“A Brief History of Helen of Troy” is a retelling of the Trojan War from the point of view of a Hermione figure. Figures representing Zeus, Clytemnestra, Odysseus, Menelaus, and Paris all amalgamate across the delusions of the forgotten daughter, having been mythologically abandoned with an epic to hear that she cannot participate in. But the play’s strength is beyond the script. The props accumulate across the stage, reminders of the evoked pain. The sets and technicals are starkly professional. The actors’ deliveries are as haunted as the audience’s winces.

“The Lady’s Not For Burning” has a comedic and complicated script, featuring a steadily flow of water symbolism and the role-reversal of a woman who maintains her innocence and a man who desires conviction. But appreciating the nuances suffered from (aside from 2 or 3 actors’ notable performances) the acting seeming uneven and probably directorially uninspired. Going into the play with diminished expectations may have helped enjoyment.

“I use urbandictionary for all my spellcheck questions.”

Getting streetwise.

Studio Conservation Theorem
There is a finite amount of manhours of occupation available to a given apartment. The amount of time an individual occupant spends in the apartment is inversely proportional to the total number of occupants.

“I have some news for you that’s going to make you very happy or very annoyed.”
Okay, I choose very happy.

See how things go.

It’s not a lens: it’s cardboard with a hole in it. It’s a reverse blindspot.
Our parents kept us and ourselves apart for so long, we lost touch with each other and went to different schools.

I see what you just did.
(Oh, snap.)

“It's a new dawn…”

Edit:
Changing how we live.
Changing where we live.

“…It's a new day…”

Assist:
Helping each other get things done.
Helping each other survive.

“…It's a new life…”

I work as an editorial assistant.

“…And I'm feeling good…”

I put the me in meta.

Red primarily satirizes age, and in particular the institution of retirement, although other political and romantic institutions also get taken to extremes. But the plot itself is just as ludicrous. Indeed, the tone becomes a radically different if the narrative were told in reversed chronology: if the characters are first shown organizing an assassination, then acting to gain intelligence, and enduring the original attacks that bands them together. However, the presentation of such wacky premises nevertheless holds an underlying maturity, making the movie amusingly enjoyable.

“Me and my brother were talking to each other…”

Anything significant is already part of my fiber. Anything insignificant I couldn’t commit to permanence. Like someone who keeps forgetting what they don’t like until it’s reexperienced, why would I ever get a tattoo?

“…Welcome to my life, tattoo / We've a long time together, me and you…”

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe” has some very clever ideas about the intersection of time-travel and fiction; and more generally of the intersection of time and expression. Unfortunately, the novel’s writing itself feels rough, perhaps intentionally, although perhaps necessary for these themes, as the protagonist narrator reacts to a fictional world that they realize is fictional. For better or worse, the choppiness of the conceit distracts from the overall narrative; but this narrative presented, twice-removed from reality, almost seems allegorical to actual experiences of the audience, living in a reality without time-travel and which lacks meta-narrative awareness.

What kind of Walgreens doesn’t have any skim milk but does have avocados?

Cinnamon Life is like a box of chocolates.

I have a job and scones. Job starts on Monday. Scones are on a plate.

Will work for food.

“I’m not funny. I’m eating a paperclip.”

Suave man is cryptoteric.

“Art is when quality of work exceeds ego.”

“The Flat Earth Society is somewhere far away / With their candlesticks and compasses…”

I like to walk. I like the freedom of motion unlimited save by my own capabilities: I can walk anywhere I can. But when walking in one direction I find a different sensation. In my return journeys I feel a heaviness in my step, an uneasiness in my limbs, a fear: a fear that I will forget to stop, that I will let myself forget to stop, that I will not be able to stop my benumbed legs from continuing their motions, that I will be carried past my destination, that I will keep walking, that I will continue inexorably into the past or the shoreline.

There’s a feeling I dread when I walk to the east, and my spirit is crying.

“…With grave determination / And no destination…”

A mug or a shot should threaten nothing more than alcohol.

“Can I borrow a computer? I have to cancel my credit cards. Also, these margaritas are really good.”

“But couldn't good be good enough / ‘Cause nothing ever doesn't change, but nothing changes much…”

A good day is one where the number of cool people met is greater than the number of jobs rejected from.
It’s been a good week.

“…White knuckles / Oh maybe it's not so bad / Just let it all come down now…”

