Neutron Dawn Update

The first full month that Neutron Dawn was open and worked on, it has had a whopping 15,574 views.  In one day, it stood up to over 1300 views.  The most popular post was that of my review on Cube Runner Level Packs.  The next two most popular posts were my comparison of File Magnet and DataCase as well as my in depth review of DataCase.  I brought on my good friends Kerby and Ed to write about their own areas of expertise pertaining to computer culture.  Neutron Dawn is the number one search result on google for “cube runner level packs”, “datacase in depth”, and “filemagnet versus datacase”.  I’m kind of excited, but I haven’t written enough on it lately.  I guess I’m getting lazy.  Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about mostly Apple Technology, but also (eventually) mobile networking technologies and anything Ed and Kerby are interested in.

Neutron Dawn

Need.

I need to write about things.  I need to reply to things.

But I also need to sleep and do my homework.  So Friday, after 2, I shall write.  Take note.

My Place.

This is not my place.  This is hell.  (just an FYI)

Today I felt more in control.  As much as I hate this place, the classes are fine.  But!  It doesn’t matter.  If the place where I’m forced to stay, if the people I’m forced to stay with, if my activites outside of class are terrible, if they make you uncomfortable, if they aren’t home, then how am I supposed to learn?  If everything else sucks and makes me depressed, how am I going to be able to do homework?  how am I going to learn?  I don’t understand.  It makes me so tired, so sad.  Not a thing is the same.  I hate it, I don’t know how to deal with it.  I don’t know what to do.  This isn’t my home.  All of it is completely foreign to me.  All of it. None of this is my place.

I want my place back.  I want my fencing club.  I want my room.  With my bed, with my comforter, with my desk, with my closet.  I want my space.  I want my place.  I want my home.

Lost

I feel extremely lost right now.  At the end of the last school year, I had a pretty clear idea as to where I was coming from.  I knew what was going on in life, I had friends, I had events planned, I really actually felt as though I was just coming into my own.  High school was a beautiful period in my life, and I don’t want to leave it at all.  Now I’m in college, and everything I learned got totally and royally (swearing surpressed) hosed.  Now I have nothing.  I have no one that I really, truly loved spending time with.  Some good quality aquiantances and friends, don’t get me wrong-Andi and Paul for sure-but it’s not right.  These aren’t my people.  This isn’t my home.  This isn’t even what I want to study for all I know.  I’m at the point where I don’t really want to get a college degree any more, it’s not worth losing these people.

One of the worst feelings I have right now-and have ever felt-is this feeling of being trapped and even perhaps condemned to my own personal hell.  Sure, I can get off-campus, but I can’t really get home.  I can ride my bike into Muncie, but then what?  I can’t stay out there.  No, instead, I’m confined to this one tiny little section of land that I hate.  As Dante described the entrance to hell, a dark wood he came across in mid-life.  This is not mid-life.  This is some (swearing surpressed) hosed to hell version of my life-it’s not even my life.  I don’t know what it is.  I don’t know what I’m doing here.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.  I don’t know what I want to do.  I’m not sure I ever did.  I worked hard.  I did my homework, got good grades, good test scores, ate reasonably well for part of the time, other times not.  Excercized every other day at fencing, had good, strong relationships, I’d like to think helped take care of my house and dogs, and when I got around to working, put my strength into it although I didn’t like it.  I found that I could go anywhere with my job, anywhere around Lafayette, and it was nice.  When we went to the same apartment building, it was boring, but we did have the opportunity to see things that were changing.  And all the people weren’t the (swearing surpressed) gosh-darn same.   They were all different.  Different homes, different reasons, different layouts, different stains, different jobs, genders, ethnicities, and ages.  Here you’re a college kid or you’re a professor.  And @*$! the rest of them.  What kind of place is that?  How are we supposed to learn like that?

Will mentioned on my other post that no one on their deathbed ever wished he’d worked more.  Well, that’s not really what I’m wishing.  In fact, I’m wishing for the opposite.  I wish I had more time to devote to the people I love, to meeting people from all walks of life, the ability to meet the most diverse people around comes from providing a service everyone needs.  It doesn’t happen here, and thus, I hate it.  If I worked in Lafayette, at least I could spend time with my family.  The only reason I see for doing this whole stupid college deal is so that I can make money enough to take more time off to spend with my family.  But I don’t want to do anything great anymore.  (not sure I ever did).  I don’t want to figure things out.  I don’t want to dwell.  I just want to go and love those people I love to the best of my ability.

