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Aug 23, 2002

On the bright side, I found the college application essay questions. On the less bright side, I spent hours just trying to figure out what I would write about before penning the worst essay of my life. Why can't they be more specific? What are they looking for? Why don't they ask me an actual question rather than "tell us something"? This essay is stilted, and boring, and doesn't make a lot of sense, and it humiliates me to even admit that I wrote it. If the worst thing people can say about me when I die is "Remember that college application essay he wrote for Mr. Wade Senior year?", I will have a lot to answer for.
Nick ::: 6:59 AM ::: 0 comments

Aug 22, 2002

Hello all you happy people! I seem to have lost the address of the site where Mr. Wade said we could look up college essay questions, and the essay is due tomorrow, and I can't find any fucking questions! Someone please give me some nasty 24-hour disease, quick!

Or, if all else fails, maybe someone could e-mail me the address of a place where I can look the questions up?
Nick ::: 8:45 PM ::: 0 comments

Aug 21, 2002

Wait a second, Laura...I never said that there was no way to increase the size of a role without a rewrite. You're perfectly correct to point out that that is not the case. A good actor can make his or her role shine, even if it is small.

What I said was that you can't make a very small role the biggest in the play. There is a limit to how much an actor can affect a role. So, think of it as a range. Each character has a certain range of importance. A great actor will be right up at the top of that character's range, but there is still a limit there. Some roles are by nature bigger than others, despite the definite impact the actor has on the role.

Now, I didn't say anything about development of acting skill; I heartily agree that small parts are very good for that. I'm just talking about audience impact.

Simply put, a good actor will shine even through a small role, but not as much as that good actor would shine in a larger part. The inverse is also true; a bad actor in a good role will give a lackluster performance, but he will still be more noticeable than he would be as a less important character.
Nick ::: 9:58 PM ::: 0 comments

Aug 20, 2002

Is there a Senior Superlative for "Most Likely to Stalk and Kill Drew Dir"? If so, I cast my vote for Kelly.
Nick ::: 10:31 PM ::: 0 comments

Since everyone is so hung up on Jason's Pepsi Blue quote, I figured I'd throw in my two cents.

I tried Pepsi Blue today. It tasted like piss. Only crappy cola manufacturers like Pepsi would try to answer a fantastic drink like Vanilla Coke with some blue gook that tastes like piss.

"Hello there, I am Ronald, a Pepsi Blue manufacturer. All day long I drink beer and coffee and Blue Dye No. 6, and I piss nonstop in great big vats that are used to fill the ugly blue bottles you all know and love. So drink Pepsi Blue! We put a little bit of our employees in every bottle."
Nick ::: 10:28 PM ::: 0 comments

"There are no small parts, only small actors."

While Laura's blog was interesting and insightful, I must disagree on one crucial point. I don't care who made it up; that phrase is simply inaccurate. There are both small roles and small actors. Yes, a good actor can make more of a small role than a bad actor, but it still won't be as much as he or she could have made of a large role. I'll agree that getting a small part is no reason to act badly, but nothing except a rewrite will change the fact that it is a smaller part than some others.

I guess the problem is that I deal in certainties, while that particular sentence is a poetic fallacy. Like "I am large; I contain multitudes." I hate that stupid quote. Surely Whitman knew that words can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Did he not realize that hordes of nonsensical people would grab onto that quote and use it to defend their own inadequacies? There's nothing wrong with its use in the poem, where he is trying to describe a feeling of transcendent interconnectedness, but altogether too many people use it in debates or everyday life.

Sorry. That's my poetic fallacy rant. I'm done now.
Nick ::: 8:05 PM ::: 0 comments

Aug 19, 2002

Why did they give us Homeroom first today? I wore my Skis Suck shirt today, thinking that we could finally do something silly like start the day at the beginning or go to first period first. Of course, the evil masterminds at the front office caught wind of this (probably through the driver demon on the Giant Yellow Caterpillar of Doom) and dashed my hopes, dropping me straight into the care of Mr. Silvestrov.

Some of you may not be making the connection. Allow me to explain.

