I feel pretty good today.

I have been processing a lot of stuff lately due to school. So much new input, and way more physical input than my depressed self ever got. There is less moving about than at Kwantlen, seeing as most classes are on the writing floor of 198 West Hastings, but the stakes, as well as the mental intensity, is way higher.

And I know that this, right now, is the grace period. I only have a little bit of homework, and it’s fairly easy stuff. The hardest thing so far has been to read the script for Misery. It is ironic that this is the first script of many that I will have to read as part of my studies turns out to be one of the few I have actively avoided ever since my mother told me what happens in the book.

Avoided the book, avoided the movie, ended up having to read the script in my first week of film school. Whatever.

Actually, I found, to my delight, that I quite liked reading the script. It was such a high density way to absorb a movie. It’s just like watching the movie except you can experience minutes of the movie in a matter of seconds. After all, the screenplay format is designed to tightly adhere to the “one page of script is one minute of movie” rule, and it takes way less than a minute to read a page, especially if you are as fast a reader as I am.

So I found myself doing the online equivalent of eagerly turning every page with breathless anticipation. Of course, that’s probably not going to be true of every script I read – the one for a Misery was written by William Fucking Goldman, the guy who wrote both the book and the screenplay for The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies of all time, amongst many other things. Goldman is considered, and not just by me, one of the best screenwriters and script doctors of all time,

So in a sense, by starting us off with Misery, the prof is starting us off with the best as a way of easing us into script reading and analysis. Reading that script was not only highly pleasurable, but sparked my appreciation for what makes a screenplay truly excellent.

I hope I can write that well some day. So much packed into every word!

As for the story : I can’t help but feel sorry for poor Annie Wilkes. She’s clearly a deeply broken person. A monster, to be sure, for what she does to poor Paul Sheldon, the writer, but not an entirely unsympathetic one. The scene with the scrapbook suggests that she has killed people all over the USA, but that seems like an informed attribute to me. Nothing else about her suggests she has the sort of issues that would lead her to be a serial killer. She’s certainly no coldblooded psychopath or psychotic driven to repeat the same scenario over and over again, and nothing we see suggests she is sadistic.

I’d diagnose her as having borderline personality disorder. And that can lead to violence (in fact, it usually does) but not to the point of being a serial killer. Maybe the studio (or Stephen King, for all I know) felt she wasn’t villainous enough to deserve her very violent end just for what she did to Paul. She had to be a true monster in order to deserve her sticky end because, if she’s a a serial killer, then our hero Paul is not just freeing himself, he’s preventing who know how many future murders.

People like their moral lines drawn with a very thick pencil sometimes. Myself included.

Now that I have read the script, I have to write a brief thing where I say where the seven pillars of storytelling – Setup, Inciting Incident, First Act Turn, Midpoint, Second Act Turn/All Is Lost, Climax, and Resolution – are in the script, with page numbers to prove I have read the thing (and not just seen the movie), and a few sentences justifying my choice.

No problem. Setup is the stuff leading up to the accident where we see Paul’s process and establish that this is his last Misery book. Inciting Incident is the accident, duh. The First Act Turn occurs when Paul wakes up and discovers his new predicament. The Midpoint would be where Paul realizes he’s basically being held hostage. That sets up the rising tension leading to the Second Act Turn, which occurs when Annie reveals that she knows all about Paul’s moving around before and how she never called anyone about him. The Climax is, of course, when he brains her with his typewriter, and the Resolution is the “18 months later” bit at the end where we see that Paul is doing fine now.

And after the harrowing events of the movie, I really, really needed that. If the movie had ended when the cops came in, it would have pissed me off. I needed to see that Paul was fine on all levels after his experience with Annie. Walking, happy, not in an asylum.

I look forward to reading more scripts. It might even become a habit. I could “watch” a lot of movies that way. I wouldn’t get the full experience, of course, but it could help me catch up.

I ordered in Chinese food for supper last night, which is probably part of why I feel good today. I have come to the realization that I have a strong reason to improve my diet now : so I can be more focused and alert in class. I spent a lot of my class time last week barely able to stay awake and feeling very spaced out and hazy. I would much rather feel like I feel right now.

So I need to improve my diet to Chinese Food levels. Lots of meat and vegetables. Give my body everything it needs to run well.