Nobody told me it was going to be this stupid.  Nobody told me it’d be this hard.  Nobody told me that I’d want to just go home more than anything else in the world.  Nobody told me that it’d kill my spirit, that it’d crush me.  Why?  Why should I be here now?  What am I getting out of this?  People keep telling me to stick it out.  At what cost?

‘What the hell am I doing here?’ as the lyrics to some song on Rock Band go (it makes me think of Ed).  Why?  Why should I be here?

Working vs. Going to School

Y’know, as much as I hated going to work, I almost felt better about going there than I do about going to school.  There, at least, I had the freedom to do things once work was over.  Work was an obligation that I really only had on a day by day basis, and there was an obvious and immediate correlation between my not working and my not eating.  I was also able to think, to act under pressure, to meet new and interesting people (more interesting and despite their swearing and smoking, almost more mature) as well as definitely more diverse.  I was able to work for a clear goal, and when I got done with work, my friends were still around to be with.  My parents were still at home.  And heck, if this were a full-time job, I might be in a less than stellar apartment, but the chances of it having air conditioning are much higher than they are here.  Also, even if I had a roommate, he’d probably have his own room!  I’d still be able to see my parents whenever I wanted, and I’d have access to a car as well as would be travelling all over the city daily instead of being stuck on this tiny little campus and the surrounding area.

Working, I had a paycheck, I had a reason, I had customers to please.  It wasn’t terribly difficult all the time, but occasionally it required hustle and called for constant readiness to get the job done fast.  I had time in the evenings and on the weekends to fence and to blog and to watch Olympics and to hang with friends.  Life was good, I could eat anywhere as long as the place was open (did you know dinner isn’t served on this stupid campus after 7:30?  I don’t usually even start eating until 7:30)  I liked working, especially with Dan, because when we got cleaning and set our minds to it, things got done.  We cleaned 15 apartments and a huge residential on my last day in about 3/4 the time it took us to clean about half as many.  It was insane, but I had a lot of fun doing that.

Also, Dan had a very interesting and diverse life story: ex-Navy, intelligence officer, been around the world, very smart.  These kids here…don’t.  You can just guess what they were.  We’re all middle to upper middle class, mostly white, fairly preppy, perhaps not as immature as other schools, but definitely not the people I like.  I love cultural variance.  I enjoy heartily talking to Julio and Jessica from yearbook, both in Spanish, I like listening to the Asiatic language being spoken, I enjoy listening to the various opinions of people who actually think, like Andrew and Will.  Purdue has a very diverse campus.  Just from the limited selection on the fencing team, I know a Russian, a Brazilian, a Brian Janeira, an all-American type fellow and everyone in between.  In my own experience fencing is the best way to meet these diverse people.  It won’t be that way here, and it makes me sad.

If I’m going to have to meet new people, I either want them to be very diverse or similar to me.  These middle of the field types hold no sway over my mind.  I want people I can love.  These people have nothing that I can see.

I hear the questions you are all gathering to launch at me.  “Have you tried meeting them?” “Do you know that for sure?”  What I do know for sure is that these people aren’t like me.  I severely miss my friends of old.

However, one of the few statements that actually comforted me was from Steve.  This is how our conversation went:

Steve: you still loose a lot of people who go different places
Me: that is true
Steve: the people who didn’t go are, like you, changed forever
college changes everything
Me: why? Why do we feel the need to change everything like that?
It makes me wonder what the benefit is
Steve: it is part of our natural growth as human beings
Me: huh
but it’s so immediate, everything gets short changed right a way.
I guess though, it’s not unlike death
Steve: you’re not wrong about that
Me: as morbid as that seems
death is just one physical exemplification of the idea
Steve: there is not slow [transition] for major change like this
Me: it’s weird
that is true
Steve: a new period in your life is now begining
it is up to you to shape it how you see fit

So I guess it’s up to me.