“It was always burning / Since the world's been turning…

Write a cover letter.
White-out a badly designed PDF.
Get rejected.
Get a different rejection for the same position.
Go downtown.
Go back uptown.
Change clothes.
Go downtown again.
Lash out by e-mail.
Drop off application with HR.
Text out a desperation plea for the night.
Drill some shelves.
Wash dishes.
Get invited to BCCBS’s Halloween party.
Lose track of time.
Check out orange netbooks.
Impulse buy a DVD I’ve never seen before.
Find my watch in my pocket.
Try out a new trivia night.
Share a table in a crowded bar.
Get the current events and politics wrong, but the sports right.
Meet a friend’s fiancee’s friend’s roommate’s girlfriend.
Meet her grade-schoolmates.
Meet their roommate, and their seminary-schoolmates.
Meet the 21 year old one of them has been talking to.
Get slightly nauseated at an unexpected reuniting.
Vow to never repatronize an obnoxious overcharging bartender’s establishment.
Barhop to a karaoke bar where there’s a waiter named Jesus.
Pick out Piano Man to be my first.
Abandon any plans to sing following the sounds of drama.
Meet a 42 year old recruited to comfort.
See pictures of his children.
Take a quesadilla slice instead of a shot.
Be swung into dance when Piano Man is requested by the birthday boy.
Give a hug to someone left hanging.
Walk home.
Try to write it all down.
Post a snarky reply to an employment advice column.
Drop asleep.
Wake up into a phone interview.
Fill out a survey for $5.
Psycho.
Be indecisive.
Snack on cherry tomatoes.
See free improv.
Plot reunions.
Put in an appearance for second place trivia.
Fall asleep.
Wake up.
Get rejected.
Get rejected.
Get rejected.
Meet a friend.
Meet her girlfriend.
Meet their 2 roommates.
Meet their 3 cats.
Watch Futurama movie.
Play Katamari.
Eat pie.

What else do I have to say?

“…We didn't start the fire…”

Psycho is odd to see in the context of Mad Men: 50 years later, the same decade is seen portrayed, with the same details but different techniques. The modern recreations of Mad Men seem natural, while the non-anachronistically authentic movie feels jerky and artificial. Yet such a schism is appropriate, given not only the psychology of the antagonist, but also the narrative itself, which abruptly shifts itself halfway through.

1 FRUIT PANCAKES, mango, mango, no meat

“If a mime tells you a joke in a forest, and you don’t hear it, is it still funny?”
I’m sorry, I missed the first part of that- did you say mime?
“Yes.” <dances a vaudeville jig>

2 bits.

“It looks like you shave high… on your sideburns.”

So tell me about yourself.
3 days ago I told my friend that that’s not the worst question you can get at a job interview. I stand corrected.

Things not to do when applying for a job
Restate what’s in your cover letter, only worse.
Not have an alibi for the night in question.

“Did you live in Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi on August 28, 2005?”

“I know tomorrow's not so bright now…”

10-10-10

“…It’s another perfect day…”

“You don't know just how to start me up…”

I had a flashback to listening through on winamp with you to music and remembering how awesome a person you are and wanting to thank you for helping all the best parts of me be.

“…I don't ever want the beat to stop…”

I like the thing in the background that sounds like a fantastical jackpot game in the Putt-Putt game room.
Oh, similes we wish we could take home with us and put on our refrigerators. With magnets.

“…I'm not a robot but I feel like one…”

Have you ever had the problem where you’re not sure whether the Thai place you were going to go try out for dinner exists in reality or just your dreams? And after all that, the food is pretty ordinary. I was hoping for a little more surreal.

“…Wake me up or I will keep my head…”

“Every day, every night, is saved by something. That’s why I love it here. Either someone lets me down, and the city picks me up, or the city lets me down and someone picks me up.”

“…up, up, up, up, up, up…”

I may not know what to write, but at least I know to who: Someone who I don’t know, who won’t know me. Someone who won’t understand how they have let themself forget what they read, who will understand that a story can be saved for another day. Someone who goes with the flow. It’s what we do.

“Snails see the benefits / The beauty in every inch…”

Read “Accidental Billionaires” to compare. Mezrich is certainly no Sorkin, yet somehow the former’s non-brilliant prose doesn’t so weaken what seems to be the story’s strongest theme. For facebook seems not to be a story of a woman jilting a man; rather of adolescents given power to define themselves and their world. Facebook was born among an institution of chauvinistic houses who choose which males will be honored by having nameless females fawn over their elite influence; of venture capital angels who choose which endeavors shall be blessed; at a college that matters because it matters because it mattered. So the movie’s added conceit, of disputed legal accounts, misses the Homeric action, diluting a swift-footed race to establish one’s own identity with a tensionless struggle to define someone else’s. Certainly, there are echoes of the latter theme in, say, online privacy; but that is generally independent of the tragic flaws of Zuckerberg et al. His flaw in the book seems to be the need to control identity, and given the actual evolution of facebook that feels appropriate; so I don’t see why the movie, while mostly keeping the same narrative, instead choose his flaw to be an inability to deal with rejection.

Social Network is the story of a tragically flawed hero, the opposite of Good Will Hunting for the subsequent antithetical decade. Action matters more than thought; failings are insignificant next to successes. Education is a background for experience; a million users and a billion dollars are simply numbers. The film is more impressive as a biography than a history, for while there is certainly symbolism in the development of technology, there is just as much symbolism in doors. Facebook itself may as well be a MacGuffin, for the purpose of the narrative- it matters mostly to show how oblivious the characters are in realizing how the world they are building does and doesn’t match the world they live in.

“Hail to those who have come…”

Posters used to get hung when I realized I’m staying at a place. Now, it’s the realization that I can’t leave.

“…In the sunlight that surrounds you…”

When did the limit of fanciful thinking go from having a time machine to rewriting legislative code?

“…Pretend all the good things are for me, too…”

The day the world lost the environmental debate was the day it became an economic question.

“…And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine…”

“I'm painfully logical / You're tragic and beautiful / And that's good enough for me…”

Cryptic subtext is my kryptonite.

“…I won't lie / I wish that I could be your Superman tonight…”

Found: compounded debt
Misplaced regret
Within pasts in which I forget
The people I forget.