A New Obsession with The Strokes

I am in the midst of the best obsession I've ever had. I've never had a favourite band before, and I've actually never really been a fan of any music group or individual to the extent that I am with The Strokes right now. The only other obsession that I've ever had that might come close to my feelings toward The Strokes was with Regina Spektor, so imagine my surprise when I find this song, Modern Girl and Old Fashion Men, which is The Strokes and Spektor being awesome together, and then imagine the explosion that followed when I found out that Regina Spektor dated the lead singer of The Strokes, who just happens to share my first name, Julian Casablancas. I feel like the band is calling for me to be a fan, and that would be difficult for me to do, except that The Strokes are actually amazing. I don't know enough about music to make a technical argument for their awesomeness, but when I put on one of their albums everything becomes better, I can't help but sing along and rock my head. I wish I played guitar, I have a guitar, and I took a couple lessons, but I stopped along with my piano and saxophone lessons almost two years ago. I wanna be a rock star, but in the way that 6 year old girl wants to be a pop star. I don't really want that, but I love to think about it, and the fact that it makes me fiddle with my guitar for a couple hours isn't doing me any harm, so I'll just go with it for now.

The French Kids Aren't So Bad

French class this year has been a weird experience for me. Being a junior amongst a class of tiny ninth graders really makes me examine how much I've changed since my first days in high school. I have changed so much, the awkward chubby kid that used to wear sneakers and hoodies is from a distant past, and that boy doesn't even look like me. I look at every kid in this class and think "they're gonna look back at these moments and feel so embarrassed". Most will hide the pictures of themselves from this stage in their lives. They'll question the music they listened to and most of all feel ashamed of how they act in class.
Let me get something straight, this ninth grade class, the class of 2017, is the kindest in the school right now. I walk into French class and I watch the innocence that these ninth graders still have. Normally this innocence is lost somewhere in the sixth or seventh grade, when kids start cursing and masturbating, but these kids, they seem so pure. Not to say that 2017 doesn't curse or masturbate, but there is something fantastic about the dynamic of the class.
There are no divisions in the class. This surprised me so much. Normally you can immediately tell cliques, they're pretty easy to spot and something that has been part of every school since the beginning of time, but this class confuses me. The kids that are supposed to mean, aren't, and the ones who are supposed to be quiet, aren't. It's amazing to see a chubby kid with glasses treated no differently than the more mature kid who already started shaving. It's something fantastic. This class is childish, they scream out in class and show the same respect for learning as kindergartners, but is that such a bad thing? I certainly remember that my grade wasn't like this. There were certain kids in my classes that I tried to avoid, and my grade even came up with a name for our popular clique, the rat pack. The 2017ers don't have a rat pack, or maybe they do and I hope that one of the freshmen in STAC would correct me, but even if there is a rat pack or a cockroach herd or whatever you would want to call it, it could never stand up to what existed in my grade, at least not from what I've seen.
These kids are good people, my French class is loud and annoying when they wont listen to instruction, but going to that class is such a relief. My day is full of having to deal with kids that have seen the worst of what high school has to offer, and the kids in my French class are just that, kids, undamaged and hardly scratched by torments of middle school. To say I have hope for the future is wrong, someday each and every child in that class will learn how awful people can be and the cliques and gossip will eventually turn them into what we all are now, but I did learn something about innocence.
Innocence is something beautiful and rare. A boy is special not because of his youth, a little girl's cuteness doesn't come from her floral dress. What makes kids special is their innocence. We protect the young from the truth of the world because to us, the corrupt and broken, this innocence is something that we can never have again, only observe in those who haven't seen yet.

Doctor Who

It's a weird show, and it is so appealing to Americans for that exact reason. And what makes it weird is it's unamericanism. It looks like every other show on television, and it certainly has the same production value as any other sci-fi show in America, but this show is different. The plot decides turn in a direction that you don't see coming and then just keeps going. Doctor Who is a perfect example of a TV show that could go on forever, and it was designed to do exactly that. The main character can be reborn as anyone, any age, any race, and even any gender, and whose personality is just as flexible. Most of the American shows that do that are total crap and make me angry because I feel like the TV companies are screwing me. The key difference is the complex plots. I'm only on season 3 but I can already say that this is a show that no American station would make. The biggest thing for me is the return of characters. Seemingly unimportant characters return, and become a huge part of the grand plot, and there is always hope that your favorite character from an episode will comeback. And the grand plot doesn't stand in the way of each individual story. Every episode someone dies, and even though the Doctor always lives, he does fail, and that's what makes the show so unamerican. The protagonist loses. Even though we start to see this is some of the new television shows this is the only TV show that I have watched where the main character loses every episode. The Doctor is trying to save people, but he can never save everyone.  He is faced with constant failure, and he travels through time having to deal with all of it. That's a more honest and human story than the majority of American television shows in the past 50 years.
One of my favorite aspects about the Doctor is that he is flesh, and he can die. He freaks out the same amount during an invasion of the strongest species ever created and when he is stuck on a spaceship heading towards the sun. He is an all powerful alien but yet he carries no weapons, no armor, and nothing much other than his sonic screwdriver and his psychic paper. And even without the TARDIS the doctor is basically powerless, he needs the ship to travel through time, and yet his race is still called the time lords.  
The show isn't for everyone, but for anyone who gives it the chance, it'll be a great experience. The day of the Doctor is coming soon, and I know I have four seasons to watch but I wanna be caught up by the next regeneration of the Doctor. I plan to blog much more about Doctor Who, because that show gives you so much to talk about.

