My parents recently got a new kitten, named Yo-Yo after Yo-Yo Ma.
This is him in early March:
And then in late March, on his first trip outside:
I like how you can tell he's older by his ear-to-head ratio.
Kittens have got to be one of the best things in the world. My mom and I used to wish for a Kitten of the Month Club, where you'd get a new tiny kitten every month, have it for the fun kitten stages, then send it back once it got older. For a while we ignored the problem of what would happen to all those unloved mature cats, but I figure you just send them out to nursing homes and farms according to personality type—lazy lap cats or hyper hunting cats.
I can't wait to have my house with wood floors and big porches and, what, five cats? How many can you have before you're the Crazy Cat Lady?
(1) In the mail: Letter of admission from Berkeley, requesting a reply as soon as possible.
(2) Also in the mail, on the same day: Letter from Peace Corps stating medical clearance, impending invitation from Placement Officer.
(3) In the back pocket of my jeans: Small, folded piece of paper with the handwritten phrase "humping is for lovers."
Movies at SXSW:
Super Size Me and Bush's Brain: Two films that capture, along with great stories, that sense of incredulity and frustration that, for so many people, permeates life in today's culture. Both are very much worth seeing, and, luckily, both should be coming out in theaters in the next few months.
The screenings themselves were different experiences, however. Both were at the Paramount Theater in downtown Austin, Super Size Me on Friday night and Bush's Brain Saturday night (the last two nights of the film festival).
Bush's Brain almost filled up the bottom section of the Paramount (500-600 seats), with overflow into the balcony. Everyone who showed up got in. The audience reacted well during the film, and then a bunch stuck around afterwards (it was almost midnight by this point) for a Q&A with the co-producer, who had a cellphone in each hand so she could ask the co-directors for elaborations or clarifications if needed. The official Q&A turned into a discussion among a group of two dozen or so standing out in front of the theater with the co-producer. Which is exactly the kind of result politically-themed documentaries should produce.
The night before, however, the distributors for Super Size Me forced SXSW to only admit 350 people into the screening—for a theater that holds about 1,200. This was supposedly to "create a buzz" and get people to pay to see it during the theatrical release, but what happened that night was that a quarter of the pass-holder line was turned away and a couple hundred prospective ticket-buyers were turned away as well, almost all knowing that there was enough room in there for them—and many having been in line for over two hours, after being turned away at the first screening a few days prior, which sold out all 1,200 seats. The "buzz" outside the Paramount that night was not a happy one.
But—a good festival overall, especially for the documentaries.
Now, apparently, I have seven weeks of college left.
In the past few days, multifarious Good Things have taken place.
First, I received Peace Corps medical clearance. This wasn't unexpected, but it was the last big hurdle before talking to a placement officer and receiving an invitation to serve. This is exciting and terrifying at the same time, naturally. So far Peace Corps has just been an application process to me—filling out forms, scheduling exams—but now it's threatening to quickly become much more real, with a country name and a departure date and everything.
Second, South by Southwest is in full swing. If there's a profession where your job is just to attend film festivals, then sign me up. I love this stuff—I'm volunteering for a little over 50 hours and I get a badge that'll get me in to almost every single screening. I saw one Friday, five Saturday, three Sunday, and three Tuesday. Like I said, I could do this professionally.
I didn't see anything Monday because Monday I drove to Lufkin to film Susan sorting through files at the Angelina County Courthouse. She was looking for records of what happened to the money that her family was awarded after her lawsuits against Pilgrim's. So she looked through files. Then looked through more files. It was riveting cinema, let me tell you.
The drive there and back was interesting, though. The road was almost entirely fogged in on the way over—four hours of white cloud keeping visibility to 50-100 yards or so. Driving back that afternoon, however, the fog had cleared and the scenery opened up in all directions. Golden sunlight flowed over rolling fields and baby cows and purple- and white-flowered trees along the highway—spring has sprung in East Texas, and I imagined that even the baby chicks that I filmed a few weeks ago have bloomed into—well, they would bloom into ugly adolescent chickens, but you know what I mean. Growth. Flowering. It was a day for singing loudly to Vs. and Clandestine and the Proclaimers.
So back to Austin and SXSW and after a day of films I check my email and, wouldn't you know it, I got into Berkeley.
BWAHAHA!
Like my mom said when I called to tell her, "I can't believe they let you in!"
So, in celebration, here's the 20-minute timed writing exercise I did after my hour and a half interview back in February. The prompt was "Describe the room that you are in." After that hellacious interview, I let whimsy take over. Journalistic? Nah. Still makes me giggle? Hell yes. Apparently it didn't scare them off.
