methodwriter85

Sounds of A 90's Childhood Playlist, Part 1 1. 2. 3. Love Will Never Do - Janet Jackson 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 2 Legit 2 Quit - MC Hammer 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. To Be With You - Mr. Big 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Everything I Do (I Do It For You) - Bryan Adams 29. 30. Losing My Religion - REM It pisses me off soooo much they didn't get the rights for "Losing My Religion" on the Beverly Hills, 90210 DVD. I'm sorry, that IS the song that defines the break-up and teenaged angst of Brenda and Dylan, damn it! Anyway, I did this all off the top of my head. Damn. I guess what they say about music imprinting really is true.

Oh, there will be a MASSIVE lawsuit.

Austin and Darius have a great bromance going on. As for Marie, I'm digging him and her for a high school fling. Not sure it'd make it anywhere past that, because frankly, Austin doesn't come off as too bright. Marie seems like she's almost as intelligent as Will is, and I can't see her with a dumb-but-sweet type in the long run similar to how I can't Will with a dumb-but-sweet type. But that's the nice thing about these characters being 15- none of them are thinking in terms of long-term partners and are just having fun. That's what 15 should be all about.

Please tell me that this kid at the very least has lost his driver's license for life.

I really wish Will had more respect for Wally. Wally came from an abusive home where the bulk of every adult male in the family are raging drunks who can't support their children, managed to get a job, buy a home, have a 20-year odd successful marriage, raise 6 kids (4 of whom weren't actually his) , with 4 of whom are either in college or college-bound. That's a pretty successful man in my wagering. Way more successful than the assholes who spawned a monstrous kid who killed 4 people in a fit of "affluenza." I hope Will realizes what a snob he's being by the end of the story.

Zayn's pretty hot although I'm not too wild about all of his tats. It's funny how they looked like squeaky-clean 14-year old school boys back in 2011/2012, and now they're all grown men covered in tats. (Except for Niall, who still looks like a choir boy.)

Because 1D is still relevant going into 2014 as they had two big top 10 hits this year with "Best Song Ever" and "Story of My Life"? "Best Song Ever" was a pretty funny video:

Pretty cool they're still having top 10/top 20 hits: They definitely dodged the 1-hit wonder bullet...which sadly looks like it's going to be the case state-side for The Wanted.

Very true. In terms of Will, I gotta go back to how he handled the Shane Norway situation. It was an empowering moment that made him feel good about standing up for his beliefs. But what Will doesn't realize, or hasn't talked about yet, is the fact that Will made it impossible for himself to ever be a volunteer for his brother's competitions again, at least the ones being handled by the ISU. He's on "the red list" now, as Daisy referred to it. I don't think Will realizes it because it doesn't seem like he's been to any of JJ's 2001-2002 season comps yet, but it would be kind of funny for Tiffany to illuminate Will on this.

I'm already thinking in glee about the pounding Will's ego is going to take when he hits college and he runs across a hard-ass professor. Dear god. Especially if he winds up in grad school (which I think is pretty likely given Will's interest in academics and the general narrative of his generation), because there is no such thing as a professor who kisses your ass in grad school. I think that's been the most beneficial thing to me from having gone to grad school- you get it pounded into your head that you don't know everything, and that you're not the smartest guy in the room, and it's probably one of the best ways of injecting humility into people. Humility is something Will very desperately needs. Mark and I have this mutual e-friend who was a Golden Boy growing up with some similarities to Will, and it was interesting to see how this e-friend (I'll call him Aaron) reacted when he didn't get what he wanted. It was almost like Aaron refused to accept it and wrote long speeches about how he couldn't accept it, because he was very much conditioned to think that he'd get whatever he wanted as long as he tried hard enough. And this was in Aaron's early 30's, not early 20's. I wonder if Will is going to be similar... I'm also wondering how Will's going to react when "jading" things happen to him, because Will's of the mindset that he can make a big difference in the world, such as when Will take it upon himself to rid the figure skating world of homophobia and basically threatened to take down the entire ISU over the issue of Shane. Wonderful teenager hyperbole, but eventually Will's going to hit into that wall that you always hit when you're an agitator for change. In contrast, I think JJ actually seems pretty conditioned towards not getting what he wants all the time, as besides skating, the only other things he's apparently good at are gymnastics and singing. Being the middle child who gets overshadowed in favor of his Golden Boy brother might have sucked growing up, but it might actually be a pretty good thing for him in the end.

I think the issue with that is because of Will's emancipation. If Will expects to be treated like and have the rights of an adult, he needs to act like one, and not like a kid. Then again, I've met adults who are faaarrrr more childish than Will is. I think no matter what, there was no way Will was going to be a normal teenager, and not just because of wealth and the way he was raised. He's a very bright guy, which gives him the viewpoint that he's always right and it's up to him to illuminate those set-in-their-ways parents and grandparents. The arrogance will probably fade in time, especially once he's out of high school and facing off against professors who don't give a damn who he is.

Anyway, I'm not so sure 19 would be banned today...check out this ad from 2011 French Vogue. I remember this mild uproar about the ad as it was seen as being way too provocative for child models.

