Why I Hate Heroes 1

I could go on forever and ever and ever about why this show is so irredeemably flawed. Seriously, it’s like a how-to manual on making an awful show. No, even worse, because it started out okay. It was a decent show that fell apart, and then the pieces fell apart.

Anyway, they’re gonna turn the de facto main character gay. Seriously? There is no way in hell this show will make it to a fifth season. If it does, I will scream. I will do crazy naked things for the Internet’s viewing pleasure.

I’m not a big fan of gimmicks and this is just insultingly obvious. Stop being gimmicky, dammit! Give the characters some real depth for once! Come on! I can barely comment on this. It’s so grating that I’m surprised it’s even a part of my universe at all.

One Month

I have now had this blog for one month and been working on Fear.less for just a little over that. I am very thankful for these diversions to give me something to do. It seems insulting at first to call Fear.less a diversion until you realize what it’s diverting me from: humongous boredom.

We have somewhere between 0 and 1 stories left to edit, which I am enthusiastic about. Ishita and I have come a long way in picking the stories apart, separating the wheat from the shit. Many of the stories are truly quite touching and it is my sincere hope and conviction that they can inspire people.

I’m actually not sure what is left to do. A while back we considered that we may be responsible for organizing the order of the stories, in the manner of a tracklist on a music record. I’d like to have a part in this because the flow of the stories can really enhance their resonant power and also it’s fun. I will continue to post on the Fear.less blog and in the Facebook group and page. Soon I will discuss the ramifications of my slow immersion into social media and the other opportunities that may come my way and I hope that I discover something rewarding soon, particularly since summer is only half over so I still need stuff to do.

I still feel a lot of insecurity in my skills but I have been assured that they are there and just need to be cultivated but I am definitely pleased that I was able to concretely and meaningfully credit a project like Fear.less.

This is not a very exciting post at all so to keep things interesting will somebody please tell me what the hell this is?

Jeff Zhao

A while ago I talked about Regina Spektor taking mostly just her voice and piano a long way and how inspiring that was. Well I recently realized how similarly inspired I am by a close friend of mine named Jeff Zhao. I met him during my year at Northwestern and starred in his final project for his first film class: Evidence (Also featured is Rujman, another one of my closest friends.)

Jeff also makes music, and I have linked on the right to his Last.fm profile.

My first experience with Jeff’s music-making process was hanging out with him in his dorm. He lived in a single, with no roommates, so he had his own space (paper-thin walls notwithstanding). He had his computer with a couple arranging programs, a microphone, and a Flying V guitar. That’s it. But he gets it done. You can hear for yourself, since his music is available for free download. (And in high quality, potentially, but that download does not include the sixth track of his EP.)

Oh right, his EP. He kept working at his music and completed one, titled .exEP after the first track. It contains six songs. Jeff’s music is aggressive, humorous and stylish. On Facebook a while ago he told me he planned on “cranking out a song a week” this summer and I really hope he does because he has taught me a very personal lesson. He is a shy college kid with few resources who still manages to Make It Happen and I find that uplifting.

I am now listening to his catchy new tune, Delta Niña, and you should too.

I Hate the Internet

So here are my closed-minded frustrations of the day.

Today one of my best friends was looking at some stories we had worked together on in high school. Naturally they are unpolished, unfinished, and total Mary Sue-fests, but they were fun. Now that we are older, wiser, and better with time management, Ethan decided that we should continue or reboot the stories in some way because there’s no way around it – we like writing fiction and thought the yarns, at their core, were worthwhile.

I saw this as an opportunity to not only develop a sustainable vessel for creativity but also plunge Ethan into the world of social media so I made him make a WordPress blog. It’s linked to over on the right and titled Light in the Abyss.

Once that was settled we had to figure out how we were going to integrate our blogs with the presentation of our creative works.

We considered having a second WP blog exclusively for creative writing. Then I discovered that  the “add page” system not conducive for that, so what we would have to do is make post categories named after each work so you would have to click on them to reel in the chapters of everything. Eehhhhh…

Then I thought of making one new blog for each work, and naming it thusly: http://justgiveup-title.wordpress.com. But you can’t use hyphens in that part of the URL! You have no idea how much that pissed me off.

We wondered if we would have to make a separate space, say on Freewebs, with a page for each work, which is more suited to the serial format we would likely use but still not quite optimal because it is off WordPress and difficult to organize.

Also, did you know that the username “justgiveup” is taken on every website ever except WordPress? Dammit!