New Blog Name

I am renaming my blog based on my enneagram number.
The enneagram has been an important fixture in STAC for my generation of STACies, and it has been for me personally too. Honestly the whole idea is exaggerated. People tell you what you are like and you tell yourself, "right of course, I am exactly like that" when you also have characteristics of all the sections of the chart. But the enneagram helps so that you can craft yourself around a core idea. You identify as this, a single number out of nine, and tell yourself to be like this number. That helps surprisingly.
I am a five on the enneagram chart. That means that I am an "Investigator" but I've also heard it called "The Observer". I really loved the categorizing of my type, I love the way that the websites describe it. Being and Investigator means that I am an extremely introverted person. But introverted in a sense that makes you different from every other type. It's like shyness but described in a way that makes me better than you for being shy. I think to myself. I have a never ending internal dialog with myself that is always working. I fear the world so much that I will take a step back and think about everything so that I don't to confront it constantly. I feel like this is the best description for a good blogger. Someone will so much to say but is too shy to ever say it out loud.
The new blog title will be "Inside the Investigator" which sounds much better than my current title which doesn't seem to make much sense because it has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.

Breaking Bad Ended and I Feel Weird

I finished Breaking Bad last Wednesday. Weirdly enough the end of that television show had more of an impact on me and my mental state than anything I've ever seen before. It wasn't just the last episode, it was the accumulation of the entire series that all of a sudden just hit me at the last moment, and watching Walter, in his final moments, made me rethink everything and I can't really explained what happened to me after that. I started crying but I was fully conscious that I could stop at any moment because I didn't know what I was crying about. That's a strange feeling. We cry about bullshit all the time, but we are always aware of the reason why we are crying, or so torn up in the emotion that the reasoning doesn't matter to us. Being in this awkward middle section makes for an uncomfortable feeling, and one that still hasn't really totally gone away.

We make connections to everything. It's in the human mind to do so. So saying that I made a connection to a drug dealing villain isn't so odd when you think that we can be easily deceived by the tricks of creepy woman with the magic ball who sells her services on the second floor of a pizza place in Jamaica Queens. My mind made my life feel like Walt's. Every little lie that I told all of a sudden felt like some huge secret, where the consequences where huge. In reality my life is nothing like Walt's, and I saw that in the last couple of episodes of the series. 

I was always a fan of Walter White, even after all of the terrible things that he'd done. In my mind, I can root for him because he isn't real, and nothing he does will affect anyone. But it kept becoming harder and harder for me to do that. That show pushed the boundaries of what I would find acceptable in another person. I would never do what Walt did, but that would mean that I would hate someone who did. That was my mentality throughout the majority of the show. I thought that Walt would kill and do these awful things, but in the end of the day he wasn't so bad that I would hate him, and even after I realized that he didn't do these things for his family, but because he liked it, I still rooted for him because if I knew I was going to die in a couple months then my mental state wouldn't be so perfect. But those last three episodes killed me. They killed Walt as a person for me, and I hated him, I saw all the awfulness that could exist in a person come out of Walt, and I was looking forward to him losing everything and hopefully die. But then the last episode came. Out of nowhere, I felt sympathy. I think that's where my mini breakdown came from. The fact that I felt sympathy for one of the only villains I've ever truly hated. And that I couldn't hate this character anymore. The show took my beliefs and turned then upside down, and then back right side up again. I believe in every person, and that no one can truly be a bad person. I stopped believing that, only so that a couple hours later I can believe it again. 

We live in a golden age of television and Breaking Bad is the crown jewel of this era. 

12 Years a Slave

*This post has spoilers

To be honest I didn't very much enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. Recently I feel that I've been surrounded by so many movies about slavery that the plots of these movies always end up feeling similar. But maybe it's not even that. With this film I'll start with the first thing I knew about it, the title. The title gives away everything. "12 Years" tells you that this only lasts 12 Years, and implies that the main character will return home after those twelve years. It also tells you that this man was previously a free man, hence the reason why the movie doesn't end when he is age 12. The only thing I was hoping for was that during these twelve years something would happen to this man, something significant that would change his whole life, that he would discover something hidden deep inside of him and he would reach some awakening, like another movie that just came out, Gravity. The film became this pool for great actors to have very emotional scenes, which is why I think it is getting so much praise and love from viewers. The acting was very good, and some of my favourite actors gave amazing performances like Benedict Cumberbatch. But having amazing acting doesn't constitute being a good film to me if the story feels dull.

Gravity

*This post has spoilers

I've seen this movie twice since it came out in theaters. After seeing it for a second time I understand it much better. Gravity is a metaphor for birth. The woman has no reason to live because her daughter died, so she wasn't really living. Then the debris comes and she is conceived, and Clooney is the mother, he keeps her alive, and helps her to become a human again. He dies but his image is still there, as we saw in the hallucination scene. He shows her that there is something to live for, even if you have nothing. A baby has nothing, they don't have any attachments when they enter the world because they haven't met anybody yet, and that is how Bullock enters the world. In the end she comes out of the lake, wet and weak, not having anyone, but yet she still understands that she has a reason to live. Throughout the film there are so many obvious signs that help you get the metaphor, and the most is this scene when she finally gets back into a ship. If you haven't already, I highly recommend that you see this film, it's worth it, just trying to find all the connections back to the birth metaphor.