Champs and chumps

If you’re lucky, they’ll let you sell your soul for an average GPA. Yessir, tonight is my math class, and guess what? It’s the same instructor that I had last time. Goodness gracious, if that means anything then I guess it means that he’ll lecture from 5 to 7:30 (ten minutes before release) and then dump an initiation test on us. Oh well. Hey Mercedes is tonight, and I can’t miss that. Thankfully, this guy is pretty flexible. If we need to skedaddle he’ll usually let a student leave a test unfinished and then come back and work on it next week. What a champ.

So I hope they play “It’s Been a Blast” tonight, and of course, “Quality Revenge At Last”. It should be fun.

Hell and Highwater

Come hell or high water I was going to finish that damned trip diary. And now that it’s done, I can get back to posting the usual junk…err...magic. Anyway, speaking of trips, Gabe is on one right now in Colorado. I think he was going to see Radiohead at the Red Rocks too. I’m excited to hear how his trip went.

Last night I went to my first screenwriting class. I liked it very much, although I’m starting to realize how grim my chances are of succeeding as a director/screenwriter. Hopefully, I’ll make some good movies and write some good scripts. I had the plan to use one of my original ideas for a movie as my project in this screenwriting class, but the instructor informed the students that we’d all be tearing into one another’s work and that if we had a project that was equated to “our baby” then we should probably leave it out. So, I decided to write a new story for this class…I pretty much just made something up while I was in class.
The other neat thing about this class is that we’ll bring in pages from our scripts and then assign classmates to read parts of our script. He wants us to get a feel for how our stuff will sound coming out of another person, to see if our dialogue mechanics work. I’m looking forward to that.

Ok, I’m outta here. See you later.

Brock's Adventures Day 8-10: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

I was much slower to rise the next morning. For that matter, so was everyone else. By the time we had all gotten ready for another day in the city we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t much else to do. In a short amount of time we had been to places we hadn’t been before, seen sights that we hadn’t seen before. (I had seen Alcatraz, the wine country, Pier 39, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Japanese Tea Gardens, Lucas Valley and more) So, to round out our 4th day at San Francisco, we rode the cable cars.
That’s something I wish we had in Phoenix, even though it’d be pointless to have. In fact, to this day, San Francisco is the sole city in the world to use the cable car system (and it’s a very crowded ride). I remember sitting there at the cable car station and watching them fill up each car to the brim with people. They would cram, cram and then cram some more. And when they ran out of space? They just started putting people on the outside of the car, letting them hold on by the brass rail. When we finally got in a car we rode into the city and stopped at a little coffee shop and it was at that little café that I saw one of the oddest things on my trip.
At a table behind ours was a couple sitting and eating cake and drinking coffee. There was nothing out of the ordinary with those two; they simply didn’t finish all of their food. However, after they had left the café an elderly woman came in and sat down at their table. And ate. By all appearances, she didn’t seem to be homeless. She had nice clothing on and she looked groomed. She probably just thought to herself, “well here’s some perfectly good food, so I’ll simply take care of it”. Weird…
After browsing through some stores and walking around the city for a while we rode the cable cars, again, this time on the way to dinner. The second time around was much better since I got to hang out on the railing. We coasted up and down hills and I almost bumped into a few parked cars and street cones with my toe. Our driver was also an interesting fellow. At one stop there was a beautiful girl waiting for the car. When the driver stopped he told his attendant that he could only take on a single. Visibly pleased, the girl said she was single, at which the driver jumped away from his post and exclaimed “twenty-five to thirty?” All the way downhill he kept chuckling to himself unbelievably; “I’ve waited years to use that joke, and finally I got the opportunity!”

The last two days were pretty much just the indigestion of my trip. Don’t get me wrong, they were still nice and I was still mesmerized by the city. By now however, everything was wearing a little thin and I was starting to realize that I had been away from home for an uncharacteristically long period of time. (By the time I finally got back I was just 4 days shy of being gone two weeks)
Instead of doing anything ambitious I took time to meet up with a friend of mine who lived in the Bay Area. He was doing well and we spent a good amount of time just hanging around in my hotel lobby chatting. After that we went on our Chinatown tour. That wasn’t too great to be honest. I mean, I guess it was ok from a certain point of view; it’s just that I saw a plethora of garbage and useless kick-knacks. Most of the crap the vendors were selling were glass capsules with condoms in them, ingeniously labeled “break glass in case of an emergency”. Oh, and to answer your subliminal question, no, I didn’t buy any.
I guess I was expecting to see some oriental items, not birth control and fortune cookies with pornographic fortunes. Maybe I simply didn’t look in the right shops. Heck, I’m a tourist, I’m American, therefore I probably gravitated to all of the businesses that most Americans in Chinatown do. I saw some great swords that were imported from China though, and some teapots.
We spent the next two days getting back to Phoenix. Along the way we stopped off in San Diego and visited Coronado Island, my home away from home. San Francisco was amazing to be sure, but I’ll always enjoy San Diego. Maybe one day if I’m ever ludicrously rich (which is highly unlikely) I’ll move there. For the moment though, I was content to get back on the road and return to Phoenix, Home Sweet Home (awwww, sugar coated ending!)