But if it were up to me, and not up to this governing thing called ‘money’ (I spit the word out of my mouth like too much phlegm), I would be somewhere diverse.  Somewhere with the people I love.  Somewhere where I am happy.

Somewhere, right now, not here.

I’d be at work.

Love

I’m moving tomorrow.  Well, today.

And I’ve been crying a lot.  I can’t lie about that.  But it comes mostly when I think about all these people that have influenced my life throughout these last few years, that’s what makes the tears come.  It’s like I haven’t quite realized that I’m leaving, because the people I really love aren’t gone.  They’re still here.  But now I’m leaving.  And it saddens me greatly.  I feel a huge amount of love welling up inside of me for them, everytime I think of what they’ve imprinted on me, when I recognize the ways they act or think or write in things around me or just think of times with them, it fills my heart so full of this feeling that it spills out in drops of something more than water on my face, on my hands.  I love these people so much, that it seeps out of me.  Tears are so much more than sadness.  I’m sad I’m leaving them, but it’s more than that.  The sadness springs from the love I have from them.  Without that, there wouldn’t be any sadness.  As such, I cry because of them.

I wrote a year ago about “love, and choice“.  I wrote that I loved everyone, in different ways.  This is true.  But I feel no need for a direct romantic relationship right now, and I think it’s because my heart is so full of love for these people who have influenced me and guided me and allowed me to touch their lives as well.  I don’t need to be validated.  I just want to be loved by these people that I love so much.  I could be living in a cardboard box in hell with these people and still retain a level of happiness simply because they’re around.  That’s how love makes me feel.

As much as I would like to have an adventure, as much as I might like to learn and progress in my life, these people are such to me that nothing else seems to matter.  That, to me, feels like love.  Makes sense as love.  But they still support me in moving on, I guess, WIll especially, but he’s been like that always, he favours change and learning, and meeting new people.  I’m a person who doesn’t like to let go, so this is helpful, but it also means that it clashes with me a lot.  Others have given me varying degress of comfort by saying I’ll meet new people or the sadness will only last a week or two.  Maybe, maybe not.  Some part of me wants it to last.  It means I still carry this huge amount of love in my heart.  I’ll need to move on though, at some point.  But I don’t want to.  I feel like I’m turning on them by doing so.

I have left once before, and I wanted to keep strong contact with the people I came back with, but I lost contact.  Only a select couple do I still talk to or share a connection with, and not who I’d've expected, either.  I don’t know.  I don’t want to lose these people.  I can say I don’t intend to, but I’m scared I might.

So, know this, then, Will, Ed, Kerby, Tiago, Steve, Andrew, Pavel, Rachel, Josh, Ryan, Jasmyn, Brian, Levy, Mr. Brist, Zach, Mark, Mark, Matt, Sam, Ethan, Tom, Jack, David, Pedro, Jill, Beth, Rebecca, Spencer, Jack, Emma, Megan, Chase, Justin, Jacob, and Emily, that I love you all, and my students, you make me proud, my coaches, your advice weighs far heavier with me than you might ever know, my good friends, you make life wonderful, my slightly outer friends, you make it complete, my longtime friends, you have helped me grow more than anything else, my thought-provoking friends, you’ve expanded my mind immesnley, my friends how want me to expand my mind, I love you guys all the more for the things you do that I might not, although I may not approve and do want you to be careful doing them, my friends I’ve lost and found, I’m sorry I lost you but even happier that I’ve found you, my friends that I’ve struggled, traveled, sweated, swore, fought, exhausted myself, laughed, ate, and bled with, you’re enough to make me give up everything.

and that, to me, is love.

Love always, eros, philia, storge, and agape,

Joshua

Brick Unveiled

The Story Veiled Amongst our Cool Shots and Crane Work.

One of the best and worst things about writing and directing a production of any kind is that it’s imbued with your own ideas, and those tend to be the ones that drive the project. However, when you’re like me, and you have a) an incredibly complex story b) little experience and c) a lack of skill in the department that convinces other people that you know what you’re doing and that they want to do it too.  So, in the interest of everyone who might see Brick as having another layer, you’d be right.