It could make life a hell of a lot easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I could send a message back in time, I would send it to my 16 year old self, and I would tell him (me) to man up, stop being such a goddamned pussy, and go into finance.

Maybe that’s just the cynicism of age talking, but that’s how I feel right now. I wish I had said “fuck all this artsy shit, I am gonna go where the money is. ”

I was totally on track for it coming out of high school. I got such high marks in accounting that the teacher was a little afraid of me. Said it would be a sin if I didn’t go into accounting as a profession. And I said “Uh, sure. ”

And that’s as far as it went. I knew I didn’t really want to be an accountant. Maybe if it had been harder for me, I would have valued it more, I don’t know. But to me, it was absurdly easy. It was all just math and being careful to do things right. It was just a system to me, and a relatively primitive one at that due to the limitations of the math inherent in finance.

And I am very good at systems.

But still, I knew I did not want to be an accountant, and that was proven beyond a doubt when I went to college and somehow ended up registering for a lot of courses that had nothing to do with business or accounting and no courses that did.

I never even considered business or finance. Somehow, the idea that accounting could be used for more than becoming an accountant never occurred to me. I never thought of becoming an entrepreneur, a banker, a broker, or any of the dozens of other jobs that the accounting skillset suits to a T.

To be honest, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I tried to get some idea by going to the guidance counselor’s office to take aptitude testing. But they didn’t seem to want to do it. I went like four times, and each time, they ignored me for a while then told me they couldn’t do it for some bullshit reason or another.

God those people were useless. And bitter. They always seemed pissed off, like a couple on the verge of divorce.

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. If getting 98 percent in Accounting wasn’t enough to convince me to follow that particular star, no aptitude test stood a chance. I had already decided, on some level, that being good at something didn’t mean you had to do it, despite what all the guidance counseling I had up until that point had told me.

The idea that you could be very good at something without enjoying it was not part of the curriculum when I was in junior high. And it honestly does seem counterintuitive to me, even now. I suppose that’s the problem with not being a mastery oriented person.

I just didn’t get enough pleasure from doing it right to even seriously consider doing it after graduation.

I wonder about other timelines for me sometimes. Versions of myself that might have happened. I know that if I had somehow gained some focus and ambition back then, I could have nailed a business degree, no problem. And then maybe gone on to get an MBA.

And then I would have either gone into finance or started a business.

Pretty sure I could have made a small business work. But knowing me, and how I always want to take things to the next level, I probably would have started a franchise. Then sold the franchise rights to others and helped them get their version of my brilliant business up and running.

And then… WORLD DOMINATION! Mua ha ha!

Well, maybe not. But remember, my heroes list includes Hershey, Disney, and Jobs. Those guys changed the world more than your average guru, and they did it with business, not peace love and granola.

I can’t see anything but spiritual annihilation down the finance path. I mean, I suppose I could have become a nice safe (and rich) banker or worked in honest insurance, but I know how greedy I am, and I can’t see anything good coming from my being in a position where there’s oodles of cash to be had and all I have to do is forget my basic honesty, fall in love with my own cleverness on an unprecedented scale, decide that anything is fair game as long as I can get away with it, and completely sell my soul to Satan.

I can imagine that version of myself ending up angry, arrogant and bitter. A classic case of “I have it all, so why aren’t I happy?”. That’s the price for pursuing the ideals of greed and materialism, I suppose. You spend your youth pursuing every dollar you can trick into the back of your windowless van, only to find out that, once age slows you down enough for you to stop and think about what you are doing, and ask yourself if you’re truly happy, or just busy.

I honestly think that the pursuit of wealth and status acts as a religion in some people. More than you would think. By encouraging us to never settle for less than we can get and always seek to better our position, society gives people the structure they need in order to keep going. Whenever the modern citizen starts wondering what they are doing with their lives, received ambition says “You’re working hard to get that promotion!” every single time.

But that only lasts for a while. So people learn to just stay absorbed in their day to day lives and never look up at the sky.

And it works for people, because what other purpose in life does the modern spiritual milieu offer? The world has a catastrophic shortage of meaning and nurturing.

What’s a soul supposed to do?

I will talk to you you nice people again tomorrow.