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Name: Ryan
Country: United States
State: California
Birthday: 11/29/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: nooo hobbies
Expertise: i am an expert, son!
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message me
Member Since:
3/19/2003
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| This is about a month overdue.
I've always believed that every good American should, at some point in their lives, take a trip across the country. Not the kind where you hop on a flight, take a nap, and magically wake up 3000 miles away. I mean one with a better view. The road trip -- a distinctly American idea that, despite the influx of hybrid vehicles and in-car entertainment systems, still carries an oldschool romanticism, alluring in the same spirit that has kept '67 Corvettes and James Dean from going out of style. Over the years, random fragments of ideas -- made up of half-imagined scenes from absent-mindedly-viewed films and hazy excerpts from forgotten books -- have congealed in my mind and informed a peculiarly strong yearning to make this trek, with the conviction that it would, however improbably, be a transformative experience, a spiritual coming-of-age.
And so, when the opportunity for such a road trip arose in the midst of planning a cross-country move to New York with my brother, it was an easy choice to make. We would pack up the van with as much crap as we could cram in it and hit the road. In prior years, I had often dreamed of driving across the country. My imagination concocted laughs and thrills and bizarre new experiences; unfamiliar places to discover, odd region-specific idiosyncrasies to unearth by chance. It would be awesome in the way road movies are awesome, and I believed this with the same fervor that keeps driving people to make and watch those exact movies. Who could say, there might even be a smalltown girl waiting to be swept off her feet before we both realized, through tears (hers) and anguish (mine), that she loved her overalls and the mud-caked hours she spent tending the horses, and I had dreams that could only blossom in the city. We'd go our own ways with a promise, foolishly made, though neither of us would admit it, to keep in touch and meet again one day. Or there'd be a close-minded town waiting to be taught a valuable lesson, the entire bigoted populace clustered in the town square as we cried passionately about living in the God Damned U S of A and having the Freedom to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fucking Happiness. They'd stand there in stunned silence as we gave them the full extent of our righteous indignation, and then as an uneasy quiet settled, we'd whisper some quip about being screwed and the entire mob would turn apeshit and run us out of town as an annoyingly upbeat ditty involving a fiddle played over the scene. In short, the trip would be epic. I had prepared my whole life for this trip. I was ready...
Alas, reality never works so sweetly. When the time came to actually make the trip, we found ourselves on a deadline with only three days to make the journey. Any dreams of being run out of Hicktown, USA quickly flew out the window in the interest of keeping a brisk pace, along with my (only slightly) more realistic hopes of an enlightening pilgrimage across the heart of the country. We left L.A. on an unsurprisingly sunny Tuesday morning, just past noon. We arrived at our destination -- a friend's place in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan -- amidst a balmy but steady rain at four in the morning, tired and no more enlightened, but happy.
Since there were no life-changing insights gleaned, or wacky but heartwarming misadventures to be had, all we have to show for the trip (besides bragging rights, of course) is this somewhat incomplete photo scrapbook. No smalltown girls, no redneck locals, just an honest look at what lies between point A and point B, mostly from the vantage point of the passenger window.
Enjoy. (And click to see them in SPECTACULAR QUADROVISION! a bigger size.)
Not sure if you can read that, but my Navi tells me it's going to be a 2793 mile trip taking 46 hours and 41 minutes.
Got the van all packed.
Goodbye.
I always liked the look of the tunnels on the 5-N just past downtown. They never really looked like they belonged in LA to me, more like some place on the way to Santa Barbara. Also, it's the only place I've ever seen even remotely close to LAX that could serve as the location where Volchok runs Ryan and Marissa off the road. Unless there are tunnels on PCH I've never seen, where the hell else could that have happened between the OC and LAX? One of those silly continuity issues that always bugged me.
I wish.
Good ol' American Southwest.
Last sunset in the West.
This is what most of America looks like, apparently.
Plenty of these milling about, too.
And we're headed back for OKC. Never thought I'd go there. Never thought I'd go back.
Nothing but open road...
...and the biggest cross in America.
Aren't we all?
St. Louis! The only city we stopped in for more than a bite to eat, a tank to fill, a piss to take, or a night to sleep.
