methodwriter85

There's a huge difference between having friends that want to hang around you because you're considered The Shit and live in the Colony, and having friends that want to be around you because they're genuine friends, especially when we're talking about middle school/start of high school. Most people don't have their life-long friendships set at 13 like Andy Sharpe in Cross-Currents did. Just because Will is an affable kid doesn't mean he's got a ton of genuine friends, especially considering that Will during the time of Poor Man's Son was pretty bad at judging people. Jason is someone that we were lead to believe that Will had been friends with his whole life, and then Jason generally ditched Will after they started high school because he didn't want, for whatever reason, to be in the same group, and because Will attached himself at the hip to Ryan. I don't think his bullshit detector really developed until sometime after he got back to school, and he decided to forego making shallow friendships in favor of Marie's approach, which was to find quality people that weren't shallow fakes like Carter's crowd, or were generally fair weather friends like Ryan and Shiloh's crowd. If Will doesn't feel like he's got a lot of genuine friends from HW aside from maybe Ryan and Alistair, I think it's because he doesn't have a lot of genuine friends aside from Ryan and Alistair. You also gotta factor in that Will has been pretty preoccupied with his family issues, and when you're 14 and in high school, friends tend to expect a lot of loyalty and a lot of hang-out time. Will also seemed to focus a lot on hanging out at parties with the Stanford crowd, and other than the float trip, he didn't interact that much with HW kids who weren't Alistair and Ryan. My guess is that Will was viewed as a cool guy who was hot, but since he was gay girls didn't have much use for him, and since he wasn't hanging out after school all the time, guys didn't see the point in continuing to invite him over to play video games. Will is kind of like that freshman who only really hung out with upperclassmen, and then looked around and realized he wasn't all that bonded to people in his class. I'm loving Marie. You can see where she's Claire's daughter, but you can also see where she's very much NOT the well-heeled debutante that we all know Claire was in 1982. As for the drinking thing, I thought it was reflective of the times. In the 1970's, when JP, Isidore, and Sam were raising their kids, there was much more of a relaxed atmosphere about drinking. Colleges had on-campus bars, the drinking age was 18 in many states, and the average legal blood alcohol level was .15. I've also gotten the impression that teen drunk driving accidents hit their peak in the late 1970's. That's probably a big factor in two things that happened- the raising of the drinking age in all states to 21 by 1984, and the rising of the driving age from 16 to in some states being 17 or 18. I know that in Delaware, at some point the age for driving permits raised to 15 and a half, then went to 15 and ten months, with the license age raised from the 16th birthday to 16 and a half, and 16 and ten months. I think in Mark's generation, it was common that you could just drive off in your car for your 16th birthday, but I don't think that's true anymore. Although lucky for these guys, they have a chauffer so it's not that big of a deal for Will that he won't get his license until junior year.

Yeah, I loved the locking the gates and them being incredibly firm on no one being allowed to drive after drinking was a really nice ode to what happened to the family in October of 1980. I liked Will kissing guys openly at the party...I remember when Mark was writing party scenes for Be Rad, I thought it was odd that he didn't show two girls kissing each other to try and turn the guys on. That was such an integral feature of my observances at parties. He replied that girls didn't kiss each other at (straight) parties in 1980, and I'm betting that sure as hell didn't happen with two guys, either. By 2000, you definitely had girls kissing each other at parties, mostly to get the guys turned on and get a crowd around them, and a couple of years later, you'd start to see guys kissing each other at parties, although not to the same degree. That the kissing happened (but there was somewhat of an negative reacton) showed the transitioning going on in the first half of the new decade...gay guys were comfortable enough to kiss at parties because they're not worried about getting bashed, but at the same time...you didn't have a crowd of girls clapping and cheering them on while taking video to post onto YouTube, which became a thing during the second half of the 2000's. Finally...9 months, 11 days remain...

Chapter 97 -When the gang parties it up to celebrate the New Year. -When the gang welcomes in 2001. I'm going to admit, I get chills watching this. These people look so happy and hopeful about the coming new year of 2001, and for 3,000 people, this will be their last New Year, and their lives are to end in an unimaginably violet, unprecedented way. -When Will has fun macking on guys at the party.

