooftops covered in snow, others too high to tell, all with a sense of awe, the architecture and scope of it all capturing my imagination as much as any movie with giant monsters would.  The streets were lined with slush that would make wet gushing sounds as we drove over it.  At this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you if anyone was talking, let alone what they were saying.  I was entranced by my surroundings.  Not always present, but very prominent is a certain parking garage near Water Tower.  When you first drove into it, there was a long, spiraling ramp leading up to sections of individual levels.  The sections were like any other parking garage, but that spiraling ramp was my favorite part.  Especially on the way down.  This idea was a direct counterpoint to how my mother saw it.  I remember her wishing it didn’t exist.
    Marshall Field's was, in a way, the highlight.  Even though I would always hope I could find the KB Toys in Water Tower, Field’s was where the real magic happened.  Going to see Santa used to just put the line through the toy section, which was good enough for me.  They always had some really cool, old-timey toys there that my mom would never let me get, so I got as much of an eyeful of them as I could.  Specifically, I remember this one 1950’s-style tin robot.  I can’t recall how much of a fight I put up for it, but I know I didn’t come out of there with it.  Santa was a different story.  I was afraid of the Santa there. And really, all department store and mall Santas.  I never knew why, but it made taking a picture an ordeal.  I would mumble to him what I wanted for Christmas, then nervously smile for the camera, and get out of the room as fast as I could.  I got better with it over time, but never really got over the weird feeling I had about it until much later, ie: when I was too old to care. 
    In my first memories of the Walnut room, my family complained about the way the tree was decorated.  They said it was gaudy, stupid, not as cute as that one year.  That didn’t really matter to me.  I just liked seeing my uncle, talking to him, and having breakfast.  Or was it brunch?  Hard to say.  What really mattered was the dessert.  For two reasons: one, it was an ice-cream snowman with a marshmallow head and cookie arms, and two, it was the way my mom got a hold of the Santa Bear mug for that year.  That was another thing.  The Santa Bear mug and ornament.  I’m pretty sure there was a line at least twice to just get the goddamn ornament.  But we considered it worth it if it looked good enough, which, as time went on, it didn’t more often than not. 
    That’s actually another surprisingly  big part of going downtown.  My mom complaining.  I already mentioned the tree in the Walnut Room and the ramp to park in the garage, but there was also much bitching about the food, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to complain about the parking, the weather, pretty much anything that was any discomfort. 
    But I never cared.  It was a blast being there all the same.  Even during the boring parts, like when my family was shopping.  There was always something for me to look at, either to be taken by the thing itself or to make me mind start wandering to a much cooler place.  Typically, I didn’t get anything from the shopping part aside from a new nutcracker.  I had a thing for nutcrackers, getting a new one every year to add to my collection.  Yes, I was a nutcracker collector even before I considered myself a toy collector.  I just like collecting things, I suppose. 
    As time progressed, I went through a stage where I wanted to avoid spending time with my family as much as possible, but even at this time, I looked forward to the Christmas downtown trip.  Although, at this time, I was much more interested in taking in the environment of the city.  I started noticing things about the city that I never had before.  Certain subtleties in the atmosphere that, perhaps to other people, would be boring were somewhat comforting to me.  The specific color of the slush that lined the streets, the way light reflected off of the icy sidewalk.  They made me feel at home. 
    That’s truly how I feel about the city.  Even when I’m in a section of it I’ve never sen before, I feel like I’m home.  Like this is where I want to live.  Now, I could end up living there and be proven wrong, but for the time being, I’m very comfortable with the city at large.  And I’m damn proud of this city, too.  The culture, the architecture, even the somewhat touristy places like The Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, or Sears Tower (not Willis Tower, dammit), they al feel so rich and rewarding.  I can’t say I’ve ever been truly proud to be an American, but I am beyond proud to be a Chicagoan. 
***
    In recent years, a new tradition has evolved for me and my family: the Kristkindlemarket.  A traditional Christmas festival from Germany revolving largely around socializing outside and shopping from private vendors.  The atmosphere is one of a family celebration, with the whole thing out in the open and just a warm vibe.  In particular what sticks out in my mind is the hot chocolate.  It has an intoxicating aroma that just blasts into your nostrils.  The consistency is much like chocolate milk, and it tastes very much like the best chocolate milk you can imagine, but nice and hot to counter the blistering cold.  When I went there with my German class on a feild trip, I tried some of the other food there, mostly sweets and the Bratwurst.  They, too, were excellent.  When I tried it, I instantly thought of the Sham-Wow guy “you know the Germans always make good stuff!”  And when I went there for that trip, it was a time when I was really stressed at school.  Even though, logically, I should have been totally unable to enjoy myself, I didn’t care about school or that one girl I liked, or any of that stuff.  It was Christmas God damn it, and I was going to get in the spirit.  It was Christmas and I was with nice people in my home away from home.  No way I’d let some stupid assignments or whatever get in the way of that. 