I’m going to try to search for some site designed exclusively for our nerdy purposes. There must be something. I’m hanging on to a shred of faith that says eventually, yes, I will out-think the Internet.

Dingleberry 1

I have a lot of editing to do 2nite and I don’t really want to stay up all nite alone writing a big post so I will share with you a poem I cranked out in a few minutes. I asked my girlfriend for a topic and she said “teeth” but what ended up coming out is not really about teeth. I hope you can figure out what it is really about or I am just shitty. It doesn’t have a title yet.

There is
No room…

The holes are just fine
As long as you shine.
The ache is all right
As long as you’re white.

Just stay in line
And keep the rotting out of sight.
Keep it on the bottom and open up wide.

Fill my mouth with your glow so hollow.
All I feed you, you will swallow.

Replica-sharp, displayed and unused.

32C and a brilliant veneer.
32, see, we have nothing to fear.

Just smile for me.
Cause I know that pearls can’t drown
In shallow pools of bubble gum fluoride.

Too rooted to flee
Just keep your head down.
False and so pretty
Just wear this crown.

…For your
Empty wisdom.

Crossword Magazines

I’ve always wanted to subscribe to those crossword magazines that my dad always has lying around the bathroom. Starting from an early age I would burn through them and many pens as an preventative measure against Alzheimer’s. And then I would keep them all in a box. My grandchildren would see Grandpa’s Crossword Box and appreciate it as the reason Grandpa still knows their names even though he is 90.

But crossword magazines are so weird. They can’t really be called magazines. They don’t have interviews, editorials, glossy color photos or top 10 lists, and you can’t even slap them into a gun and heat people up. They are so self-contained. They’re in their own little world. The one that assisted me in a bathroom adventure last night opened with exactly one letter to the editor from a farming family who has to get up early in the morning to drive goods to market and prefer crosswords to caffeine for staying alert. Exactly one goddamn letter, one vestigial flash in the pan of human personality. And then it goes on and on into dozens and dozens of puzzles.

I’m not even sure what to muse on about this because it’s so inhuman it just exists in a different universe from me. It’s like trying to see in a world with no light. Is that overly dramatic for a fucking crossword magazine? I get the same feeling from towns with two or three digits of denizens in the middle of nowhere. So isolated. I don’t know if I could live like that. What kind of band would only ever release music without ever giving interviews or having a website or anything? The crosswords are all generic too. There weren’t any themes or anything (though that is hard to do with a crossword as opposed to a word search) that made me go oh hey somebody wanted to flavor this creation. This creation, this black-and-white, down-and-across quilt of challenges with mysteriously no human qualities but a letter from some farmers and a disturbingly long list of credits.

Anyway this is one of those posts where I don’t presume it to have any value but I couldn’t get over how the topic made me feel.

Regina Spektor

So Regina Spektor’s new album comes out soon. It is called Far and I have already listened to it. It’s very good. She is fantastic in general. She keeps the focus on her voice, her piano, and her always interesting lyrics, and the endless ways in which they intertwine. And I do mean endless.

Like a lot of singer-songwriters she has a great deal of songs that are only 2 or 3 minutes. A lot of them are great. Many people have heard Samson, and The Calculation off the new album is awesome. But my favorite tunes by her for some reason are the longer ones that are around 5 minutes. Whenever I see a timestamp in that ballpark next to one of her song titles I know good things are going to happen to my ears. Tunes like Us, Genius Next Door and Aquarius are just so sparse and subdued and epic and it’s great.

What’s really important here though is when I said the iterations of her musical talents were endless. Now in a period of profound endearment to Regina, I acquired a bunch of recordings of some of her unreleased material – over 70 songs. And these recordings exist because she plays them live. She thinks they are good enough to play live. She has written hundreds and hundreds of tunes. She is prolific as hell. I find it stupidly impressive. She just keeps on going, dreaming up piano riffs and neat vocal flourishes and her funny lyrical vignettes. And they’re not shitty. She had been playing Genius Next Door for years before it showed up on the album, and Aquarius is one of the unreleased 70.

I admire Regina because she doesn’t just have a job making and playing music, she also obviously thinks it is Pretty Damn Awesome and continues to push her repertoire far beyond the confines and standards of the music industry.

When I realized this tonight I went down to the piano and began to compose Real Song #1 but it was too late to continue playing without pissing off people trying to sleep. So tomorrow I will resume. Who knows, maybe you will hear it someday.

