All Amanda Can Jet

We’re leaving, getting in the truck and driving back to the hotel we’ve been living in. He lights a cigarette, rolling down the window six inches to let the smoke out, and we roar out onto the road, faster than necessary for no reason at all other than to delight me, I suspect. 

The radio immediately begins to play Young Folks, and so he turns it up and says, “I’m really feelin’ this song right now.” I say something soft in agreement and try not to take any of this to heart.  It’s dark out here, fog just at the edges of sight, farm land rolls past with some small houses but mostly just blackened fields. 

After a minute, I realize that I’m perfectly content in a way I haven’t been for a while and I continue to wonder if he’s going to say anything about what will happen next.  In a few minutes, it turns out there’s a space for it, a space for the asking.  I wait, and he does not say anything. 

I got sent an album to review, and the link to the website held this appropriate salutation.

The Mondrian, 11.13.10

Prepping the pedals.

• I leave the house early to make sure I beat traffic, I figure I can write at Susina Bakery before the movies start. To my right there’s a man and a woman having an Italian lesson.  He speaks fluently, his hair on anyone else would be an insane Robert Pattinson satire, but on him it’s just appropriate.  She wants to sleep with him, I can tell. Anywhere else in the country she’d be the prettiest girl in the room, but this is the heart of Los Angeles and everyone here is the prettiest girl in the room and he is suitably unimpressed.  

• I pick up my laptop to move to a different table and the woman to my left warns me kindly that there’s a new kind of software out there that people are using to get into other people’s computers.  I stare at my seven year old 12-inch PowerBook and think “Well, if they want about a hundred pictures of Out of Africa and about a hundred really terrible short stories, they are welcome to them.”  I listen to her warning for about a minute and try to thank her as nicely as I can, because she’s trying to be nice, and not crazy.

• This is what Los Angeles calls 1) compact and 2) parking.

I think today is the day everyone gets their EBT money, judging by the shopping carts around me at the Food 4 Less. I was genuinely surprised as it was ten in the morning on a Thursday and everyone around me was buying huge cartloads of food, like we were all in the early stages of a disaster film. I’m there to buy detergent and as I’m perusing the selection, two boys walk past me.

A: We used to make meth but it got too complicated so now we just like push weed.

B: Yeah man. That makes sense.

Does it? Does that makes sense?

I haven’t exactly been… how you say… excelling with my grad studies this semester, and as such I received a very sternly worded email yesterday advising me to keep it up and see what happens.

When you’re unemployed a freelance writer there isn’t a whole lot to do after you’ve sent out inquiry e-mails and written your work, so I find myself going to the gym every single day for longer and longer periods of time without noticing. I spent two hours at the gym today, walking and reading.  This isn’t a ra-ra me moment, this makes me a little sad that I’m not feverishly doing my work.  All in good time. However.  I have to read essentially 75 young adult books/magazines/manga in the two weeks. Since yesterday at this time, I have read three.  I checked out seven manga and two books today, and I intend to go back to the library every day and check out as many as I can feasibly read in one day. 

I like my routine.  Gym, across the street to the enormous central branch of the Public Library downtown, then home to read for hours.  And if I can read at the gym, even better as it’ll make the time pass.

There was a girl I started following because she posted lots of pictures of Alex James.  She was the sort of tumblr-er who ruined your Google reader, because you’d clear it out and come back at lunch and she’d have posted something like 150 times.  Most of it was that sort of slick posturing people do when they are socially awkward and say things like “Haters gonna hate!” about everything they do?  People who actively try to put themselves on the outside, even though everyone is cool with them being on the inside.

Little by little I got drawn into her life, she was alone at college somewhere in Canada, she didn’t have many friends or much money and seemed to spend most of her time, well, tumblring. She overshared like I’ve never seen, a new and frightening brand of overshare that could only be the work of someone who had always had the Internet. What disturbed me the most was the fact that she was having unprotected sex with a guy in this band she would go see. I could almost read the subtext, like she didn’t want to ask him to use protection because that might make him not want to sleep with her.  This didn’t happen just one time, she kept doing it, and making these graphic posts about how it was and how she couldn’t find morning after pills anywhere OH WELL.  She used the dude’s name and his band’s name quite liberally, so anyone could have found him easily.

I got worried. I thought about writing her a note, like one of those It Gets Better deals, only about how sleeping with a dude who doesn’t give a crap about you is a bad life move in the end.  About how she was going to end up pregnant or diseased which was going to be expensive no matter what she did. About how there were other ways to be.  But this, of course, was not my place and as I was still deciding what I should do, I forgot about it for a while.

A few days ago I realized she hadn’t posted in a while, and after looking around, I see that her blog has gone missing.  She changed her tumblr name and disappeared without a warning.  I tried to find her for a minute, no luck.

I don’t even really know who she is, I don’t know her name. All I know is she struck me as one of those lonely people who lashes out before anyone can get to them first, clinging to a kind of manufactured weirdness as a means of dealing with life, and it made me sad.  I hope she’s okay.

