Back in Greensboro! And the good news is that the majority of my day was spent in the gym. Feels pretty good to think about that in reflection. Things are going to change this semester. I’ll be going on a healthy college diet of booze and lettuce. Those abs will be conquered this semester god damnit!

I played Alex in ping pong today. Our games are becoming furious and intense now. Today’s game turned into a pretty tough workout in itself. Alex is still better than me, even after those training sessions with The Chopmaster. But I’m getting there. I’m much better and each game today came down to a one or two point difference. I’d imagine that just a few more sessions and I’ll be better than him.

I’ve been getting fat this week. It’s been intentional though, it’s okay. I’ve been binging on chocolate ice cream and mountain dew this week. Kind of a last post-Thanksgiving, post-Christmas hurrah before school starts up in a few days. I guess it’s to celebrate the last week of break before I get back into the mix of working and going to the gym constantly. Yeah, I know it’s a stupid idea and I should just be exercising now to make my life easier in Greensboro but, god damnit, the ice cream is too delicious to stop eating and its such an easy alternative to making my own food for lunch.

I have also not done anything productive this week. Instead, I turned it into a pretty nerdy week, just catching up mostly on Oscar movies. Some of them haven’t even come out yet. Ah, the joys of Internet piracy.

Movies I’ve seen in the last four days:

In Bruges
The Wrestler
Milk
Gran Torino
Man On Wire
The Wackness
Frost/Nixon
East Bound and Down (30 minute HBO pilot)
Waltz With Bashir

Fantastic. All of them.  It’s hard to tell, but I think I enjoyed The Wrestler the most out of all of these so far. It’s the movie that’s been stuck in my head the longest since. I’m really hoping that people will take pro wrestling a little bit more seriously after watching it. But I know that won’t really happen, just like Brokeback Mountain seemingly didn’t do a lot for gays after it came out.

There’s nothing too special about the direction to talk about but the performances are just fantastic all around. Mickey Rourke’s character, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, felt like a real person by the end of the film. A real, pathetic and depressed person. Rourke will probably win an Oscar in a few weeks for that role.

I've been meaning to write a lot of entries here, since there have been many things going on lately that need to be documented on this thing. I figure that I'll just update a little more over the week when I have time to catch up. First, Love's Fire.

It ended. The son of a bitch finally ended. But for all of my bitching, it was actually a nice experience. I mean, the actual days themselves were rough and made me want to stab my eyes out but the overall experience was very positive. The people involved were all generally very nice people, and Chris (the director) taught me much more than I expected to learn going into it. The only downside to this is that I did nothing as far as the actual production went.

But while watching the show, I felt something very strange that was truly genuine, that I don't usually get to feel. Considering that I didn't do much, I had no ties to the show's themselves. Which means that I was not nervous in the least bit. So I assumed that I wouldn't feel that wonderful feeling of satisfaction that I usually get after each night is done, when the crowd is cheering. But on these show nights, with the sold out crowds I found myself once again getting very excited hearing the crowd's reaction. I was very very excited for the actor's this time around. It was a great feeling that made me feel very unselfish. "They laughed at that part? YES! It worked! They did it! OH yes they didn't fuck that part up! Woo!" This time around, I recognized exactly how much work those people put into this and it was great to see people acknowledge their performance, and that people actually really understood the play and enjoyed it.
 

I am currently in class, wasting my parent's money. But I don't know if anyone would blame me the guy is lecturing us on atomic theory. Lecturing us because the bookstore doesn't have the book we need, so he doesn't know what else to do. I feel bad, I have no idea what he's talking about but I stare at him and type this anyways, pretending that I'm listening and taking notes.

It must really suck to be a teacher sometimes. I mean, you're up there, you're looking back at your students and you see out of a class of 15, five or eight of those little fuckers on their laptops. And you god damn know that they aren't listening to you at that moment, they're just playing video games or reading webcomics or checking facebook. How often does someone actually use a computer to only take notes. This guy served in World War II, he's incredibly intelligent, thats a given. He served in the most ridiculous and bloody war of this country and now he's teaching kids that don't give a shit about what he says.

Holy crap,  it's already been a month into the new semester. College life goes by so incredibly fast and I still can't tell if that's a good thing or not. I've been planning out a lot of my time lately, and I've figured out a rough idea of what I want to do for the next five or so years. If it goes the way I imagine, then I'm going to have a very busy and hectic schedule these next few years. And of course all of this future thinking has made me a little stressed out. I'll be alright.

Gogol Bordello is pretty fucking cool. Fun, fun music. It's very happy, exciting gypsy music. Most of the members are somewhere from Eastern Europe so I'm digging on the singer's accent. I'm very glad I decided to download this guy.