Sitting at a small round dining table in Brad King's kitchen, I once again ask myself, "What kind of person paints a room lime green?"
This question had been floating through my mind over the past hour and a half, as Brad grilled me on my past work and professional aspirations. My eyes kept drifting to the bold blue of the living room, the TV dedicated to Nintendo, and the wooden rooster staring solemnly from across the coffee table.
Now, sitting by a window while melted snow from a freak Austin snowfall drips to the concrete of the back patio, I am left to contemplate the room itself.
A Red Stripe box holding two empty bottles and a can of Bud Light sits next to dishes and an empty two-liter of Coca Cola on the kitchen counter. The coffee pot is empty, drained by Brad's three cups and my one, which sits next to me, lukewarm.
I glance over my shoulder at a golf ball and a pack of Hooters playing cards.
A kitchen does say a lot about a person, I think to myself.
Brad's dog, a lazy black lab, blinks at me from the living room. She, too, appears mildly perplexed: "How did I find myself here? What does any of this really mean?"
"And why does he have ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like chickens?" I add silently.
The white tile shines except for spots of coffee and black dog hairs. The stainless steel trashcan lid is covered with fingerprints smeared through a fine layer of dust.
The utilitarian clean of this kitchen conflicts with the neon green of the walls. Is this a room in a delicate balance of order and chaos, or simply the unfortunate result of poor interior design?
So yeah. This unexpected turn of events makes my decision about this fall a bit more interesting. I'll be flying out to Berkeley the first weekend in April to do the official J-School visit thing—Leslie and Bryan, clear the couch!
I have been staring with great anticipation out the window of my flat here in the heart of San Francisco, sighing heavily, waiting for the riots and the plagues and the screaming monkeys and the blistering rain of inescapable hellfire. I have my camera all ready and everything.
There has been nothing. I see only some lovely trees and a stunning blue sky and my neighbor walking by with her pair of matching chow chows as a pained-looking woman struggles to parallel park her SUV. Same old, same old.
And this is San Francisco, gay-marriage HQ, Sodom-and- Gomorrahville, debauchery central. We are supposed to be careening off the nice, safe road of social acceptability right now, welcoming chaos, exploding into a fiery hellmist of our own sick godless depravity and dropping off the disgusted planet any minute now.
Where is my raging apocalypse? This is what I want to know. Where is the social meltdown? The moral depravity? I was promised an apocalypse, dammit. What am I supposed to do with all these tubs of margarine and confetti and kazoos? . . .
The P2 thesis symposium went very well and fairly painlessly—it was a tad anticlimactic, actually... Now I'm just tired and kinda sick instead of tired, kinda sick, and frantically editing video / making a powerpoint / practicing a speech at noon.
Tim and I marked the occasion with Noelle at Trudy's, though I figured today wasn't the day to dive into the wonderful world of Mexican Martinis, what with the cold medication and all.
Then Tim and I watched clouds and fell asleep on his roof—it was a perfect afternoon, good for dozing... the kind of dozing where thoughts and images wander in and out of your mind, embossed in the air and sunshine. But this afternoon, instead of random thoughts I remembered random facts, like that police cars don't have hubcaps, and that a new stadium tested its plumbing by getting volunteers to flush all the toilets at once. And that the day after 9/11 was the first time atmospheric scientists were able to test what the sky over the U.S. is like without jet contrails, because all flights were grounded.
I've been feeling pretty inadequate as a blogger for a while now. I'm not a witty amateur pundit. I don't divulge horrendously intimate fears and weaknesses. I'm never the first to link to a funny site. I don't spend enough time on my photography to have anything worth sharing. I'm not in the midst of some spectacular new phase of life in an exciting place.
What was my day like? Well, I got up. Then I had some Special K Red Berries. I checked everyone else's exciting blogs for updates. Now, surprisingly enough, I'm procrastinating on thesis work. Which I'll probably do for, oh, the next two months or so.
That's really it for events.
Sure, there's stuff in my head to ramble about, but somehow posting a few paragraphs about my love of a fast-moving sky or my paralyzing fear of death in an attempt to impress my readership with something meaningful just... seems... pathetic.
Matty's post on loneliness was honest and moving in a way I can't seem to achieve. The effort of forcing things out onto the screen for my blog (that word still makes me feel mildly sheepish) just doesn't happen—it did for 325m, but that was because we were a group of people working towards similar goals of self-expression in a close, trusting environment.
I found a Peace Corps Volunteer's website a few days ago—she's 22, straight out of college, and now teaching English in Benin, Africa. She posts journal posts and letters to home, all wonderfully detailed and useful to someone anticipating the same leap into the unknown.
