The Future

When most people hear the word “future” they usually think about flying cars, giant skyscrapers, and corporations taking over the world. But what a lot of people don’t think about is that the future is tomorrow, or a week from now. Where will you be in a week? A month? A year? It’s uncertain–I mean, you can have a pretty good guess as to where you’ll be, but in the end you never know. This uncertainty is one of the reasons I’ve been stressed out today.

Now, if you’ve read my “About” page, you know I’m only 14, and I’m in 8th grade. It may seem a bit silly for a 14 year old to be preoccupied with worrying about the future, but here’s what got me thinking: my spring break just ended, which means that the next big break from school is summer vacation. That’d be fine any other year of school, but then I got to thinking “oh man, I’m going to be a freshman in high school next year.” Then I got to thinking “well what about after high school? What then? And will my grades stay up in high school enough to make it in life?” The future does scare me, a bit, and I’d personally be much more content staying in 8th grade my entire life where things really don’t matter, and I can screw around knowing that in the end everything will be alright.

Yeah that’s all fine and dandy, but sadly we’re quickly speeding into the future at one second per second, and as those seconds pass by I get closer and closer to high school and college and the real world and the uncertainty of said real world.

And my teachers aren’t helping a whole lot with relaxing me. Today in health class, the bane of my existence, we learned about “club drugs”. Apparently, if you ever go to a high school party, you’ll most likely walk out of there with something in your body you didn’t want, i.e. some form of E or K or H or GCB or some other letter. (I realize this is a gratuitous exaggeration, but those are literally the words my teacher used.)

Then there are the teachers who don’t realize that you have other classes outside of theirs, so they decide to just pile on a crap-ton of homework and projects, all due in two weeks. Thanks to Italian, ho paura di fallire. Tutto. (Sorry to any native speakers, I probably just butchered your language.)

I probably shouldn’t be worried about this, but I am. And I think everyone my age is, deep down. You hear about all these things from your parents like taxes and mortgages and bankruptcy, and you begin to wonder just how long you can stretch out your childhood before being thrust into the unknown, all by yourself.

Stress of Scripting

So if you don’t know there’s this annual event every November called NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month, and basically in thirty days you’re challenged to write a 50,000 word novel. This November will be my first time doing it.

But obviously it’s not November (at least I hope it isn’t where you live…), so why am I telling you about NaNo? Because the people who run NaNo also have a cool thing in April; it’s like NaNo, but instead of writing books, you write scripts. 30 days, 100 pages. It can be anything that involves a script–a stage play, a TV show, a movie or even a comic book. It’s called SCRIPT FRENZY, and yes, when you mention it in text it must be in all caps. Why? Because it’s awesome that way.

In all seriousness though, this competition is difficult. For one thing, it’s taken me the last 4 days to plan, outline and gather information just so I can begin writing my script. I’ve just spent four hours writing and have only come out with about ten pages (I’m a slow writer), and you need 100 to win the competition. My spring break ends on Tuesday of next week, so how I’m going to balance all my schoolwork and still output a decent movie script is still in question.

The thing about scripting that makes it fundamentally different from my usual fiction writing is that you lack the ability to hear the character’s thoughts. True, you can get around this by using voice-overs and whatnot, but I’m writing a dramatic movie, so voice-overs would kill the serious mood of it. In a screenplay you have to trust that your character’s actions and dialog will be enough, and the viewer can do without internal thoughts. This has proven difficult for me.

Another difficulty I’ve faced is the amount of formatting involved when writing screenplays. Sluglines, character names, actions, and all the other elements have to be perfectly formatted with the correct margins, spacing, etc. True, this is my first screenplay and I’m not planning on selling it to a director (if I was to shoot the movie, I’d want to direct it), so I probably won’t get flamed too much for not having proper formatting. Still, it’s much easier in a novel to just write a quotation mark or italicize a bit of text and then go on. In a screenplay, every bit of text has to be just right.

There’s a lot of stress involved in writing screenplays, yet in a weird way I almost like it more than fiction writing. If I’m confident enough in the finished product if/when it’s done, I may choose to post it up here for anyone to read. We’ll see.

NaNoWriMo: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

SCRIPT FRENZY: http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/

Computers make me scared

I just had a terrifying event happen to me. I was on my computer, playing a few games like I do all the time, when suddenly my computer just shuts down. Just like that, off. So, naturally, I instantly begin to freak out.

Good thing I have my trusty iPad with me! After a quick Google search on my iPad (actually, not that quick, my internet kind of sucks) I found out that my computer overheated. Joy. I also found out that it is probably due to the fact that my ventilation fan-thingy has too much dust on it. Awesome. So now I have to A) Take it into a technical support guy and be charged an outrageously large amount of money to have my fan cleaned or B) Do it myself. Unfortunately because I don’t have very much money to just “toss around” it looks like I’m going to have to try option B. Which requires opening the computer. My day just keeps getting better!

Anyway, for the time being I’ve blasted the external fans with some pressurized air and have downloaded a program to tell me the CPU temperatures. I’m checking said program once every three and a half seconds. As I’m writing this the four cores in the laptop are all at around 50 degrees Celsius, which I’ve been told isn’t too bad. So that’s nice, I guess.

It’s kind of funny how much stuff was running through my mind right after the computer shut off. Stuff like: “Oh shit, no no no no no” and “if this computer breaks I’m screwed” and “did the hard drive fail? Did the processor fail!? OH GOD THE MOTHERBOARD”

Ah, computers, you make me scared.

Being offline

So the other day something happened that really annoyed me. I signed onto Skype after having not signed on in about a day, and was greeted with no less than five people yelling at me, all asking why I hadn’t been online. This is a response to those messages.

Now why, people who send me those messages, is there an “offline” button in the first place if you’re not meant to take advantage of it? Why can’t I get off my own damn computer for five seconds to go do something? I do have a life, surprisingly, and that life–much like my online life–must be taken care of. But here’s the difference: online, there’s not much to be worried about as long as you stay on reputable sites and whatnot. But in this cool thing called reality, there is a lot to worry about. Like starving to death. Or going to the bathroom. Or sleeping. You know, little things.

So I’m so very sorry I wasn’t there to talk about how you just beat another dragon in Skyrim. Or about how you just found seven diamonds in Minecraft. Really, I am! But unfortunately real life is a lot more challenging than online life and, as such, I am forced to back away from my computer every now and then to tend to it.

Please, stop spamming me with messages when I’m offline. Here’s a little tidbit of info for everyone messaging me: if I don’t respond within one minute of your message, that means I’m either A) offline or B) not wanting to talk to you. And don’t do the whole “he didn’t respond the first few messages so let me come back in an hour and try again” routine. No. I always respond to sent messages when I get them after signing back on. Always. So there’s no need to spam my IM chat window or whateverthefuck to try and “get my attention”. If I didn’t respond an hour ago, and I haven’t responded yet, I’M STILL OFFLINE. And stop posting freaking status updates saying “GET ONLINE” because the only way I can see that is by being online, and it’s quite counter-intuitive to post a status telling me to get online if I’m already online.

Thank you for reading. I’m going offline now. To eat. Because that’s what real life people do.