I gotta admit, I'm pretty interested in the Triton stuff, as well as seeing what happens to Claremont as defense really takes off. (They have a branch of Triton there or some kind of new defense manufacturing plant there, right?) I'm also excited to see how Wade and Matt adjust to life outside of Stanford. I'm really hoping that Will has his "Aha" moment about this, like he did when he realized that Robbie wasn't the devil in Paternity. For someone who started off the story basically calling out his family for being snobs, he himself hasn't been called out on his own snotty behavior. Just for the record...I fucking LOVE Llamo Sheepskin Mocassins: Sheepskin mocassins were really popular at my school in the late '00s, but it seems to have been more of a regional thing, as I remember talking to people from Minnesota who had no clue about this.

Some vintage commercials I don't think would fly today:

I wonder when you're going to riff on "color code" terror alert levels. Ugh. The Post 9/11 era was nuts. I really enjoyed the high school break-up drama. Whether you're in high school in 1981 or 2001, some things don't change- like what happens when a love-sick puppy ex-boyfriend debases himself in front of everybody at school in order to try and get his girlfriend back. Marie is lucky that she's not this girl I went to high school with- apparently her ex-boyfriend picked her up and started punching and slamming her into a locker when she wouldn't take him back. I can't see Noah ever doing that, but I do think Marie's lucky that Noah is a senior and won't be around next year. High school break-ups aren't like college or real-world break-ups- you have to see that person around every day.

Chapter 58 -When Will learns of Marie's break-up drama with Noah, and Noah begs her in school to talk more in school about this silly little tiff they're having. "Summer Wind Was Always Our Favorite Song" by The Ataris -When Brad gets stopped at Triton for a search. "What's Going On" by a 2001 All-Star Tribute It's crazy to look at this video- it's basically a snap shot and who's who of where music was in the late 90's/start of the 00's. It was intended as an AIDS tribute, and it was shot before 9/11, but after 9/11 the scope of the benefits expanded to include 9/11 survivors. It also reminded me, "Wow, J Lo really was everywhere back in 2001, wasn't she?" -When Brad leans of Triton's plans to expand in order to take advantage of Bush's new War on Terror. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

It's been two weeks since my friend Stephen died. I checked out his FB page, and found a link to his obituary. It's so strange. I've actually had this habit since I was 11 or 12 years old of reading obituaries. This guy in high school said I was morbid for doing so, but I've always liked reading about the interesting and long lives of people who lived through things like World War II or the Great Depression. I also like to visit cemeteries, check out tombstones, read the dates, and imagine what sort of lives these people might have lived, especially the ones who lived a long time. I felt a bit of sadness for the ones who didn't get much of a lifetime...and now...now I'm dealing with reading an orbit of someone that I really loved and cared about, with so many memories of I can't possibly list them all out. 1986 to 2013. Seriously. That's it. That's fucking it. It's all my friend Stephen got. It feels obscene. And his orbit just feels so generic, rose-colored, and stock-character. Not that I'm going to rail against his parents for that, of course. It's just a reminder that you can't fit a whole person's life in a couple of lines. It's impossible to convey that. It's impossible to cite specific memories like the time I listened to him bitch about this snobby resident who made fun of his clothes, or when we watched a squirrel eating a Chik-Fil-A waffle fry while perched on a garbage bin in front of Willard Hall. Or when we were in Dunkin Donuts and I told him that I wrote his name as "Stever" in my cell phone, and he just grabbed my phone and changed it because "Stever" was a nickname that he absolutely refused to go with. I keep being afraid that in thirty years, I'm going to forget what his voice sounds like, or not be able to remember little moments like the ones I listened above. Like I said, Steve and I didn't have a dramatic friendship- mainly just made up of little moments. I keep going in my head, trying to remember as much as I can about him, like how he moved and how he talked, so that he stays fresh and 3-d in my head, because I don't want him to fade into memories as some generic nice former college friend that died when we were just three years out of college. At 50-something, I want my memories of him to be as vibrant as they are now. I had an e-friend tell me that he was worried that I was idealizing the guy, but I think I'm actually actively trying NOT to do that, because I want to keep him in my mind as he was, not who I wanted him to be. I feel like if I do that, I'll be able to keep him "real", in a sense. So I want to remember the warts. There's this part of me that's so pissed off that Steve flushed away all of his potential to try out heroin, and I keep wondering if maybe I had called him that night something might have been different. But then there's the logical part of me that knows that there isn't anything I could have done. I know it and I accept it. Still. I'm past the intense grieving...still some cries now and then, but not the intense sobbing that I experienced in the first few days, sobbing so intense I needed to hold on to something to stay up. I can even laugh and feel happy about something now, although I'm still mostly just going through the motions, and not a day goes by that I don't think of him. I even managed to have fun on my 28th birthday, although a part of me just kept thinking about the fact that Steve will never have a 28th birthday. He'll never become the great counselor that I knew he was going to become, and all of the people that he was going to help...he can't now. It's such a colossal waste of a man that I knew was going to do great things with his life. It's weird. I was jealous of Steve. I thought he had it more together than I did, I knew the guy had far more of a superior brain than I did, and I was jealous that he pretty much had a job guaranteed for him as a grief counselor once he got his degree. Steve wasn't going to flail around post-Grad like I've been doing. But now that bright future has been wiped out. And I feel like I kind of lost my Quarterback, in a sense. Who am I going to call when I know I need a verbal bitchslap on all of my B.S.? Who is going to be brutally honest with me about where I might be going wrong? And who will have all of that backed up by the fact that we grew up with each other in college? No one. I'll never have that again. I'll make friends, but as someone once said to me...the friends who grew up with you understand you in a way that the friends that you made as an older person don't. The one person in this world that understood everything there was to know about 21 to 24 year old Jeremy...that guy's gone, and I can't ever replace that. I kind of feel like there's this part of me that is gone now, and I'll never be quite the same again. I know I'll recover, and I am recovering, but I can't ever go back entirely to who I was two weeks ago.