And maybe, if I am completely insane and awesome, 500 more will follow before I’m 30.

Heart Surgery

So my work on Fear.less is continuing to go pretty well. Ishita and I have developed what I feel to be an efficient and effective two-step editing system that I liken to cleaning a wound and then dressing it (or it might be more accurate to say excising the tumor).

In the first edit I work with what’s there. I restructure and rearrange sentences in order to enhance flow and clarity, and I cut out things that are redundant on a small scale. I also suggest possibilities for headings and make some formatting changes. These tasks sort of clean up the article to prep it for surgery. We find that when the crust has been scrubbed away and the story has been polished, it’s much easier to see how its components come together to form a coherent whole – or not.

This allows Ishita to go through and mark in red everything she thinks is irrelevant or poorly worded. Sometimes this may be a lot, but like finding the lice beneath the hair it’s a problem worth pointing out. The second edit is more forceful. It involves slicing away as much excess verbiage as we can in order to leave only the interviewee’s personality and message. Also included are final heading and title checks, which may need to be changed in order to make sense in the context of this new stripped down version of the story.

What is left, my friends, are stories with a pounding pulse. Raw on the plate. Ishita’s ebook is a menu that serves only naked, beating hearts.

Fearless

Not the Taylor Swift album, though I do enjoy that as well.

Now that my editing duties at Fear.less are shifting into overdrive I guess I should tell you about it.

It’s an e-book crafted by Ishita Gupta and Clay Hebert, the former of whom is my cousin. It is being created as part of Seth Godin‘s Alternative MBA program. It presents the stories of entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, survivors of tragedy and more, detailing how they felt stifled by fears just like those experienced by you and me, and how they drew on the potential within themselves to overcome those fears. I, though I would gladly edit most anything, am personally enthused by this project, being a meek and paranoid sort of guy. It’s an awesome undertaking that literally is capable of inspiring millions (a statistic gathered by adding up the tallies of viewers of the sites where it will be posted upon completion).

I for one am glad that the forecast for the weekend is dreary and stormy so I can sit in all day and really wring the juice from these incredible stories. I haven’t had the pleasure of reading all of them so far but I will tell you that Platon‘s and Ben Zander‘s are favorites of mine.

It should be out in July so join the damn Facebook group and invite everyone you can and go to the site and sign up. Thank you.

Things JGU Currently Fears

• I’m making a long drive or two tomorrow. I’ve never really been a big fan of those
• I’m drastically changing my approach in editing the Fear.less stories and I hope the new one is efficient and effective
• Not being able to let go of grudges and how this may damage my management of personal relationships, I will go into this more later in a maybe-weird wankpost

Things JGU Currently Likes (About the things he fears)

• Seeing friends
• $$$
• ♥♥♥

Treat Excerpt from Fear.less (that you can put to use TODAY)

“As you begin to receive positive feedback, pay attention to it. It helps to ground yourself and get a sense of perspective around the negative feedback you receive. I keep a file of “nice things people have said.” The file is only for me, and I don’t look through it that often, but it’s nice to know it’s there.” – Chris Guillebeau

3,000 Words

That’s, like, 3 pictures.

Or it’s me, and possibly you, at the end of June, on 100 Words. All you do is write 100 words a day, every day. 100 words is not a lot. This seems like a sexy tool for developing discipline, or a bonus goal to tack on to whatever else you are doing in your life, just because you can. I will use it for both. Perhaps I will show you the results at the end of June if Just Give Up is still operational. They will probably all be poems of some kind. The short kind, if nothing else. Hopefully, the decent kind.

If you’re a complete loser I suppose you could paint 3 pictures in the one month and that would be equally impressive!

Also,  I have realized something paramount. This blog’s next 3,000 words, and its next 30,000 and 3 million words, will be written at the exclusive request of me. It’s dawned on me that this month will involve a lot of writing and if I carry out other people’s agendas that’s like putting a penny on the train tracks. A penny made of a brick of C4 and a man holding a detonator. That’s a big penny, worth at least 3000 cents.

Really though. Editing Fear.less, crafting this devilish embryo, 100 words, who knows whatever else. I hope the month is boring enough for me to do all that. That’s not actually true. I would gladly stop for the blessing of constant access to a nice girl.

Now, off to start the first dollar of words. That would be a spiffier little figure of speech if I had bet someone $30 that I could complete the task.

But I hope no one is dumb enough.