Why the World Needs Superheroes

Japanese Flavor- Circa 1978

American Flavor- Circa 1960

 

 Bruce Wayne.   Anung un Rama.  Minami Kotaro.  Clark Kent.  Kamina.  Mindy MacReedy.  Steve Rogers. **

If you've been living in a country that has television for more than a year, you recognize at least two of those names.  If you're a geek like me, you probably recognized all of them.  But weather or not you know who they are is irrelevant, what is is what they embody.
 

It's Your Job to Complain About Your Job

It seems Ehrenreich wants to show people just how rough it is for minimum wage workers to get by.  The long hours, low pay, and questionable at best working conditions all paint a picture of people who teeter on the edge of poverty if not outright fall into it.  It's something that I'm certain would shock many people... in the late 90's, when this was written. 

Since this piece was published, it seems, at least from my perspective, that awareness of the very dire conditions of minimum wage workers has become more widespread, and might have even been widespread before this was published.  However, that doesn't make it any less well-written or compelling.  It's still a damn good non-fiction story.  Easily as dramatic as anything P.T. Anderson could come up with.  It also makes me wonder how much conditions in these sorts of jobs have improved, if at all, as nowadays, it seems that most people who don't work in them just assume they suck and don't pay much attention to them outside of that.  I know that my mom had a lot of nasty things to say about Walgreens when she was working for them, but nothing this severe.   I'll probably look into it at some point.  

*Insert clever title here*

Two things stand out to me immediately as ways my family shaped my identity early on in my life.  First is my Uncle.  As I've said before, my father died when I was very young, so that sort of figure had to come from elsewhere in my life.  When we met, my Uncle would often give me a lot of advice, stories, and general tidbits that he felt would help me out later in life.  I can't recall many specifics, and anything that stuck with me has long since melded into my subconscious, so I can't say much else about it. 

The second is my mother.  A lot of ideals my mother has have been burned into my own mind, but the most prominent would probably be her feminism.  For the longest time, I didn't like girls.  I'm not sure why, and it seems stupid and embarrassing in retrospect, but I guess between her hammering those ideas into my head and my own intellectual awakenings, something clicked.  And now, here I am making visual rhetoric projects about female characters in cartoons. 

As for now, well, I tend to be myself around my family, the only real differences being that I'm a little more reserved around extended family and try not to swear in front of my mother, which is just a courtesy thing.  Really my interactions with my family are pretty boring, and as time goes on, I think less and less of what they think of me.

School, man. It's nuts.

There's no getting around the fact that this is late, and I can't say I have much of an excuse other than "Halloween," and if you know what I was doing for Halloween, you know that's not a particularly good excuse, so let's just get right into it.
It seems apparent that throughout the piece, Anyon is heavily implying that, depending on the average income of the area, schools have a tendency to train students in preparation for whatever jobs are most prevalent in that area.  They are conditioned to put the same level of thought into their schoolwork that their parents put into their jobs, so that they are more likely to go into those fields and not do their own thing.
The sentence quoted seems to basically be saying what I just said.  That the schools are training the kids to be carbon copies of their parents in relation to society.  And I think that yes, it is fairly accurate.  Of course there are exceptions (as always) but it is generally how it goes.

Overall, I felt like this article was fairly interesting, but didn't really capture my attention in any meaningful way.  I've left the public school system, and am trying my best to forget about it for the time being.  One of back-up careers is actually to be an English teacher, so obviously, I'm going to have to re-acquaint myself sometime, but for now, I just want to forget about it.  It was a time in my life that I look at with very little fondness in terms of the schools themselves, and I'm extraordinarily glad to be here now.  I understand how looking back on this time in our lives helps us understand how our identity was shaped, but for me, it was more the social aspect and things outside of school that shaped me, so even if I'm talking about school in those terms, I'm going to hit a wall in terms of things to talk about pretty fast.

