two weeks to go...
it's getting really close. i now have only three more class days left in my entire school career.
of course now that the daunting task of making a life for myself is nearly upon me i've started to be less and less sure of everything. not that i've been having real second thoughts about career choices or anything, but now that i actually have to do it...
one thing i've really been thinking about is whether i've sold myself short on choosing to focus on cinematography. i really do enjoy the photography aspect of filmmaking a lot, but i'm not sure at what point it became my sole focus, or whether i consciously picked it. there are still aspects of directing that i really like, but i've stayed away from them because everyone going into film wants to be a director and i think subconsciously i figured i would have a better shot at being successful in a less ambitious role. thus, selling myself short. that's not to say that cinematographers can't go on to be directors, but it's uncommon.
another concern i've been having is with my back condition and the amount of physical labor that goes into a set production job. it would probably be better for my health to stick to something like producing or post-production (and the frustrating thing is that i really feel like i could enjoy those jobs, too). i can already tell that my back has gotten worse again since my surgery, and it's been less than a year and a half. i honestly don't know if i can spend the next 40+ years of my life carrying heavy things around a set.
finally, i've been a lot more apprehensive about the job market recently. i've tried e-mailing both of my l.a.-based supervisors (from hancock and ex-terminators) dropping the fact that i'll be graduating soon and looking for work, and i haven't heard back from either of them. on top of that, i feel like i've been hearing from more and more people who go out to l.a. and can't make it, eventually coming back defeated and broke. the economy is pretty tanked, and i really won't be in the best financial situation upon graduating, so i'm already at a disadvantage for going out there. i'll be battling school loan repayments, high cost of living, and intermittent employment at best. i really need to buckle down and spend the next six months getting as financially stable as possible.
i feel like i've generally been pretty good about taking life in stride and adapting to new opportunities that come my way. i can't really think of anything that i've really wanted and not managed to get for myself (in the achievement sense, not the material goods sense), so i just have to keep reminding myself that it will all work out.
(i realize i never posted anything about my trip to dallas and the texas state fair, but i think it will just have to stay that way.)
thursday, november 20th, 2008 at 4:11 pm • permalink • 1 comment
a tale of two cities, part i
things have been pretty busy the last two weekends with back-to-back trips out of austin for ut football games. the first was to colorado - denver and boulder to be exact - and the second was to dallas for the red river shootout against oklahoma.
i've been to colorado only once before, for a boy scout camping trip when i was 11. that was obviously out in the wilderness, so i had never seen any of the big cities. we (four of us - me, tk, arun, and matt) flew into denver on friday afternoon and i was immediately impressed with the architecture of the airport - the white roof is designed to evoke the peaks of the rocky mountains. the weather was a little bit gloomy but it felt awesome having just come out of hot, hot austin. we rented our car, checked into our hotel, and headed for the oldest restaurant in denver, the buckhorn exchange. they're famous for their buffalo steaks, but they had way more than that. as we waited for our table, we got to order drinks and enjoy some live folk music played by one guy and his autoharp. the whole experience was incredibly relaxing and enjoyable, and by the end of the night i had dropped $80 and tried rattlesnake, elk, and buffalo all for the first time. the dinner was topped off with the buckhorn's famous dutch apple pie a la mode with cinnamon rum sauce. there's no way to describe it other than to say it was a spiritual event - the four of us agreed that it was not only the best dessert, but flat out the best food any of us had ever eaten in our lives. no exaggeration. we ended up ordering three.
after dinner, we set out in search of a place for a drink or two. i have to say i was consistently impressed with how clean and apparently affluent denver seemed to be - every building looked well-kept and interestingly designed. we came upon a bar/club right near coors field called the tavern, which, ironically enough, did not serve coors but did have shiner (a texas beer). i really enjoyed it - the dj who was spinning that night was really good and the weather was perfect for being up on the open-air roof patio. the other guys seemed to complain the whole time, but i suspect that's because they were making really lame advances on colorado girls the entire night and being repeatedly shot down. i managed to have a great time despite their negativity and my not drinking (designated driver!).
