Supernova Pt3: I have a Land Rover

Supernova Pt1: Where the hell are we?
Supernova Pt2: SWITCH TO THE OMEGA!
Intermission: What do you mean, "Who is Tia Carrere?"


Step back, sons. I have a citronella candle, diet Canada Dry ginger ale, and a brand-new outdoor outlet on my back porch. It's time to watch part two of this epic adventure in style.

Here goes.

Well, we start out with different into music - a little less epic, a little more punk rock. Interesting choice. There's some more CG space animation mixed in with stock footage of what I'm sure are real disasters. So it's kind of like you're switching between watching the news and playing Starcraft.

Actually, it's exactly like that. Huh.

So, basically everything is on fire. EVEN THE GOATS!

They made sure to add a recording of a goat bleating in post. I'm assuming that it's bleating in terror, but then I don't speak goat. He might have just been asking for ice cream.

Things are also randomly blowing up all over the place. There's this American reporter telling us about it now, standing in front of a solid, mysteriously unexploded buildi- oh, nevermind. Boom goes the dynamite.

Then the camera pans back and it turns out that the US Military are just sitting around watching the news. The station goes to commercial, and Evil Leo props his hands on his camo-clad hips in a manly fashion and proceeds to monologue in fine supervillain fashion. He even manages to quote Abraham Lincoln. You can tell he's been practicing this in front of a mirror for years. He says we have to "face the arithmetic" and save the human race "without sentimentality."

In other words, "I've done this math on this thing and the more people we save, the less chance there is that Tia Carrere will sleep with me."

Speaking of Agent Delgado, she's there, and someone found her a hairbrush, which is a shame because I thought the post-helicopter-crash 80s 'do was really adding to her credibility.

She asks Evil Leo is he's heard anything about her mother and sister, and he says they refused to go into the Secret Underground Nazi City. Even though he said 'pretty please.'

Agent Delgado puts on her Resolve Face.

It's on, now.

Then suddenly, the scene cuts and the screen says we're in Washington DC. Fantastic. Maybe this is where all the Australian people are. The DoD are sitting in their command center talking about how the entire world is on fire and no one knows what's going on. They should really watch the news like the Military.

Cut to the lesbians, who are making home movies and enjoying brunch.

Before you make cliche jokes about UHauls, remember that THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD IS ENDING. Time is limited.

The British Journalist has been fired, but she's still gonna Get Her Story Out, I'm assuming using the Ginnyssistant's Skype and Twitter Savvy. Since everyone in this movie has time to stand around and watch the news, apparently.

Back to Luke Perry, the Brilliant Astrophysicist, whose brilliant escape plan is to... pry open an air vent an anorexic ballerina wouldn't be able to wedge through.

Thank God Agent Delgado is in this movie. She shows up with something useful - handcuffs.

Luke Perry puts up a fight, because he's never seen Star Wars.

Agent Delgado Does Not Have Time For This Shit. She forces him to wander around in a basement for a while and then shoves him into a car. Because it's been established that you can drive to the surface. Nevermind that for a ramp to work like that it would have to be miles and miles... hey. Maybe it's a ramp all the way through the planet, and that's why all the American people are in Australia.

Before I have time to consider this idea more fully, we're taken back to Luke Perry's wife. You know, it doesn't surprise me that she's not included in the Secret Underground Nazi City. Since she's clearly very unitarian and unprejudiced.

She and Evil Leo would totally get along. And they need a Secret place to go, anyways, because the guy she's so wigged about has escaped from prison and is Coming To Get Her. So she runs her ass away and leaves her slave behind to "get things in order" and be killed. As she drives away, the slave speaks for the first time. With a South African accent.

Meanwhile, British Journalist has posted her home videos up on Myspace. As you do.

It's taken Luke Perry all this side plot to realize that Tia Carrere is saving his ass. She promises to drive him to Sydney, but then he's on his own because she has to go save her mother and sister in St Louis. Missouri.