Well, this is a generation of guys who grew up when there were openly gay celebrities like RuPaul, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen Degenres, etc etc in the 1990's. There were books like Heather Has Two Mommies getting published when they were children.They're too young to really remember the AIDS epidemic, which did cause a lot of homophobic backlash in the 1980's and early 1990's. The internet began to rise when they were in middle school, which allowed them to get support and make connections to people who were like them. When they were in middle school/high school, gay civil unions were allowed in Vermont. By the end of their teen years/early 20's, gay marriage was allowed in Massachusetts. This is in pretty stark contrast to Brad's generation, when being gay was literally equated with "Got Aids Yet?" It translates to having a generation of young gay men who were much more open about being gay than in previous generations, and at younger ages, with people coming out not just in college but in high school and even middle school. (I came out when I was 15 and started making my first gay friends in 9th grade.I think for older guys, that would seem awfully young.) Instead of cocooning themselves in gayborhoods, they felt comfortable and safe enough to be openly gay with their friends, which in turn means that more straight guys have had openly gay friends, or at least absorbed the message that it's politically correct to be tolerant of gays. (Which is something that really didn't start getting pushed until the 1990's.) That in turn means that these straight, or mostly straight, guys felt more comfortable exploring the other side of themselves, whether it's just harmless flirting to full-on sexual encounters with other men. I think there's even a little bit of difference between people Matt and Wade's age (born circa 1980) and Will's age (born in the mid/late-80's.) I remember talking once to JWolf, the author of The English Year and The List. He had a hard time understanding Andy's angst in Cross-Currents. (And to be honest, so did I when I first read it.) And I think the reason why he had a hard time understanding Andy's angst was because he had never absorbed the kind of inner-homophobia that Andy had, because JWolf grew up with messages that were fairly positive about gay people. Adam Phillips and JWolf grew up in roughly the same area, with roughly the same kind of white suburban middle class background, but there's about a 9-year difference between them, and that seems to have made a big difference. And in turn, I've noticed differences between my peers and the current college kids, born in the early 90's, who are even less homophobic than my peers were.

I can't picture Marie as written so far ever going along with anything she didn't agree with because her cousin said so. I really can't. Will does feel like a leader, but not in a autocratic way- more like a Democratic way. He had to work and negotiate with Darius on the issue of Jeanine's care- I don't think Darius would have responded if it were more like an edict. Of course, given that Brad's generation is only approaching their late 40's/early 50's NOW (and are still in their 30's in CAP time), it seems incredibly premature to wonder about the dynastic succession for WIll's generation, as the oldest of them would in 2012 only be barely out of their 20's. It would make a lot of sense if the mold kind of ends with Brad's generation, though. I agree that it's nice that we seem to be getting the "Academic" back into CAP. Brad and Robbie went to Ivy League schools and are very bright, but neither of them seem to have the same level of academic spirit or thirst for knowledge (YES, I KNOW THEY SENT THEIR KIDS TO HARVARD-WESTLAKE, PRIVATE TIM. I STILL THINK IF THEY WERE HARD-CORE ACADEMICS IT WOULD HAVE COME ACROSS IN THE STORY LIKE IT DID FOR J.P. IN HIS TWO STORIES, OR HELL, LIKE IT DID FOR ANDY SHARPE IN CROSS-CURRENTS EVEN THOUGH HE WAS ALSO A MAJOR PARTY BOY) that Will's been displaying. The marine biology lesson from Will remains my favorite moment from him.

They've released a bunch of these portraits ...they're done up Capitol haute couture portraits for all the different characters. They look pretty great, especially Katniss. They really upped the wardrobe for this film, which is great. Katniss's interview dress was such a disapointment in the Hunger Games. Check out Sam Claflin as Finnick O'Dair...after seeing this, I totally think he's going to pull the character off: Would I have preferred Armie Hammer? Yeah, but I think Sam looks pretty hot as Finnick. He's got fantastic bone structure. I love that he's got what is essentially a pirate costume on. I totally think that fits with his District 4, sea-goer image. Anyway...8 more months! Yay!

And Jeff likely would have been born well after Brad and the Gunn High Class of 1981 graduated (it'd be sometime around the first half of 1982), so if Lark had gotten a girl pregnant towards the end of senior year, she probably wouldn't have been showing through the summer after graduation. I mean, if Brad didn't find out that his sister had a baby until said baby was a freaking three year old, I could easily see him missing that Lark had a kid, especially if the mother hid the pregnancy from everybody she went to high school with.

