there's no place like...

When I was 14, my family moved to Brownsville, Texas, a sleepy little border town best known for being the birthplace of Kris Kristofferson and the site of the last battle of the Civil War, in that order, and was (and I'd wager, still is) a cultural black hole for anyone looking to do more with their lives than go to the mall or slink across the border and immerse themselves in the kaleidescopic debauchery of Matamoros, Mexico. At 17 I left for college, coming back as infrequently as I could. Though my emotional connection to it was always tenuous at best, with each passing year I felt further and further removed from the city and its inhabitants. Eventually my antipathy turned into outright hostility, and I spent the hot summer days in my room, marking time until the day I could leave again.

No, not my room. The guest room. When I left for college, my parents gave my room to my sister, Sabrina. And for good reason. Sabrina and Samantha had been sharing a room since we moved. So I got the guest room -- bigger room, bigger bed, bigger TV, bigger shower, but the guest room still, filled with dried flowers and cowboy art and other vaguely Southwestern bric-a-brac. By the fourth day back I was referring longingly to California as home and no doubt breaking my poor mother's heart.

In 1999 my family woke from our collective stupor and moved back to our house in Oakland.
The room I grew up in was again given to one of my sisters -- again with good reason, this time to Samantha -- and when I came home from college I was once again shunted off into a room bedecked year-round in autumn colors and filled with wicker furniture and scented candles.

Ah! Then Japan, and my own decorative instincts -- or woeful lack -- were allowed to run wild. Not fancy, not even coherent, but definitely, unmistakably mine. Four years of accumulated J-crap covering every square inch of my apartment, from a framed 1000 yen stuffed into my shirt pocket by the head of the Owase yakuza for helping push his car to a gas station, to a 3-foot high plaster statue of the English teacher in the town just north of mine, given to me by my office for reasons that never really became clear, to a Christmas cartoon drawn by a 13 year old boy that included the words, "SANTA, I WANT THE BIG PINIS!" My room. Mine.

Then the day came that I packed as much as I could into four suitcases and returned home. My room, my old room, sat unused at the end of the hall, still filled with Samantha's effects while she was off at school -- but my parents were reluctant to let me move into it for fear of Sam feeling like she'd been squeezed out, so I moved back into the erstwhile guest room. I did my best to decorate it, going so far as to fill the shelves of my desk with the a bunch of j-trinkets -- a plastic diorama of level 1 from Super Mario Brothers here, a miniature bust of Stalin there. That, combined with the inevitable pile of laundry and bedsheets on the floor, and the room began to feel like home.

It was, in fact, the process of rooting through crates of my old stuff for things to further solidify the mine-ness of my room that, choked with something I thought was nostalgia but turned into something more, I came across a box of 8-mm films I'd made in college. A month later I was sleeping on my sister's floor in New York. You know the rest. I planned to stay there through the holidays, not because I particularly wanted to spend Christmas and New Year's cold and alone but because returning to Oakland for the second time in less than two months without having found a paying job felt like an admission of defeat. But then my parents bought me a ticket, and I was give the choice of coming to California or saying that I simply didn't want to come home -- not something you want to drop on your mom and dad a week before Christmas.

So, I came home to find myself sleepin in a room that has again been transformed into a khaki and burnt umber panic attack. My stuff has been crammed into boxes and thrown into a closet, while the room down the hall -- the room I grew up in, the room I still think of as irrevocably, fundamentally mine -- is now Sarah's, having moved back home to live rent free while busting her ass at law school. Home for me now is a rickety futon and inflatable mattress on a floor in Spanish Harlem. So it will be, at least for a little while.

And so, the lesson relearned. You can't go home again, and again, and again.

Why, lo! I mop well! -- Who will employ?

Reading over my blog so far, it strikes me that it has become less a chronicle of my time in New York City than a long list of humiliations, embarrassments and failures. Still, there's no denying that humiliation, embarrassment and failure are an integral part of the New York Experience, and they make for far more interesting reading than a bland retelling of what time I got up, what I ate for lunch, who I slept with, or how I'm feeling. But sometimes the unending wave of serio-comic tragedy that has thus far characterized my time in this city gets the better of me, and as much as I'd like to jump on the two-point-oh-happy bandwagon and blog about how OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1, I actually find it necessary to process my complex and contradictory emotional psychoscape like a healthy, normal, functional goddamn human being. And sometimes I just want to talk about what I did today.

