Memories in a Box

My Video Blog posting.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GcR1qS40YA

Memories in a Box

Open the shoebox in the closet and let the time travel begin. The past has just come to you. All those things you kept over the years, can’t bear to part with, even when you have no reason to keep it. A brown fuzzy button, a drawing in the local newspaper, a green card, a letter, my life. One little seemingly unimportant thing holds so much.

The brown fuzzy button is from an old school, full size van. My high school boyfriend’s ride. Believe me or not, his name was Duck. We used the same box hair color, we’re anti social, and liked to fight authority. He got rid of that van, got a sports care, rolled it, killed a girl, went to jail, then “we” ended. Broke my heart, why was she in the car, why did the newspaper call her his girlfriend, why do I keep the button. The button is neutral, but the memories are not. Take the good with the bad.

The drawing in the paper is of a girl watching Bevis and Butthead on TV, while passing out, while falling backwards, being caught by hooded death. Kick ass drawing for a 5th grader. I drew it. I read Animal Farm that summer, meet this boy Marker, which lead to a strange friendship that I still have today. Marker was a great guy who had so much going for him. He is a genius. A genius that plays acid driven jam music, his band is underground famous, and was busted for growing pot. Yet in our summer class for smart kids we were reading heavy, dreaming big, and had our whole lives in front of us. I ended up dropping out of high school, going to college a year early and taking 10 years to graduate. He went to college, found drugs, went to Mardi Gras, didn’t come home for 2 weeks, parents called him in as a missing person. I said he probably got high on drugs and ended up in Mexico with no cell service. Yep. He came back from Mexico never to be the person he was before. I still love him.

I am an American citizen, born and raised. I have a green card. From Ireland. I lived there for 6 months while I went to school. It rains, sideways, while the sun is shining, and it’s 50 degrees, always. When it rains there are will be at least one umbrellas in any trashcan you see. I learned after my first umbrella that not having one is cheaper.

A letter I received in elementary school from Erin Grimes. Not a clue what happened to her in life but she was my friend back then. The address on the front was upside down. Inside was a drawing of two horses. She could name any bread of horse and I could name any bread of cat. I can still remember the basement where we would have sleep over parties.

Here is a shoebox filled with my life. Moments and memories that I can only remember when I see the little pieces that were left behind. How much more have I forgotten because there is nothing to remind me of it? I don’t keep journals, I throw away photos of times and people that I don’t care about anymore; I even clean out those boxes every once in a while. Sometime it is to forget them memories and sometimes things get tossed because on that day I just didn’t care anymore.

Coolest RA ever!

I often question how I got to be an RA. Oh yeah, I didn't have my piercing or hair colored crazy. Oops. But I am really good at what I do and I take pride in the fact that I can be off the wall but still do good things for the people around me.

A resident showed up at my door because she lost her nose stud and she didn't know who else could help her. I did!

Movie Review

Burn After Reading

With an all stare cast that includes John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney a moviegoer would expect an award-winning plot and script. Burn After Reading wasn't nominated for any Oscars awards.

I'm a huge fan of total messed up movies, American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine, and Closer all fall into that category. All are movies that involve either heart break, death, and/or sleeping around with other peoples spouses. Burn after reading has all of my favorite aspects for a movie but fell short on any true meaning.

There is meaning in American Beauty. Everyone is looking for something beautiful in there lives where decay has replaced beauty. One boy in the movie manages to find beauty in everything, including garbage. The line at the end, when Lester is talking about how it feels to have died, he says “but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...” That is meaningful, some times you just need to breath.

Eternal Sunshine is another movie that had deep meaning. The big question brought on by this movie is “Would you erase your past memories?” This movie shows us what would happen if we did and the life lesson is – we need our past. Our past makes us who we are today and if erase it we are doomed to repeat it.

I don't believe in movies with happy endings because real life is in high demand yet short supply of happy endings. I want movies that give me the real life pain that is floating around other people’s lives. I can either sympathize with movies like that or fell good that my own life isn't like that. Burn After Reading has no happy ending but falls short on being a movie one can relate to.

People are sleeping around with each other and everyone is within 6 degrees of one another and this can be related to. Innocent people getting killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and this can be related to. There was a group of men that belonged to some government group who held no reliance to the plot of the movie and that could not be related to.

The opening scene that had the men in suits added to the movie but the rest of the scenes with them in it didn't. The movie would have made more sense and been easier for me to follow if they had cut the men in suits out of it completely.

This could have been a great movie. It held all the elements that I enjoy. It also held those men in suits that didn’t add to the plot of the movie at all. Burn After Reading had the ability to have some great and profound meaning but it choose not to. A movie that is as serious as this should have some poetic meaning or it should have been a comedy.


The movie trailer for this movie made it seem like it would be funny. But all of the funny scenes were in the trailer. This is something of a problem in the movie industry.

This is how we do it

One thing I love and will miss about Nebraska is that we are people who get to the point. I ask a question, I get a direct answer that should be under 3 sentences long, any longer then that and a person is putting way to much detail into the answer and the point is lost.

Remember it was the blue number 8 that was important. Details about the cage were not, hence there were no details about the cage. Two weeks later and I still want to know why there was a blue number 8 on a white rabbit. I don't even know if I was told the rabbit was white or if the detail about the color of the rabbit was left out. It doesn't matter because it was all about a blue number 8 on the back of a rabbit. All other details can be omitted because they don't matter.

We know a lot about wind here in Nebraska and have had it with the wind. Windbags beware! We have had enough.

