Like some kind of weird fanfic (My friends are the best.)

So last night I finally sent my friend Caleb (who writes an amazing blog called Does This Make Me Look Hipster?) a copy of Like a Dog In Space since he's been begging to read the whole thing for literally forever. And he read it and loved it and raved about it, and then he was like, "I've had Katy Perry's song Firework stuck in my head this whole time."

Five minutes later, he was adjusting the song lyrics to vaguely summarize the plot of the play, and it was quite honestly the most awesome thing I've ever received.

With his permission, I'm reposting it here. (The first stanza is in capslock for some odd reason.)

DO YOU EVER FEEEEEL LIKE A DOG IN SPACE
DRIFTING, THE RUSSIANS LOSE THE RACE
DO YOU EVER FEEEEEL LIKE YOU'RE INANIMATE
HAVE NO WAY TO TALK, YOUR BEST FRIEND IS A ROCK
YOU HAVE TO FIIIILE THE PAPERWOOOORK GET MISTER PAPPEEEERS TO SIIIIIGN
JUST WEEEEEAR THE ROOOOOCK AND TRY NOT TO DIE
CAUSE BABY YOU'RE A MAAAAAAANEQUIN
FOR DECADES YOU WILL TRYYYYY TO WIN
MAKE US GO AW, AW, AW
CAUSE YOU'RE STILL NOT A COSMO NAW, NAW, NAW-UT
Do you ever feel like a dog in space,
Drifting past the moon,
No way to come back home?
Do you ever feel, feel inanimate,
Unimportant,
Like an old Maket?
Do you ever feel you’ve been decided for?
Your time’s already up and you have just barely begun.
Do you know that there’s
That there’s a guy for you
And he’ll help see you through
You’ve just gotta create
Your fate
And take
The bait
He’ll give
You life
Just open your eyes
‘Cause baby you’re a Mannequin!
Doomed from the start, never to win.
Show them all the mi- i- ight
The might that you personify-y-y.
Baby you’re a Mannequin!
Prove to them that you can win!
Make them go ah-ah-ah!
As you become a cosmona-a-aut!
You don’t have to feel like a dog in space.
‘Cause now you have a place
To help in the space race.
If you only knew
The possibilities
The opportunities
Borne from necessity
Could be they’d help you find
The place that you could go
A man whose sure to know a way to keep you comin’ home
Bring him a meteor
He’ll open up a door
It won’t be long before
He will help you create
Your fate
So don’t
Be late
He’ll set
A date
There’ll be no more dummy crates!
‘Cause baby you’re a Mannequin!
Doomed from the start, never to win.
Show them all the mi- i- ight
The might that you personify-y-y.
Baby you’re a Mannequin!
Prove to them that you can win!
Make them go ah-ah-ah!
As you become a cosmona-a-aut!
[This part didn’t need to be changed:]
Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon.
It’s always been inside of you
And now it’s time to let it through
‘Cause baby you’re a Human!
And now you have a chance to start again.
Leave them all behind in fli-igh-ight
And redefine what’s wrong and ri-igh-ight.
Baby you’re a Human!
Papers let you start again!
Be what they all said you’re no-no-not!
You will become a cosmonau-nau-naut!
Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon!
Boom, boom, boom,
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon!

I am thankful for (one day late)

1) I am thankful for parents who love me. When I was younger, I used to bemoan that they weren't cool enough, and then I grew up and realized that even though my parents aren't "cool," they're happy and smart and successful and have the best intentions for me.

2) I am thankful for everyone else's parents who love me - the people who even though they don't have any obligation to, make sure that I'm doing okay/let me crash at their house/have had some hand in my growth into the person I am today.

3) I am thankful that in the last year I have had so many learning opportunities and have come out of them a stronger, smarter, more mature person.

4) I am thankful for the "Still stuffed the next morning" feeling I have because it means that my family has enough food to keep stuffing it down my throat until I feel sick.

5) I am thankful for the shitty fold out couch I slept on last night because freezing my ass off in a hotel room sure beats spending thanksgiving on the streets like the homeless people I pass on my way to class.

6) I am thankful for my friends who love and support me, who are always good for a joke or something to do. Whether I met you last week or last month or five years ago, thank you for being a friend. :)

And thank you, reader, for reading my blog. I wish you a happy and healthy new year, and hopefully I'll see you right back here next November.

Gratefully yours,

Leez.

What is there to say?

A girl I went to high school with died today of natural causes. She wasn't sick and she wasn't in an accident. She had a brain hemorrhage and then four days later she died and it came out of nowhere. I've had a friend my age die before, but it never gets easier to hear someone you know has died, and so suddenly as well.