Luckily for everyone, today was a conflation of the two -- I can manage my frustrations through obsessive listing and categorization, and you can take some small pleasure out watching me squirm beneath this city's thumb. Hurrah!

OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1 With no end to the writers' strike in sight, film and television production is at a stand-still, which means that any cachet my plucky-30-year-old-moves-to-the-big-city-to-start-all-over narrative buys me is being eroded on a daily basis. When you're on a set asking people for any leads on paying work having just flown into town the night before, you look like a fucking champ. When you're calling up those same people for those same leads a month into the most acrimonious, industry-shaking work stoppage in memory, you just look like an asshole with terrible timing.

And so today I took it upon myself to find a job. Rode the 6 train to Union Square around noon and resolved not to return home without some form of employment, however low-paid or debasing. By 12:30, there were a few important caveats:

1. I will not be a hot dog/pretzel/kebab vendor.
2. I will not sell DVDs on the subway, however hot/new the releases.
3. I will not busk.
4. I will not work anywhere that requires me to wear a hat of any kind.
5. I will not expose myself for money. For money.
6. I will not work anywhere that boasts of its number of locations, nor will I work anywhere that I can see two or more of without turning my head.
7. I will not work anywhere that requires me to remain behind bullet-proof anything.
8. I will not work anywhere that has punctuation in the name.

So, short of the myriad other jobs I am simply unqualified for, like lawyer or professional banking millionaire, the wide field of potential employers was quickly narrowed to bookstores, bars and coffee shops. Each has its relative advantages and disadvantages, but they all share one important thing in common: they are all, in the end, far too depressing to consider working there full-time. Plus I need to keep my schedule flexible so I can, I dunno, dick around. Write. Whatever. The dream is safe.

I. Coffee Shops

Advantages: Cute tattooed chicks, free caffeine, access to cork boards filled with information on improv workshops, open-mic nights, one-woman shows and classical guitar lessons.

Disadvantages: Low pay, incessant clicking of laptop keys.

Snobbery Level: Medium to High

The money isn't the best, but it's the only job I've ever held that was absolutely, irrefutably, cause-and-effect responsible for getting me laid. She and I were working the special midnight to 6 am shift during finals at USC. I was 19, it was late, we were alone and she was kind of crazy. One thing lead to another lead to a bit of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. So far so good, but I heard she tried to kill herself my senior year, which is why thinking back on it fills me less with the manful pride of the conquerer than with terrible, creeping guilt. Am I right, fellas?!


II. Bars

Advantages: Cute drunk chicks, free alcohol, tips, the irony of having been a drug and alcohol counselor AND a bartender within a year too sweet to pass up.

Disadvantages: Even nice bars reek of piss and vomit, don't own any skin-tight black shirts, couldn't mix a Cosmopolitan to SAVE. MY. LIFE.

Snobbery Level: <scoff> Is that how you always dress?

The advantages are considerable, but almost half of the bars I walked into require a headshot before the manager will even speak to me. And while the idea of a job where it is not only acceptable, but expected for you to be drunk at work is almost too good to be true, there's some small part of me that thinks it probably is. Plus, I don't know if I could bring myself to serve any thing with more than two words in the name or "-tini" affixed to the end.


III. Bookstores

Advantages: Cute nerdy chicks, free books, can say "Oh, well, that's Kierkegaard for you," and not have anyone call me on my bullshit.

Disadvantages: Air of quiet desperation, tried to hire me before I even asked for a job.

Snobbery Level: Can you start right now? How about tomorrow? Maybe you should fill out two applications, just to be safe.

Like most writers (or rather, like most people who tell people they're writers to make their unemployment seem noble) I love bookstores. My favorite used to be Book Soup on Sunset in L.A. I applied for a job there right after college, made it through the interview, and passed the drug and lie-detector(!) tests. I was set to start work the next week. That was on September the 10th. Then guess what happened? Maybe I should work at a bookstore just to stick it to Osama and finally even the score.

It started getting dark around five. With no job and no real solid leads I was feeling pretty rotten and decided to head home. On the way to the station I passed another intern on The Show Which I Am Contractually Forbidden From Naming. I told him I was walking around looking for a job, and we talked for a few minutes about unemployment and its general suckiness. I'm just a set intern, so I only go in on days we shoot. He's been doubling as an office intern, which means he is getting not paid to do five times the work. Or was. Turns out he was fired from the show last week. By Rosemary. He seemed reluctant to say more, but I said a few unkind words about her myself and he relaxed. Then he said a curious thing: "I thought you guys were friends." I assured him we aren't.