saturday we made our way out to boulder and had lunch at a local campus establishment called the sink, which was also very good. we were heckled by quite a few cu fans passing by on the street, but most of it was pretty friendly. another group of friends had rented a cabin up in the mountains for the weekend, so we went to hang out up there for a few hours and it was gorgeous. the drive was fantastic (as long as you were paying attention to the scenery and not matt's complaining about the slow car in front of us) and the cabin itself was situated right on a babbling, rocky river like something out of a bottled water commercial. the only sounds were that of nature, despite being a stone's throw from the road and two neighboring cabins on either side.
the game itself couldn't have been better - our seats turned out to be directly behind the band, so i got to spend a lot of time talking to old friends. i do have to fight off the occasional nostalgia for lhb, but in general i haven't had any problem enjoying the games just as well or better as i did my freshman and sophomore years. we ended up winning pretty soundly and met up with the other group of guys to hit the town. we headed for pearl street, which had been touted as boulder's closest equivalent to sixth street in austin; it was nothing like sixth but we found a couple different bars to hang out and get harassed by buffaloes fans in. the next morning we were up before the sun and on our way to an 8 a.m. flight back home. all in all, exhausting but totally worth it.
this turned out to be a bit longer than i was hoping, so i'll leave the dallas trip for another time.
monday, october 13th, 2008 at 7:27 pm • permalink • comment
things that are ridiculous: domino's pizza tracker
i was feeling pretty lazy tonight, and i figured, "hey, i'm a college student. i don't eat nearly enough pizza." so i decided to go ahead and order some, and because i like to avoid phones whenever possible i ordered online at dominos.com. that's when i found this:
tracking a package being shipped from hong kong is one thing. tracking my pizza from the domino's ten blocks away? that's pushing it. it even gives you the names of the people making and delivering your pizza! tonight i was taken care of by greggory and richard (the "delivery expert").
after some googling, i found that domino's claims that its tracking system is accurate within 40 seconds and is already implemented in all of their stores.
some things just make me wonder.
(oh, and if you were curious: the apparent cook time for a domino's pizza is six minutes.)
tuesday, september 30th, 2008 at 4:43 am • permalink • comment
ike cleanup
my parents have spent the last three days straight cleaning out everything in my grandparents' galveston home after the devastation of hurricane ike. i still haven't seen any pictures, but very little was salvageable and they have four feet of water in their house during the surge. they finished completely clearing everything out of the house, minus the things in the attic, and someone is coming to tear out the drywall starting tomorrow.
it's just mindblowing how quickly something can be gone. the house that has been the same for forty years, through my dad's childhood and my own, will be essentially gone in the span of less than two weeks. luckily my grandparents are not the kind of people to let something like this phase them. as long as they have their family and their church community around them, they feel pretty much at home. they probably have less emotional attachment to that house than i do, and they've lived in it half their lives. from what i hear, grampa is being pretty cavalier about throwing everything away. he's pretty much my exact opposite in that sense.
the big news is that they've decided not to move back to galveston. after a little bit of searching they've found a retirement community closer to my parents' house and they'll move there as soon as their lease in college station is up next month. it's weird thinking that i won't spend this christmas eve in that house like i have every year of my life thus far.
in lighter news, ut won its fourth football game of the season against arkansas this saturday, 52-10 (actually the score of all three of our home games this year). i'm getting really excited about the trip to colorado on friday for our next game. i don't think i've ever been on a trip with just friends before, so it should be a lot of fun. plus, usc, georgia, and florida all lost this week so we're going to get a nice bump in the polls.
monday, september 29th, 2008 at 3:05 am • permalink • comment
material world
my mom sent me some photos of the damage from hurricane ike on galveston today, and it's actually hard to look at them. so many people have lost so much.