Really, that's all I have to say.

Verbal sketching

I imagined I became a mole person

And strung up my hammock

between pylons

In an old abandoned subway station.

And every night, the other runaway kids

and me

lie awake and listen

to the sound of

sewer rats mating.

I imagined I rode the trains

all night long

right down to the place where

they turn around

in that old abandoned station

with the jewel-tone tiles

in the roof.

And it's all so pretty,

so pretty,

so pretty,

And it's all so clean,

so clean,

so clean,

because

they never let anyone in.

Sun I am disappoint.

I was really, really excited for the new Golden Sun game. Like, I don't buy video games often, but I would have bought this one. But then I went on the website and read the character summaries and... ugh! They're so derivative of the last generation of games! I know that generation Xerox is a trope, but we've even got villains pushing the protagonists to accomplish their mission and a mysterious masked man. I don't know much about the plot yet, but for a game set 30 years after the original pair and released some ten years later, this is upsetting.

The original Golden Sun games were hailed for their originality in story, setting, and gameplay. While the battles are nothing new if you've ever played any incarnation of Final Fantasy ever, they were pretty fun, and there were a lot of good/nerve wracking puzzles to figure out. The new game looks like it's sticking too closely to the original, and it worries me.

At any rate, the game doesn't hit North America until November 29th, so I'll wait for some American reviews before I decide whether or not to get it. At any rate, playing it would be good for nostalgia, and I am a bit eager to return to that exciting, imaginative world the first games took me to. :)

So today was interesting.

Today, I:

1) Went to an AUSA (Anthropology Undergraduate Student Association) movie night and watched a documentary about the Amish.

2) Made new friends.

3) Played old school Super Smash Brothers

4) Went to a fucking awesome poetry smash.

5) Finally saw my amazing friend Chris perform (he's a hip-hop/rap artist and poetry slammer)

6) Was told by a random person in an elevator that they loved me.

7) Came home and finally watched the movie Moon.

8) Which is a fucking amazing movie. HERE'S A TRAILER, ADD IT TO YOUR NETFLIX QUEUE, IT IS AWESOME. Seriously, I think it's the only movie I've seen that actually manages to match the mood and style of 2001: A Space Odyssey and do a good job of it. I'm easily fascinated by speculative/realistic Sci Fi, but this was seriously amazing. Also I really like the theme music and I need it for my writing playlist.

Hey Sarah Palin,

Leave my first lady alone.

You, Sarah, are a washed up hack hanging onto her fifteen minutes of fame, who can't even raise her own children to understand that calling people faggots on facebook isn't socially acceptable behavior, let alone possibly be qualified to run a country. Your own relatives on the record saying you dropped out of U. Hawaii because there were "too many Asians" and you're currently in a fight with Alaskan Fish and Wildlife over getting too close to a family of bears, on national television. Your political track record consists of making embarrassing social gaffs, pandering to your competition ("Can I call you Joe?"), exposing yourself as an inarticulate ass on national television, and quitting halfway through your term as governor of the least densely populated state in the union. You advocate fear and misinformation.

The list goes on.

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, is classy, intelligent, well-spoken, educated about her causes, and stylish as all get out. You quoted her out of context and frankly your remarks about her hating white people only make you sound like an ignoramus. You didn't even actually say half the one-liners people attribute to you - Tina Fey did. You aren't even half as witty as she is.

In short, Michelle Obama is a better mother, politician, and all around human being than you could ever hope to be.

So shut up.

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

-Abraham Lincoln

TVtropes is down.

Oh my god I don't know what to do with myself how did I ever live before TVtropes. :(

EDIT: And then it came back and I went back to wasting my life on the internet forever.

They're dogs! They're dogs in space!

So my friend Lydia and I have decided that we are going to find ourselves a Yuri's Night party to go to, come hell or high water, and if we don't then we'll throw our own, eat pizza and astronaut ice cream and mocktails, and watch space-themed movies and TV shows. There's a long-established Yuri's Night party in NYC, but it's 21-and-up, and we happen to be... nineteen. So yeah, that's unlikely.

But what I would really like to get ahold of is a copy of this cute little kids movie that will probably never see an american release. They're dogs! In space! Based on a true story! What more can you say about it?

Anyway, April 12th 2011 is the 55th anniversary of Vostok 1, and we are going to celebrate it one way or another.

Isn't he just adorkable?

Oh Dan Radcliffe, I think I love you. We'd be a perfect match.

Just saying.

For me, the scariest part of the shining is when Wendy realizes Jack's just been writing the same phrase over and over again where he thought he was writing his magnum opus. I am scared of waking up one day and realizing everything I've ever thought I accomplished was actually complete shit.