"Really? She talks about you all the time."

Suck it, Rosemary.

dream a little dream of me

When I was in junior high school I spent a lot of time in the school library. Not in the studious, bookish way, but in the mopey, bad at sports way. Read a lot of Stephen King. That kind of way.
And as a kid who spent a lot of off-hours at the library (splitting my time between there and the band hall -- that kind of way) I was witness to a bit of behind-the-scenes action. I knew which students won the contest to come up with a slogan to increase interest in reading days before it was announced at a school assembly (one of whom was yours truly -- that kind of way). I knew that Bart Simpson had been elected both president and vice-president of the student body, but that Mr. Lorenzen decided to award the positions to Angela and April, the two twins who'd received the second- and third- most votes respectively, rather than hold a re-vote. I heard my science teacher Mrs. Keane admit to another teacher that the graffiti mural that had been sprayed onto the side of the auditorium one weekend and had been painted over despite overwhelming student protest was "Really fucking cool." And I remember that there were two books banned from the library, and that I was an accomplice in enforcing -- and subsequently undermining -- the ban on the second.

The first book was The Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks spin-off that contained descriptions of, among other things, the titular prom queen being raped by a ghost. Needless to say, the complex Lynchian meditation on sexuality, voyeurism and the fluid nature of identity was lost on the dick-dumb 13 year olds passing the book back and forth beneath their desks and breathlessly scouring the pages for the word "pussy."

Banned.

The second book to be removed from the Montera Junior High School library was The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams. It was, as the name suggests, a guide for decoding the various signs and symbols from your dreams, but with a special emphasis on the dreamer being gay. Naked in public? Gay. Missed a test? Gay. Was there water in your dream? Gay. Did a little girl say something to you in your dream? Gay. Were there stairs? Gay. Were you having sex with that girl from your pre-algebra class while Mrs. McCabe ran around the room setting everything on fire? Gay. And weird. Of course none of us really knew what gay was, except that it had something to do with the reason we all covered our dicks with our hands when we walked past Mr. Miller in the locker room, and why we all kind of snickered whenever Mr. Black referred to his "wife."

And so it was, that The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams (I swear to god that was the title) caused a number or problems for students and teachers alike, and I was in the library when the decision was made by the librarian, who seemed genuinely upset at the prospect, to remove it from the shelves. Unfortunately it wasn't where it was supposed to have been, so she asked me to help her look for it. I dug through a pile of returned books while she looked through the stacks. I found it and, after debating it for a few minutes, dutifully turned it in. She thanked me, put it on her desk, and went about her business. I wondered what was to become of it, and left.

Word soon spread that the book had disappeared, to the chagrin of the bullies and the relief of the bullied. The prevailing opinion was that it had been stolen, probably by some rules-flaunting badass, and I was hesitant to reveal my role in what was the decidedly non-badass truth -- less out of shame in being a tool of literary censorship than in ruining the fun. A couple of days later I was back in the library and saw the book sitting unattended on the librarian's desk. I stole it, along with a book on how to make sound effects with your mouth, written by that one guy who wasn't Michael Winslow. It was the first time I'd ever stolen something. I felt horrible.

The idea was to use the book (the former, not the latter) as leverage to boost my cred, but I made the mistake of letting my friend Robert McKnight borrow it. The next day I saw him in the hallway at school, holding the book and bragging to a bunch of people that he'd been the one who'd stolen it. And so it goes.

Eventually the novelty of the book wore off, replaced by pages ripped from Playboy and Penthouse and decidedly seedier fare, but from time to time I've thought back on it and decided that it must have been some sort of elaborate joke -- like those gag books that say "All I Know About Women" on the cover and are filled with blank pages. Still, every once in a while I'll wake up from a particularly confounding dream and wonder to myself, what would The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams say about that one? You know what? I think I already know.

Then there are dreams that are so obvious, so head-slapping blatant that, to paraphrase my friend Joe, you wake up kind of mad at yourself. Late for football practice, naked in public, that sort of thing.

And so, the point at last.