• There is an old man at the gym, when he comes into the gym he is fully clothed in day clothes.  He walks over to an elliptical machine, puts his things down and goes to get two squares of paper towel from the nearby dispenser.  He then proceeds to take off all his clothes except a wife-beater and some white boxers.  Climbing on the machine slowly, he makes sure to only touch things using these paper towels he has with him.  Then he uses the machine for about half an hour or so, slowly moving the arms and the legs. With all his clothes in a pile next to the machine.

• At Trader Joe’s, a young child of perhaps three is holding a list, being pushed around in the cart by her dad who keeps deferring to her.  “Did you get everything you needed?” “Oh, you want the albacore or the tongol tuna?” She checks her list, and barely coherently directs him to the appropriate choice.  At first I thought it was a playful joke between daughter and father, but after a while it seemed like maybe she was actually going to be cooking and he was just trying to facilitate her dreams.

Michael Cera is so suited to this kind of dopey cutesy conversation, you know somewhere in a Brooklyn apartment Jesse Eisenberg is watching this, clutching his fists and gritting his teeth knowing he can only dream of one day approaching these levels of schmaltz and kitsch.

- from my upcoming liveblog of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

• The other day as I walked into my apartment I stopped short because the girl who lives across the way from me in the guesthouse was singing “Passionate Kisses” at full volume, and in that kind of half-sexy voice people use when they think they’re alone.  But her window was open, and I wanted to laugh or make a noise to let her know, but it didn’t really matter so I stayed silent.

• Yesterday as I was braving the nightmare that is weekend shopping at Trader Joe’s, everyone’s banging their carts and baskets into each other and the song “Nobody Walks in L.A.” comes on and I look around to see if anyone else seems to have noticed this, but I appear to be alone in my observations.

• As I fell asleep last night at 9:30 p.m. reading Alice Munro, I could hear the neighbour playing his trumpet, and I put down the book and just listened for a few moments. It started to rain sometime during the night and the two sounds blended.

Overheard:

“So I was making out with this guy at like 5 a.m. we were both a little drunk, and his phone went off, so I said, ‘Zordon’s calling.’ Then I refused to take my top off unless he listed all the colors of the original Power Rangers.”

Jeremy handed her a list of things he felt were important, and she studied them carefully, trying to show him that she cared.  He often wanted to close his hands around her wrists, circling them first with his thumb and pointer, and then thumb and middle finger, all the way on down to his thumb and pinky.  Just to feel what that would feel like.  He looked at her wrists, sitting on the edge of the table across the booth from him, and he felt for his own wrist, under the table, closing his right hand fingers barely around his left wrist.  Slowly he changed the gesture to adjust his watch.  She was still holding the piece of paper he had written on, running her fingers carefully over the edge almost as if she wanted to get a paper cut.

from my unfinished novel, Lack.  It’s so unfinished you might call it hardly begun.

The Farm, Medford, OR. (December 2010/January 2011)

Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT. January 2011, 18-24

(Me and Sondre Lerche doing an interview at Sundance 2008.)

natechesley:

Sometimes a nice, big, freshly cleared surface is the most wonderful thing imaginable. Much like the sort you need to go about a jigsaw puzzle, and for the same reasons.

Because of this quote I completely cleaned off my entire desk and got to work on my article.

I’m at a party on Sunset Blvd., it’s 4 a.m. and this guy keeps trying to sequester me away from everyone else, trying to lure me off into the Hollywood night, presumably to make out with me.  Having had nothing to drink, that makes me far less inebriated than he, I skillfully evade and begin to ask him questions about himself in a well-lit area of the party.

Amanda: What is it that you do?

T: I am an engineer. What do you do?

A: I write film reviews.

T: What does that even mean?

A: Um, I watch movies? And then my ideas about them get published?

T: No. How does that even work? 

A: Studios employ lots of PR people who send out invitations to journalists an—-

T: Oh. Yeah, okay. Let’s go take a walk.

A: Nope. I’m good here.

I look down and notice he’s wearing a wedding ring.  He’s visibly annoyed that I don’t want to follow a perfect stranger out into a dark unknown area, and begins to get snippy, so I go in for the kill.

Amanda: So do you live in Los Angeles?

T: Yeah, Sherman Oaks.

I smile sweetly and half-look away.

A: That’s not Los Angeles.

Immediately his face hardens.

T: You know what? We have the same police department and the same fire department. I pay my taxes and we’re in Los Angeles.

He stumbles away, and the sky is already getting lighter.

…in my review of the 25th Anniversary Blu-ray release of Back to the Future.

If I have one major complaint about the DVD, it is the DVD case itself.  The case is ugly but functional from a graphic design standpoint, it proudly touts the various features so you can easily find them on the different discs, there’s a standard picture of Doc and Marty McFly on the front cover, etc. However, besides the lack of style, there is one major design flaw.  Getting the actual discs out of the case is a study in excruciating patience and dexterity, as you have to carefully push the disc towards a very specific area in order to avoid snapping the disc in half or slicing your fingers off.  I cannot figure out why this design is preferable to simply lining the packaging with razor blades, as the result seems to be the same.  I found myself squinting and turning my face away every time I had to take one of the discs out, just in case it shattered.  However with some practice, even the most fearful can take the discs out with ease.

We like Scully and Mulder,
walkin’ shoulder to shoulder.

Busta Rhymes - I Know What You Want feat. Mariah Carey