Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Eh, lemonade brainfreeze.
Sticky keyboard.
Geh.

Jeigh fought down the urge to stick her tongue out in disguist and ram it up her nose. No more lemonade. Put it away. Jeigh had spent the last...(*looks to clock*)...many hours writing a convincing speech for her Wednesday presentation. The thought of simplicity had been simmering in her brain for about a week -- well actually for a few years, but it'd only been a week since getting the assignment -- and when she began to type, the ideas flowed freely, though she feared a tad too whimsical, what with goofy anecdotes about dinosaurs, the moon, and amish.net, and this was before taking the Nyquil. But if no one found it funny, they were the ones at fault. Perhaps she could try to raise Henry David Thoreau from the dead just for this one night and have him write the speech for her. It was Halloween afterall. At least it would be for the next five hours. Just enough time to find some ancient medallion in the old basement of the...dorm...hall...what happened to all the lemonade?

Anyway, she was considering posting some drawings for her readers, but feared she had none, for most of her...well that was a lie. ALL of her comments lately were ones that had clearly not read the blog, for they spoke of shallow ideas, presumably all from the same user. Nevertheless, drawings did liven the dead space of letters. Dead letters. That sounded like an Eerie Indiana episode. Jeigh decided TV was in order. Perhaps Halloween would provide some good movies on the television set. Afterall, last night, she'd caught the Thirteen Ghosts remake, which she quite liked, and then a cheap Judd Nelson movie about the Bermuda Triangle. Mark Sheppard was in it, so she would have continued to watch to see what would happen next, but she'd taken Nyquil before Thirteen Ghosts was over and was worried she wouldn't have the mentality to brush her teeth if she waited much longer. Anyway, if she couldn't find anything on TV, she did have three seasons of Red Dwarf and a sketchbook to keep her occupied.

Emo Conspiracy

Most people by now had heard the term emo. The trend was easy to describe, though everyone had a different twist. "Goth meets Harry Potter" was one that Jeigh laughed at because it held some truth. As much as Jeigh didn't like to admire fads, she liked the emo look, particualrily the emo glasses and old chucks. Jeigh found this stereotypical, yet amusing site: http://www.dobi.nu/emo/ because she knew that some people reading her blog were still living in the dark ages and were not familier with the term. Where have you guys been for the last ten years?

However, she'd been asking around for about a year what emo-style music was. She got a thousand different answers. Everyone knew Emo was short for emotional, but music was supposed to be emotional. It was art. She even did some research on the internet and after only a couple minutes, she figured out excactly what emo was. A conspiracy. Someone had started it some time with no real style in mind and everyone was like, "Yeah! I like emo too!" even though they didn't know what was going on. They just wanted to be cool. So then others caught on until everyone said they either did or didn't like emo, but in truth, no one really knew for sure. They coppied how other people have defined it, but there were so many different versions. Some people defined it as having really cliche sappy lyrics that repeated over and over, but wasn't that just pop? Other people said it was like whiny boys singing about their loves and losses. But wasn't that just regular boy-bands -- in the same vein as 90's pop? The best way to define it was to give examples and Jeigh had never heard of any of these bands before.

There is no such thing as EMO!

Serenity

Jeigh saw "Serenity" last Sunday. That Joss is a genius, she thought. That first shot in the ship was a 4 and a 1/2 minute oner!!! He introduced all the character in one shot. Granted it took them forty-some takes, but it was beautiful. The only thing she had a problem with was that her favorite character died. This wasn't one of those instances where one is following a series and then their favorite character dies in the next episode. There is a difference because there had been over a year between the last episode of Firefly and the release of Serenity. She had come to love this character over that year by watching the same episodes over and over. The character was static inside the Firefly DVD boxset, never changing. Now that the characters could change on the big screen, it was scary because once they change (or DIE!) one sees them differently than in the last year of no change. However, she did see, as a writer, why Joss did this. If her favorite character wouldn't have died then and in that way, she wouldn't have been so tense for the rest of the movie. Suddenly all bets are off. All the characters are getting wounded and no one really knows who will surivive.

She loved the part on Miranda. The mystery. She honestly tried to figure out what was going on, but couldn't. That was a really cool feeling. When the audience found out, it wasn't disappointing. It was really cool, actually. No one saw it coming.

Jeigh decided that everyone should go see Serenity right now...or at least before it leaves theatres. It's worth your money. Trust her. She knows these things.

Josh Joplin Concert

Months and months ago, Jeigh had seen "Madison, WI" on Josh Joplin's tour list. This was startling and disheartening because she'd be living in LaX by then. She, however, was determined to go. She'd do anything. But how? She had no car. The gig was on a Tuesday night and she had class at 7:45 the next morning. So, as time went on, she realized how impossible it would be to get there. Oh well, she thought. She'd already bought tickets, so perhaps her father would go for her and video tape it. That would be enough.