Rambling about myself writing about myself

I've made mention on here that I don't particularly like writing about myself, and the memoir wasn't much of an exception.  While finally writing about the experiences I described was a great way to purge all of those old emotions, I still didn't really enjoy it.  It was more like a need than anything, and that may or may not come across in the final project.
Talking about what I like about my memoir, I can't say that there's anything that stands out.  I like to think I just did a solid job on it, though.  If anything, I think that talking about my dad dying, The Thermos Incident, and my time in the outpatient program helped the most with me purging those emotions further.  Talking about my latest episode and how I snapped out of it was somewhat less helpful, because the conflict and resolution of it was all internal, whereas the other two had more extraneous factors that I think led to a need for further purging.  If that makes any sense.
I think during a revision I might add more detail and possibly consult my mom for clarification of facts, but that's about it for straight-up revision.  I should note that if I could have an infinite amount of time, I would have done a video combining narration, talking head footage of me, and footage from Batman Begins and Gurren Lagann, because to me, the one thing I tried to convey to outsiders is just how much of an impact media can have on us and the way we see the world, and for Gurren Lagann especially, a text description doesn't do it justice.

"I wanna be the very best! Like no one ever was!"

Alrighty, it's late, I have to get up at 6AM, and I'm fucking pumped because that damn song from this post's title is stuck in my head. Let's do this.

Rose seems to be influenced heavily by his love of literature, which came about only after a teacher had presented the material in a way that interested him, which shows a direct relationship between his education and the development of his identity.  Similarly, while he initially perceived himself as not particularly intellectual, that was due to how his education presented itself.  When his education became more enjoyable, he started to embrace his intellectual side.

The term "cues" refers to behaviors that we see as children which clue us in to how to behave normally.  A good example would be the way kids' speech patterns have tendency to mimic their parents'.  I'd imagine that how this affects the development of identity is self-evident; that the more exposure we get to a particular cue, the more likely we are to adopt it for ourselves.  At least early in life.

Dese ppl yoose BIG wurds

Okay, so first off, I think it's pretty clear that the reason people reject the idea that transgenderism is a "disorder" is because that implication, at least in their minds, reeks of herd mentality and individual oppression.  Which, to a degree, it does.  While the approach most psychologists have is noble in terms of the long-term, it represses the child's current happiness and peace of mind.  The whole thing is a slippery slope, and I honestly don't know if I can make a solid conclusion.
As for Simm's decision, on an objective level, it's pretty much impossible to judge her decision until Brandon/Bridget grows up, but on an emotional level, I applaud her intentions and genuinely want things to work out for both her and Brandon/Bridget.  Going off of the "storyteller" language Rosin used, I'd say she has a similar outlook, but that may just be my own interpretation. 
Also, I'd like to say that their whole story would make an amazing movie.  But that's just the filmmaker in me.  Again.

Overall, I thought this was really fascinating.  It's refreshing to see two sides to an argument like this that doesn't just amount to the anti-side being all "IT'S NAWT WHAT GAWD INTENDEMATED!" And it actually made me think about my stance on the issue for a bit.  I still feel that switching genders is ultimately the decision of the individual who has those feelings, and that the negative side affects of going through with it ultimately stem from society, as opposed to anything biological or mentally internal, but I gotta give props to some of those psychologists on the other side of the coin for putting up a good argument.  Also, as for the approach to determining weather or not a child actually is transgender, it sounds like the Netherlands have it right.  I honestly think their approach makes the most sense and looks to have the most concrete results so far, but ultimately, I think it's going to be a while before a method is nailed down perfectly.  That's just the nature of this type of science.

I WAS RIGHT YOU FOOLS! I WAS RIGHT! YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ME!! YOU MANIACS, YOU BLEW IT UP, YOU BLEW IT ALL TO HELL!!! I TRIED TO WARN YOU!!!

So, this essay basically describes, in explicit detail, all the various psychological factors which shape our gender identity.  It presents these factors in a way that is very scientific, even-handed, and kind of hard to argue with, leaving it all to interpretation of what it means for society as a whole. 

Early on, the author talks about how children are so easily impressed upon with gener roles due to outside influences, and how pretty much everything they're exposed to shapes their perception of what is normal. 