Last night I had a dream that I was back in school, taking a math test I hadn't studied for. I then realized that I was at least a decade older than all of the other students in the class. I stood up to tell the teacher that I must be in the wrong room, but she said she wouldn't speak to me until I put some clothes on. I asked where I could get some clothes, but she told me there was no time, because I had to solve all of the equations in order to defuse the nuclear missile headed our way.The kids started crying, and she told them to hide beneath their desks while I hurried to finish the test. Of course, it turns out I was also illiterate, so I tried to squeeze beneath my desk, but it was a children's desk and I couldn't fit. The missile exploded outside the window and I was caught in the blast. I survived, but I knew I'd been poisoned. No time to worry about that, because there was an army of faceless robots walking toward us across the rubble. I told the kids in the class to hide in the shadows, then realized that was a terrible idea and that's the first place they'd look. If I didn't do something everyone would be killed and it would all be my fault, so I came up with the idea to sing the national anthem in order to distract the robots and to inspire everyone to rise up and fight. I stood up and started singing, but everyone was staring at me, and I got nervous and forgot the lyrics. Suddenly the robot leader morphs into Condoleeza Rice, and challenges me to a sword fight. I said that that was completely unfair because robots can't be hurt by swords, but nobody was listening. I screamed and screamed that robots can't be hurt by swords, everyone knows that! But the kids around me just keep telling me not to let them down. Then I woke up.

Dreams are an important window into our own subconsciousness, and are a way to defuse the various stresses and anxieties built up within us. I just wish my subconscious didn't think I was such an idiot.

"...because if I don't say something, who will?"

Well, the big day has come and gone, and I'm sitting in a cafe still fighting off the last of a hangover that, all things considered, is blessedly mild. My original plan of staying at home and eating a turkey sandwich in the dark didn't pan out like I'd hoped, and I instead went out to Brooklyn to celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional manner.

I met up with Cat, an old college friend whom the past six years have seem to have left untouched, save for her hair, now a decidedly un-Asian blond. Cat's roommate, boyfriend, boyfriend's brother and boyfriend's mother rounded out the night, and though I didn't know any of them, they broke out a bottle of Glen Livet and the scotch made us all fast friends. Dinner: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans. Talked a little about the state of the world but couldn't pin down each other's political bent and so kept things vague. Moved on to movies and literature. Cat's roommate likes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and No Country For Old Men and is pretty. Her boyfriend's brother has a copy of Moby Dick on his bookshelf, but also owns Spiderman 3 on DVD. By the time dinner was over we'd emptied a few wine bottles and I'd move back to the scotch. Fast friends.

Then the Scrabble board came out.

I'll get right to it: "reteed" is a word. It is the past tense of retee, which means "to place upon a tee again". As in, the wind blew my ball off the tee, so I reteed it. Then I used my club to beat the editor of the Official Scrabble Dictionary so savagely that his own children couldn't recognize him.

Now, I am a man of many inconsequential but nonetheless fervently held beliefs, and chief among them is this: Scrabble, like life, is so much more about the spirit of the law than the letter. If reteed steals bread to feed his family, then truly, what crime has he committed? If reteed withholds ten percent of his taxes to protest the war in Iraq, or uses the copy machine at work to make copies of fliers for his band, or doesn't wait for the light to change before dashing across the street to pull a child from a burning building, there are some who'd stamp their feet and shake their fingers and wave the scrabble dictionary in his face and call him a rule-breaker -- and though they may be right in the strictest sense, their stubborn adherence to such arbitrary and unjust rules flies in the face of the very social fabric that those rules are meant to protect.

I'm not saying that reteed can go around planting evidence on people he knows are guilty to guarantee a conviction, or that his drinking problem can be overlooked because he isn't hurting anyone other than himself. Addiction hurts everybody. Reteed is a really great guy in a lot of ways, and yeah, he's charming, he doesn't go around starting fights, he never drinks in front of his kids. Look, we can go around all day coming up with a list of reasons why we can look the other way, but it falls upon those of us who care the most about him to take a long, hard look at the situation. If we hesitate because it's uncomfortable or embarrassing, then we don't deserve to call ourselves his friends.

My point is this: reteed is a word. In fact, it is so obviously, irrefutably a word that I grabbed the Official Scrabble Dictionary from Cat's boyfriend's brother's grubby little hands and called the phone number for the National Scrabble Association, which they'd listed -- foolishly -- on the copyright page. After navigating the computerized menu for a few minutes I was directed to the voice mail of marketing coordinator Katie Schultz and left a reasoned, articulate and almost entirely profanity-free explanation of why reteed should be included in the next printing of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. (I did drop an F-bomb toward the end, but I was caught up in the moment and immediately corrected myself). And just to show I wasn't fucking around, I left my real name and real number just in case she wanted to discuss the matter further. That reteed isn't included among words officially recognized by the Scrabble people is an injustice, but it will compounded immeasurably if if their mistake is left uncorrected.

