methodwriter85

The other time Will felt like a real character and not Mr. Golden Boy Prince was when he was explaining to Tony all the interesting marine biology stuff. By having Will be in the right all the time, it's hard to think of him as anything but Mark's fantasy 14-year old son. Seriously though, aside from thinking he was life partners with John Hobart when he wasn't, when has Will ever been clearly in the wrong? Even when Will trashed his parents house and ran off to Hawaii, we were supposed to feel sympathy for him and believe that Brad and Robbie deserved it, and everyone fell over themselves trying to make Will feel better about himself. I still like and enjoy Will's character, but not as much as I did before the Hawaii escapade because it became, like you said, a sexed-up Parker Lewis with Family Problems, and less about an openly gay teenager enjoying his accepting friends in early 2000's California. From Tim's review: I don't know, I kind of feel like Brad's character integrity took a major hit with Millennium, and has never quite recovered. I kind of feel like in order to make Will the hero, Brad had to serve as the villain of some sort. Not to the extent that Jeanine has, but Brad needs to do things that piss off Will over and over again in order to demonstrate Will's reasons for rebelling against him. Before Millennium, Brad and Robbie had a solid 15-year partnership and had raised three happy, healthy sons. Then that all just went to shit somewhere and somehow, to the point where neither of their two youngest sons relate to them anymore.

Well, technically this would have been in the mid-90's as If It Fits took place in 1995 and the legal adoption process probably would have occured in late 1995/early 1996, but yeah. Will's black and white view of the world makes a nice foil to JJ's view, which I think is more grey. I don't think JJ would do absolutely anything to get ahead in his sport, but I bet he'd do a lot, and he'll probably get more grey the further along in the sport JJ gets. Still, I think at JJ's absolute core, he wants to win because he's the best, not because his rich daddy bribed the judges or his rich grandpa had someone taken out. I do imagine that, if Will stays involved with figure skating as a spectator, he's going to be likely to start pushing against the whole "figure skaters can't be openly gay" deal, and probably pushing JJ to push against that as well. Whether JJ goes along with that, or he goes with the status quo will be interesting as the decade unfolds. Also, I think Will is totally going to get into environmental rights. If he's really the next Tonto, I think some kind of activism has to be in his future, because fighting for what's right was a huge part of Tonto's personality. I think the Gulf Oil spill would be a nice thing to cover. He'll be 23, so just out of college and full of that early twentysomething idealism. I can totally see him sending a bunch of angry Tweets and pictures in Louisiana while trying to help. I can also see him getting involved in Prop 8 protests and "No H8te" campaigns, but his love of the ocean and marine biology would make me think he'd be more inclined towards protecting that. His black-and-white view of the world would be a perfect fit for environmental activism. Well, you gotta keep in mind this is from Will's viewpoint, a 14-year old who can't view the grey in situations yet and has (fairly and unfairly) marked his parents as the enemy. Of course they're going to seem like big bad monsters to him. But it kind of feels like, barring the Tony freak out incident and the realization that John was not his life partner, Will has more often than not always been right about things. It kind of feels like Mark's written Will as his Golden Boy character who can do no wrong, which is fine but I find it hard to relate to. Will was at his most enjoyable to me when he was having fun with his Harvard-Westlake friends and just being a teenager.

I knew about Betamax because I am a historian, and the 1980's is one of my favorite decades.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

I don't think I'm doing a selection for this chapter, but just picture heart in your head. LOL.

No, I was just raised on Television Without Pity, where we critiqued t.v. shows for fun.

I liked PMS, and I liked how you ended it. But there were problems to the story, and one of the problems was the lack of balance between the narrators. You hit that much better here.

He kind of did that with the April Fool's chapter of Poor Man's Son.

I think you hit on what the problem was with Poor Man's Son. Will's teenage angst and Gathan's teenage angst were both too much. If Will had been the comedic B-story of wacky 13-year old hijincks to Gathan's A-story of coming to terms with both his past and his newfound wealth, it would have been a much better story because there would have been more of a balance. Mark was coming at it full-throttle with the angst on both sides, and it became too much. Here, there's much more of a balance.

Christian Bale Visits Shooting Victims I thought this was a pretty neat story. Yeah, Christian Bale was the guy who went on an ugly rant on the set of Terminator Salvation. But he's also a guy who took the time out of what was obviously a busy schedule to comfort the fans who went to see his movie and got struck by bullets instead. I'm really impressed by him now. People may always point at the Terminator rant, but I hope they'll always point to this act, as well.

I think you might have mixed up Will with Wade for that moment.

Chapter 53 -At the party, and again when Wade stops the car to give Matt a blowjob. "Country Grammar"(Hot Shit) by Nelly We're going to be hearing a good deal of Nelly for the first half of the 2000's.