Luke Perry says, "You can't make it to St Louis from here. It's halfway around the world."

Tia Carrere says, "Watch me, bitch. I have a Land Rover."

Luke Perry's wife and daughter have decided to go camping on that other planet where the weather is positively bucolic. They should really just take the human race there. I guess it would really mess up the view, though. They bought another South African slave when they got there. I'm taken off guard when this slave calls her first name. I was actually assuming her name was 'Madam,' because it made the whole thing less offensive to me.

Anywho, Agent Delgado has managed to find a real Australian person! So she steals his car. Diplomacy is for those other people. You know, the ones who aren't awesome. Like Luke Perry. Who watches her steal the car, knows the car is stolen, but still has to be told to get in. As he buckles his seatbelt, he chides her for stealing it. IT'S THE END OF THE FREAKING WORLD, LUKE PERRY!

Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean:

Brunch on the terrace?

How about a slumber party? We can paint each others' toenails and tell ghost stories!

Seriously, girls, if you ever get a guy into bed, and he has a cute little dolphin tattoo on his arm, you should probably start hinting that, you know, "If you were gay... that would be okay... I mean cause hey... I'd like you anyway..."

Aaaaaand back to the "action." Tia Carrere and Luke Perry are on the road trip from hell.

Luke Perry is writing in his diary.

Dear Diary.

Agent Delgado is such a bitch.

I'm so glad I'm HAPPILY married and NOT ATTRACTED TO HER AT ALL!!!!!!!!

Agent Delgado interrupts his furious journaling to tell him that they've been riding in the car from the Phantom Tollbooth this whole time, and his tiny, thoughtless brain is going to keep them from reaching St Louis.

He says, no, the Pacific Ocean is going to keep us from reaching St Louis.

She slaps him upside the head.

He makes sure to note in his diary that this is the WORST ROAD TRIP EVER.

Cut to a reminder that the WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING, thanks to these images from Starcraft

And some dramatic music.

British Journalist and Ginnyssistant have decided to take a road trip, too. For a movie about catastrophic climate change, no one seems very concerned about the environment.

That bitch slap Delgado delivered knocked the final thoughts from Luke Perry's head, so the Phantom Tollbooth car stopped working.

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

So now they have to walk to St Louis. At least this way they'll be decreasing their carbon footprint. They should keep trying to protect the environment and conserve natural resources, because at this point I think they might have all completely forgotten that the WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING, so the script writers might have, too.

Supernova Intermission: What do you mean, 'Who is Tia Carrere?'

Confession: I haven't finished watching the miniseries yet. Honestly I haven't had the time. It's just a long movie. I promise I'll finish recapping it. Just not today. Today is 'Intermission.'

Apparently none of my friends know who Tia Carrere is. So when I'm telling them about why I started watching this movie, and I say, "Because Tia Carrere is in it," their original question still stands.

This is totally unacceptable. I thought my friends were cool, but apparently they're not cool enough to PARTY ON!

Now do you understand why I had to watch this movie?

She's not in this scene, but it's one of my favorite scenes ever, so it's totally the song of the day.

Link to Part 3

Supernova Pt2: SWITCH TO THE OMEGA!

Picking up exactly where I left off, we're watching TV with Luke Perry's wife again, and a news anchor with an American accent mentions that we are in the Southern Hemisphere. Finally. 35 minutes into this movie and it is established that we're in Australia.

So Delgado (Tia Carrere, in case you weren't paying attention during Pt1. It's okay because I kind of wasn't paying attention either, and I'm 99% sure none of the actors were.) has basically forced Luke Perry to go to this conference on the Sun and find out what Fabulous Scientist told the Top Scientists in his Doomsday Email.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you about the magically self-destructing emails. Fabulous Scientist sent out an email to, like, 5 or 6 major scientists before he disappeared. Delgado is assuming that they were important emails but she doesn't know what they said, because they destroyed themselves after being read. She can see who they were sent to, but she has no idea what the contents were.