Last week, someone posted a clip online from a Josh Joplin concert last Friday, the song "Mortimers Ghost." Jeigh had never seen Josh Joplin perform live before and this was completely unexpected. His pictures showed a serious, probably mild-manored, average looking guy. He hardly smiled in any of his pictures. But here on stage, he grinned the whole time, bouncing up and down, rocking side to side, kicking his legs out, everything! This is when Jeigh realized that a video was not enough. She had to go to the concert on October fourth. So, she called up her parents and begged. They said they'd think about it, and by the next day, they decided that it would be alright considering the only class she'd miss was Speach and it was just listening to other kids give their speaches on Hurricane Katrina that day. So it was settled, and Jeigh was psyched.

Tuesday, October 4th, Jeigh's father picked her up and they made it back home to Madison in time for dinner. At 7:45, they left the house and arrived at Cafe Montemartre around 8pm. The opening act, Cordero, was scheduled to go on at 8:30 and Jeigh wanted a good seat. When they arrived, there weren't any seats open except way off to the side, but two women in front of the stage at the bar moved and Jeigh and her dad grabbed those seats -- the best seats in the house. The bartender told them that Cordero was not coming and that a lot of people were coming to see them. Jeigh didn't mind so much. But they had to wait around for an hour. Jeigh began to get anxious. She had met her favorite band, Blessid Union of Souls, last May and suddenly remembered how nervous she'd been walking up to the autograph table. She'd actually gotten dizzy. She didn't want to pass out before Josh even arrived. Meanwhile, Jeigh's father was aghast at the man painting the ceiling in the next room. First he rolled right over the two people drinking and then over the unattended Martin guitar.

Around 9pm, a van pulled up and a tech got out with a guitar. Jeigh got more nervous. Jeigh's dad said to tell him when she saw Josh, but she realized that she might not recognise him. Afterall, he was a medium-height, male, caucasian in his 30's with short dark hair. That described half the people in the room. The band came in, but she didn't see anyone that resembled Josh in any way. She could tell who the drummer was because he began pretending to play the drums in the next room.

Then, a little after nine, a man in a Jean jacket walked in. She knew it was him instantly, and said so. There was no doubt. He spoke briefly to the band and then entered the cafe. The first thing he did was walk to Jeigh and her dad and thank them for coming. Jeigh couldn't believe he was so nice. She told him she was a huge fan and her father told him how he had to drive all the way up to LaX to get her. Josh said that it was perfectly fine if she wanted to video tape the show.

The show was incredible. Jeigh planned to write down the playlist some time while watching the video back. She requested "That Was Then," but he never played it. That was alright; he played many other of her favorites, including "Dutch Wonderland" and "Jaywalkers of the World" and "Camera One." He actually broke a string playing "Camera One" and the tech said he was too hard on his guitars. Josh -- with that wonderful speaking voice with some kind of Pennslyvanian accent -- made the audience laugh with his anecdotes between songs, including stories about plastic cows, a mustache hair stuck in the microphone, a folk-singer's union, and ripping on Jimmy Buffet.

After the show, Jeigh got to talk to him breifly. She was able to buy a sad bunny t-shirt, get one autogrpahed poster, two photos with him, and two hugs from him. She also now has the one hour and 20 minute video of the whole concert. She forgot to ask him "Who is Mr. Henry, anyway?" but that's okay. She got back to the car wearing her Jaywalker t-shirt and pants filled with cameras and tapes and batteries, and she wondered why her shoulders were wet...it was Josh Joplin's sweat. She found it odd that he wore a heavy coat while performing because usually people get really warm jumping around on stage, but she remembered seeing photos of him performing in a winter scarf as well. Huh.

Sans Design movie

Well, it looked like Sans Design was a go. Jeigh had spent about half an hour (and two full sticks of chalk) writing on the sidewalks of her college campus to advertise the movie-making club she was starting. Okay, it wasn't really a club because if they wanted to call it a club they would need to become official and Jeigh didn't like having to deal with other people's rules about what a club can and cannot do. So, not a club, not a society, just a group of students creating a no-budget movie.

Anyway, though thinking she'd wasted her chalk on the eyes of Those That Look Up, quite a few people who came had only heard about the meeting via sidewalk. This was uplifting for Jeigh. She had a dozen people in a conference room, all looking to her for answers. Except...Jeigh had never led a meeting and worried that she may have come across as too disorganized. Some people might not come back, but she hoped they would. Okay, so she had never led a meeting. She had, however, made several films before. She knew what she was doing.

She was excited for the next meeting, though she had no idea what she was going to talk about. Perhaps she would hand it off to the volenteering producers. Afterall, she suspected her voice to be going. "Eh-heh-HEM!"