The Science of Getting By Posted by Sad Blogger , 26.6.11 at Sunday, June 26, 2011, in

There's a film coming out this summer with a sure-to-attract-a-slew-of-contemporary-romantic-types title, The Art of Getting By. Naturally, I bash the title because it's been stuck in my head for the past week or so and it really does have that 21st-Century sort of artsy fartsy, "oh my mind is troubled and I just can't help creating beautiful things because of it" vibe. IMDB sums it up thusly: "George, a lonely and fatalistic teen who's made it all the way to his senior year without ever having done a real day of work, is befriended by Sally, a popular but complicated girl who recognizes in him a kindred spirit." Yes, I admit I have an obsession with "isms", fatalism especially. No, I will not be seeing this film.

I took a look at another trailer for the movie in the middle of writing that last paragraph. It was a different trailer from the one they've been shoving in between episodes of Love It or List It and House Hunters (yeah, my life is thrilling), but it gave me even more insight into why I despise the existence of the movie. When I sat down to write this whole thing some four days ago, I was simply toying with the title. I didn't like that it suggested there was an art to getting by. Rolling "The Science of Getting By" around in my head was getting boring and I needed to express the notion in a broader context. I had this big diatribe planned that was going to explore the idea that getting by is, in fact, a science rather than an art. I was going to dribble on about how art has no real rules. How art comes from inside people who are connected to whatever it is that feeds them with brilliant ideas. How art is subjective and even if one person says it's wrong, it can be a completely new kind of right for another person. It's abstract and fluid and freeing and infinite.

Getting by is a science because it's always the same. Sure, some people might have their different methods, but they will always arrive at the same conclusion. It has rules and a consistent structure. It is two-dimensional and suffocating and finite.

Getting By
Step 1: Wake up the first time and imagine not waking up.
Step 2: Wake up the second time and notice how urgently the clock is trying to get your attention.
Step 3: Wake up the third time and accept the fact you're not dead.
Step 4: While pissing, showering, dressing, eating, brushing, think of ways to be not-alive.
Step 5: Cling to whatever excuse to stay alive makes the most sense today. (My family needs me)
Step 6: Keep clinging.
Step 7: Masturbate to create temporary clearness of mind.
Step 8: Resume clinging.
Step 9: While eating, pissing, brushing, undressing, attempting to sleep, think of not waking up.
Step 10: Take advantage of not being a member of conscious existence.

At one point in the trailer I watched, this George kid takes Sally on her first school-skipping adventure. He begins with a set of rules, one of which is just simply..."Noodles". I assume that's supposed to be funny to people who are amused by silly-sounding words and all-too-familiar to the school-skipping culture. Like an in-joke overcompensating with "in" and in desperate need of more "joke". Anyways, in practically the same breath, he declares you must "cut rarely in order to preserve the 'specialness'". So it's meaningful to him and he's creative or something with his witty, inventive non-words. Hey! I thought he was supposed to be fatalistic! I did too. But apparently he's managed to find some meaning in the actual act of slacking. Oh, I just had a thought. These people think they're making Ferris Bueller II.

But they're not. Sad face. They are, once again, "grown ups" attempting to emulate another sub-culture of youngsters that they don't understand. I know that sounds shockingly juvenile and out-of-character for me to say, but read my reasoning GODDAMMIT!!! Just like Diablo Cody thought she was Little Miss Catchphrase with Juno, Gavin Wiesen seems to think he's going to be the voice of the slacker savant. Little Georgie is a brilliant artist who just doesn't give a shit about his education. He makes smartass remarks to the teacher about how meaningless her lessons and assignments are (maaaahhhhnnnn), he tells his art instructor he has "nothing to say". OK wait a minute. A couple seconds further into the trailer, he's this soulful mystery guy that says things like "I'm the Teflon slacker" and "I like layers." So we're shown that he's passionate about his do-nothing-ness but then we go back to the art teacher urging him to dig into his soul and say something about what he REALLY cares about. Of course that's when he realizes he really cares about Sally.

