methodwriter85

I have a tendency to throw tantrums at times. I think that's a character trait of mine that Mark wrote subconciously into JJ. My bad. Anyway, Mark, what a nice way to resolve Wade and Matt's relationship woes. Of course, they've got the major question on the horizon of what happens after their '02 graduation from Stanford, but that can wait for another day. I like that Wade is considering helping JJ...it's important that they get along, because if JJ's going to be coached by Tiffany, Wade's going to need to be comfortable with JJ.

I thought that was a great way to finish off the relationship issues between Matt and Wade. Great happy ending. I'm not sure I ever see Wade and JJ being best friends, but I think they'd get to a place of understanding each other. If Tiffany's going to be JJ's coach, JJ and Wade will need to get along.

Chapter 98 -When Matt officially commits himself to Wade.

Rebecca Black's Viral Hit Turns Two I remember whenever I was having a really bad day, I felt fantastic when I would rush home and watch , and just laugh and laugh. "Partying, partying, yeah!"

Thank you. That was exactly what I was trying to say. I tried to stress again and again that I don't think Brad's unintelligent, because he clearly is. I'm just saying that we haven't had a protagonist who's been an academic since JP, and it looks like we might wind up getting that with Will, which is pretty cool. I'm basing this off of Mark's comments about how JP sees in Will a kindred spirit in terms of their pursuit of knowledge.

They've managed to raise 2.4 million so far. So it's a go. Woo-hoo!

The first two seasons of Veronica Mars was head and shoulders above what was airing on the UPN, and I'm including the 6th and 7th seasons of Buffy.

Hey, Rob Thomas (the creator of Veronica Mars) launched an official kickstarter campaign to try and raise money to make a Veronica Mars movie. Veronica Mars, if you don't remember, was a short-lived t.v. show about a teenaged sleuth from the Greater San Diego area, probably one of the most intelligent teen sows I've ever seen. Pretty cool. I hope they can pull it off.

I have a thing for Max Thieriot because of The House at the End of the Street, so I'll totally watch. Freddie Highmore was Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Aaron Eckhart as the surgically altered Lark a.k.a. Scott Slater? He's definitely one of those smoking hot middle-aged guys, and he looks like someone you could picture as being a blond California surfer. Aaron basically looks like what an Abercrombie model who kept his looks up would look like at middle age.

I'm just baffled by the response I got, because I did not think it was offensive thing to say someone is not an academic, because by the technical sense of the word, Brad is not. After JP, the only actual academics we've had in the story were Whist and Max. I didn't say Brad isn't smart, or that only academics are intelligent. I mean, seriously, did I say anything that could be construed as offensive? Because that's how I felt about PrivateTim's response- like he was pouncing on me for saying something offensive, and I really can't fathom how or why anything I said was offensive. That's why I'm really confused here.

I'm basically in-between being a student and really starting on that career path. It took me seven years to finish undegrad and grad school. I count my two years of grad school as being the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. And yeah, there's the academic world, and then there's real-world knowledge. You're talking about real-world knowledge that Brad has gained in being a CEO, which is not the same as academia. I was trained to be a public historian, which means that I'm supposed to serve as a mediator between the Ivy Academic Towers, and the public at large. I learned both academia and real-world knowledge as a result. I get what both sides are like, and I don't think either side is superior- they're just different. I was in no way dogging Brad. I'm just saying that he isn't an academic, and since he isn't publishing articles or teaching kids in an academic environment, it would be a pretty fair assessment for me to make. That doesn't mean I think for a second that he doesn't have a lot of knowledge or could have done that field if he had wanted to.

It's going to be interesting to see what things will be like when I'm in my early 40's and Tet's in his mid-30's, and gay marriage in the U.S. has become more of a given. I wonder if the 40-something/50-something guy you see prowling the bars is going to become less of a common sight. As for me, I'm basically celibate. I've had periods of sexual activity and they were fun, but I decided at one point that I felt like hook-ups were pretty empty and not really worth it. Sometimes it's frustrating, and there are times where I just can't stop thinking about sex, but eh, it always passes.

Damn, I was hoping that you were going to just stick with the flippant response. Now I'll be serious. I'm more responding to Mark's comment in reviews that he thinks JP sees in Will a kindred spirit in terms of their thirst for knowledge. Not that Brad's a dunce in any way shape or form, but other than attending Princeton, we haven't seen much in terms of Brad being an academic. Of course, I am in no way saying that someone who's not an academic can't be smart, because Brad is. He's just not someone who made the choice to dedicate their living to the grooming and pursuit of esoteric knowledge. He could have if he wanted to, I'm sure, but he didn't make that choice. I'm just saying that I know it's nice that with Will, we seem to be getting a little bit of the "Academic" part of CAP back in the series. The caps were more about how it's frustrating that you seem to disagree with everything I write, and I was responding in a way I would have when I was 15 and in a flame war on a discussion board. Sometimes I can be a little stubborn if I believe I'm right about something, and feel frustrated if I'm not getting the last word. That was rather regressive of me. Sometimes I feel like you just keep chipping away at me on this board.

Yeah. "Raw deal" makes sense, but the "raw" thing feels off. Mark, is it possible that this is slang you used with your friends back when you were young in the 1980's and it's just not the kind of 80's slang that carried over to the next generation like awesome did? I'm honestly pretty curious about where you got "raw" from, and why you have the characters using it a lot.

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.