Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Zoom F'ing Zoom

So Europe. I got tickets on an airline called Zoom. I did my research and it got good marks, had been around a while, and they were a great price. Last Friday they went under. They suspended all flights and all tickets became worthless. I just about flipped out. Luckily I managed to find ticket leaving out of Miami (instead of Ft. Lauderdale) on Virgin Atlantic and the credit card (Go Visa) is reversing the charges to Zoom. But still way harrowing.

Now I’m just praying that Hannah, Ike, or Josephine aren’t in collusion to screw up my trip somehow. I mean seriously: 3 storms out there all at once? WTF man W.T.F?

Watched this wicked show from England called Skins. It was really neat. They did two seasons of it (ten episodes each) and then dumped the whole cast. Let me tell you why this is genius. The show is about a group of British teens in Bristol (ages 16ish to 19ish) and their lives. It’s very dramatic, but it follows them through their A-levels (college I think but somehow different from university). Each episode focuses on a different main character (which is genius in and of itself) but there are on-going plots. It got a lot of flack because of how frankly and in your face it dealt with drugs and drinking and sex (there’s a lot of frontal nudity and a lot of men’s asses you don’t want to see), but the cool thing is that by using a different character as the focus each episode, the larger arcs and the other characters get to be filtered through that one. So the super stud may come across as the hero in his episode, but when see through his ex-girlfriend’s eyes, he’s a real douche. I think it’s a fantastic way to get a well-rounded view of every character from every angle.

The brilliance of dumping the cast is that at the end of the second series (season) they all find out if they’re going off to university. As a general rule most shows don’t transfer well from highschool to college. So they chose to end it and move on to a new set of teens (they kept one characters little sister as the link between the two series). And they chose to let almost every storyline and relationship stay up in the air. You never know whether Tony and Michelle get back together or if Sid finds Cassie in NY or if Jal goes to music school. A lot of people complained about them deciding not to resolved every story line, but I love it because it’s how real life is. Storylines are NEVER tied up in real life. When you graduate HS, you don’t know what happens to the 300 people you hung around with. In fact, you probably don’t even know much about the dozen people you were close with. I only really kept in touch with one person from HS. So I think it was brilliant and ballsy that they chose to simply let that set of teens fade into life. Bloody brilliant.

I also read Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (which I adored) and Looking for Alaska (which I adored much less) in preparation to write The Things We Leave Behind. I started working on it but I’m experimenting with POV’s which is fun. I won’t start working on it in ernest until I return from the vacation.

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