our house was lucky - the predicted storm surge didn't happen, and all we lost were portions of our fence, some shingles, and some trees. my grandparents' house in galveston didn't fare as well. they took on about six feet of water, and they haven't even been able to get back on the island to take stock of everything yet. today was the first day people were allowed back, and they're coming in tomorrow from their temporary (?) apartment in college station. they're not expecting to find much. i really wish i could be there to help them as they go through everything; it's going to be a horrendous task. my mind keeps racing over all the things they have in their house - all of their 35mm slides and photos, handmade quilted blankets, valuable oriental furniture, knick-knacks from their numerous trips around the world... things i would be devastated to lose.
mom thinks grandma and grampa will ultimately just end up staying at the retirement apartment they're renting now, because the house will be too hard and too costly to fix at their age. i really hope that's not true, but i would bet she's right. they've been talking about moving for a while, and i've noticed them starting to give away a lot of their cherished things as if they don't want to make the executor of a will decide what to do with all of it.
tonight, mom also mentioned that a house in our neighborhood burned completely to the ground. it even spread to the garage of one of their neighbors and destroyed the cars in the driveway.
and it all started making me realize that i have this real fear of losing everything. i'm not as worried about the monetary value of stuff, and it's not just about those "irreplaceable" things that people are worried about in a disaster - photos, keepsakes, etc. i have a palpable attachment to everything, every little thing, that i own. and now i'm sitting here trying to figure out if that makes a hopeless materialist or not.
for my whole life i've been a terrible pack rat. throwing away something is always a monumental achievement. the longer i've had it, the harder it is to get rid of it. i always have way more possessions than anyone, i never pack light when i travel, and this week i've been trying to figure out how to make all of my stuff fit into the biggest closet in the house. i get so much of my comfort and emotion from my things. living simply is never a concept that played well with me.
i own dozens upon dozens of books that i've never read because they looked good at the store or i found them in half-priced books. i own a miniature pizza oven, an ice-cream maker, a set of ramekins and a culinary torch for creme brulee, a bread machine, a toaster oven, and a fondue pot, and i haven't even graduated college yet. i have enough christmas decorations to fill four large crates, two computers, over $1000 worth of bedroom furniture, over $5000 worth of musical instruments, a $1500 television and a $500 playstation. between my laptop, my portable dvd player, and my ipod, i can watch three separate movies at a time, anywhere i want. i have three different bottles of shampoo because it's hard not to buy a new one when they redesign the bottle to look cooler.
and i don't know what i would do if i suddenly lost everything in a fire or a hurricane. why do i put so much emotional stock in the material things around me? it would seem easier (and much more financially sound) to not own so much, but i just can't do it.
thursday, september 25th, 2008 at 6:53 am • permalink • comment
punctuation quandary
so i'm sitting here trying to figure out which way of abbreviating initials in a name is more aesthetically pleasing, and which is more functionally correct. take, for example, our friend mr. tolkien. you can either put spaces and periods between his initials or lump them all together into a de facto first name:
1. j. r. r. tolkien
2. j.r.r. tolkien
3. jrr tolkien
option 1 preserves the spaces that would otherwise be present if you were to spell out his name in full, "jonathan ronald reuel tolkien." however, it seems odd to use so much space for a single name, especially when he is never known by those full names. options 2 and 3 seem to suggest that the initials are all part of one compound first name, which may or may not be the case. for some people, this would be correct, such as my roommate thien-ky, who goes by the nickname "tk."
people who go by "tj" or "aj" or "pj" or any other of the more common initialed nicknames would probably not include spaces or periods, as those letters have become their first and only name.
i wonder how long i would have to go by "a. c. ewert" before i could take the spaces and periods out.
monday, september 22nd, 2008 at 1:43 am • permalink • comment
"real" world, here i come
i had no classes today and took the opportunity to go in to my advisers and take care of my graduation applications. i had to go to separate buildings for the college of communication and the college of liberal arts, but when all was said and done it only took me about thirty minutes to be completely approved for graduation in december. it's official now!