Photo op #1.
And #2.
The Mississippi.
We didn't come all this way to NOT dip our toes.
And that was St. Louis.
Layover in Columbus, OH to see my uncle and aunt. Sometimes I miss suburbia.
You can't see the front of our van, but it's got about 6500 insect carcasses on it.
This is their backyard. Oh, the wonders of Ohio.
The Chung men are always open to a photo op.
And here's where we ate dinner and then drove for the next 9 hours to arrive in New Jersey at 4 in the morning without taking a single picture to document the experience. Trust me, it happened. And thankfully, Sae was more than willing to keep odd hours.
New York, at last.
Assuming I find a decent camera and get around to taking pictures, there'll be a part 2 to this post where we actually see, you know, the city. But finding a job has become priority one for the time being. The camera, and thus the photo scrapbook, will have to wait.
So maybe we didn't get to live out the cheesy cliches, but we made it to New York City, and we saw a lot of green pastures and blue skies doing it. Not a bad deal, at the end of the day. | | |
| 
What are you doing?
That's right, folks, Twitter is taking over the world. What was once considered a tremendously silly idea ("It's a service that's basically Facebook's status update...and that's it?") has now become the method of choice for people to communicate. Yes sir, in 140 characters or less, you can spout off any and all of your idle thoughts, important announcements, or check-this-out's to the rest of the world. It started with the tech heads, spread to the political sphere, but once the celebrities really got ahold of it, it was over. Now everyone is following their favorite athletes or comedians on Twitter. But more importantly, they've got their own accounts from which they can tweet about their own lives for the rest of the world to see.
 And that's where the trouble starts. Twitter's biggest problem is precisely what makes it so popular -- it's so damn easy to use. Sure its comfortably cloud-adorned background of that familiar turquoise hue brings a sense of fun and hipness to your participation, and its cute little memes ("fail whale!") encourage an in-the-know community to stay up-to-date, but Twitter's biggest coup is its implementation of a single white box that patiently awaits your attention; that elegantly spare space allotted with limitless possibilities as it seeks your answer to one simple question -- "What are you doing?" And with that one question came a torrent of takkity-tak-taks as thousands, and then millions, of people began fervently typing in their answers.
That was, to put it ever-so-dramatically, the beginning of the end. Twitter’s easy-to-use design contained one epic flaw: the complete lack of any filtration system. There’s nothing to encourage people to stop and think about what they’re going to type, no hoops to jump through to dissuade the less-inclined from doing what most people should do when they find themselves moved by the urge to tweet about the flavor of coffee they’ve purchased from Starbucks that morning…gulp that sucker down and just continue on their way. The millions of users now on Twitter speak volumes for how beautifully this has worked out for the service’s creators, and in all honesty, it is a great system. It’s a beautiful way to allow people to communicate. But an unexpected result is that it paints a sad, even pathetic, self-portrait of what goes on in most of our heads from day-to-day.
The fact is, the very large majority of us have absolutely nothing of interest to say at any given moment of the day. It’s only on occasion that anything remotely interesting crosses the best of our minds, and even less often that it’s compelling enough to merit sharing with someone. So you can imagine what happens when millions of Twitter users are allowed free reign, and even encouraged, to spout off whatever they like as often as they can to an unsuspecting patronage of followers. You get a lot of dull, pointless, and utterly inane Tweets. Twitter might as well be called Clutter with the amount of wasted verbiage transmitted through its network. The biggest selling point of micro-blogging is also its biggest inherent flaw – it has so few demands of its users that anyone can use it. Whereas the standard for blogging can generally be considered to be at least a couple hundred words per blog, Twitter only asks for 140 characters! So anyone, in essence, can write. And as we all know, that is simply not true. While it’s debatable how interesting many personal blogs actually are, the fact that you would need to drum up a few hundred words about a subject meant you’ve probably put at least a respectable amount of thought into each entry. So you’d write away, and be it good or bad writing, at least you had a few hundred somewhat coherent thoughts on a sustained topic of choice. But with a 140 character cap, your space limitation means you don’t have to actually say ANYTHING. In fact, I’ve too often seen Tweets that contained 140 characters or less of absolutely nothing. Time-consuming, soul-destroying words of absolute no use.