Which, for the record, is totally 100% impossible.

Emails are not like letters. Any time an email is sent, it bounces from more than one server before it gets where it's going. Every time it bounces, essentially a copy of it is made.

If you're a "National Intelligence Organization" employee with jurisdiction that literally goes all the way around the world, and you have the resources to see that emails were sent, then you probably have a nerdy sidekick sitting in a basement room somewhere, spinning pixie sticks between his fingers and farming gold on WoW. And if you're Tia Carrere, you could just purr at him over the phone and he'd find the contents of every email ever sent.

So armed with a totally bogus premise that we have to let slide because it's a movie, and Tia Carrere just showed up and we have yet to see her in a low cut blouse, Luke Perry goes to this conference to talk to these Top Scientists.

He gets there and one of them has already killed himself. The others are all pissed off in various foreign accents. We finally hear an Australian accent, but unfortunately he's one of the Foreign Scientists. While Luke Perry is talking to them/spying for Delgado, we're introduced to some American military people in a DoD style command center. Does Australia even have a government?

One of the scientists finally gets so pissed off that he runs away screaming something about the KGB and Mother Russia, and Delgado chases after him. At first we think he's trying to jump off the roof and kill himself - afterall, the FREAKING WORLD IS ENDING and ostensibly these people all know that - but he's just trying to James Bond it to another rooftop.

He fails because he's a pissed off scientist, and

Delgado has to go get him. Honestly, it's so annoying when characters don't understand what part they're playing.

But it turns out this Foreign Scientist is so useless that he can't even manage to let Delgado save him, even though she was totally giving him a look right down her shirt.

I mean, if Tia Carrere's cleavage can't save you, what the hell can?

So the two Clean Cut Feds are standing back on the other roof looking over at Delgado like, well, Quantico didn't train us to run and jump, and she brushes her hair back and says, "Go get the others in the van."

What she means is, "I'm stuck on this roof now. You'll have to finish the movie without me."

And then, in a dramatic scene cut, there's the van, and the words we've all been waiting for: "SYNDEY, AUSTRALIA." The time is 47:51, and it's finally confirmed that we're in Australian.

Delgado understandably handcuffs all the scientists now, including Luke Perry. You know, since they seem to be trending towards freaking out and/or dying and/or messing up her hair. Luke Perry protests loudly and asks for a phone call to tell his family he's okay. To which Delgado's face says, "Psh, bitch, you're in Australia. Did you hear me Mirandize you? I'm pretty sure 'miranda' is Australian slang for something, but it aint 'rights.'" He asks her to take the handcuffs off, at least, and she just walks away. Luke Perry's face tells her, "You know we're going to have sex later. My wife is heavily armed and has hair like an Oompa Loompa."

No, really, she does. Look:

So then there's an EPIC WORLD DISASTER MONTAGE to remind us that IT'S THE END OF THE FREAKING WORLD. And since naturally they've put everyone who knows about it in a helicopter despite constantly talking about all the electrical storms and magnetic interference, the montage ends with the helicopter having a complete failure of all it's electrical systems.

That's bad, because they're flying it at night, and possibly all the way to America.

So the helicopter pilots shout a lot of mumbo-jumbo back and forth, shaking the control stick and randomly pushing buttons. Delgado pops her head between their seats and is all, "Hey, guys, what's up, do you need, like, a soda or anything? No? How about a look down my shirt?" And one of them is all, "Hey, thanks, maybe later please go buckle your seatbelt," and then the other one bellows, "SWITCH TO THE OMEGA!"

And the helicopter crashes.

Now that Delgado and Luke Perry (What is his character's name? I can't remember.) and everyone else who knows the WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING are dead, we cut over to the United States DoD command post, where they're freaking out because all the planes and helicopters in the world had to switch to the omega. No, really.

