It was for my History of East Asia course (His107 I believe), and my TA Samuel was this uber cool Taiwanese guy. For our essay, he said he would approve any and all topic ideas we had as long as it was on Japan (our focus for the semester). I was hesitant to take him up on this, but when he told us that his professor in his graduate class specializes in Godzilla, I knew I could write about something crazy. I thought of something and decided to talk to my TA about it.
Red: We can write about anything?
Sam: Yes, a student in my other class is writing her essay on Hello Kitty and Globalization.
Red: Wow!
Sam: Yeah, that’s a hell of a topic, do you have one yet?
Red: Yeah, I’m going to write about ninjas.
Sam: Ninjas?
Red: …and post-modernism? I don’t know, I’ll think of something.
It was at this point that I knew I didn’t really belong at this university.
“They got the situation, they got me facin’
I can’t live a normal life, I was raised by the strip
So I gotta be down with the hood team
Too much television watchin’ got me chasin’ dreams
I’m an educated fool with money on my mind
Got my ten in my hand and a gleam in my eye
I’m a loc’ed out gangsta, set-trippin banger
And my homies is down, so don’t arouse my anger, fool
Death ain’t nuthin but a heart beat away
I’m livin life do-or-die-a, what can I say? I’m twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-fow’?
The way things are goin’ I don’t know…“
I wish everyone knew how tempted I was to put these lyrics up as my Facebook status last week.
I feel exactly the same as I did last year. Where’s the personal growth? It’s bumming me out that I haven’t changed much. I’m not going to change my life overnight, or drop every bad habit I’ve developed over the years and start being this new Redford by tomorrow, but it would be nice if by 25 my life didn’t so closely resemble the one I’m living now. For the better of course.
And yes, it’s not as if I haven’t reached this epiphany before, and ideally, I should have thought like this 6 years ago, but there’s a weird sense of urgency that comes when people stare at you and go “wow, 24? Really?” Yeah. Fuck.
My mom’s friend recently built me a new computer but had to replace the motherboard since the company issued a recall for them. Our replacement motherboard, however, was incompatible with my computer and caused it to crash every 5 minutes. Now I’m in the process of finding a new motherboard, so I’ll be computerless until then.
You might think I would use this time wisely and study for my CSC or exercise, but I’ve been doing a whole lot of lying in my bed instead. It’s a lot less pathetic than it sounds because I finished a book and several of Joe Rogan’s podcasts while I was lying down. I’m not a deep philosophical thinker, but when I don’t have a computer to distract me I find that I spend quite a bit of time wondering about my life. Life in general actually. I feel like a chunk of my life has been spent doing things I’m “supposed” to do, and with what spare time I have left over I get to do my own thing (whatever that entails). I don’t think I have done enough of what I want to do, but the trouble with that is that I rarely know what I want to do. It’s like I was programmed to work but somewhere down the line I became self-aware and now I have to kill all humans find a real purpose in my life.
No, it’s not a quarter-life crisis. I’m starting to dislike that term because it’s too dramatic. Japan has a crisis. Libya has a crisis. We don’t know what to do with our lives, but with shelter, food, and some recreational drugs at our disposal, I’m sure we’ll arrive at an answer. It must be quite the luxury to consider that a crisis.
I was on my way home from work the other day when I met a stranger on the subway platform. He came up and asked me what my birthday was. It was odd, I’ve never been asked that by strangers before, but what the hell, I told him anyway.
“Your birthday is going to be on a Saturday this year.”
Then he asked for my mom’s birthday.
“September 22nd.”
“It’ll be on a Thursday this year.”
I took out my phone and turned to September on my calendar and there it was! Thursday September 22nd 2011! It blew my mind.
“My dad’s birthday was on January 15th.”
“That was a Saturday.”
“Did you memorize the whole calendar? This is amazing.”
“Yeah. I gotta go now this is my stop.”
And then he left. He was a bit awkward, so I’m suspecting that he was autistic, but that doesn’t take away from how incredible this was. He tried to explain the process to me, but the subway train was too loud and I couldn’t catch any of it so I just nodded and fed him more dates.
I remember watching this movie as a kid. I was 7 when the movie came out and the trailer blew my mind for 3 reasons:
1) It had Egyptian stuff. I was really into pyramids and pharaohs and stuff as a kid. I can’t really explain this, other than I liked the idea of hieroglyphics. I used to make little booklets with my own hieroglyphics in them.
2) It had Space stuff. Well, that was the impression I was under. I turned out to be quite wrong about it. Star Wars was amazing to me as a kid. Star Trek was much too slow for me to enjoy, because it didn’t have the same kind of dog fights as Star Wars did. Imagine my disappointment when I watched this film and realized that there weren’t any space fights in it at all.
3) It had Kurt Russel. I must have watched Big Trouble in Little China every day as a kid, so he was my favourite actor.
So I bugged my mom and she took me to watch this movie. I feel for my mom, because there’s no doubt in my mind that she hated this movie, but she took me to watch it anyway because that’s what moms do. It’s technically what I do now with Angelina, but I brainwashed her into liking the stuff I like, so she’ll come into my room and ask me if I want to watch some Futurama or Simpsons with her. Score!
Anyway, I’m a massive fan of trailer music (no, not country music), but there’s always a few songs that are a bitch to find because they were made specifically for the trailer. Return of the King is a prime example, because they used a song that wasn’t featured on any of the soundtracks. I had given up all hope of finding this song a few years ago when I decided to look up the trailer again to have another listen. I found out that they released a rarities archive and this was one of the tracks included on it. Seriously, it made my day.
So I decided to look for other trailer music I wasn’t able to find. There was a really cool song that they play on a lot of trailers for adventure movies and I learned that that was actually from the Stargate film!
And there we go. Which is what led me to getting the soundtrack (pretty awesome soundtrack btw), and the movie as well. I love revisiting movies, because you never know what you miss out on the first time around. I watched Lost in Translation again this year and absolutely loved it, as opposed to when I watched it in grade 12 and hated it. Can’t wait to watch this film! I’ll definitely review it (because you know, reviewing movies from 1994 is what I do).