 So why is this killing us? Well, it’s not. But it sure as hell is annoying. Many Twitterers, Twitteronians, Twitterheads, or what have you seem possessed to Tweet simply so they can feel connected or can make an imprint, however small, on the virtual -- and by proxy, real -- world. And the fact that everyone’s doing this means Twitter naturally becomes a self-sustained producer of peer pressure to say something. “Look, everyone else is doing it, so you better, too!” It’s resulted in a disaster zone of bloated and convoluted Tweet streams that just beg to be unfollowed. Which would be easy to do, but then the social networking aspect of the service comes into play. What if your friend is a major offender? How do you explain unfollowing a good friend? In this post-Facebook world, un-following someone has the potential for carrying volumes of unspoken subtext. Is it a slap in the face? Merely an accident? A passive aggressive method to send a message? Whereas with Facebook, there’s a specific label to the action – un-friending someone is about as plain a message as you can send – with Twitter, there’s no such clarity. Following someone doesn’t necessarily imply any feelings of goodwill or camaraderie, only an interest in what one has to say. And yet we've been conditioned by Facebook to view the severance of virtual ties as an act of abandonment, even hostility. So what are you saying by unfollowing someone who is your friend?
Twitter has thereby unleashed a cornucopia of social uncertainties. And not only does the question of to unfollow or not to unfollow become an issue, it also creates anxiety for Twitter users who fear they may be treading down the path of tweeting inanely.
“Oh no, I really want to share this, but is it interesting?”
“Okay, I didn’t Tweet about that one thing earlier…is it okay to Tweet about this now?”
For fear of later embarrassment, these become relevant questions everytime you feel the itch to Tweet. Indeed, Tweeting can soon become like that last shot a buddy offers you at 2 in the morning – either the start of something enjoyable, or a bad, bad idea, especially when you look back on it the next morning. And this kind of stress would be terrible for a system meant to act as an enjoyable way to stay connected with the rest of the world.
In the end, what can you do but learn to self-police? The only other alternative is to throw caution to the wind and Tweet about whatever you want, regardless of the repercussions. But how long will it be before you’ve pissed away all of your followers (or at least the ones who know the difference between being sociable and being that guy who won’t shut up)? There’s a learning curve for every technology, and hopefully people will learn to master the easily-overlooked one Twitter has to offer.
Until then, we’ll just have to brave the horror of those sickeningly enthusiastic Tweets about the demeanor of that labradoodle you saw while walking in the park.
P.S. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Twitter has also opened up a whole new avenue of expression for the cleverer among us. While some may abuse their 140 character limit to proffer trite, pithy, and damn near damnable observations, others have seized the opportunity to showcase a mix of wit and understanding of the medium to spectacular effect. It’s a public show with private seats – hilarious one-liners and quips for all to enjoy on the privacy of their smartphone screen. That is perhaps the peak for which all Twitterers will learn to strive for. How to be clever in 140 characters or less, or more importantly, how NOT to sound like a special ed second-grader with tourettes and internet access. Can we get to a point where all Twitter users know to only share what deserves sharing, say what needs saying, and @reply what demands @replying? I don’t know, but THAT would be something worth Tweeting about.
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| Idle Friday evenings demand a Xanga update. Cause hey, if everyone else's out but you, nothing like dropping a mind deuce (yup) in a public forum to soothe the soul a teensy tiny bit. Ahhh, feels good don't it?
Update on my life: job-hunting is about as soul-crushing an endeavor as any I've encountered before. Especially considering that the film industry is still crippled from the lingering effects of one strike while being blue-balled for the past 9 months bracing for the next. Not to mention this whole recession business; lordy the job market is dry! It's really depressing when people I haven't seen in a while ask me what I've been up to, and all my answer can really amount to is some combination of "My resume has been ignored by every major employer in my intended field!" and "My brother and I spend way too much time maintaining a movie blog that turns absolutely no profit!" But hey, at least I'm keeping busy by being more or less unproductive. For those that do care, please visit the blog: cinema, verytasty. It'll change your life. Or not; either way, it's a whale of a good time!