I'm waiting on the call.

not with a bang, but a meh

As with most soon-to-graduate fifth year seniors, I spent my last semester of college not taking things very seriously. A go-nowhere internship at a third-rate production company and a disastrous string of PA gigs on z-grade indie flicks, coupled with my increasing focus on writing, and by the time my last semester rolled around I knew - knew! - that a career in film wasn't for me. My resolve was further solidified by a class called CTCS 466.

CTCS 466 was -- and, part of me hopes, still is -- the hot-damn end-all-be-all of blow-off classes. Taught (and I use the term as sarcastically as possible) by Leonard Maltin, it consisted of watching a movie that hadn't been released in theaters yet, then watching The Maltin bring on a guest speaker involved with the production and hold court over a sycophantic, uninsightful Q&A. Think Inside the Actor's Studio, but instead of James Lipton fawning over Sharon Stone's brave character-decisions in Gloria, it's Leonard Maltin fawning over the DP for AntiTrust. It was, in short, the perfect opportunity for a disillusioned film student to hone his contempt for the pomp and pretense of the industry to a stabbing point. My time in the class was one long, slow eyeroll, but there are three distinct memories I'd like to share.

The first is of Ron Livingston, who starred in a movie called Two Ninas. The movie had been listed in the curriculum as Two Ninjas, and when The Maltin informed us of the error the collective groan of disappointment was comically loud. After the screening Ron came out and answered our questions and was just an all-around cool guy. Afterward me and my friend Jen Bradwell went up to him and asked if he wanted to go drinking with us and our friends. And yeah, yeah, we were both kind of stoned, but it just felt right. He laughed and said that he was flying to New York that night but that he totally would've come out if he were sticking around. And you know what? I think he would've.

My second memory, and one perhaps more nakedly indicative of my mentality at the time, was the screening of Shrek. This was about a month before it was released in theaters, and none of us had any clue that it would become such an embarrassingly prominent pop-cultural landmark, let alone spawn two sequels which, I can only assume, saw a further drop in what the produders no doubt laughingly referred to as quality. As with most of the movies we watched, I didn't particularly care for it, but I was less bothered by the movie itself than by the guffawing, hillbilly adulation it inspired in the rest of the class. After the screening the two co-directors and a couple of animators came out for the Q&A and were warmly received by the audience. And for good reason, because they were funny and charming and very unpretentious and eager to talk about something they'd clearly worked very hard on. Comments from the class were of the "Omigosh, your movie was SOOO great!" variety which only irritated me further, so I raised my hand. The Maltin called on me, and I had an exchange with one of the directors that went something like this:

Me: Yeah, question. Did you guys choose the music yourself, or was there pressure put on you from outside?

Director: No, we chose the music ourselves.

Me: Because there were parts where it seemed like more of a marketing decision than a creative one. Setting a montage to "You're A Rockstar" seems, I dunno, a bit calculating and obvious.

Director: I, uh...

Me: It just doesn't feel like the choice of someone who, y'know, cares about the creative integrity of the project.

Director: That's your opinion, I guess.

In the excruciatingly awkward silence that followed, I heard someone behind me mutter, "Jeez, what an asshole." And shit, he was right.

My third memory, and by far the one that left the most lasting impression, was the very last class of the semester. With graduation and the terrifying prospect of life after college coiled next to us in the high grass, we piled into the theater one last time to see a movie directed by a recent USC graduate, some weird sci-fi flick that hadn't even found a distributer and that they were probably screening as a personal favor for an alumni. That movie was Donnie Darko.

I find Donnie Darko difficult to talk about, because I've never been able to separate myself from the mute, thunderstruck wonder I felt seeing it for the first time. The one thing I'd learned in film school, the one hard lesson I'd been bludgeoned with again and again, was that the mighty fortresses of personal vision invariably crumbles beneath the thousand kinds of compromise -- but here I was, faced with living proof that a personal vision, and one so demented and bizarre, could not only live to see the light of day, but flourish, and in one fell swoop, a movie nobody had ever heard of came along and knocked me on my ass. Quite simply, Donnie Darko left me speechless.

Or rather, almost speechless.

