I'm Turning into my parents!

I'm starting to notice that I'm judging every single movie I see by the same standards my mother uses when she watches movies... Although, considering she was a film major, I don't blame her. She was Hell-bent on making my sister and I having good taste in movies, so she scarred us for life by showing us the original Psycho back when I was... what, 11 years old? Something like that.

But I guess I can thank her... otherwise I wouldn't be into doing amateur film reviews for a small time podcast on the internet!

Conversations of strangers...

Ever have the fleeting interest in what other people are talking about? For instance, the scene in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, where Holmes (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) is in a restaurant and he starts focusing on the details of random other patrons of the restaurant. The mind can pick out words of a specific person or group of people in a place like a crowded restaurant, which is why you can hear your friends at the table over the noise of everyone else talking and the ambient music playing. What if you decided to listen in on a random person's conversation? What would it be about? What would it make you think? Would it make you go out and do something you've never thought of doing before? Would it alert you to some imminent event about to happen that you had no idea about until just then?

BTW, I call dibs on a story idea revolving around that! Already working on one now!

A pet peeve of mine

When people erase whiteboards and they leave small bits of whatever whiteboard marker was left there. I don't know, but somehow it really bothers me. I can't help but get the urge to go up, take the eraser myself and then erase it and make sure that there's nothing left there.

Maybe I'm a bit of a perfectionist... maybe it's also my German ancestry! I mean, Germans are known for being very neat and tidy... have you ever been to Berlin? For the most part, it's really clean on the streets there!

The best advice I've ever been given

Back in high school, my school was so small that everyone in the school was required to attend the graduation ceremony, (excepting, of course, those who had very good reasons to not be present.) The reason being was that because the school was so small, if only the parents of the graduating Seniors and the teachers attended, the gymnasium would be considerably empty. So, they had the rest of the students attend.

It was either 9th or 10th grade that I remember the most (aside from my own graduation in 2009). I can't recall who the commencement speaker was, but I remember his message, and it's something that I hold close to me to this day.

He talked about an old Native American tale about an elder talking to a younger boy about how inside each person, there are two wolves fighting: one representing all the good aspects of someone, and one representing all the negative aspects. The boy asks, "Who will win?" And the elder replies with "The one you feed."

While I remember other commencement speeches, this one stuck with me the most.

The 3D craze

I can't help but wonder when they'll start showing advertisements in 3D. I mean, a lot of movies that are expected to be big hits are put in 3D, there's the new Nintendo 3DS system that's coming out soon, and they're even making 3D TVs and movie discs that portray movies in 3D. Heck, even I have a video game that has some 3D elements in it.

It seems that soon, everything may be 3D... or not. I think there's still a considerable population that doesn't like 3D and may not buy into it.

But still... 3D could open up an entirely new realm of possibilities in advertising. I mean, remember the scene in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie (the one with Gene Wilder) where he had that new idea to teleport a chocolate bar into people's TV sets so they could try his chocolate bar for himself? Maybe, with the addition of the sorts of motion sensing controls that they have in the Xbox 360 Kinect, there could be interactive, 3D commercials, where you show a product and you can virtually manipulate it.

Totally gimmicky, but a cool concept, nonetheless.

What my mind map said about me

Apparently, I'm very scatterbrained and disorganized. That, actually, doesn't surprise me very much. I never really was organized and my mind always has a tendency to make wild connections with other things that must make for a very messy sort of web in my head.

Embarrassment

I have experienced embarrassment. For me, though, it's not so much as something happening like a friend of yours saying or doing something stupid that makes you guilty by association. For me, it's wen you are under the impression that you know something, and then you say that bit of information you believe to be true, but it turns out, in front of tons of people, no less, that you are very, very wrong.

I was under the impression that French Guyana was a French colony. Upon expressing the false notion to my French teacher, the look on her face was making me wish I could just teleport myself to anywhere other than there.

Moral of the story: Always ALWAYS check your facts before you believe them to be fact. Or, at the very least, express that you are not certain that it is fact.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

[insert lyrics to "Let it Snow" here]

An idea hit me for a music video to "Let it Snow" while I was trying to get myself up for school (only, of course, to find out that it's closed).

So, basically, have the tune playing, and the beat will be replaced with car crashes. Minor ones, of course, just showing cars sliding on the road and bumping other cars, enough to cause a considerable dent. That's kind of how I'm seeing this weather right now. Totally crazy down here in Dallas...