The head brass turns to the guy at the main computer and says, "How do we avoid this from ever happening again."

And the guy blinks and says, "Well, we could start by appointing a director of the DoD with a basic command of the English language..."

Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean:

Refreshing fruity beverage?

Aaaaand Luke Perry is back from the dead. He is fall was apparently broken by a conveniently placed vat of stage blood. He sits up, looks over, and

BAM. Agent Delgado is one bad-ass motherfucker.

She calmly tells him in one sentence that they're the only survivors, and her cell phone isn't working. "Did you pull me out?" he asks.

She shrugs, "Yeah." Of course she did. She's Agent Fucking Delgado. I wouldn't be surprised if Agent actually IS her first name. She's that hardcore.

So then Luke Perry, sensing that he's no longer the Exemplary One here, tries to reassert himself as a loving family man, and starts staggering across the desert with Delgado half-heartedly trying to stop him before she finally just pulls out her gun and is like, "Fool, I just saved your ass and you're still under arrest and if we're hiking across this desert you're gonna fucking carry my water and my purse."

But then a new helicopter comes to get them, because no one ever makes a logical prediction in this movie. We're introduced to this hardcore military guy who reminds me of Leo McGarry from West Wing only evil, and he takes Luke Perry and Agent Delgado on a long elevator ride into a giant underground compound that they're planning on putting 10,000 people in to save the human race from extinction.

I'm not making this shit up. Someone else did, I swear.

So, Evil Leo McGarry outlines the plan for who to save - without saying the word 'eugenics' even though it's clearly what he's talking about - and then he's like, "Oh, yeah, you're on the list, Luke Perry."

Luke Perry says, "So what about my wife and daughter?"

Evil Leo says, "I'll have to check the list. But last time I checked, we weren't looking to preserve the gene for Oompa Loompa hair." Luke Perry then makes the logical leap from 'my wife' over to 'Agent Delgado,' and demands to know if she gets to come in the ark.

Evil Leo deadpans: "Agent Delgado has the necessary skills."

Translation: "I'm planning on tapping that once the world ends."

So then Luke Perry has a major freakout and steals a 4-wheeler. Agent Delgado is screaming at him, "You moron, did you time that elevator ride? We're miles and miles underground. This place is going to survive THE END OF THE FREAKING WORLD YOU CAN'T JUST -"

Oh, but Luke Perry CAN drive a 4-wheeler all the way to the surface of the world.

Well, fuck that. Agent Delgado can run after him in her high heels.

Take that, Luke Perry. Anything you can do, I can do bad-ass-er.

Back to the DoD, where they've found some scientist to explain how it's the END OF THE FREAKING WORLD, and the director of the DoD makes fun of his graphics.

The scientist kind of coughs and says, "Yeah, well the server that we had Photoshop on was knocked out during a magnetic storm."

And that's the end of Part 1. The actual Part 1 of the miniseries, not just a division I made up in my head so I could go to the bathroom and take a nap.

I'll watch Part 2 tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Link to the Intermission

Supernova Pt1: Where the hell are we?

I picked up this movie at Rite Aid, in a 4 pack with 3 other Bad Disaster Movies. I figured it had to be a winner because Tia Carrere was in it. I didn't realize until I got home and started watching that a) it's AMAZINGLY, AWESOMELY BAD and b) it's a 3+ hour miniseries.

Clearly, some this calls for some marathon lampooning.

We start out with some pretty okay CG animation of planets and suns and, you know, general space. At the bottom of the screen, it informs us that this is happening MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO. Some nebulae zoom around, some stuff explodes, some asteroids and comets zoom past...

Then the screen says PRESENT DAY, so we know it's present day even though the graphics didn't change at all. Less than five minutes into this thing and I know I'm in for an awesome ride. Here we go...