The director, Richard Kelley, came out to tepid and uncertain applause -- a far cry from the rapturous reception that greeted the director of A Knight's Tale, though perhaps the comparison is unfair. Nobody seemed sure of what to ask him, and after a few awkward minutes, The Maltin called for one last question. I raised my hand, grabbed the microphone from the usher, and said what, in my head, sounded like the following:

"Mr. Kelley, though I have grown disillusioned and cynical about the film industry and find myself on the verge of abandoning my plans to pursue film as a career, I feel I must say to you now with a sincerity so deep and pure that it scares me a little, that your film touched me in a way that no other film has. It is something that, until this very moment, I believed to be a cruel fiction: a film borne of a complex, powerful, and uncompromising personal vision. Nay, sir, not merely vision, but something deeper and longer-lasting. I hesitate to use the word "genius", because to do so would be an injustice to the towering monument of your work. And though it pains me greatly to clothe in such drab, clumsy words the glorious feeling that stirs even now in my chest (O! this pain twin to that of the fool who stares too longly at the sun!) I must speak now, or forever curse my stubborn tongue. I ask sir, humbly, that I be allowed to do your whatever bidding you deem fit, to be near you that I may sup on whatever scraps you may carelessly toss my way, to witness first-hand the strange alchemy by which you conjured light and sound and with it transformed mere celluloid into something so rich and sublime. There is no task too menial, no abuse I will not gladly endure if it means obtaining some small window through which I may spy upon the glorious mechanism of your brilliance. Sir, I prostrate myself before you. I am your humble servant."

Clearly this would have been embarrassing enough, had the movie not reduced me to a babbling wreck and mangled my wide-eyed admiration into something that sounded more like this:

"Uh, yeah, I, um...it's just that...wow, you know. Great, and just like wow. Movie, uh...can I, like, uh...you know, boxes, lifting boxes or whatever, see how it's done, see myself firsthand, how it's, y'know, it's like, really, really great. Also, can I have a job?"

His response was what you might expect, something to the effect of "Sorry dude, I can't really hook you up with a job right now." I thanked him and sat down, too blinkered to be embarrassed until, as everyone was shuffling out of the theater, a football player slapped me on the back and told me that it took balls to beg for a job in front of 200 people. From time to time I have thought about that moment and cringed, less out of a sense of personal embarrassment than out of a frustration that my sincere and profound fondness for it, however clumsily communicated, should have been mistaken for mere ass-kissery.

Cut to six years later, and it was with impossibly high expectations that I went and saw Richard Kelley's much-delayed and much-maligned sophomore effort, Southland Tales. It is, put simply, a convoluted and embarrassing mess that suffers not from lack of vision, but from an overabundance of it. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself -- or would be one balanced, at least partially, by sheer audacity and scope -- were Southland Tales not at heart merely a thematic retread of the ideas that drove Donnie Darko. But all the mindfuck talk of time-traveling souls and wormholes and wounds in the fourth dimension and the general sense of apocalyptic dread, which worked to such startling effect in the latter, come across as such pretentious, incomprehensible gobbeldygook in the former. The big ideas that drive Donnie Darko work because they collide with such a small film. Donnie Darko can be about the end of the world because, at heart, it's really just about one very troubled boy. But when Richard Kelley uses those same big ideas to tell a story about the end of the world that is so stiflingly, literally about the end of the world, the result is a frustrating wreck -- an enigma, to be sure, but sadly one that hardly seems worth the effort to sift through.

And yet aside from my disappointment, there's a symmetry to it all that I find comforting. Donnie Darko was a bittersweet goodbye kiss on my way out the door, a small reminder of what, exactly, I was giving up. Now I'm back in town, and Donnie has grown bloated and slow, and made one too many bafflingly ill-conceived casting decisions (Jon Lovitz? Really?). It's the guilty comfort you feel after running into a girl who dumped you and then, in the intervening years, went a little bit nuts. It wasn't satisfaction, it wasn't schadenfreude; but it was some kind of omen, a small but subtle sign that, fuck it, at least I'm on the right track. I left the theater and decided to walk the whole way back to E 119 from Times Square. It was cold and starting to drizzle, but by the time I got home I was whistling.

Well , they say it's your birthday...

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in the third grade. Being a shy and easily embarrassed third grader, I kept the fact of my imminent bespectacledness a secret from my classmates until the morning I showed up to school wearing the set of frames that, after two hours of careful inspection, I concluded would provide the least ammunition for mockery and derision (incorrectly, as it turns out -- but that's a different, much more painful story).