i'm already on the lookout for potential job opportunities in the spring when i'm here in austin with nothing to do. i'm even looking ahead to where to live in los angeles. it's all going to happen very, very fast.
thursday, september 18th, 2008 at 4:55 am • permalink • comment
r.i.p. journalism
 after watching all the president's men and good night, and good luck, i was already acutely aware that american journalism is nothing like it used to be. not that i lived through those times, but public trust in our anchors, writers, and editors is a thing of the past. i no more "trust" brian williams than i trust steve carell or general electric. and the idea of getting our news from one man with a teleprompter seems foreign in this age of headline scrolls, themes songs, title graphics, 24-hour cable channels, senior analysts, satellite feeds, and liveblogging. imagine anderson cooper doing a segment without cutting away to washington or cnn's chief political commentator. unlikely.
about a week ago, i logged onto cnn.com to see the headline yikes, it's coming! (referring to hurricane ike). not only was cnn trying to make a funny in a time of legitimate danger, they were doing it with a word pun that was neither compelling nor inventive. in one breath, they sensationalize the prospect of "certain death" and in the next they make a joke about it. somewhere in the back of my mind, my respect for cnn was taken down a few notches.
and now this: palin's glasses designer likes obama.
he's actually quite conservative, but he comes from a place in japan called obama so he feels connected to barack himself. well, thank goodness we know where he stands. i mean, why isn't every media outlet covering this? c'mon people! and it's not just some fluff piece, either. it's a full article, with a video and "story highlights" to boot. i don't think i've ever read such a frivolous story in my life.
i would say i'm giving up reading cnn.com altogether, but i know that's just a lie. they know how to get me to come back, over and over. it's just apparently not with the news.
thursday, september 18th, 2008 at 4:37 am • permalink • comment
too cool for school
 i was watching a clip of chelsea handler's interview with actor guillermo díaz from weeds, and he recounts a story of the "cool guy" in school giving him five and poking a hole in his hand with a thumbtack. aside from my severe worrying about where kids are picking up this sort of behavior, it also made me start wondering on my walk to class today about the nature of "cool kids" and how it's a concept that seems to manifest spontaneously in children and then disappear later in life.
disclaimer: i use a lot of blanket statements, and they are not meant to be condemning or all-inclusive, but how i perceive the majority of people in a group to behave or think.
i still remember the "coolest kid" in my second grade class (15 years later i still go to school with the guy, so i won't name names). he always wore the nicest clothes, he had the most friends, he had a twin sister so that made him interesting in our young minds... he was even the "best looking," though it's hard to believe we were even thinking about that at age eight. what's weird isn't that he enjoyed a bit of popularity back then, it's that it has been a blueprint for his life (or what i can observe of his life) ever since. throughout high school, he and his sister remained attractive and popular - he was on the football team, i think she was a cheerleader.
now, in college, he's like so many other "cool" kids - joining a frat, driving around in a huge pickup truck, partying every thursday, friday, and saturday, struggling to get into the business school so he can make lots of money and woo a woman who will eventually cheat on him with a high school student. okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's still partly true. i've occasionally heard of a nerdy kid bulking up and making a name for himself later in life, but it's rare if ever that you hear of a once-popular child turning to a life of mathematics and losing his social skills.
so what's weird to me is not that some people are more popular than others, it's that (in my limited perception) they seem to surface very early on and be persistent. and is it the cool kids that lord their dominance over everyone else, or is it the nerdy, unsocial kids who lift them up as gods among children? part of it is just inherent to what makes a "cool" kid - social skills, nonchalance, not being overly smart or overly stupid, being attractive, having money. all of those things are conceivably inborn or a result of upbringing and could be sustained through an entire lifetime.