Well, I turned the offer down. I thought very long and hard about it, and it came to this... I would be driving 30 miles each way for the commute, with a roundtrip 1:30 to 2 hour commute, for about 4 to 5 hours of work at 9 dollars an hour. With gas incredibly likely to hit close to 5 dollars a gallon this summer (and at best, 4 dollars), plus the wear and tear this would do to my 8-year old car, it just didn't seem worth it for what would amount to maybe 40 dollars a day. I might as well just volunteer at a local museum. There are quite a few of them in Delaware, especially in Chateau Country. (Thank you, du Ponts.) It was definitely one of the hardest decisions I've made in a long while, but sometimes you really just have to go with your gut. And my gut was screaming at me that this isn't a good fit. I did get something out of this interview, though. I realized that I'm not comfortable with driving more than 30 minutes for a commute to a job that isn't full-time, unless I could take a rail or bus ride to it. I also realized that I'm more interested in doing archival work than I am in doing historically intrepretive work. And that's pretty valuable information to realize, I think. I think one of the important things about adulthood is figuring out what your limits are and learning to work within them. The director of the plantation seemed to understand when I leveled with him about how I was not comfortable with the commute, and I did ask to keep him as a contact, with he agreed with. I do feel like I learned a lot from this experience.

I'm not entirely sure how well the idea of "one ruler" is going to work with the Will/JJ/Darius/Marie/John generation...when Crampton Construction was the family company and everyone was concentrated at Claremont and later on at Escorial, it was one thing, but this seems like a generation with wildly different interests that could and should take them all over the globe. It might become like what happened with the British monarchy, where there's a ceremonial "head", but all the real decisions are reached by Parliament. I can see Will as a leader, but I can't see him as the kind of leader who would expect everyone to follow his orders, like the way Brad does. I think it'd be more a republic and less of an autocrat feel to it. Mark, are you familiar with the story of the Du Pont family? I think it's an interesting model to read about...at one time, they were very much in the mode of that French family mode, especially as they were building their gunpowder empire in the United States. They had what constituted as a "chateau country" in the Brandywine River Valley, and had the kind of regional power the Cramptons seem to have. But that feeling diminished as the Du Pont Company became less and less of a family run company, and more of a global company after the 1990's. Of course, this is something that wouldn't really be an issue until Will and the gang are at least in their 30's, and that's not til the mid-2010's, and I'm not sure we're going all the way up there, unless Mark has this burning desire to explore Riley's teenaged rebellion circa 2015.

Hunter Parrish from Weeds as Ryan? I kind of had him in mind for JJ, too, but I think Ryan would fit better, now that I know you don't picture Ryan as having rounded features. (I totally had Ryan pictured as having a round face and facial features.) If you've ever seen him in Zac Efron's 17 Again, he's incredibly good at playing the high school bully, which is what Ryan was when he first appeared. If you' agree to this one, you'd be fufilling Adam's request to have someone looking like Hunter Parrish in CAP. LOL.

Adam Phillips has talked at length about his observations in guys who "walk the fine line", and how clearly straight or clearly gay starts to become blurred, so I think Noah is representing a little of that. Gathan especially represented the guys of the 2000's who clearly did abscribe to any sexual labels to themselves...Noah seems more along of the lines of straight guys who can flirt around with gay guys and not be uncomfortable with it. I called it "jokingly gay"...I noticed it a lot in 2003, but I'm sure it was around in 2001, especially considering these people are living in a liberal area of California. Finally, I really like Noah being straight, because I think Will strikes me as someone who would mostly have straight friends and not relate that much to stereotypical gay guys. (The exception being JP and Stefan.) That was true of my experience in college- I had some gay friends, but all of my very good friends in college were straight. The big bulk of the openly gay kids at UD were of the shallow, "I can't believe you wore those shoes with your hair!" variety. That's why I was shocked when I went to IUP and met gay kids who could carry on conversations about things that went beyond hair and clothes. Tim, I really agree with you about liking the social mixing. In my high school experience, social lines weren't played out along the lines of the popular head cheerleader and the quarterback and their stuck-up friends made high school hell for everybody else. There were bitches and stuck-up people at my school, but for the most part, everybody just did their own thing, and social groups would often mix. I like that Will's high school experience is apparently going to reflect that more instead of Brad's high school experience, which seemed very much of the whole "rich, good-looking kids terrorize the poor, normal-looking" kids that we see so much of in Hollywood movies about high school. It does happen (Adam Phillips's Cross-Currents definitely described his school as having the vibe where the rich good-looking kids ruled everything), but there are other kinds of experiences, too.

As much as I would have liked Noah as Will's boyfriend, I'm glad that he's got a male high school friend for whom there will be no sexual tension.

I was wondering if there was going to be any bitterness by Niners fans towards the Ravens. I'm kinda suprised by it- I thought it was a rather clean Super Bowl, where both sides played great (first half- The Ravens, second half- The Niners), and where both sides were pretty respectful of each other.