In short: Ughhhh god damnit why the fuck.

In long: I don't really understand why I'm still doing this fucking play. I'm not doing anything. At this point I'm wasting three hours of my life every night when I go there, with about five or ten minutes in between when the director, Chris, does something interesting that could help me out as a director myself. What's more, and this is a very sad note, the actor - tech relationship still seems nonexistent and tense. I thought it might be a little different if I were to be at the rehearsals as well but no, it's all the same. Actor's stay with the actor's and virtually ignore the tech people, while the tech people are boring, stupid and generally a very lame bunch. It's starting to actually depress me. I'm starting to feel depressed when I show up every night now because it feels so hard to pretend I'm doing anything important. Oh well. Two more weeks.

So I learned that the "Hot Rod" guys I met last night all have a history in acting or film making. And given the fact that they all live in the dorm made my head start going a mile a minute at the possibilities. I'm going to try to round them up to make weekly shorts or skits with them. They've agreed so far to come together at some point in the nights. Great, I just need to capitalize on this. Let's hope that this goes better than my failed show idea from last semester. Hell, I'll probably just take the show ideas that I came up with and film them as separate shorts instead. Either way, it's incredibly exciting for me. I've been dreaming that I might be able to get a small fan base of sorts with these guys if everything goes incredibly well. This should be interesting to see what my journal entries on this will be like in a few weeks.

I saw "Hot Rod" tonight for the second time and you know, it was actually really funny. Although the big difference this time around was that I was in a room full of guys that were into the flick. I mean Jesus, not only did these cats know about The Lonely Island website, but they were wearing "ANDY" and "AKIVA" shirts too. That was nice to see that other people have been to that website. Oh and I was also slightly intoxicated. Slightly. The movie is hilarious and works perfectly as a flick that you should gather a bunch of friends around and watch with a few brews. A Comedy Central flick if you will.


"Larry's Big Move" finished up. http://youtube.com/watch?v=vd1JHpbBjbY


That was a very refreshing experience. The first narrative short that I've made with the XL1. What's especially interesting about this is that "Larry's Big Move" is the LAST script that I wrote that I thought would every get filmed. I actually wrote it with the intention of not filming it. And everything else that I had planned to shoot, even the smaller 5 page scripts have still not seen the light of day. Go figure. The film went pretty well overall. A lot of amateur mistakes were made but hey, I'm still learning. At the end of it all, I'm pleased with the end product, very happy for Justin and Mary's acting work, and proud of them. And the best part is that I know that it will only get better from here.

    Just a quick note:

    Due to the fact that I so far do little to nothing during my Love's Fire rehearsals, I've begun to read Shakespeare's sonnets. I managed to read the first twenty of them today AND the explanations on what the hell I just read. Some of the sonnets are incredibly beautiful works of art that surprise and evolve through the passing of each line. Others are the typical Shakespeare lingo bullshit that I simply don't care a lot about. The sonnets where he goes on and on, describing nature or eyes a little longer than he should, using language a little too difficult than it should be, to describe a concept that should be a little easier to do.

    But when he gets it down, MAN! It's awesome.

    I'm going to see if I can finish reading all of the sonnets between now and Valentine's Day. I was thinking that it would be amusing to bring up my findings in conversations in the near future. Say for example, great bushy bearded Clinton is going on about how amazing William Blake is.  "Oh Blake's character cleverly represents the misfortunes of the common man." "Ahh yes, I agree! This reminds of Shakespeare's Young Man character in his sonnets! Tell me Clinton, shall I compare you to a summer's day? I can do that now you know."
  

When I was in elementary school, I would sometimes hear the teacher say to some stupid and disruptive kid, "If you think you're so smart Billy, why don't YOU teach the class?" and I would secretly wish that the teacher would call on me instead. Every time a teacher would ask that, the kid would squirm in his seat, and feel generally guilty for himself and the point was made that the kid is an asshat and the teacher always wins. But if the teacher called on me, less than 10 year old Mohit would take the opportunity to be a great douchebag. I could see myself going up there and puffing my chest out and going " Okay well yes class *ahem*, two times two is equal to... MR. BOLLAND PLEASE. We don't have all day.. uh, sir." Oh, and the kids would just laugh and laugh. They would think I was the greatest. Yeah, I was kind of arrogant back then.

Ah, back from the break. Many things happened during the break, which would explain my updating absence.  Whatever.

I actually filmed a movie over the break, entitled Larry's Big Move. I wrote it, rehearsed it, rehearsed it some more, fucking filmed it and now I just need to finish editing it. I find it to be a very proud accomplishment since this went down as one of the most professional productions that I was ever at the helm of.  It should be done in a few weeks.