Last year I spent about a week blissfully snowboarding in Steamboat, Colorado. It was during the Winter Olympics, I remember that much, because scads of the American athletes in that competition hailed from the town I was touristing in. Anyway, near the end of the trip, I decided to declare my allegiance to snowboarding by purchasing the orange "Skis Suck: I'm Going Riding" t-shirt that I wore today. When I went into school the next day, Mr. Pantazopoulos decided that "suck" was a naughty word and that I had to take the shirt off (I was wearing another shirt under it, coincidentally my "Snowboardin' USA" shirt from Crested Butte). So after that I could only wear the shirt when I knew Mr. P wouldn't be around.

Fast forward to last week. Mr. P has a nasty habit of breezing through my homeroom classroom, so I decided not to wear the shirt during the first week, when it was likely to be spotted. But today, I thought we wouldn't have homeroom, because it was stupid to have homeroom today. Of course, we did, and when I arrived, Mr. P was talking to another science teacher (Caswell?) in there.

I made it to my desk, grabbed a random sheet of AP Statistics notes, and made like it was homework while I casually held my folder in a way that happened to conceal what was written on my shirt. I thought that I would just have to sit that way for about a minute while he finished his conversation.

He sat there jabbering on for almost 15 minutes! I was starting to cramp before the bell rang and he finally left. Here I am acting like a fugitive, while the crazy man has no problems with shirts that advertise tequila or bludgeon you with overt insinuations of promiscuity. But thunder-flinging god forbid some punk snowboarder wear a shirt with the word "suck" on it!

The moral of the story is that the front office has been out to get me ever since they found my deadly 2" swiss army knife.
Nick ::: 9:28 PM ::: 0 comments

Transcendent Blog Stupidity No. 2: Communication (or lack of such)

A blog is like a one-sided message board. You can post all the interesting gobbledygook you want, but no one can add to it with his or her thoughts. The person can send you an e-mail, but no one else will be able to read it. Alternatively, the person can post to his or her own blog, but then anyone who reads both will experience the unabated flow of ideas all out of order.

The inconvenience of replying to a post on a blog impedes the natural bouncing motion you usually get with ideas. My fellow bloggers, we should really find a place to host a message board and give it a try. It's much less like a boring monologue and much more like an interesting discussion.

Of course, putting the words "boring" and "interesting" in there was kind of a cheap trick, but you get my point.

This lack of feedback is usually the cause of Blog Burnout. Someone posts and posts and posts, but since there is no one else contributing to the discussion, the blogger eventually runs out of momentum. Now, this isn't a problem with someone like me, because I have an unending supply of things to say. But even I will admit that I prefer to be replied to.
Nick ::: 8:45 PM ::: 0 comments

Laura -- I put your blog up above Chase's because his sucks.

OK, OK, in all fairness, his wouldn't suck if he ever updated it. But he doesn't, so it does.
Nick ::: 5:12 PM ::: 0 comments

Bethany -- wouldn't it be awesome if God did smite people with thunderbolts? The first to go would be televangelists, and then telemarketers, and then Mr. Wolf.
Nick ::: 4:57 PM ::: 0 comments

I keep forgetting to nag people about this during the day...but I still don't have a ride home from school in the afternoons! What kind of Senior rides the bus? Don't answer that, I know I'm a huge flaming nerd and I don't need any of you to tell me.

Anyway, what brings this up is my sudden resolve to do a blog on "the school bus is the Tenth Circle of Hell." I'm going to start small and work my way up to the real tortures of this mode of transportation.

First there's the comparatively minor embarrassment factor. After all, you can only be seen debarking from the giant yellow caterpillar for a precious few seconds each day. Still, that lump of red-hot shame is there and I'm not going to deny it.

Next we have the time factor. I hate sitting on the bus for an inordinate amount of time while unimportant other people are picked up. Invariably there will be some fucking ditz who rushes to be first on the bus just so she can stop and hold a standing conversation with the person sitting in the frontmost seat. The fact that there is a queue of potential passengers waiting behind her is just too big a thought to fit through her brain's narrow ingress hatch.

Of even greater magnitude than timeliness is the issue of discomfort. Whatever bloody idiot drew up the bus routes neglected to consider the actual number of students who live on each route. There are many buses out there with just as many seats empty as occupied. On my bus, we are sitting three to a seat. Not to be prissy, but especially in the afternoons, it can be a real roaster in there, and with that many people it is almost unavoidable that one of them skimped on the Speed Stick.