Scene 1: The Obligatory Observatory
Featuring: The Obligatory Scientist Who Never Learned To Write Without Speaking Aloud

So, we listen to him talking in a relentless monotone about how THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD IS ENDING while getting these long, Trek-esque views of his workstation, and then finally, we get a look at the guy.

And he looks like this:

Luckily I already wasn't taking this movie seriously, because I think he's supposed to be the 'genius astrophysicist' the cover talks about, and he looks like a gay theater critic. Even if he was speaking with one ounce of emotion about the END OF THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD, I would be unable to listen because I'm too busy staring at the double glasses he's rocking.

Anyways, he has a little discussion over Skype with a girl who could be a main character later on, but you never know with these things and I'm blinded by the light winking off this guy's old lady glasses chain, and then he of course gets up and walks away with purpose. They always do. They discover that the WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING and then they get up and leave.

He gets into this awesome old truck with a surfboard on the roof, and drives away. He is immediately followed by two Very Clean Cut Boys in a Land Rover. It is black, like their suits, because they are clearly Feds. They have binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses which they wield at the same time. You have to go to Quantico to learn that shit.

He's out in the middle of nowhere, so this driving scene is going to take a while even if he's just going for an ice cream. Obviously we need to cut to -

A News Reporter.
She has a British accent, which makes me wonder if we've switched continents. She doesn't help me, either, even though she informs me that we are now at "Memorial Fountain, near Downtown." She awkwardly tells the camera about some ducks, and then awkwardly tells the ducks to get away from her designer shoes. None of us listen.

Back to the Fabulous Scientist, who is finished driving and has arrived... at a coffee shop. See, I had guessed ice cream because it's a movie about the sun and usually they like to establish how hot the sun is.

He looks over at the Feds, who are so clean they sparkle like Twitards, and then walks into the coffee shop. It is busy, but all of the patrons appear to be men, many of which are in muscle shirts. So Fabulous Scientist stops dead in the door and says, "Who wants to make some easy money?"

If a guy walks into a gay coffee shop and he looks like this:
And he asks you if you want to make some easy money, you should probably make sure the condom you have in your wallet hasn't expired.

But apparently this coffee shop is not as gay as previously suspected, because the Feds watch in sweet, child-like confusion from their Land Rover as every patron walks out to their car and leaves. You know, I would too.

Fabulous Scientist then uses his clever Acquire Prostitute/Escape Surveillance Plan to make it to the airport, where he walks past Luke Perry. The camera lingers for a moment on his face (Hey, honey, isn't that Luke Perry? No, really, I think it's Luke Perry!) and Fabulous Scientist gets lost in the crowd.

Luke Perry has to become our main character or the rest of the movie will be just a long running-through-the-airport montage. He tries to help the camera out - he can still see the Fabulous Scientist - but Fabulous Scientist refuses to turn around so he's stuck in this movie for the next... oh, god, there's more than 150 minutes left in this thing.

Well, Luke Perry, if I have to, you have to. You're Exemplary Man. You wouldn't leave me to die alone like this.

So he takes us home so we can find out what a good family man he - oh, dear. Trouble in Disaster Movie Formula Land. Exemplary Man is not so exemplary here. His wife comes down the stairs to meet him holding a gun. It turns out that she's just afraid of the world, and not trying to kill him for forgetting to pick up the milk while he was out, but still. Luke Perry almost got his ass shot by his own wife.

They have a fight, wherein his wife makes sure to mention that he is a Brilliant Astrophysicist, about how she wants to move "back to the States."

WHERE THE FUCK ARE WE?
So far I have heard American accents, and one British accent.
Mathematically speaking, I think we're probably supposed to be in Australia.

Luke Perry finally detaches himself from his gun-toting wife while his daughter plays Fur Elise in the background, and goes into the office, where he has a video email from Fabulous Scientist.

