Ted talks. <3 to MC
Lessee..... in college my official majors were Theater, followed by English, followed by Film. My official minor was in Psychology. When it was looking like I'd pick up a general studies degree, I had focuses on Communication and History, as well.
I have a couple of dreams, one is to win a major Poker tournament, and one is to write for Marvel comics. I'm a simple person with poor self-esteem, so my goals are based entirely around things that I know I'm good at. My majors in college were mostly to placate my family, which has slowly become less important to me, even as my family themselves have become more important. There is a confrontation brewing, and it sort of terrifies me, although I instinctively know it'll work itself out.
Writing is a passion of mine, albeit one I neglect. Or to put it another way, FICTION is a passion of mine that I indulge in continuously. The idea of creating something for the most part is intriguing and exciting, but it's not so much what I love so much as seeing it right there for me. I get emotionally invested in sappy independent movies, and I'm cuckoo for Marvel Comics, which is essentially a soap opera for boys. My desire to one day write for them stems less from my need to create anything, so much as a childlike curiosity to see what would happen if something I invented was introduced to the universe---I've seen obscure, bad, or neglected characters have new life and thought breathed into them by someone else, and that excites me. The idea that a character can go in a wildly different direction when another mind is behind them--but a direction that still makes sense, mind--is absolutely amazing to me. So yes. I want to write for Marvel comics, but I think my ULTIMATE goal on that end is for someone better than me to write about something I create, while not being insulting to other people when I take control of their old toys.
Presently, I'm writing a novel about emotional prisons. .....And Kung-Fu.
Poker is something different entirely. It's wild. It's hard to describe what it is about the game that I enjoy so much, other than the fact that I used to be very good at it. A good night playing Poker can put me into "the zone" or "Flow" or a Eudaimonic State if you want to get fancy. Even if I'm losing. Watching Poker on TV used to be super exciting for me, because I got really good at figuring out what was going on in the players' heads and predicting how games would go to my dad. I have a huge competitive streak, and when I want to be completely honest with myself, my body will never, ever be as sharp or as capable as my mind. Poker is a game that I can skillfully be toward the top of fairly consistently when I take part. I love me some Team Fortress or some Basketball, and I get competitive as hell when I play, but in the former, I'm only above average at best, and in the latter, well...... I'll beat someone who doesn't play.
I love -watching- basketball, because it's absolutely fascinating to me to look at how all the little details that go into every single team every single day effect each and every game. Similarly, I'm becoming a bit of a political junkie.
I guess you could say that I'm in love with fascination in general. I embrace things that I feel have a wealth of depth to them, and dig as deeply as possible into attempting to understand them. I think it's also why I can't seem to stay focused on any one major or field of study for very long, and it's probably a chunk of the reason why I've always been such a poor student, despite generally having a stronger mastery of the material than most of my peers.
But I'm getting carried away. You asked for good things to read to be as invested in certain things as I have been. So I can do that.
I love movies and I think the amount of thought that goes into making movies is amazing. Watch these films in no real order:
Citizen Kane, Koyaanisqatsi (warning: boring), Blue Velvet, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Conversations with Other Women, The Education of Charlie Banks, Battle Royale, The Verdict, The Lives of Others
These are not all of the best films I have seen by any stretch of the imagination (Most of them are significantly above average, though), but they all ought to strongly make you feel
something, and isn't that the point of movies?
I love theater, but instead of watching something brilliant, you should just talk to theater people and observe the passion they put into even a terrible play. For my money, that's more interesting than any play is on its own merits.
When I studied theater, I was big on comedy/sketch writing. So a lot of stuff actually applies to sit-coms and the like. Watch all of Arrested Development. Frasier and Cheers are two of the most well-written comedies of all time. Mmmn.... Most things are hit and miss. Those three are almost entirely "hit", though. If you just want to watch one episode of something to see my appreciation for comedic writing, watch Season 5's episode of Frasier titled "Frasier's Imaginary Friend". The final scene and blow line are probably my favorite in television history in both writing and execution.
As for sketch comedy itself, I have a handy link or two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3-LxmrFm40http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdmqBmiEZd4&feature=relatedEnglish was a terrible choice of a major that yielded almost nothing with what I thought was a passion at the time. However, my linguistics class introduced me to Steven Pinker, who is a fascinating and brilliant person with opinions on all kinds of stuff. Read one of his linguistic books if you're interested in how language works or WHY it works the way it does.
You would think that I would have a good recommendation for psychology, but for the most part, while the subject fascinates me, I've yet to really find something written about it that sticks with me to this day.
Biology is a big interest, and I could have seen myself making it my major if it weren't for how impossible it would be for me to cut on a dead human or even an animal that wasn't unrecognizable on my dinner plate. Read CRACKED, of all places, if you want to be fascinated by how amazing Biology is. Just start going through the animal articles one at a time and marvel over how diverse the world truly is.
There have been truly great basketball games and poker games televised in the past, but I find that there's a lot of mystique that goes away when you actually know who's going to win, so it's really hard to get someone into sports(or competition) without them experiencing it live, first-hand. Sorry.
Marvel Comics is difficult, too, because the universe is so huge and there have been so many stories that have just built on one another over and over again that jumping in is difficult. I fundamentally disagree with people that there is a definitive point you should start at if you want to fall in love with the genre. I started reading comics during the 90s, widely regarded to be the worst decade in the history of comics as far as literary merit is concerned, and I still follow the same characters today. Just jump into a book that's currently well-written and ask questions if you're having a hard time following it. In the old days, there used to be a letters page at the end of every single comic, and you could figure out a surprising amount about the universe by just listening to the editors answer people's questions and foreshadow a bit about what was going to happen. It's a medium that just sort of grows on you over time. My appreciation for what's going on today in X-men stems less from the events taking place in those books than it does the events I've witnessed over the past ten years, and was compelled to read about because of those years of reading. Jump onto Hickman's FF sometime and revel in the horrible confusion for a while. It'll start to make sense as you go along.
~~~
These are some of my passions, but making them accessible to someone else has never been one of my strong suits. If it was, I'd probably get laid a lot more.