Darius is actually a sophomore, but I still don't think it's that weird for Darius to still have a very high school mindset. I don't think high school kids started becoming a mystery to me until I was about 25 or so. Hell, I've met mid-thirtysomethings who still have a teenaged mindset, which really shocked me because before that I thought 35-year olds had a wisdom and maturity to them because of their extra years.

Hey, Private Tim, they're running a new T.V. show on Fox called Surviving Jack, which is set in 1991 Southern California. Seeing as that's where and when you went to high school and had your coming-of-age, I thought it'd be cool for you to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gg3T-NeBPc I'm not totally sold on this, but I'll give it a shot because I fucking love the 1990's. It'll be cool to see if they've good at capturing the time and place of the show. I do think, from the trailers, they were pretty good at re-creating the early/mid-90's look, with the lead's Bugle Boy shirts and his sister's scrunchies and mid-drift tops. And not to mention the Hypercolor T-shirt. I actually have this vintage 1990's t-shirt that I'll wear every once in awhile...it's a GAP t-shirt with horizontal stripes of lavender and aqua. It's hideous but I love how early 90's it makes me feel whenever I wear it. The 90's are a hard thing to capture period-wise, because it doesn't have that set, defined aesthetic that decades like the 1970's and 1980's have. I think the best films/shows I've ever seen that really captured that era would be Being Erica, in shows where Erica would flashback to the 1990's, and The To-Do List.

Good one. I like it. It's weird being 28. I remember I used to mercilessly tease Adam about his age when I was 22 and he was 28. It's so strange to be on the other side. (Well, not in his case, as Adam as now 34.)

It's a little over a week since my good college friend on November 29th, and I got it confirmed to me on November 30th. I'm past the intense feelings of sadness, but it's interesting to learn that I've apparently got a lot more grieving stages to go through. The last 'sad attack' hit me when I was walking around KMart, and the sad version of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" came on. It's really strange how unpredictable this stuff is...I thought that I'd go to the bar we hung out together at so many times in college, put on "I Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd, and I'd have a good cry...but...nothing. Maybe a little tearing up, but not what I expected.

That's not true for everyone. For me, a kick-ass breakfast would be Belgian waffles, a side of bacon, sausage gravy biscuits, along with pineapple and cranberry apple juice. Anyway, I really do hope Austin turns out to be a better friend than Noah was. I like that Will can have a hot male friend with whom there's no sexual tension...I always kind of figured that was part of what ruined his friendship with Ryan. The whole thing reminded me of when Tommy Hilfiger's daughter was on a show called "Rich Girls", and she got frustrated because she couldn't figure out how to make a burrito. At 18. I'm not kidding. It's weird to me, because I figured out bacon and eggs when I was 7 or 8. I figured that was a basic even the biggest non-cook could do, like spaghetti or hamburgers. Maybe he'll learn how to grocery shop when he goes off to college and learns that dining hall food is really disgusting? I remember Target becoming my friend that first year of college.

Chapter 57 -On the jet ride to Hawaii, where Will is convinced that he needs to have a boyfriend to show up Darius, and Austin agrees to pose as his boyfriend. "We've Got It Going On" by The Backstreet Boys -When Will enjoys his new sex room. "Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol Can I just take a moment to say how fucking gorgeous Billy Idol was in the 1980's? Man. Simply beautiful, in a cruel, sneering way. -When Will and Austin try to hook up, but realize that at the end of the day, Austin just isn't programmed for it. "Girls and Boys" by Blur

Yeah, I thought it was really unfair to compare it to the movie. It's a live performance which means you have exactly one shot to get it right. The only flub I ever noticed was Liesel saying, "May I have my first taste of champagne? No?" Which should have been, "Yes?" Everyone in that product clearly put 200 percent into it, and I hope the fact that 18.5 million people watched it means that NBC will try this again. You gotta admit though, Adam...Rolf was hot. And a good singer. And really hot.

Given that Evan Lysacek is going out for the Olympics, JJ COULD be preparing for those. But I'm towards JJ being retired by 2010 or 2011.