I'm sorry, this guy isn't getting old to me:
As a side note (who am I kidding? This whole movie is a side note...) where do they come up with the operating system GUIs for these movies? Why can't major scientists just use Mac, Windows, or even Linux? They always seem to be using some rip-off of Windows95, even though their computers manage to perform really amazing graphic feats.

So then a bunch of science talk happens, which I ignore because they made it up and no one is speaking with any emotion, and the gist of the whole thing is that no one knows where Fabulous Scientist is.

FINALLY, Tia Carrere shows up. I've been waiting for her.

Tia Carrere's name is Delgado, and she works for the National Intelligence Organization, which they totally made up right then. Luke Perry mentions that she's 'a long way from home,' which she ignores. The Clean Cut Feds pipe in and say that it's a 'joint task force,' and Agent Delgado is 'working with them,' despite the fact that their accents are more American than hers is. Does anyone know where the fuck we are?

We get back to Fabulous Scientist, who pulls out a map and begins trying to figure out where he is. With the help of his rickshaw airplane pilot, he manages to find... the equator. So that's a start. At least someone is trying.

Fabulous Scientist gets into the plane, buckles in, and then thinks to ask, "Are you sure this thing will fly?" Which is a legit question. The props department went a little overboard with the rust colored spray paint.

The pilot smirks, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out... a plastic Jesus statue. He kisses it and slaps it onto the dashboard.
Oh, shit.

Back to the action! It turns out that Ginny the Assistant IS going to be a main character. She is desperately looking for Fabulous Scientist via email and Twitter, and dodging the savvy British News Reporter, and seems to be trying very hard to mask an Australian accent. I'm so very confused. Are there Australian people living in Australia?

The camera gets distracted by the television, where a news report tells us about some whales beaching and a "Spontaneous Zebra Stampede." Oh, yeah. THE WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING. I'm glad someone remembered.

The TV is on in Luke Perry's house, and his wife is watching. But then she has a random PTSD-style flashback of that time when she watched a serial killer torture and kill someone (You know, that time.), and Exemplary Man continues to destroy my faith in him by sneaking up and kissing her on the neck while that's happening. He basically scares the living shit out of her, but then he apologizes and she apologizes for, you know, having something horrible happen to her, and it's all okay and Time To Make Out. But then they have another fight and she walks over and picks up the gun because she remembers that she's got PTSD.

Back to the British News Reporter, who is sitting at her desk drinking out of a double-sized flask. I don't blame her because this movie makes me want to drink, too.

Does anyone remember the WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING?!

So now we have to establish that Ginny the Assistant is straight, because after her sparky interactions with the Burned-Out British News Reporter, I was questioning it. Not only is she straight, but her boyfriend is Doug Ross from ER.

Well, not really, but it's some Clooney knock-off doctor who is treating some kid with a cut foot in an emergency room. Close enough. Ginny is visiting him and they are having a date. In the hospital where he works. He's cordoned off a trauma room and put up some cheesy x-rays with anatomically incorrect red paper hearts pasted on them.

Ginny says, "Oh, god, why?" and he says, "It's our anniversary. One year to the day since I first kissed you." And she says, "Oh, god, I forgot I am so sorry." Who remembers that? She's a very busy assistant to what I'm sure is a very high maintenance Fabulous Scientist. She doesn't have time to cater to Doug Ross' puppy dog eyes. She's dating a doctor because he's busy, which means he doesn't have much time for her, which means...

You know, this is not making her any less gay to me.

Speaking of gay, the British News Reporter is now driving out into the desert to the Fabulous Scientist's house. The power is out and the place is torn to shreds. She notes that "despite being a known eccentric," she doesn't think Fabulous Scientist would have done this. She clearly has never witnessed a grown man having a hissy fit.

She opens a closet door and there's a porcupine in it.
She is so scared she runs all the way to Ginny's apartment for comfort, and Ginny tells her the porcupine is named Skipper, and Fabulous Scientist used to sit on the porch with him and drink tea. Maybe eccentric is Australian for "queer as a three dollar bill." Since they don't have dollars in Australian.