so what makes someone uncool or unpopular? being smart or overly concerned with learning, being unattractive, not having the money to buy nice things, not playing sports. i can't even begin to number the times i was teased on the playground for raising my hand in class, or for having funny glasses, or for being in the band, or for having an asthma attack any time i attempted physical activity. where are kids' ideas of cool and uncool traits coming from, and why are they so consistent across time and place? there's really no logical reason why kids with giant glasses can't have all the friends, or why people who read lots of books or care for their schoolwork can't be considered "cool." it's just that that's never the case. even as kids, we laughed at the absurdity of the poster catchphrase, "it's cool to stay in school!" since every self-respecting elementary school-goer knew that the coolest thing you could do would be to drop out. even then we laughed at the absurdity of re-defining the word, despite its complete arbitrariness.
finally, while the cool kids don't always change, it seems like the uncool ones do. to this day i find myself in situations where i feel like everyone else is looking down on me for being awkward, intelligent, or unattractive. the difference is that it used to just make me feel bad about myself and deep down really want to be athletic and attractive and popular like the cool kids. now, i just think anyone like that is a dick and i don't want to be like them at all. never once in the last five years, in my "out-group" of slightly awkward friends, have i ever heard anyone say, "man, i really wish i was like that guy!"
for me, i know it's just a lifetime of convincing myself that no one should be able to make me feel inferior. every nerd has to learn this lesson eventually, or they will be crushed unmercifully by the world. in the long run, i think it has really benefited me, as i'm for the most part now wholly unconcerned with what anyone thinks of me or my actions. i do enjoy a freedom of self-esteem where i can do what i think is right and makes me happy without caring what anyone is going to say behind my back. when they've said it to your face enough times, it ceases to matter.
at some point in this ambulatory reverie, i realized that it was probably this exact academic thinking and preoccupation with the details of the world that made me unpopular in my youth. c'est la vie.
wednesday, september 17th, 2008 at 3:46 am • permalink • 1 comment
the beginning of fall?
last night i left the house to grab some late-night fast food (i know, so shoot me) and the weather was inexplicably 15° cooler than it has been. it felt incredible. i ended up driving to whataburger with the windows down, smiling all the way. like in a commercial. a whataburger commercial. the cool front persisted through today and everything was overcast so it was bordering on chilly, which is very strange for september in austin. it usually doesn't get respectably cold until mid-october. regardless, every time i have walked outside today, i've felt refreshed and invigorated. like in a garnier commercial.
my favorite day of the year has always been the first real cold front when summer is never coming back. it's weird to celebrate the end of freedom like that, but in texas it's always well after school is back in full swing and it starts to get old trudging to and from class in the heat. it's always such a welcome change of pace. we're supposed to get back up in the 90s later this week, so today really doesn't count. but it feels great nonetheless.
in other news, i've been getting emails from my colleges about applying to graduate. i'm so ready to be done with school forever, but there is a definite sadness to all of it. i'm almost feeling a mental block toward the applications because it makes it all very real. for 16 of my 22 years, my life has been dominated, planned around, plagued and enriched by, and spent on my education. for the entire length of my memory i have done nothing with the majority of my time but go to school. it's weird (at least to me) to think of it like that, and it makes being done with this chapter in my life even more monumental. but perhaps i am being dramatic.
monday, september 15th, 2008 at 10:02 pm • permalink • comment
© 2001-2008 andrew c. ewert.
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about
this part-blog, part-phlog is an unreliably updated account of my adventures and misadventures. it has no real cohesive theme, but i'm apt at any moment to digress into rants on language, politics, film, and technology, or anything else that interests me at the time. for more about me and this blog, click here.
currently...
• reading: the kite runner - khaled hosseini
• watching: star trek season 1
• listening: i'm yours - jason mraz
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• ike cleanup
• material world
• punctuation quandary
• "real" world, here i come
• r.i.p. journalism
• too cool for school
• the beginning of fall?
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• let's try this again...
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