Some people like to say that they only intended their songs to be songs.  I think Brick is a song that was just intended to be pure emotion.  There’s a loose story, and the story is kept loose in the music video.  I call this basic storyline the “day” line.  It corresponds to reality, and you only really see the two main characters-Ben and Samantha-getting up and driving to the clinic, sitting in the clinic, and then driving home after it.  It’s not clear that they went and got an abortion; you’d have to know what the song was specifically about to understand that aspect.  And it could have come across stronger through our video, but I was loathe to make it about the abortion itself.

In Brick, the girl has already made the decision.  The man is left to wrestle with her decision and his own feelings on it, especially guilt: “it’s not me you’re dying for” and loneliness “for the moment, we’re alone.  And she’s alone, and I’m alone…”  These are the more raw emotions that the man is dealing with.  The emotions are intended to come across mostly through his scenes with the piano-the scenes that are dark and lit with the purples, pinks, and blues: darker colours, but soft colours, reminiscent of a child.  These hopefully elicit a feeling of night in the viewer, even though he’s clearly on a stage of some sort.  His emotions are most raw in the “night” storyline.  He’s alone there, he has the ability to express his heart.  He makes no effort to control it for her here.  Here, he is alone, in the dark of night.

You’ll notice that most of the rest of the video is situated within a graveyard.  You could call me morbid, but I wanted the feeling of death to be strongest in this ‘twilight’ thread of the story.  Here, things are less solid and more surreal.  The man is wandering, with no clear path.  Sometimes he sings, sometimes he’s silent: as much as twilight is the area between night and day, light and dark, this area is a transition world where he alternates between feeling strong emotions (when the music rips out of him) as well as a is burdened by a choice-the shots where he starts falling and eventually gets to the point where he sinks down against the stone wall.

The idea was that at that point he makes his decision.  At the point where he ‘breaks down’ he comes to terms with the fact that he can’t keep running from it, and, indeed, it’s already happened.  No matter how he feels about it, this character-the character in this music video-is shown running back towards her after walking away.  Read into that what you will, but I saw it as him realizing he wasn’t done yet.  Obviously they had some issues to work through but he also realized his responsiblity level and returned to her.  What happens after that?  Who knows?  We return to the dark of night where he’s still in emotional turmoil, but you’ll notice that he doesn’t return to the graveyard.  He’s made some choice.  We don’t-I don’t-know what he tells her on that street corner.  But he’s made a choice.  And that’s the last we see of the reality thread.

The final shot of the video, where Ben (Josh) walks off toward the stage and is caught up in the spinning lights and spirited away is in there because it looks cool.  But if you were to ask me post-production what it means, I might supply you with the following idea: the man sweeps off to the edge of the stage as a move, presenting himself to the world, laying open his emotions and asking to be swept away in them, which he is.  All the lights in this film-starting with the happy light of day that’s the first shot of the film and then occupying varying levels of darkness from twilight to dawn and midday even, all the way to the pink, purple, and blue lights that he’s under represent his emotions, and the general mental state of the character, sort of a mood ring, if you will.  He starts out happy, and then things get murkier, until, in the darkness, something becomes clear to him again.  The lights shine out bright in the darkness and amongst other lights, but only in the twilight is there very little actual light, only so many shades of grey.  And often choices are like that.  There comes a point, though, where there is nothing left.  Where we’re up agains the wall, and we simply choose.

Choose.  Act.  Choose again.

In one moment, your life will never be the same again.

Brick.

A production of Eternal Landscape

Written and Directed by Josh Williams, 2008

Original idea by Josh Shives

Based on the song Brick by the Ben Folds Five, 1997

Brick.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you…

A Shives, Hughes, Williams Production
An Eternal Landscape Film

Ben Folds Five

Josh Shives | Nicki Eberle

director of cinematography: Kerby Hughes
editor: Josh Williams
executive producer: Josh Shives
producer: Kerby Hughes
written and directed by Josh Williams

Brick

Special thanks to Randy Brist and Zach Smiley of the Jeff Radio-TV department and Scott “Roadie” Alhersmeyer of the Jeff Theatre Department

-for a discussion of the themes and storylines of Brick see here-

Protected: F#@k Life. (not quite what you think)

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Wow, Fencing.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: