I HAVE MOVED

I have a new blog now:

jaekido.wordpress.com

Opposing Forces

In the winter of 2000 my film making aspirations grew to fruition. I kept hearing about a local Amateur Short Film contest sponsored by a local radio station and movie theater.

I wrote a script as best I knew how (nothing like what a real script looks like). It was a short sci-fi action film with a twist. I bought about $1500 dollars in video equipment and editing equipment, and spent hours and hours crafting prop guns (old, spring-loaded paintball guns and squirt guns painted black), a downed probe satellite (a piece of duct, some circuit boards, tin foil, a couple model parts, duct tape and black paint) and the coup de grace: the Arakelian Merc costume.

This costume was fashioned out of an Army rain coat (black trench), plastic bmx body armor, pieces and parts of old model kits including a Klingon bird of prey, lots of black plastic tubing and zip ties, some liter-size ink bottles from work, and black paint. The helmet was made from a paintball mask, black tubing, zip ties and an old witches wig that had been woven into braids and attached to the mask.

I enlisted the help of my then young niece and nephew, their parents (my sister and brother-in-law), my now deceased grandmother, my brother-in-law Tim and friend Bob. My wife even does the voice over at the beginning. My little brother plays the worker clones in the opening sequence.

While we were shooting and editing this piece, we were confident that we had the winning film. There was no way that anyone could make a film better than Opposing Forces. Unfortunately, the judges did not share our optimism. The film did not even place in the final twenty and was beaten out by a poorly shot and poorly voiced over movie about a @#$%!&* washcloth!

Back then I had a half digital camcorder and a weird linear editing system that used a pass-through effects box and actually had a IR transmitter so it could control the destination VCR. I would like to try and re-edit the film as a special edition version, but I believe that some of the original footage accidentally got taped over. I used to have a bad habit of not labeling my tapes so I never knew what was blank and what was not.

I finally have the technology and know how, with Tim's assistance, to present to you, in all of it's analog/digital hybrid glory: OPPOSING FORCES.



Now, once your done with the movie, you can enjoy this bizarre outtakes reel I put together after editing the movie. For some reason the blooper segment is a diatribe of sorts against Tim, but I'm not sure why that is. As for the strange behavior of the host, well, he should have been on Ritalin as a child. You should know that the outtakes have been rated PG-13 by me because there is a particularly abrasive word that occurs near the end of the segment. I don't care, but I thought you might. NSFW.

MeTube

I know, I know. I've been away for so long. I hope to return eventually, but right now I'm working on submitting my writing to print medium for publication and I'm trying to put together a resume. I got to get me one of them jobs, yo.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doing some video stuff, so I loaded an old video to YouTube to test out if my computer can handle that kind of thing. If my computer will let me load and edit some new stuff, I may start vlogging.

Here's the video:

100 Word Story

I’m just a grunt.

Point me toward the enemy and I will kill him. Give me something to guard and I will protect it with my life. Just don’t ask me to think. I’m not trained to think; I’m trained to react.

I should never have been given this task. You don’t present a moral dilemma to a soldier. I should not have options, choices.

I stare at the control panel. One switch kills me and saves humanity. The other saves me but wipes out half of the global population.

Which one do I choose?

Click.

I’m still alive.

Damn.

Itch, Itch, Itch. All I Ever Do is Itch.

I feel that the time has come for some obligatory complaining. Now, I am aware that it is usually one’s vassals who complain to the Knight of the Manor or, as in our case, the Noble Elite who should complain to their King. However, I am the one who will do some complaining.

My. Feet. Hurt.

Not just because I walked a long distance. Nor because I had to spend a long period of time standing in a line of any kind. My feet hurt because I have the worst case of athlete’s foot I have ever had. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? That I, one of the least athletic people I know, should get athlete’s foot.

I am convinced that I got it from those bowling shoes a couple weeks ago. I went bowling, I wore shoes that have been worn by at least forty thousand people, or one person forty thousand times, now I have foot fungus.

Oh, it started out normal enough. There was some itching and burning. The kind of itching where I would use the heel of one foot to scratch the top of the other foot, and while I was scratching it would itch more causing me to scratch more which made it itch more which…you get the idea. The problem is, it feels so good when you itch it. I’m not talking like, “Ooh! That felt good.” I’m talking about Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally in the now infamous diner scene.

Only now, my feet are swollen, red, scabby, jungle rot. The stink, the hurt, and I want to chop them off. I have to soak my feet in baking soda and wash them a couple times a day. I’m spraying them with Lotramin. The instructions say it should take about four weeks to clear up. Only two more weeks to go.

Yay!

Oh, and by the way, I did not post over the weekend on purpose. I have decreed that weekends shall be days of rest for the Mineral King. So it is written, so it shall be.

And check out this video from Hank Green of Brotherhood 2.O, now cofounder of Nerdfighteria.

That Clinking Sound Is My Crown Falling to the Ground

I knew it would happen eventually. I just didn't think it would happen so soon. I failed to post yesterday. I went twenty-five straight days without missing a post.

I blame my wife. She surprised me and the kids today with a package that arrived via UPS. I opened it up to discover Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the PS2. What was I to do? I broke out the axe and shredded some legendary rock all the way through to the end...on easy.

As I finished playing the end credits song, Through Fire and Flames of something like that, I realized that the clock had just turned midnight. I realized what I had done and my head hung in shame and my guitar fell in slow motion to my feet. I bowed down and cursed the Rock Gods for deceiving me with their promises of fame and fortune but leaving me only with a sore wrist, aching fingers, and no new blog post.

So now what do we do?

I have decided that as a penance for my iniquity, I shall allow you, my dear Noble Elite, to determine what I shall write about next week. Here's how it will work:

1. You will either leave me a comment below or email me at the address that is in the sidebar on the right (hint: it's under Request an Audience With the Mineral King) with a suggestion for a topic that I should write about and a suggested word length.
2. I accept submissions/suggestions through Monday at midnight.
3. I will place all of the suggestions into a hat.
4. I will draw three of those suggestions out of the hat.
5. I will ponder the subjects and word counts.
6. I will announce the subjects and word counts.
7. I will write about the subjects until I have met or exceeded the word counts.
8. I will post my penance promptly for your perusal and pontification.
9. I will cease with the alliterative phrases.

There you go. The whip is in your hands and I ask only that you be gentle.

The Worlds Between The Blinking of Her Eyes

I sat alone in the back of the coffee shop, my laptop open in front of me and a yellow legal pad opened to a random page of notes, under the pretense of working. I actually went down there to write; I was working on my masterpiece, and epic fantasy adventure that would one day find itself in annals of history next to the works of JRR Tolkien himself. That is, if I could ever get past the first chapter.

I had been sitting in the coffee shop for the better part of four hours. I had passed in and out of a surreal, hyper-awareness that is expected to accompany eight cups of dark roast coffee and six shots of espresso. I was so high on caffeine that even my pencil felt like it was tingling.

For about the fourteenth time, I sat back from my keyboard and looked around at the people in the coffee shop. It was the same people that I usually saw in there. There was the spiky-haired kid that always wore the torn jeans, a grey sport coat, and flip-flops. There was also the trio of pop-Goth girls who wore the uniform of non-conformity that marked them as pseudo-rebellious. Mr. Tim sat a few tables away from me, reading the paper and sipping at a frothy mocha. Then there was me.

I had been coming into the coffee shop with enough regularity that the other regulars would at least give me a cursory nod of acknowledgement as I passed by them to my preferred table in the rear of the establishment. I didn’t drink the fancy iced coffees or specialty drinks that were so popular amongst most of the patrons; I liked my coffee hot, black, and strong.

I looked down into my mug and saw that there was only a swallow left, so I quickly downed it and automatically got up for a refill. I dropped a quarter into the refill jar and topped off my customized ceramic mug with some of Brazil’s finest. While the hot liquid swirled out of thermos pump and into my cup, I heard the bells on the front door announce that someone had either come in or gone out. I didn’t even bother looking to see who it was. The regulars were already here, so it was probably just a random person wanting to jump on the coffee house bandwagon.

I walked back to my table and sat down in front of my computer, carefully setting my coffee an arms length away on the left. I was suddenly aware that the coffee house had become eerily silent. I looked up to see what was going on and that’s when I saw her.

She was standing by the front door, looking around the coffee shop. She was tall. Really tall, for a woman. In fact, the coffee shop had one of those rulers by the door that you usually see in gas stations so that the attendants can see how tall a robber is as he’s leaving the store with all the money and a couple six-packs of Milwaukee’s Best. I could see that this woman was precisely six feet tall. She was slender, too, not just thin.

She began walking towards me. Okay, maybe she was just walking in my general direction, but from my vantage point she was walking towards me. She didn’t walk so much as she glided. You know how, in the movies, when a pretty woman walks into the bar, restaurant, or say coffee house, she appears to move in slow motion while an indoor breeze blows her hair around her head? I swear to God, this woman did just that.

She was wearing some sort of full length dress of shimmering silver that made me think of the Mithril shirt Thorin Oakenshield gave to Bilbo from the treasure hoard of the vanquished Smaug. Her dress seemed to absorb all of the surrounding light, polish it to a high sheen, then release it back into the room where it danced around her like the glow of a star. The material also did a wonderful job of outlining her magnificent physique. Every curve, every peak and valley was momentarily accentuated then at once shrouded in mystery.

Her skin was pale and seemed to radiate much of the light that hovered around her and her features were soft and subtly angular, suggesting an elegant beauty that transcended traditional definition. Her hair was silver-white and floated around her head as if she were submerged in water.

Suddenly she was standing in front of me at the opposite end of my table and I flushed with embarrassment for staring so blatantly at her and for entertaining some of the base, subversive thoughts that traveled below the surface of my imagination. I was shocked that she was standing before me and couldn’t even begin to imagine what she could possibly want from or with me.

Without a word she pulled out the chair in front of her and sat down across from me. She made no sound as she moved. She stared directly into my eyes with a fierce intensity that all at once conveyed an ancient power and a helpless pleading. I found myself inexorably drawn deep into her grey eyes; they were dark and powerful like storm clouds hovering on the horizon, all at once dangerous and beautiful.

“I need you to come with me,” she said without preamble. When she spoke her voice was deeper and softer than I could have imagined, and it filled my ears and my mind simultaneously. I was unable to speak.

“I need your help. It has to be you and it has to be now. You must come with me immediately or all will be lost. If you come now, you will forsake all that you know and love in this world; you can never return. If you refuse my invitation, if you refuse my plea, you will never be offered this opportunity again. Will you come with me?”

I finally managed to find my voice. “I don’t understand. What are you asking me?”

“You have long dreamed of a chance to travel to a magical world of fantasy and adventure, of mystery and intrigue, of beauty and danger. This is that chance. You have a desire and I have need of you.”

“But what about my wife? My children? Am I supposed to just leave them behind?”

“If you choose to come with me, you will never see them again. If you come with me, you will never remember them, but they will always know that you left them.”

Somehow I knew that this was no dream, no hallucination. Ever since I was a child I dreamed of this exact scenario. It was always a mysterious woman from another world who needed me to come to her world, to the aid of her people. I was to be the only one who could fulfill their prophecy and rescue them from the darkness that threatened to engulf and destroy them.

When I conceived of those fantasies, when I became obsessed with leaving behind the world of my birth, I was single with no comprehension of having a family of my own. Back then it would have been easy to leave behind my less than perfect life to begin anew in a world unlike anything I had ever known. Back then I was dealing with my own issues of abandonment after my mother left me. She left my dad, my sisters, and my brother too, but I was the one most affected by her leaving. We never saw her again. Several years ago, my brother left in search of her. Where he went, I never knew. I hadn’t heard from him for more than seven years.

Things were different now, though. I had a wife, a son, a daughter. My life was good. I was happy with the way things were going, even if they were a bit mundane. My family loved me and I loved them immensely. I could not even fathom leaving them behind, abandoning them without a word like my mother had done.

“Time is short. You must decide now what you will do.”

I felt myself once again pulled into the depths of her stormy eyes. All at once I felt the tethers that were binding me to this world begin to snap and break away. This was my dream. This was an opportunity that was unparalleled. I had been waiting my whole life to be taken to another place, another time.

I thought again of my wife, my son, my daughter…I couldn’t recall their faces. I struggled to picture them and realized that I had lost their names too. There was only me and this woman, whose name suddenly came to me as if I had always known her.

I held out my hand and she took it in her own. Her hand was soft, slender, powerful. I could feel her Presence begin to overwhelm me.

“Take me with you, Lady Valhantra. Take me to your world. Take me to our world.”

I felt my body begin to dissolve away from the world that I had lived in for more than thirty years, a world that suddenly felt foreign and unknown. I continued to stare into the eyes of Lady Valhantra and in them I saw the birth of a thousand universes and the death of a thousand more. I saw millions of lives begin and end in between each blink. I saw her eyes fill with tears and tens of thousands of worlds were covered in flood waters. I saw her needs, her desires, her passions and her fears, and I saw that they were mine also. I forgot everything that I once knew and remembered all that I had never known.

Intermission

I have decided to take a brief hiatus from the Evolution of a Nerd. I may reduce the output to one per week or maybe every other day. I was starting to get a headache from going back in time every day to the events of those years. It’s not that it is particularly difficult for me on an emotional level; I just felt that the past two essays were not as well written as some of the others.

I also need to spend more time thinking about the events of those years so I don’t forget some key event or humorous story. I need some other ideas to write about. So I open it to you. If you have something you would like me to write about, post in the comments and I’ll see if I can oblige.

Yesterday, I interviewed the parents of the Eastern Michigan University student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room right before Christmas 2006. The story made national headlines for various reasons, chief among them being that the school apparently violated the Cleary Act and did not warn the students and family of students that her death was suspicious. Some high level faculty members at the University lost their jobs over that blunder.

The parents of the murdered girl are the owners of my local coffee shop and I have a casual relationship with her father. I am writing a profile for my Writing for Publication class and asked them if they would talk to me about the charity foundation they started to help AIDS victims in Africa.

This problem was a passion of Laura’s before her death and it was her hope that she could one day go to Africa to help the children affected by this disease. That is why her parents started Share Laura’s Hope. Share Laura’s Hope is in association with World Vision and all of the funds raised go directly to help with the AIDS crisis in Africa. Below I will place a picture and link for you to follow if you are interested in helping. Additionally, I will be putting a banner in the sidebar for this organization. Anyone is welcome to copy this banner and use it on their own site if they so desire. I also plan to post my article once it is finished.

SHARE LAURA'S HOPE

Evolution of a Nerd: Seventh Grade Stretch

Coin sorters automatically sort your change into its respective size/values when you drop a handful of coins into them. There are slots or tubes that are specially designed to accommodate each of the different coins. The coins have no choice over where they end up; their destiny is predetermined.

Junior high is the same as a coin sorter. Students are poured into the school from several area elementary schools and they fall into their predetermined slots. Jocks, stoners, preppies, geeks, nerds, losers, et al. form into their respective packs despite the fact that many of them have never met before.

I wrote of this phenomenon once before in a previous piece of fiction:

I like to think that I was ahead of my time: a loner and a recluse. Truth was, I wanted to be a jock, a preppy, a stoner, or whatever. I just wanted to fit in somewhere. I'm not really sure what circumstances caused me to become an inadvertent social outcast. Maybe the universe had already deemed me unworthy at thirteen. Perhaps I was predestined to fail.

Whatever the reason, that's how I wound up sitting at a table full of rejects at lunch. There was Stewart, the fat and smelly kid that had been horribly assaulted by puberty and had more hair on his shoulders and back than Mr. Bright, the gym teacher. There was Elliot, quiet and shy, who always took only two bites from his pizza before pushing it across the table to me. Ten years later he would be killed in a bold display of cosmic irony when his ex-girlfriend ran a stop sign and plowed into him at sixty mile an hour. Richard was the pimple-faced computer geek, and his odd-looking girlfriend was Shelly, whose only comeback to any insult was, "Eat me raw!". Scott, greasy haired and leather clad, was one of our class’s four future suicides. That left me, the scrawny nerd with the big head and even bigger glasses, and Toby, the one-armed pedophile. Of course, I didn't know he was a pedophile at the time. Maybe he didn't know then either. Whatever. That's his story, not mine.

That was based on more fact than you realize. I was so lazy that I would go without lunch because I didn’t fix one. Maybe “Elliot” thought I was poor and that’s why he always gave me his pizza. Maybe he only liked pizza in small doses. I don’t know, but I couldn’t stand Shelly.
Seventh grade was the year that I spent more than half the year in lunch-time detention. It was not because I had a disciplinary problem; it was more of a motivation problem. I didn’t do my homework. Ever.

In Algebra, if you didn’t turn in a homework assignment, you had to take a special note home and have your parents sign the note. I couldn’t do that because that would have meant letting my parents know that I wasn’t doing my homework. Unfortunately, not returning the slip meant detention.

On top of that, I got a detention from my music teacher for some BS reason. I’m pretty sure she was one of the teachers that hated me for no apparent reason. Our principal had a policy that you couldn’t serve two detentions simultaneously, so for every day you didn’t do the second (or third) detention, he gave you a detention. I was stuck in a loop where my detentions grew faster than my score on Galaga.

I’m not sure how I made it out of the seventh grade. If I remember correctly, I had three Es at the end of one of the semesters. I tried to cover it up by intercepting the report card in the mail and telling my parents that some of the report cards had to be sent later do to a computer error. I then took three different pens and changed my grades from Es to Cs and even forged the individual teachers’ initials. I finished it off with a small handwritten note in the corner of the report card that said, “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Needless to say, my parents were no dummies and I spent a lot of time grounded. I was never really a bad kid, just not very bright. I was always smart, I just didn’t have any common sense and I lacked the ability to see the big picture.

Maybe if I had done better in school academically, I would have been able to adapt socially. I sometimes wish I could go back and change the way I approached school. If I had only applied myself, I could have graduated with honors, gotten scholarships, gotten…what? I guess I’ll never know, but that’s okay. I’m pretty happy where I’m at.

Evolution of a Nerd: The Sixth Grade Sense

Sixth grade. I was eleven years old and, as you can see by my picture, I was resigned to the fact that I was being pushed to the outskirts of the school social structure. I was solidly identified as a nerd if for nothing else than the way I dressed or, more precisely, the clothing I had no choice but to wear.

My homeroom teacher was Mrs. Burke, a gentlemanly old broad who fit my idea of what a witch would look like, as per a Madeline L’engle influence, of course. Mrs. Burke did not like me, a fact that she was not remiss in reminding me of on more than one occasion. As had become a habit of my teachers in elementary school, I was assigned a desk that was as close to hers as possible while still remaining in the main seating area.

For reading, my favorite class, I had Mrs. Usborne. Her only real fault was that when she confiscated a toy or trinket from you, she kept it. That’s how I lost a couple of Go-bots, but that was alright because Go-bots weren’t as cool as Transformers. They were like the mentally/physically challenged cousins of the Transformers who couldn’t move or transform as well, but still had someone who loved them just for who they were.

The math teacher was Mr. Willard. Mr. Willard was generally a quiet guy, but had a reputation for flying into a rage if truly provoked. He was also a black belt in karate. Rumors of him punching holes in black boards, chopping desks in half, and kicking wrinkles into the space/time continuum abounded. I only saw him mad once, and he used his foot to push JC Keeler’s desk back about ten feet. He died a few years later in his early forties of a sudden heart attack.

One of the highlights of sixth grade was camp. Every year, the sixth graders went out to some outdoor preserve that I can’t remember the name of and camped for a week. We did all of the usual camping activities you would expect. There were minor hazing events, cabin antics, archery, canoeing, dissecting owl pellets, nature hikes, sports, blah, blah, blah.

For more information, see any movie where the kid goes to camp and has wild adventures and is the center of attention. Now, during that movie, pause it on a scene where you can see a whole lot of campers in the background. Find the skinny, awkward kid with glasses who is probably by himself. Yep, that’s me.

The most memorable thing from that week for me was discovering in the showers that some of the boys were developing a little faster than others. I also learned how to get into and out of a shower without anyone getting a look at my lack of development.

I was a Safety in sixth grade. Some of you may know them as crossing guards. For the second half of the school year, I wore a bright orange Safety Belt and controlled all of the kid’s safety at my particular corner. All I really did was stop the littler kids from crossing the road when cars were coming. For one week during that time I got to wear the coveted White Captains Belt. That’s not as racist as it sounds. It should actually be White Captains-belt. Or Captains Belt which was White. It just meant that I was the Safety Captain that week; though all the Captain really did was wear a White Belt. He had no real power.

The most amazing thing to me about being a Safety was that I was nominated and elected by my peers. Someone in my class nominated me to be a safety and then enough people believed in my ability to lead the children of Central Elementary to safety that they voted for me above so many others. There were also, like, twenty of us. Maybe they were just hoping I’d get hit by a car.

One of the highlights of being a Safety, a job that I believe every one of my sibling and I held, was that the principal took all the Safeties to a Detroit Tigers baseball game at the end of the year. I don’t remember what I did, maybe it was just my poor academic performance, but I was not permitted to go on that trip. That was the year they took the pennant.

I almost got paddled by the principal once, but I was set up. It had been raining and so we had indoor lunch recess. Lunch recess was not usually supervised, but the principal would periodically and randomly poke his head in.

I was playing with my GI Joe Zartan action figure by the window. Some jackass, I don’t remember who, grabbed it from me and started playing a spirited game of keep away from me. Eventually the apes tired of the game and one of them opened the window and threw Zartan out onto the rooftop of the maintenance building, which was connected to the main building right outside our window.

I climbed out the window and onto the roof to get my toy and, of course, the monkeys wouldn’t let me back in. I was banging on the window and trying to outsmart them, but they had me outnumbered. Suddenly they all let go of the windows and I was able to climb back into the class room.

I clambered over a couple desks and landed at the feet of Mr. Arnold, the principal. Of course all of the gorillas who were tormenting me said that I had just climbed onto the roof to screw around. Mr. Arnold took me down to the office and gave me a lecture about safety while threatening to use his paddle on me.

It really is a good thing I was a pretty mentally stable kid. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t try to retaliate for all of the abuse I suffered at the hands of bullies. All in all, I turned out alright. Though, the next year was the beginning of seventh grade.

Aaaaarrrggghh! Junior High!