I suppose I'm just waiting for something to write about that isn't "I don't want to do thesis work" or "I hate George W. Bush"—or some poorly-written stab at the terrible beautiful painful exhilarating experience of being alive.
The Super Bowl 2004 ads were all sorts of disappointing. Besides being almost nonexistent, they were all either for beer or erectile disfunction meds.
The Oscar ads, however, were a whole different story. Margaret Smith of the Family Screen Scene, for one, was relieved: "No commercials featuring feminine hygiene or male pharmaceutical products will air, which is fine with us. No matter how tastefully done, they're basically distasteful."
Distastefully tasteful? Alrighty.
From CNN.com: "We want the show to reflect, not a stuffiness, but a dignity appropriate for film's highest honor," said Ric Robertson, executive administrator for the motion picture academy.
No stuffiness in the Oscar commercials, just Funny. And Funny without exploding horse farts or screaming wives or, thankfully, endless ads for crappy network shows. The cross-country dog was cute. Gopher hunting was great. Scorsese was only moderately awkward.
Looks like the "Super Bowl for Women" is the also the "Super Bowl for Ads That Are Actually Good."
Walking through the first floor of Dobie this morning on my way to the bank, a guy with a guitar put his hands together when he saw me approaching and told me that oh Lord this one has the evil spirit in her and if I don't change my condemning ways I'll suffer in my love life and finances.
Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I'm Sixty-Four Thousand Chickens?
(The guy at the table behind me is calling everyone he knows to say that he got a "159 on the L-S-A-T, which is 80th percentile. Not too bad, eh?... Well, anyway, just wanted to share my score with ya!")
I went to East Texas this weekend—despite my main subject's 6:30AM Tuesday call requesting a rescheduling—for what turned out to be a very productive shoot. I did a few wheel in one hand, camera in the other drive-by shots of The Head, as well as a few drive-bys of the feedmill downtown, where I was honked at and given the thumbs-up by a seventeen-year-old in a service van.
The true excitement, however, was Saturday morning. I called Dr. Miner, the overall-ed, slow-speaking farmer that I know Danny remembers fondly, on Friday afternoon, and he told me to call him at 8:00AM the next morning to go film baby chicks being unloaded into his houses.
Watching 64,000 baby chickens being unceremoniously dumped into four chicken houses over the span of an hour and a half is a truly unique experience. I'll try to do it justice here.
Dr. Miner and his two sons, David and Daniel, have twelve 300-yard-long metal chicken houses under contract with Pilgrim's Pride. Each house starts off with 16,000 chicks, with an ultimate survival rate of 95 or 96%. That's about 200,000 chickens on just a few small acres of land. The ammonia smell inside the warm, dark houses is strong almost to the point of overwhemling. You can hear the din of chirping from outside the houses.
The chicks are delivered straight from the hatchery in what looks like a converted school bus—painted white, with the Pilgrim's logo on the front and vents running along the sides. The chicks are in 2' x 1 1/2' plastic trays, 100 to a tray, stacked ten trays tall. The bus is just solid chick inside—fluffy, yellow, chirping baby chick.
The two Pilgrim's employees on the bus put ramps running from the bus door to the barn door. One uses a long metal hook to pull the stacks of chicks down the ramp, where the other loads them onto dollies. They take two stacks at a time to workers at the back of the chicken house, then immediately go back to unload more stacks.
Each tray has a brown paper lining under the chicks: one guy pulls the paper from the tray, the next tosses the chicks out, and then the empty trays are stacked to be taken back to the truck.
The chicken tossing was probably my favorite part—a hundred tiny yellow fuzzballs flipped out of their trays onto the floor, slowly forming a warm fuzzy matt of chick. Most simply went back to sleep, huddled together in the sawdust and months of accumulated chicken waste. A few toddled off towards the food trays or water drips. Some raced after the men walking away from them or towards the daylight at the front of the house.
Two stacks of ten trays are unloaded in a minute or two, finished by the time the next full stack arrives. After about fifteen minutes, 16,000 chicks have been unloaded and everyone moves on to the next house to repeat the process.
I went inside a house that had been filled earlier that morning—the chicks had re-clumped around the water drips and in the food trays, most sound asleep again. They were so terribly cute—I had trouble picturing them as the gawky three-week-old chickens I saw on my last visit, much less as the frozen legs and thighs at the supermarket—which is exactly what they'll be in six to seven weeks.
It was entertaining, educational—and hopefully all captured more effectively on film than I've been able to describe it here.