We are a culture that, even us big city boys and girls, work hard and get to the point. The mentality of people here in the breadbasket is of a hard working life. We are a culture based on getting up before dawn to grab some breakfast so we can be out working the fields by dawn because you never know when the weather will change and a whole day of work will be lost.

We need to get to the point because there isn't time to waste. There might be a freak snow storm in the middle of June in the next hour and a Nebraskan can get much done in an hour. Ok, so we are not all like that but that is our culture. West coast culture is laid back, and Seattle is the most laid back city in all of America, Miami is the heart of the party, New York never sleeps, LA is full of phonies, Texas is the home of the cowboy, and in the midwest we get to the point.

When I start dealing with people who are not from the midwest I become very confused and disorientated because they just keep talking and talking and talking and I can't remember what they are talking about or even the question I asked because I asked a question then they started talking and it had nothing to do with the question I asked, Oh I remember the question, but yeah they haven't said anything that has to do with the information I was looking for. Don't get me wrong, I have issues articulating myself sometimes, but if that was the case then most people ask me to clarify. They don't just start talking.

Not sure how I'm going to survive when I move out west. It will be rough.

VH1 to mush my mind

Thank god I have VH1 to warp my mind in the hours before sunrise. The one's where I'm not yet awake, runny on a treadmill, and primed for mind control.

First though, I saw a PC commercial this morning, yes on VH1, where the guy's opinion, "Mac's are about the aesthetics, I don't think of them for computing power." WTF!? this guy has obviously never tried to run InDesign and PhotoShop at the same time on PC. News Flash - runs as fast as a dead dog.

"Love me, hate me, say what you want about me
But all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to
if you seek Amy"

I hate Britney Spears. She is a white trash ho bag. But god damn it if her songs aren't catchy. That song has now been in my mind for 3 hours. I'll be singing it when I go to bed.

Fade in - "I don't care just what you think as long as it's about me."

At 6am it all flows into without falling out again. VH1 also brings about most of the men on my top 10 list of hotties. Thank you VH1; Eminem just made the list. Ha! Love him or hate him, he is a genius. Scary, right? But true. Go, go rockstar!

VH1 pop culture, TV induced ADD, everybody dance now!

I would also like to point out in my ADD ramblings that in the movie Seven Pounds, Will Smith is not an IRS agent. Without giving it away anything important, he steals his brothers identity as an IRS agent. Had to get that out there.

At the Drive-in

I love working at movie theaters but my favorite was the drive in. When I started there were only two rows of poles with speakers left. But the mike I used to make the pizza announcement was strait out of the 50's. The theater opened in the 50's and I bet it was the original mike. It also opened 10 days late because of bad weather, go figure.

I hate going to bed after 10pm and this job would keep me out until 2am some days, but I loved it. I would set my alarm and go to sleep after the other employees had gone. If anything happened to the film the alarm was loud enough to wake me up. I had the fun job of being the projectionist, everyone else gets to leave after the first movie and I'm there by myself the rest of the night. My boss's back yard was adjacent to the lot and he would stay up until I had left.

If I didn't feel like putting up with customers I would wonder around the lot, if it was hot I would go inside. Along with being the projectionist I was also called a "lot manager". I would get to kick people off the lot if they were doing things they were pissing me off.

The joys of any job, where to start. How about with the stupid phone calls.
Person: What time does the movie start?
Me: As soon as it starts getting dark.
Person: What time is that?

First I'll point out that the screens for a drive-in are always on the West side of the lot. Durf, lets think about this. Sun sets in the west, if sun is setting while screen is on west side of lot then - shadow is cast on side that is being watched and movie can start at dusk instead of after full sun set. No way! I have had to spell this out for many a people. This really should be common sense.

Now lets factor in time of sun set, is it cloudy, how cloudy is it (sometimes clouds would cause the movie to start later, no I won't explain it), how dark is the movie being shown (dark movies have to start later, no I won't explain this either), and this leads to there being a 20-30 minute range of when I could start a movie. All of this is common sense for me before I started!

So when people call and ask what time the movie starts, I'm sorry but it's really hard to tell. Ok that was a complete lie because by the end of my first summer I had the art of knowing when a movie would start perfected. I would know at least 30 minutes in advance when it would start. But if someone wants to ask what time does it get dark, I'm not releasing any more information.

Yes we play movies in the rain, we only stop if the power goes out. I get to pull the giant metal poll off the roof even when the sky is full of lighting. Yeah!

Creapy stuff happens too.

There was the night that I had to ask a man to leave because we were closed. He was high on something and I was alone. He just said, "oh, ok" and left, but really, I'm not that big of a person. What if he had been crazy?

Then one night, just last year, I was working at the other theater, the 8 plex, and got a call, "the drive in was blow away by a tornado, you don't need to come to work." Hellz yeah! I get the night off! I wouldn't have been excited if I would have known that they weren't going to fix it. I thought I was getting one or two nights off at the most, turned out to be the whole summer. Sad days. About 6 weeks later I drove by and it was nothing but an empty lot, except the box office which is steel polled and cemented into the ground, I still don't think they figured out how to get it out. I drove by and one lone tear rolled down my face.

My boss's wife whom I get along with great, most people don't, her back yard is attached and I know it affected her greatly when it was taken away. It affected all of us here in Kearney that actually attended it. The stories I heard from people who use to tell us about how their first date was at the drive-in, and I won't get to hear those stories anymore.

It's like losing a friend that I actually liked.