Back at school and working on a play, assistant directing Love's Fire. And by "working," I really mean, watching other people work. Because assistant directing a play is equivalent to being a production assistant in a film. It's a very boring task that leaves me remarkably tired at the end of each day. For the rest of the week at least, I'm going to have to be there with everyone sitting at attention for 3 hours every night, pretending that I'm interested in theater. I'll probably end up writing more of my frustration on the subject in the next few weeks, the first show is on Valentine's Day and it's looking pretty good so far.

I've noticed something interesting from the lack of sleep I've recieved in the last week. For whatever odd reason, I caught a mild case of insomnia in the last week, nearly staying up for 24 hours straight for two seperate days out of the week. Nothing horrific, but a lack of sleep nonetheless.

But I noticed that when I stopped sleeping for healthy intervals, I stopped dreaming. Instead, my conscious life was a big, long dream. Everything had a hazy quality to it. One event began. It ended eventually, then the next event started up. Much like a dream, when this would happen, the last situation would become a blur, a foggy memory with key spots remembered. Five minutes ago would feel like five days ago.

I also, of course, lost all sense of humor, and began to hate the world. My friends commented on that, they noticed the hate I grew out of nowhere. Shame. I was a very spiteful little bitch. And I also have a beard now, I'm assuming from the lack of sleep. It's a hobo beard, no trims anywhere, the neck hair is all there. It sucks, it's the first time my facial hair has been very, very itchy.

I'm still not sleeping in a consistent manner, but I'm starting to feel better about it at least.

It depresses and frightens me to no end that its a beautiful and warm sunny day, this day on DECEMBER THE MOTHERFUCKING 10th GOD DAMNIT TWINKLEFUCK. It bothers me. 72 degrees outside. I should be wearing shorts and a tshirt but i'm wearing a full sleeve shirt just so I can feel a little more normal given the date.  I'm sweating.  I'm sweating from being outside in December.

Finished American Gods recently, very cool book. It's amazing how he managed to fit in so many gods into the story. So many obscure gods too, I had to sit by the computer to wikipedia everyone just so I could get every little reference to them that Gaiman put in. Speaking of Neil Gaiman: alright alright I'm with everybody else now. Neil Gaiman is a fantastic writer. I had my doubts, I read some of his comics and didn't really like him that much, and Rohit shat all over his Sandman stuff. But he's a great novelist. It makes me want to read Stardust maybe. But now it's on to some Vonnegut. Oh right, and final exams in a few days. Whatever.

Today, I sat at Tate St Coffee for about 2 hours straight, reading American Gods. It's a wonderful book so far. I'll probably end up talking about it more when I'm done with it.

Just came back from the first script read through of "Love's Fire." I'm assistant directing that one and it should come out on Valentine's day and should be something good. Being there made me realize something sad though. Until you get to the top, and you will know when you are at the top, you will always be someone's bitch. The jobs just depend on how many different people own you at any time. Anyways, the script read through went very well. It was a lot of fun to watch these people just put on their acting face in quick moment, then jump out of it the next instant.

My my, I haven't been keeping up with updating as I planned I would. But whatever, it's not that big of a deal. Many many things have happened in the last few weeks. Some horrifying, some good. Speaking of horrifying, it is my birthday today. Not that my birthday is a horrifying thing, I'm not that emo. The big thing is that I'm 18, now an adult, which means that I'm going to have to step it up and take things seriously now. If I want to be where I want to be in 10 years, then I'm going to have to become much more prolific. I haven't accomplished much, but what I have done I'm happy with. I just need to keep that up.

Holy Christ, I was walking down the street today with my iPod on listening to N.W.A's "Fuck Tha Police". It's a catchy song, I starting singing it a little bit and I look to my left and see a cop drive by really slowly. Windows down, he just looks over at me and shakes his head. Then he drove off. Fuck.

Alright, I'm better now. What a strange night.

We've got some fun plans cooking for Halloween, I'll be going to Franklin St at Chapel Hill. I'm excited for that, I hope that works out. I've only seen videos of that on the news. It looks to be a ridiculous time, there will be so many drunk people walking the streets.

I finished reading The Shining. That was great, felt like I had just finished climbing a mountain. I like the books' ending much more than the film adaptation, but overall the film is much better. The novel seems to go into too much detail that just isn't necessary. Regardless, It was a good read, I don't regret spending the last few weeks reading it.

I've decided to stop seeking out a job for the rest of the semester. So to fill that time up until mid-November when I begin assistant directing Love's Fire, I've begun thinking up movie ideas nonstop again. I came up with a fun idea to do which is essentially going to amount to an exaggerated video journal. I've got people that will help with it, I just need to actually put it into motion at some point.