Plot summary aside, this film feels like it's reaching for some cultural middle ground. Like it's going to be the next gateway to clique-equality. Like the geeks before them and the stoners before them, the soulful slackers are finally going to receive recognition. But they're being misrepresented here. That whole "I don't see the point" attitude doesn't come from an inability to recognize what you care about. It comes from the understanding (with blinding clarity) that you don't care about anything. This kid needs his class-cutting and noodles and his art and his girly-friend. He doesn't represent an ism. He's not the new archetype to plumb for entertainment gold. He's a scripted mess.

As I'm skimming over all that, I feel like my point got lost somewhere. But is that so new? I think I touched on all the ideas I'd been mushing around. Oh, kind of a side note. I watched Bandslam the other day and it felt kinda like The Art of Getting By is going to be. Like a writer overheard a teenager mumbling incoherently about what losers he thought all his classmates were and a lightbulb went off: "I bet I could synthesize that rage and manipulate it to create characters that represent what I believe teenagers are!"

Dear writers, stop it.
   -Sad Blogger

To Hell With Exposition, Context, or Introduction Posted by Sad Blogger , 11.6.11 at Saturday, June 11, 2011, in

I find it difficult to recall my childhood. It's not that my memory is particularly bad, I just know that there was a point in my life at which I was decidedly a sissy. I was the kid that would grab the soccer ball when it (finally) came to me and clutch it to my chest in a bear hug, subsequently bursting into tears when the other kids screamed as if the world were ending. On my first day of the third grade, I was the new kid with no previous knowledge of what a "religion journal" was, subsequently bursting into tears when the teacher asked me to get mine out. I remember most specifically a day one year after that. Our fourth grade science class was raising mealworms (affectionately called "mealy worms!" by we yon idiots) to observe their transition from pupa to adult. Part of our project was to construct a little house out of cardboard and milk cartons for our wee subjects. Ambitious architect as I was, I set out to design a trendy bi-level apartment for my bugs, Nolan and Oscar. Halfway through the shingling process, my fat friend, Geoffrey, approached me from the side and informed me that A) I was doing it wrong and B) I sucked. Subsequently, I burst into tears. My parents had neglected to prepare me for what I started to believe was the world out to get me. I imagine if you look closely enough, there are WWII trenches carved into my skin from the constant deluge of hurt feelings and broken dreams that flowed down my cheeks.

Oddly—or more so, naturally—enough, rather than sinking into that role and become a sadder person, or learning from my misfortunes and becoming a better person, I rose from my presumed ashes and became the maker of cry-babies. Starting at a new school in the fifth grade, I immediately picked out the wimpiest kids in the class and set out to establish my higher status. The conveniently-named Erik Bultman became Erik Butt-man and everybody laughed. The obviously poorer-than-everyone-else Erik Bultman was called out for his crimes against vanity and everybody laughed. The scrawny, poorly-groomed, Urkelesque Erik Bultman was tagged and targeted and tormented and everybody became uncomfortable. So technically there was only one wimpy kid in class and literally I was a bully. I didn't know better. I suppose that would have to be the moral if this story had one. I didn't know how to examine my situation and see the difference between right and wrong. That's how kids think. Nobody had really done anything to make me less of a wimp or to make my world less wimp-provoking, so it made sense that I go about creating and prodding as many wimps as I could. Or just the one. I hate to admit that I continued being that person until my parents decided to start homeschooling me in the seventh grade. Even as I write this I am realizing that decision may very well have come at the behest of the parents of every preteen I degraded in middle school. There's nothing like getting the punch line a week after hearing it.

I thought that "vanity" thing was a pretty decent wordplay.

   - Sad Blogger

PS for kareno - I don't care if this seems familiar, I think it's a passable example of my ability and worth sharing :D