What was my VR project about?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! IN YOUR FACES!!!! I WAS RIGHT!!! PRAISE ME! PRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAISE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, ahem. 

What I mean to say is that this provides a great deal of scientific evidence to support my theory about how the media children consume has a direct impact on how they perceive gender roles.  While I don't particularly care for the very technical way in which it was written, it lays out its case in a fairly compelling way, and more importantly, makes me sound smart.  Now there's a true feat of science. 

Another thing I found interesting was the idea that it isn't until age 7 that children's ideas about gender are fully developed, this makes me wonder what would happen if a child was raised in a totally gender-neutral environment.  I'm sure this is something scientists are also chomping at the bit to know, but is held off from being done due to ethical implications. 

Aside from that, all I can say is that it was pretty good.

My body's boring-ass life

I'm fat.  Not disgustingly so, but enough for people to notice.  It fluctuates, but that little belly is always there.  It's weird, sometimes I think it looks like a hideous growth, and other times it blends into the contours of my body perfectly, and it looks just fine.  To me at least, I've never put much stock in what other people say about it, but then again, not many people seem to want to comment on it.  It seems to be a case of "Yeah, he's kinda chubby.  Moving on."  It wasn't always like that, though.  When I was really young, I was actually quite skinny.  It's hard to tell if the fatness was spawned by the shoving down of emotions from my dad's death, or if it was just my years of eating nothing but crap catching up.  Either way, I'm working on it, but God only knows how long it's gonna take.
While people rarely comment on my weight, my mom feels a constant need to comment on my hygiene.  I didn't wash my hair good enough, my teeth look yellow, I missed a spot when I shaved, did I trim my nails yet?  The hair one comes up the most, even though my mom is the only one who ever comments about it.  Period.

My ankles are fucked up.  They really are.  I don't remember when it started, but I'll have these bouts of one of them aching like crazy or having some other bizarre pain-related-issue-deal.  It always comes up without warning, and I'll never have done anything to it, but then, it goes away as quickly as it came, and I move on.  I've chalked it up to a personal anomaly a log time ago and haven't though much of it since.

Can you tell I'm not really into writing about my body?  I barely like writing about my mind.  I really don't know what else to say.  I'm nearsighted with astigmatism?  The glasses give me a lot more of a "nerd" look, which is shockingly accurate?  Fuck, man I don't know.  My body is boring. 

There Were No Tears

I can't say I remember the entirety of that day, but I know that when it happened, I was outside.  My friend Zack was over, and we were playing on the blacktop by the garage.  What we were doing, I cannot, for the life of me, recall.  But what I do remember is that right in the middle of whatever the hell we were doing, Zack's mom told me about the call she'd just gotten.  My dad had a heart attack.  I didn't know what that meant at the time, but it didn't sound good.  Zack made a snarky comment about my dad dying, but his mom reminded him of an aunt of theirs who had a heart attack and lived.  I felt a lot better, and we went back to whatever the hell it was we were doing.  Then, whatever the hell it was we were doing was stopped again, this time by my mom pulling up in the driveway.  I ran up to her and asked about dad.  I'm not sure if there was any lead-in, but I remember the words "he died."  No tap-dancing around it. 

There were no tears.  I had every reason to cry right then, with no shame in it, and I almost felt like it, but no tears came out.  I just sulked.  And that's all I did for the longest time about it.  There was the occasional misty eye, but never bawling, never like what my mom or sister did.  At his wake, no tears.  His funeral, no tears.  At every cemetery visit for the next 5-odd years, no tears.  Just sulking.  Stoic solemness. Whatever you want to call it. 

It was not long before, at my aunt's house, my mom (or was it my Aunt Becky?) read to us The Fall of Freddie the Leaf.  What the story was, how it was resolved, I can't say.  All I know is that it made me feel better about the whole thing.  And, however shitty it sounds, that was the end of it.  For a while, at least.

It's Here! The Slideshow and stuff!