Enough whoring. On with the life-update: I guess I'm technically a freelancer right now. I just happen to freelance in a variety of areas--videography, grip/electric, basic web design, etc. The paychecks are few and far between, and my credit card bill is certainly something to envy (and how!), but hey, I'm getting by (barely) so I can't complain (too much). Living at home is underrated, too, bee-tee-dub. Free rent, food's provided, what more can ya ask for?
New York still awaits (I'll get there), but with this economy and those living costs, I honestly don't know how long it's going to take until I can finally move over there. That is perhaps the most frustrating part of all of this unemployment business--I can't be where I want to be and can't get my life moving in the direction I want it to. And look at that, it just forced me to end a sentence in a preposition! This is fucking awful.
Now that that's out of the way, what else is there to say? Another Vegas trip is looming in the future, and even though it's beyond fiscally reprehensible to even consider going, here I am. Considering. Seriously. Oh, Vegas. How I hate (love) you.
New Facebook is one giant Twitter feed. Twitter is gay (not a fan of the word in that context, but sometimes, it's just appropriate). And I am a Twitteronian (follow me here). As is every other relevant person in America, apparently. But I still refuse to use Facebook's Status Update. Cause that shit is TRULY lame (gay).
Keri Hilson's "In A Perfect World..." finally leaked. Been waiting forever for that album. Let's hope it's good. Yes, I pirate music (who doesn't?). I also buy more CDs than anyone else I know (fact). I think of it as I like to test drive my purchases before I commit to them. Go get Company of Thieves' "Ordinary Riches" (out now!) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "It's Blitz!" (out March 31st). There's probably more but those two have been eating up the rotations on my playlist. Oh yeah, while we're here--if you haven't yet, check out Taylor Swift's "Fearless" (forrealsies). Thank me later.
Things I enjoyed this past week or two or three:
1. Late night yogurt runs (less cause of the yogurt, more cause of the spirit of it all).
2. All night beer pong seshes, even if I inevitably fall asleep halfway through.
3. Re-reading old chat logs and laughing my ass off at how utterly stupid and juvenile and carefree and enviable we were (we really are growing up). I hope to do this again in the future.
4. Watchmen finally got made!
5. Sudden small but rich bouts of indefensible optimism, flashing at me like the universe was taking my picture, leaving lingering phantoms of blue skies and clouds of the poofy variety.
6. The right song at the right moment, for reasons you could never elucidate but you KNOW other people get.
7. Extreme sensations of discontentment. Cause at least I haven't given up hoping striving for more.
I meant to spice this post up with pictures and the such, but alas--tired --> lazy --> no pictures. Maybe next time? Can't say when that will, but hopefully sooner than later, huh folks? Till then... | | |
| Just to let my (very few remaining) readers know that I am in fact not dead, and have been writing (albeit in a different capacity) all this time:
http://www.cinemaverytasty.com
That's it for now. | | |
| Giving thanks for:
-All of the people who have come or gone my way this year. If you've made idle conversation with me, linked me to some YouTube/Vimeo video worth a look, reminisced about childhoods with me, smiled as we passed, made me food, ate my food, traded online banter with me, offered me a place to sleep, recommended a movie/cd/book, had a drink with me, or simply listened to a That's-What-She-Said joke from me -- thank you.
-Good movies (most recently Slumdog Millionaire and Rachel Getting Married), good music (most recently parts of 808s & Heartbreak, Fearless, The Sad Robots EP, and some mixed Amanda Palmer), good books (most recently The Road, The Time Traveler's Wife, Paper Towns, and The Graveyard Book).
-The need for something Greater.
-Holiday food.
-Holiday cheer.
-Cold weather and warm coffeeshops.
-Vegas trips, past and impending.
-The vague promise of New York.
-Unflappable swagger.
-Wikipedia.
-BlackBerrys.
-Christmas songs.
-Someone to share a brewski and (on special occasions) have a smoke with.
-The conviction that this next year will be one for the books.
-The desire, however elusive, to Create.
-Family gatherings.
-A long-overdue run to Albertacoes.
-Warm blankets.
-Change, or something like it. | | |
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