Just saying.

IT'S DONE.

Well, first draft, at any rate. Weighing in at 75 pages, two acts and twenty scenes, let it be known that Like a Dog in Space has made it to the point that I'll be going over it ferociously with a ballpoint pen tomorrow morning furiously revising every last detail.

Also,

Let it be known that I do, in fact, understand the difference between Korolyov and Star City. Korolyov is mission control and manufacturing, and Star City is training. One is a suburb of Moscow and a city in its own right, the other is a military base that's slowly been evolving into a town since the 1960s. However, Korolyov was called Kaliningrad in the 1960s, which is incidentally also the name of a different, more major city further west, and it shares its current name with Sergey Korolyov (though in the play I've chosen to go with the alternate spelling Sergei Korolev, since this is the spelling I've seen used by actual cosmonauts). So, even though most of the action of act one more properly takes place in Korolyov/Kaliningrad, I've consolidated it into Star City for the sake of clarity, and also because... come on, Star City is a totally boss name.

(Incidentally, there are no less than four towns called "Star City" in the United States, in Arkansas, Michigan, Indiana, and West Virginia.)

Anyway, the point of that was that I really did do the research, and then chose to ignore it and exercise a thing called "artistic license." I was discussing this with a friend earlier and we came to the conclusion that the battle between factual accuracy and artistic license is one of the big dilemmas that comes with dramatic writing as a field. You want to do enough research to respect your subject matter, but don't want to include too much information that you sacrifice clarity. If you don't do enough research and just make shit up, then your name is Dan Brown and the Catholic Church puts you on their blacklist.

That and this is subject matter I'm really, really passionate about and I'd hate to do it any less than what it deserves. My geekiness must be shared!

Alright. Big day of revisions tomorrow. I'm off to bed.

Astronautically yours,

Leez.

PS - Did anyone notice I rewrote my bio in the sidebar? c:

I can see the finish line.

Right now, Like a Dog in Space is 62 pages long, which means it's officially the longest thing I've ever written, and I only have a finite number of scenes left to write. I had an epiphany this morning about how to bring it full circle and I'm really excited to get there.

Back when I was blogging on Livejournal (No link - it's full of emo shit), I'd occasionally post excerpts of things I was working on, or had worked on and put aside, and today I'd like to do something like that with a rough few first pages of Like a Dog in Space that I worked on over the summer on my way home from Blank YPF. I wrote about six pages, which included a frame story I ditched along with the earliest versions of the sisters centurion, although their names were Ingenuity, Perseverance, and Honesty then. Ingenuity made it furthest into the current draft but her name got changed to Possibility pretty quickly when I realized it was a clunker. Ivan's basically the same, though some of his temporality and goals got altered when I started working on it for real.

So then, for the rest of the post, enjoy the things I scrapped!

-----------

(Crickets chirp through the thick air of a summer night. BEN and ANNIE lie in their pajamas on a beach blanket in a yard somewhere in the United States.)

BEN

Do you hear that?

ANNIE

Hear what?

BEN

That’s the sound of the universe dying.

ANNIE

Are you sure? I just hear crickets.

BEN

You know what I did at school?

ANNIE

Learned to use big words and act like you’re smarter than me?

BEN

No. I looked through a fancy telescope and I saw all the way out to the edge of the universe and do you know what I saw?

ANNIE

I don’t know… God?

BEN

No. I saw that the universe is dying. I saw light from stars so far away that it’s taken twelve billion years for their light to reach our eyes. It takes so long for their light to reach us that the stars aren’t even there any more by the time we see them. So what I saw, Annie, what I was looking at was a dead star. I was watching it die.

ANNIE
I liked you better when you didn’t talk like this, Ben.

BEN

Look up. One by one the stars are dying. The universe is going cold.

ANNIE
This is depressing.

BEN

Do you see it? The whole sky flickering out into oblivion—

(It gets slightly darker.)

ANNIE

It’s just getting cloudy. It’s supposed to rain after midnight.

BEN

And I walk through the streets every day, watching all of the people walk past, worrying about this-and-that-and-this-and-that, tied to their phones, and I wonder-

ANNIE

You’re being really weird, Ben.

BEN

Does anyone know the stars are dying?

(Annie looks at him for a moment, then rises to her feet.)

Where are you going?

ANNIE

Inside. Did you stop taking your pills?

BEN
They block the scientific process, little sister.

ANNIE

I’m telling Mom.

(She exits. Ben surveys the darkening sky.)

BEN

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. We’ve got front row seats to the farewell performance. Ladies and gentlemen, this is how the universe dies.