I'm going to be honest. This is actually the first job I've applied to since I left my holiday season temp job in January. So it's not like I've been searching for three months. This was kind of an "on the whim" job application. It was worth it to go on the interview, either way. I hadn't been on a job interview since October, so it was good to refresh those skills. Someone told me to think of it as like this- you don't come into a job interview with the implicit understanding that you're going to take the offer if it's given to you. Both sides need to realize it's a good fit. Every bit of my gut instinct is telling me not to take the job. Even my mother doesn't think it's a good idea. A mother of a unemployed graduate. Telling him that it's not a good idea to take a job offer.

I got a job offer as a seasonal intrepreter at a historical plantation in Pennsylvania. I'm not really jumping up and down about it. I had mis-givings about the job when I drove up there...the plantation is pretty out of the way and wasn't easy to find even with GPS, and it's about a roundtrip 90 minute to 2 hour commute. The job only offers 9 dollars an hour, and it's based on when school groups tour. On one hand, this is good experience, and I haven't had a job in a three months. On the other hand, I'm not sure the wear and tear the commute would take on my car would be worth it, as well as just the stress of the commute. Finally, I think that I'm more interested in archival work, as opposed to intrepretive living history. At 17, living history is what I thought I wanted to do, but after three internships of archive work...I think I really think I'm leaning towards that. I'm more inclined to work some job within the area and then volunteer at a historical society on weekends while I wait for the right opportunity to open up than to take this job. I'm leaning towards saying no (I wanna say 80 percent of me is thinking no), but there's this fear...what if I don't get a job offer again? I don't know, it's confusing. If I do go through with turning down the job offer on the phone(the guy gave me his personal number to call for when I reach my decision), do any of you have any advice about how to do it respectfully and without alienating them? I mean, if I lived closer, or these was a reliable transit route, or this was more of a full-time job I'd probably had said yes without hestitation, but I'm not so sure.

Not necessarily, though. Roger "snaughed", and he wasn't a Hayes. And Matt Carrswold is biologically a Hayes, but he doesn't snaugh. I don't think any of the characters have described Matt as snaughing.

Joe Flacco on his new 120.6 million dollar deal: Joe Flacco: It's About Respect, Not the Money Way to go, Flacco. It's pretty amazing to think that a guy who five years ago was talking to his college football coach about possibly joining the baseball team instead of going out for the senior combine now holds the most lucrative contract in the NFL.

Yeah, that would have been in the early 1960's. Hot Jeff would have been born in 1981 or 1982.

Yeah. That's why I said, "If you made Theo James a little bit darker..."

If you took Theo James (aka the ill-fated Turk from season 1 of Downton Abbey) and made him a little darker and 18 years old, I could see him as Darius: He definitely has the exotic, ethnically ambigious good looks down, I think.

Let's congratulate Mark for winning best hosted story with Paternity! It's been an interesting 4 and a half years working with you as part of the team. There have been times where I've been really frustrated with you, and vice versa, but I think we've done a great job of working through it and I really hope that we as a writing team have helped you create the best work that you can do. *hugs* You're like the zany fun older uncle I never had, and I'm glad to be your e-friend. In celebration, I thought I'd post a song...enjoy!

Hey Blue, I'm wondering... Mark has his characters saying "that's raw", as in "that's awful" or "that sucks", quite a lot. Do you remember ever saying that with your friends? I'm racking my brain trying to remember it, but I don't. I feel like I would have heard and said "that bites", "that sucks", or "that's a dick move" in place of how the characters seem to be using "that's raw." Mark, where are you getting the "raw" thing from? Off of a website, or personal memory? It doesn't feel like something that would be anachronistic, but I'm curious about it, because it's not a slang word I remember using that much. Is it possible that it's actually 80's slang that wasn't that popular with my generation? Or is it possibly slang that's particular to your area and just didn't hit my area, Mark?

I think it's within the edge of possibility. Robbie's mom would have been in her early/mid-40's in 1981/1982. I'm also going with Ryan's father, but I'm not sure about it being a relative of Robbie's.

Here's a pretty life-affirming story about a man who found an abandoned baby on a subway, and would eventually raise the child with his boyfriend, and then get married to him by the same judge who allowed him to raise the child. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/we-found-our-son-in-the-subway/ What a great story. Family really does come in all different shapes and sizes.

I'm really shocked Corbin's article was allowed to be run in the first place. Then again, my school newspaper was nothing but a propaganda piece for University of Delaware.