Wade doesn't really come off as a smart-ass the way Matt and Will do.

I really liked Will as narrator when he was just a kid having fun with his friends at Harvard-Westlake, but the war with Brad really turned me off on him, as well as the guy's insistence on being 24 at 14. So I guess I'm back to liking Wade more.

In 2000, I think my main concerns were about listening to Third Eye Blind's Blue album and making sure I saw Popular. I would bet serious money that JJ knows the entire WB lineup by heart.

I think you're not entirely far off. In any event, Penn State is lucky they have a billion dollar endowment, because most of that is probably going to go towards all the litigation. As the largest school in Pennsylvania, it has a such an impact on the regional economy that it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Check me out at Firefly Music Festival! It was so much fun.

I spent three days as a volunteer at Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware. I left Thursday night to set up camp, and came back Monday afternoon. Thursday night was probably the most fun in terms of camping- I was placed next to people who were pretty cool and friendly, and all of us hung out when we got back on Friday and Sunday. I got to see the Black Keys, the Killers(who set off fireworks for their finale), Graffiti 6, the Silversun Pickups, The Wallflowers, Ok!Go, and Imagine Dragons. It was so much fun.

I'm not picky, but there's got to be at least somewhat of physical attraction, but personality trumps it. I'd take an okay-looking guy with a great personality over a drop-dead gorgeous guy who didn't have anything else going on for him in a heartbeat. Because if all you have in common with someone is the fact that you like looking at them, it's not going to last in the long run.

Penn State Students Keep Vigil Over Paterno's Statue Two Penn State students have decided to set up a tent to protect the Paterno Statue from vandals, after a plane flew over the campus saying "Take the Statue down or We Wil." I don't think the statue should be taken down, but maybe Penn State should put up a memorial garden or something for victims of sexual abuse?

Agreed about Nick Bartzen. The Conrad Boys could have been a very good movie if the director/lead actor had someone set him aside and told him that he couldn't act. Seriously- all three of the other lead actors in this- the drifter, the errant father, and the angsty little brother- were all good, natural actors. When the director is the weak acting link, something is wrong. I get that this was his first(and so far only) film, and it was his baby, but come on. He should have looked for a guy that could actually act.

Do Harvard-Westlake students get the day off for Election Day, or not? That was the norm for my public school days, but I'm assuming it might be different for private schools.

I don't think JJ has to die, though, in order to explain why he doesn't get the Olympic Gold medal. From what I understand about 2006, nobody but Evengei Plushenko was going to get the gold medal. And in 2010, Johnny Weir was the odds-on-favorite, and Evan Lysacek got the gold medal instead. There are so many variables that happen in the world of sports that it's completely believeable that someone with massive talent doesn't reach the heights they should have reached. Although if JJ does die at 9/11, he'd be 15 years old, same as Billy's age when he died. That would really freak Brad out, I think. But if we're going for likelihood, JJ would be in either Bulgaria for the first Junior Grand Prix of the 2001-2002 season, or he'd be at home. I think if Kristin was named Christian and looked like this, you'd be all over that character.

Bieber isn't a boyband, though. Anyway, this was fun. LOL. Gotta love TW.

Over in reviews: I don't think JJ is equpped to handle his own emotions, let alone the negative emotions of a crazed mother. He's coming apart here, I think. I don't think a total breakdown will happen, though. At least not until JJ watches Evan Lysacek take the gold medal at the '10 Olympics(and likely his last chance at them as being 28 at the 2014 ones would be pushing it), and realizes that he traded in his entire childhood and adolescence on something that never panned out. I agree with that, for the most part, but I think that if JJ REALLY believes wholeheartedly in something, and it's important to him, he'll be really, really stubborn on it. But he's not going to make a big mess about something if it's not something deep down in his gut that he believes in. I think for the most part, JJ would avoid being a rebel, because figure skater rebels don't exactly get rewarded in this sport. It seems very much like being good little boys and girls who do what they're told and say what they're supposed to say. I think that's a big part of why Johnny Weir never got gold, because he wouldn't do what he was expected to do. I honestly can see them being close brothers in adulthood that Skype regularly- who live either on opposite coasts with Will in L.A. and JJ in NYC, or even countries- maybe JJ winds up living in Paris or London. I think it'd be good for JJ to be in an environment where he can't blame the fact that he doesn't have friends on Will hogging up all the attention- maybe at Tisch School of the Arts? (If and when he decides to drop skating and go to college.) You've got two brothers, so opposite in so many ways, who've essentially been raised as Irish twins. It can be so tension-filled and explosive in those teen years; that I can really see them getting closer if they don't live in the same area, because then JJ will have to make his own friends without riding on his brother's coattails, and come to some realizations about why he's not as popular as they are.