It was the middle of third period by the time my glasses were ready, and when my mom dropped me off at school I put them on, summoned all the courage a shy, easily embarrassed third grader could muster, and walked into class. My feeling of maybe-it-won't-be-so-badness deflated the moment I set foot through the door as 20 heads whipped around to better gawk at the bulky gray plastic frames on my face. I could hear the shocked giggles percolating in my classmates' throats as I hurried to my desk, and I hadn't even put my backpack down when someone shouted out, "Hey, four eyes!"

Here's the thing. It was my teacher, Ms. Holan.

The first person to make fun of my glasses was my third grade teacher.

The day progressed as one might expect, with a seemingly endless parade of teacher-sanctioned jeers and name-calling. I spent most of the day with my head on my desk, desperately fighting back tears in an attempt to salvage some small scrap of what, at 9, I was beginning to recognize as dignity. Things finally began to wind down by the time school ended (though it erupted into glorious, blinding new life the next day when Alonzo Davis screamed into the side of my face that the glasses had a picture of Brainy Smurf at the temple -- but again, that's another matter entirely). The moment the bell rang I grabbed my backpack and bolted for the door before anyone else was even out of their seat. Ms. Holan barked at me to sit back down. Then, after releasing the rest of the class, she called me over to her desk, folded her arms, and told me I had a bad attitude.

I say all of this to say thus: that even at the tender age of 9, I knew a goddamn setup when I saw one.

Which brings us to yesterday.

Yesterday was my birthday, and instead of spending a rainy Wednesday dicking around my sister's apartment, I got up early and went out to the set in Brooklyn. The day went by smoothly. I discretely mentioned to a couple of people that it was my birthday and let the buzz build on its own. Wrap around 8pm, out comes the cake and a mercifully unharmonized rendition of Happy Birthday. Everyone is collectively impressed that I came in for an unpaid internship on my birthday. I shrug. Yeah, well, y'know.

The lovefest came to an end, and on my way out I was stopped by the associate producer. Let's call her Rosemary. Rosemary, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, has become increasingly antagonistic toward me since my arrival, to the point where she doesn't so much as look at me when I say hello. It's all very weird and uncomfortable -- all the more because I am absolutely dumbfounded as to where it comes from. Even so, it all felt very familiar as she pulled me aside, folded her arms, and told me I have a bad attitude. C'mon, you know this one. All together now.

I could only gape in dumbfounded wonder as she proceeded to accuse me of being, among other things, lazy, uncooperative, unenthusiastic, and disrespectful, the examples of which were baseless and vague, phrased thusly:

"Now, I'm not going to go into specifics here, but one time I asked you to do X, and you were all like, psssh."
"I'm not going to sit here and run through a list, but when I asked you to do Y you, like, hesitated for a second."
"One thing I won't do is dig up a bunch old stuff, because we're both adults. But I told you to pick up Z and, like, I got the feeling you thought it was beneath you."

I can't stress enough that all of this is utter nonsense. I have never balked at doing any work, I have never said so much as a cross word, and I have sure as shit never been all like psssh. But I stood there, growing quietly angrier and more confused as she listed each supposed wrong and perceived slight, and on my birthday no less. By the time she admonished me to think carefully about whether or not I want to continue to work on the show, I could do little more than assure her through clenched teeth that, in fact, I do.

And so I rode the slow train home, fists jammed sullenly into pockets, as the hot flower of righteous indignation bloomed inside my chest. By the time I got home I'd come to three important realizations. The first is that, as the low man on the film industry's totem pole, I am subject to Rosemary's every arbitrary whim and insecurity-fueled power trip. The second is that, if I want to continue to work on this or any other show, I have no choice but to stand there and take it. And the third?

This girl totally wants to fuck me.

cigarette butts and zombie unitards

The life of an unpaid intern goes something like this

-Wake up shivering on the linoleum floor of your sister's apartment at 7 am, huddled beneath the travel case for your bass which, fully unzipped, barely fits over both arms, providing just enough warmth to make you feel like you're being mocked.

-Pile on a bunch of clothes and hustle down to the subway. Get on the right train going in the wrong direction.

-Arrive at the studio! Have everyone remember your name! Feel a surge of Fuck Yeah!

-Find yourself minutes later scouring the sidewalk in front of the studio for cigarette butts to fill up an ashtray in one of the shots.

-Tell yourself as your hands overflow with gritty, damp filter ends, to think of this as character building.