And the greatest misery of all is the company. I can deal with socialites, ditzes, shallow people, jocks, nerds, people who no habla ingles, people who hold screaming conversations with the person right next to them, and a whole host of other annoying high school stereotypes. But there is one person on there who I simply cannot stand.

He is loud. He is fat. He is conceited. He smells. He is stupid.

This kid sat directly in front of me one morning, and I simply could not take it. He was bellowing at the person directly behind me, and I could tell what he'd eaten for breakfast just by the breeze. It was like being in my own little localized rainshower; I could see the drool encrusted on his lower lip. He was wearing the stereotypical perfectly pressed plaid of a true preppie, and loudly decrying BMWs as beneath his notice. He tried to flirt with a girl sitting across from him, and I think her three lines were "Shut up," "Leave me alone," and "I don't like you." Of course, he didn't take the hint, and continued to harrass her for the entire ride with questions like, "Aww, come on, what's not to like?"

I was just leaning back, eyes wide, paralyzed with horror. Surely this cannot be a sentient human being! It must be some hitherto undiscovered species of ape, or a demon summoned from the pits of hell to torture me.

That was when I made the connection. The bus is hell.

Save me. Please?
Nick ::: 4:57 PM ::: 0 comments

Aug 18, 2002

For the love of god, someone e-mail me! Now I know why Bethany has one of those tacky guestbook things...here I am blogging out my heart and soul (or at least an ice cube tray and a somewhat dingy sneaker-bottom) and I have no idea who would actually want to read this kind of crap.

Right. This morning I went to two church services. It was really bizarre. Just about my only connection to my years as a religious person (11-13, I think; just left of the age of accountability) is my continuing participation in the handbell choir. You know, they're those little bells, you hold one in each hand, they ring? Well, I really like playing handbells even if I take the whole religion thing with a grain of salt. So when I stopped going to church and youth group, I continued to play handbells. The downside is that we occasionally have to perform at church services.

Well, today was Youth Sunday or something, which means that instead of a sermon we have testimonials from teenagers, and instead of hymns we have what they call a "praise band." The handbell group was brought in to perform one song, and the rather unlikable director forced us to sit through both church services we played in rather than leaving through the back when we were done. This means we were subjected to the same testimonials twice.

I seem to remember good testimonials from my religious days. I recall people who got up there and talked about hardships and how their belief helped them get through tough times. They didn't even ask for money. But this Sunday was awful. Only one testimonial even made sense! I'll give you a hint: someone was stupid enough to put Jennings Tinsley up on the pulpit to talk about his most transcendent moment. And I had to sit through it twice!!

*shudder*

One of the other two speakers was this completely shallow girl who apparently had her faith affirmed by a bunch of vacations she took. She must have repeated this spiel about eight times: "Well, I was, like, sooooo totally overawed by my trip to the Bahamas and how much God loved me, and then he showed his love even more when I went to West Virginia, and I though that would be enough of God's love but then I went to this place with, like, the best maid service ever. Those people loved God enough to love me by making my bed every morning and cleaning up after me, and now my faith is, like, so totally strong." She actually got misty-eyed at times.

The other speaker wasn't bad at all, but she was talking about the benefits of mission trips on which teens can help the less fortunate and learn about the world around them. She didn't get into a lot of tear-jerking silliness, so I was pleased with her short and to-the-point testimonial.

Of course, through the whole second service, there was a couple in the very back row of the balcony, snogging nonstop. Disgusting.

On the bright side, the music was good. The best aspect of any religion has got to be the music. That's why I won't go into a youth group without a radiation suit, but I don't mind playing handbells at a church.

One of my few bits of wisdom that I'm really proud of is my take on religion. From what I can tell, you don't get better people in a church, and you don't get worse people in a church. Churches draw an almost 100% accurate sample of the surrounding population. You get nasty people, who enter the church to snub others. You get nice people, who enter the church to help others. You get horny people, who enter the church to snog others.

This is why I'm not fond of religion. People use it as an excuse to be what they are anyway. Even people who claim their lives were "changed" when they found religion were already looking for a reason to change their lives. If they had walked into a Buddhist temple, the result would have been no different than if they'd chosen a Southern Baptist Church. My point is that I can never entirely understand why someone would need an excuse to be themselves. The single most important difference between a religious person and someone else is that the religious person isn't confident enough to be him- or herself without some sort of outside approval.
Nick ::: 7:21 PM ::: 0 comments