(He rises, picks up the blanket, and drapes it around his shoulders like a cape. The crickets chirp. In the distance, cars whiz down an interstate. And beneath it all, the tinkling sound of falling stars. Annie re-enters.)

ANNIE

Mom says to come inside and take your pills.

BEN
She does?

ANNIE
She also says that you’re twenty-three years old and she shouldn’t have to remind you to take them.

BEN
Tell her I’ll be in in a minute.

ANNIE

She said now.

BEN

I’m a big boy. I won’t get lost between here and the front door.

ANNIE

(Sigh.)

Ben.

BEN

(Bigger sigh.)

Annie.

ANNIE

…What am I going to tell Mom?

BEN

Just like I said, that I’ll be there in a minute.

ANNIE

And if you’re not?

BEN
Then she can come get me. Stop letting her make you do her dirty work.

(He nudges her away.)

Go on.

ANNIE
I’d better not get in trouble for this.

(She exits. Ben looks to the sky.)

BEN

I’m on to you. They might not know the light is fading, but I do. I will peer into your inky blackness and see nothing, seek the fires of creation and find only cinders, journey to that wall of brightness at the edge of the universe and find that the fires all burnt out a long time ago-

(The tinkling of falling stars grows louder, drowning out all other noise. A spot of light appears on Ben’s face. His speech gains a frenzied quality.)

Reality is an illusion and perception is a lie, the stars spin and then burn out-

(The light grows brighter.)

The constellations glow for a single moment and then blink out, like chain of Christmas lights gone bad-

(Brighter still.)

We burn, we are consumed, time marches on in the cold dark!

(A flash, and then sudden darkness. Through the dark, female voices sing a sweet three-part harmony.)

INGENUITY, HONESTY, AND PERSEVERANCE

Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird. And if that mocking bird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond ring don’t shine…

(The voices are drowned out by the sound of falling stars. Lights up on INGENUITY, HONESTY, and PERSEVERANCE, kneeling. They all wear simple white dresses, the styles varying to be appropriate to their relative ages.

IVAN IVANOVITCH lies in front of them, his head in Ingenuity’s lap. He is barefoot and wears a shabby jumpsuit. One arm is decorated with a soviet sickle and hammer, the other with an illegible patch that gives the general impression of having to do with outer space. Around his forehead, he wears a paper headband emblazoned with the word “MAKET.”

In his arms, he holds a plush dog. If it were a real dog, it would weigh about thirteen pounds. The noise recedes after a moment.)

IVAN IVANOVITCH

I never had a mother.

HONESTY

Well, to be fair, neither did we.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

But you seem so… motherly.

INGENUITY

Hardly. You just don’t expect very much from a mother.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

How would I know what a mother is supposed to be like?

PERSEVERANCE

We had another sister, Necessity. She was the maternal one.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

What happened to her?

(The three women whisper to each other briefly.)

HONESTY

She died.

PERSEVERANCE

Nobody told you about this place?

IVAN IVANOVITCH

No… what should they have told me?

PERSEVERANCE

This is a graveyard for ideas. It’s a place where thoughts, notions, and dreams go to die. Things get junked, but ideas come here to waste away.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

So what are we doing here?

HONESTY

My sisters and I – we are Ingenuity, Honesty, and Perseverance. Along with Necessity, we were the spirit of the 20^th century. But, you see, now it’s the 21^st century. We’re no longer needed.

INGENUITY

We’ve been replaced by Excess, Desire, Single-mindedness, and Worry.

PERSEVERANCE

They’re not as catchy names, are they?

IVAN IVANOVITCH

No, they’re not.

PERSEVERANCE
What’s your dog’s name?

IVAN IVANOVITCH

Chernushka. She’s my co-pilot.

PERSEVERANCE
The dog is your co-pilot?

IVAN IVANOVITCH

We’re cosmonauts. We crash-landed here.

HONESTY

Oh. Oh! I’m so sorry.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

What for?

HONESTY

You didn’t crash-land here. You were forgotten, outmoded, lost to time and history.

INGENUITY
Tell us your name – we’ll repeat it and remember it. Remembering each others names makes the fading slower.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

Ivan Ivanovitch.

(The women join hands.)

INGENUITY, HONESTY, AND PERSEVERANCE

Ivan Ivanovitch. Ivan Ivanovitch. Ivan Ivanovitch. We will not forget you. Ivan Ivanovitch.

IVAN IVANOVITCH

What do I do now?

PERSEVERANCE

You go. You explore. You find other travelers, other obsolete ideas, and you tell them who you are, and you tell them who you’ve met. If we keep each others names in our minds, the fading slows down.

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.