-Stride -- stride! -- up to the head of the art department with a mountain of cigarette butts spilling from your cupped hands.

-Stand there for a moment and wonder what you should do with the butts after the director steps over, looks at the pile in your hands, and turns his nose up at them because they look too dirty.

-Throw the pile in the garbage, then go make more coffee.

Yes, the duties of a pushing-30 intern on a stoner-friendly TV show are many, and unpaid. Still, when I made the decision to return to film-and/or-television, I told myself that it was not only important, but necessary, to start at the bottom.

Standing in front of a green screen while a man in an Italian leather jacket tells you that the muddy pile of trash in your hands is too dirty is the bottom.

This episode of the show I'm working on features an Internet Zombie attack. An Internet Zombie attack is like a Regular Zombie attack, but for the fact that the zombies are all wearing silver unitards. I jump at the chance to be an extra because it meant that the only trash I'd have to touch would be the actress I was chasing.

Count it.

Needless to say this was my first time wearing a unitard, and as such I'd never heard of a dance belt. (Actually, I'd heard the term used as a punchline on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I didn't get it, but I laughed anyway. Ah, the folly of youth.) A dance belt, for those of you who have never had the pleasure of wearing a unitard on a soon-to-be nationally televised internet-themed comedy program, is a swathe of fabric used to mask the contours of the wearer's naughty bits. I, being among the uninitiated, walk on set with the smothered tangle of my junk protruding from the otherwise smooth, sexless contours of my unitard. The director positions me and my fellow extras behind the actress and we run through the shot a couple of times, then get ready for a take. He calls action, we sink into our best zombie slouch and lurch toward the camera.

All of a sudden the director calls cut and announces that he can see my penis. The man who moments before had given me the business about the dirty junk in my hands is now giving me the business about the dirty junk in my tights. He phrases it more delicately than that, but his tact is somewhat offset by the fact that he announces it to a room full of people. Cue a five-minute pow-wow between the director, producer, DP, and various other interested parties, about whether or not the visibility of my man-bits was a problem.

It is ultimately decided that, because this show will be viewed by the children of America, I should be strategically positioned behind a waist-high wall. We get the shot, and the children of America are safe.

And so I come to the larger point: that no matter how bad you're feeling, no matter how put-upon, overlooked or underused, having an entire room full of people talking about your penis -- no, not merely talking about it, talking about how dangerous it is -- will lift your spirits quick-smart.

Welcome to Blogtown, Population: This guy

Well, I've gone and done it. For years now I've carefully cultivated a sense of superiority over the blog-mad Web two-point-o-izens, pruned it and protected it and watched with almost paternal satisfaction as it bloomed into a beautiful, smug little flower.

But times they are, uh...well shit, a-changin', and it dawned on me that the smug prick who stares down his nose at bloggers in 2007 is the smug prick who stared down his nose (or over the collar of his vintage peacoat) at people who didn't buy vinyl records in 1997. Get with the times, pops.

Of course, all of this is needless preamble to one plain truth: the masturbatory self-regard that is the lifeblood of all bloggers -- among whose needy, self-important ranks I must now, it seems, count myself -- has become too much for me to bear alone. And so it falls upon you, dear reader (christ who am I kidding, mom and dad) to bear the brunt of my uninformed opinions, half-baked social commentary and miscellaneous, inarticulate rambling. But I mean, y'know. Over the internet. Web 2.0, etc.

At the end of the day my blog (short, as most of you know, for "web-blog", itself an acronym from the German Welfureinkreutzbuchen Braunleibeolandergreunblog) will serve as a record of my time in New York, and a much-needed substitute for the biannual Here's-everything-I've-been-doing for-the-last-two-years-crammed-into three-long-paragraphs-by-the-way-I-hope-everyone's-well emails I'd bang out on a slow day in the office in Japan. Now you can have front-row tickets to this carnival of the mundane: watch the inexorable transformation from spangle-eyed emigre to jaded New Yorker in real time! Web 2.0!

If I learned one thing from my time in Japan, it's this: you better share the weird shit while the shit's still weird. In the beginning, even the basest, most innocuous example of J-weird would spurn hours of heated emailing. By the end of my fourth year, however, even the sight of a video clip of a woman shooting baby eels out of her lady-junk barely warranted a tired sigh. And that's a goddamn shame.

So, let this web-blog stand as a corrective, lest the eel-infested vaginae of the world go unheralded. Huzzah!

B.W.