God, this movie is long. Part 2 of Part 1 will have to wait until later. I have to get to class.

Link To Part 2

You might have had to be there...

So, I finally got an ASL (American Sign Language) professor who knows that we're going to try to cuss in sign whether or not we actually know how Deaf people do it. I now have the sign for "bullshit" - actually several signs for bullshit, but one of which is my absolute favorite. It's very satisfying to do and I'll be using it a lot among Hearing people.

The way we got onto the subject was that we just started the unit on ailments.
And this conversation happened:

Prof: So... you all have learned this sign to mean 'shit.' But it's not... it's not like bullshit. It's not a cuss word. It's actual shit. It's a descriptive classifier, so you have it this way, and then this way...
Student: But what about the in-between?
Prof: The... in-between?
Student: You know, when you're not constipated, and you're not...
Prof: Oh, you mean a regular shit.

It was pretty much the funniest conversation to ever happen in an ASL class. We also learned the signs for male and female orgasm, because he was teaching us the sign for 'bug bite,' and the only difference between the sign for 'bug' and 'male orgasm' is two slight finger twitches.

Robots need love, too.

This is Dan Mangan's video for his amazing song, "Robots."

In his words: "Inspired by early 80s gang movies, Robots tells the story of two rival gangs who engage in their own back-alley version of robot wars, pitting one robot against the other in a battle to the finish. But when one robot chooses compassion over malice, the gang members are forced to question their own hatred and animosity towards each other."

In other words, "Stay gold, Ponyboy."

This is how I know, every time someone mentions the Rapture, I know they're not talking about me.

So, I went to Warren Wilson College when I was 17, and I left it when I was 19.

I was so burned out by the place that for about six months after I left, I purposefully and aggressively refused to recycle. I left lights on. I wasted water. I kind of thought that this made me a bad person, but it was a necessary cleansing step for me. At Wilson, environmentalism is shoved in your face and you don't have a choice. It was one of the reasons I picked Wilson in the first place, but I very quickly burned out, and after a lot of thinking about it, I think I know why.

I believe fundamentally in compromise. I don't think anything is black or white. It's all shades of gray, sometimes so dark or light that we can't see it, but black and white exist only in theory. Life is all mixed up. Nothing is clean and nothing is totally rotten.

I do believe in treating the Earth with respect, and responsible use of natural resources, but I also believe that there are a lot of people in the world, and they can't all afford the better option. At Wilson, most of the kids came from families that could easily afford the organics and the handmade-by-empowered-women-in-Africas, so they didn't understand what everyone else's problem was.

It's like, I love animals, probably more than I love people, but I'll never join PETA because they don't compromise. They think we should get rid of animal husbandry altogether, when in fact centuries of domestication have rendered cows, sheep and chickens completely incapable of life in the wild. We have a responsibility to them and unfortunately that means we have to continue the industry. I do think it could be done in a much more sustainable and humane fashion, but PETA doesn't accept that compromise, so they don't get my money.

WalMart is an awful, soul-sucking place that destroys small businesses and treats its employees like dirt - but in a crappy economy where the price of living keeps going up and up and the minimum wage stays exactly the same, they make it so that a lot of people can afford to eat and buy clothes. The entire system is broken, not just one little part.

I sometimes joke about how I'm not a very nice person. The truth is that I taught myself to be more selfish after I left Wilson, on the heels of a mental breakdown and completely without a singular, personal sense of Right and Wrong. I'd been letting people dictate how I should think and it left me a weary, out-of-shape, confused smoker, hanging my dreams onto people who weren't at all interested in taking care of them and running away from the people who were.

It took me a long time to feel Better.

I love the world and sometimes I feel like it loves me back, and I try to do the right thing when I can, but I look at articles about Green Living and blogs by people who make their own soap and only eat foods grown in a 50 mile radius, and it just makes me... tired.