Brock's Adventures Day 6-7: Pour the Wine

It was daylight receding and I was sitting there in a darkened, wooden room by a window that glanced out at the street. The place I was sitting in was none other then the Buena Vista café, a quaint little joint positioned along the crevices of the city. Nothing was particularly outrageous about this place. No props or attitude garnered it its claim to fame. By all rights it was the kind of café that could be found in any big city. The only thing that made this our destination for dinner was one thing; the Buena Vista was the birthplace of the Irish coffee. With a little caffeine, a frothy covering, and a healthy dose of whiskey, it was well reputed and notorious within San Francisco’s social circles. Of course, I being the under-age minor I am only took a slight taste of the concoction, but I earnestly believed through that sip that the Irish coffee earned every bit of notoriety it had contracted. Thankfully, the Buena Vista also had good food.

While I’m telling you about this place I should also mention that this was after we saw the Japanese Tea Gardens. While visiting the soothing calm of tranquil gardens, everyone decided to get something alcoholic, so I followed along in high hopes of actually eating somewhere within the city. And we did. The Buena Vista was stationed along a road just before the piers. It was there at the table that everyone decided they wanted to do something else alcoholic for the next day in the city: They wanted to visit the wineries. Napa Valley, Beringer, and even the Francis Ford Coppola Vineyard were on their list of wineries to stop off at. Considering that I had already indulged my wishes to see Alcatraz, I decided to tag along and see if I could get on one of the vineyard tours. After the choice had been made (and we had finished dinner) we left the Buena Vista Café and strolled around the city to get a glance at life after the sun had set. We didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, or lively, but we did come across a small gallery that was currently showcasing some artwork by Marc Chagall. Marc Chagall had painted a series of dark paintings during a stay in Russia, and those pieces were about to be put on display. As a result everyone was in the grips of his works. The paintings we glanced at in this gallery were not those understated pieces, but rather some of his more recognized works. Colorful and bright, the reds, oranges and blues of these paintings seemed to wash and run into one another. Misty clouds of liquid sunshine composed the visages of famous musical icons like The Beatles and renowned landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge. Chagall’s overstatement of the bluntly obvious though had turned McCartney’s rosy smile into a sneering grimace more characteristic of the Joker. These pieces were totally unlike the works currently being popularized in the paper. It was in those paintings from Russia that dark figures and harshly beautiful women haunted Chagall’s mind.
It was an understatement of his work, and seeing his work was an understatement of my trip.

The following day we drove out to the Wine Country to see if it was at all possible to go on a Wine Tasting Tour of the vineyards. My family felt that it was completely plausible for these wineries to hand out free bottles of wine to anyone who happened to stumble upon their grounds. Moreover, they had planned to find this one particular vineyard whose name escapes me now. At any rate, we set off to find the wineries and to go on a tour. Hours and hours of driving produced no sign of that particular vineyard; yet, it did provide a fine tour of the countryside. Sure, I was in throes of boredom sitting there in that car looking for a vineyard that was starting to seem non-existent. But the countryside was beautiful. It was green and lush, and the plains of the valley rose and descended in hills and expanses. Now that I’m sitting here typing up this description of the countryside, I’ve come to wish that I had brought a camera of my own to take pictures of the land. Finally, after a time, they decided to stop at the Beringer winery and take their tour.
When we got out at the Beringer Vineyard I couldn’t help but be reminded of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I suppose the best word to describe the winery is “whimsical”. It had such a surreal personality. It was like the winery was slightly stationed in the real world and slightly in the bizarre. Some of the more fantastic elements included winding cobblestone paths that led into twisting stairs and large looming wooden doors that opened up into barrel-laden rooms. I kept looking around to see if I could find any surly Oompa Loompas stumbling around. Sadly, I only found half-hearted employees. Also disappointing was missing the final tour of the day. We had spent so long driving around looking for this unknown vineyard that we missed the other vineyard’s tours. Still, my dad decided to get some wine while he was there, and we found a good Mexican restaurant on the way back. So…it wasn’t an utter loss.