Slideshow:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24792002@N07/sets/72157627762764494/show/

Full stream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24792002@N07/

Reflecting on the Visual Rhetoroic Project

Alright, so after days of brainstorming and hours of work, it's finally done, and all in all, I rather enjoyed it.  It was a unique challenge coming up with little scenes to try and explain my point, and even more fun to set them up.  The biggest obstacle was definitely the brainstorming portion.  So much of the topic I chose is abstract ideas that are better explained with words accompanying them, if not with words entirely.  But again, it was more of a fun challenge, and the only truly frustrating part was some of the execution.  For example, for the photo depicting the traditional damsel in distress, I wanted to do a picture-in-picture of Arcee on the screen of a monitor being looked at by Hot Rod.  However, GIMP was not co-operating with me and I had to scrap that version of the idea.  Also, for the shot where Arcee is squaring off with my cat, it took forever before my cat would stay still enough for a photo. 
If there's anything I would have done differently, it would have been more prep time.  I would have fooled around in GIMP more, written down more ideas for scenes, and just overall do more ahead of time. 

As for the personal function, well, for one, it helped me think more about the issue, and the paper portion especially let me vent a lot of my frustrations with the tropes I talk about.  And, of course, it gave me an excuse to play with my toys. 

If there's anything I want other people to take away from this, it's that what I'm asking for is not hard, by any stretch of the imagination, and if you feel the same way that I do about this, it's not out of line in any way to ask for change or even try and make change with your own art.  And also, that toys are fun. 

So, this Visual Rhetoric Project deal

I decided it's going to be about the portrayal of female characters in children's media. mainly western animation.  It's something I feel passionate about, although I'm not exactly sure why.  It's probably the years of being around my Good-Kind-Of-Crazy Feminist mother finally getting to the core of my brain.  Regardless, The argument I'm going for is to try and convey the importance of such characters in children's television.  Millions of kids watch TV every day, and it has a major influence on their perception of what is "normal" in the world.  Having shallow female characters, aside from being annoying from a writer's perspective, isn't doing gender relations any favors.  And beyond that, I really believe in not talking down to kids in their cartoons and despise the "it's just for the kids" excuse for poor writing. 

I plan on using the copious action figures that my nerdy crack-habit of a hobby has given me access to, in order to do some scenes which satirize a lot of tropes associated with female characters in cartoons.  I suppose that aspect specifically wold be using pathos to a degree, as it makes people laugh at the absurdity of the issue and draws more attention to it that way.  And of course, the ethos of using familiar characters.  
Also, I wonder about possibly using more of a photo comic format, as I feel it would convey the message better.  But by the time you read this, I'll have already asked you that (LOL, fourth wall, what's that?). 
The biggest obstacle (besides any technical difficulties) will be with inventing scenarios that properly convey what I want to say in a concise manner. 

 

This is Pac-Man.  You probably knew that already, though, which is how both you and I know that this is using ethos to its full effect.  The context is that of our current pop culture climate, which celebrates the nostalgic in a way that has never really been seen before, and given the generation that produces most media, "nostalgic" generally means 80's pop culture.  The result is a whole lot of homages to classic video games among other things.  I already talked a bit about this two entries ago, so I won't dwell on it too much, instead focusing on how I feel about this specific venture.  

There's nothing I can really bring against it on an objective or aesthetic level, as it's well done and I really enjoy the look of retro games, but part of me wishes it was something besides Pac-Man.  Not that Pac-Man is a bad game, but I personally never found it as appealing as some other classic games like Galaga and Dig-Dug.  And there's also the fact that I'm not very good at Pac-Man.  Which means when I look at this, I more think about repetitious failure than addictive fun.  But that starts to enter into realms of heavy, heavy bias, which are not that interesting to read about.  So instead, I'll comment on he image's placement.  It's fairly high up on the window of a tall building, which makes it a bit tricky to spot at first, but hard to ignore once you do, which is a very good way of letting your art grab someone's attention (we can argue about weather or not this is "art" all day, so let's just say the term is a short hand for whatever this is).  It certainly worked for me, and was effective enough to make me write a blog post about it. 

Thoughts of Asimov (Among Other Things)

Out of all the photos in the MoCP, the ones that struck me the most were the "Selenography II" Series by Jenny Äkerlund.  According to the plaque, they were not photographs per-se, but painstaking re-creations of old astronomy textbook pictures of the moon done in graphite and made to look like photocopies of the pages.  Knowing this made them much more impressive, as I had initially though they were photos of the textbook pages.  The attention to detail alone was enough to impress me.  More than that, though, it reminded me of the works of Issac Asimov.  The kind of science fiction that's more about technology and discovery than characters or story.
This makes sense in the context of what the plaque says was Äkerlund's intention; to show how things that were once novel and fascinating are now just relics of the past.  Similarly, what the pieces show to me is how given the passage of time, things that were once educational or scientific can become fantastical.  They seem to evoke a sense of mystery that implies a deeper mythology than what is seen in front of you.  Like Egyptian Hieroglyphics, what was once just another means of recoding information has taken on a whole new level of mystique.  A sense of, again, mythology.  I look at them and it makes me feel like there's something more, something unknown to something that is very well known today, the moon.  Like perhaps there is life there, little green men scampering about the surface, or perhaps an underground civilization of seven foot-tall lizard-people with piercing red eyes, razor-sharp teeth and four-inch talons on their hands and feet, which are only used for when they are deprived of their high tech-weaponry.  An assortment of laser guns with varying degrees of power and 80-foot tall Theropod-shaped mechs that breathe fire and shoot plasma missiles from their--ahem.  Sorry, got a little carried away.  But that does give you an idea of just how much these pieces fire up my imagination.  And really, I'd say any photography that take me from old-timey pictures of the moon to giant robot dinosaurs is successful in my book.

Adventures in Visual Rhetoric with Video Game Fandoms (That I'm Not Actually Part Of)

Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: I've played The Legend of Zelda games exactly twice in my entire life.  Both times were only increments of about 5 minutes each.  First was at my sister's friend's house, which inexplicably had a Gamecube (or was it an N64?) with a copy of one of the early 3D Zelda games.  Ocarina of Time, I believe (which would mean my assumption of N64 was correct).  I think I got to a boss level and gave up out of frustration and then fact that my family was leaving anyway.  The second time was fairly recently.  The original on a free online NES emulator.  This time, I gave up because I kept dying and had no idea where the fuck I was going.  

Regardless of my very limited knowledge of the Zelda games, I've always enjoyed the imagery of them.  A terrific blend of classical Tolkien fantasy with 80's pop sensibilities.  And going off of the sheer amount of people who dress as the main character Link alone, I'm not the only one.  Above, you see one such person.  A woman.  A very attractive, red-haired woman.  Dressed as a character who is supposed to be a young blond boy.  It really goes to show just how far-reaching the appeal of the franchise is.  Which I suppose is the context it's intended to be viewed in.  A show of someone showing their admiration of something they love.  It invokes both the ethos of a familiar character like Link and the pathos of nostalgia that a long-time fan of the series would feel.  But even outside of this context, it invokes a different kind of pathos, the kind that is sparked by almost any fantasy imagery: a sense of awe and wonder, a simple but effective way of unleashing the viewer's imagination, conjuring up further images of riders on horseback, epic battles, dragons, and princesses.  It's a very well-composed image that inspires a very visceral reaction in me and anyone else who enjoys this type of imagery. 

And there's also the fact that it's a really, really good costume.

One of those Introductory Deals

To be honest, I've never been big on writing about myself.  Ask me to write a 12-page epic about a beaver who saves the world from a TV repair man and I'm all over it.  Ask me to write two paragraphs about my favorite middle-school memory and I freeze up.  I'm weird like that I suppose, which is a decent one-word descriptor for myself.  Not good, not bad, not smart, not dumb, just weird.  First thing you should know about me is that I am a gigantic fucking nerd.  Reading comic books more often than novels, collecting action figures, memorizing exchanges of dialogue from my favorite movies, the whole deal.  I've even been to a few conventions, including one which I attend annually.  I'm active on several message boards and even have a YouTube channel littered withsure to be classics for at least one eccentric loner.  Although my main geeky passion is arguably film, which I have the uncommon ability to both take seriously as an art form and mock relentlessly.  Must be too much MST3K.  I could sit here and bore you with sob stories about the various tough times I've had in my life or depress you with my family's current financial situation, but we just met, and I'd prefer to keep things lighthearted so, look! Ponies and video game references! 

Ahem.

Right, so why am I here?  At Columbia?  I want to be a filmmaker.  A director, specifically.  I've got a head full of ideas buzzing about like angry Waspinators and I'm ready to pour them out onto the silver screen and see what happens.  This means that I would be writing most of my own films, so naturally, I do like writing.  Although, as I said, I'm more adept at fiction than non-fiction.  If anything, from, this class specifically, I hope I can at least get more experienced with writing as a whole. 

I suppose that's all I have to say here, but trust me when I say there'll be a lot more to come.