methodwriter85

Some thoughts: 1. Will is, as Tommy put it, way too big for his 13-year old britches. I can't believe Brad spilled the whole story to him. Well, actually, I can, but it's like Brad doesn't have any kind of backbone against his 13-year old son, and it makes me lose respect for him that he can be manipulated into talking about things he shouldn't have shared with Will. There's trust and then there's putting Will into the big leagues with stuff no child should know about. He's way in over his head. I hope Will gets a reality check and soon. 2. The dynamic between Matt and Gathan is interesting. Matt is a blue-blood, at least by breeding, and Gathan is nouveau-riche. It'll be cool to see what will happen when the team starts having practice. 3. I know that it's realistic, but GOD it is annoying to listen to teenagers whine over romantic love interests they dated for like five minutes. Will, it's a summer fling. Get over it. Ugh. 4. I'm glad JJ is not allowed to have a social life so I'm spared reading about yet another teenager whine about a romantic love interest. LOL. If JJ doesn't date until he's eighteen or so, hopefully he'll be a little less whiny about dating than Will is. Or maybe, just maybe, JJ will be a guy who likes to have fun hookups and doesn't lose his head over a romantic interest because the focus is always on his career, which would be realistic. 5. I liked the Vegas plot, because it allowed me to use "Big Pimping" by Jay-Z. And I liked Gathan 'effing up big time. 6. If Gathan wants to be an effective town mayor someday, he's really going to have to learn how to budget. He should take some accounting classes while at Stanford. 7. I really liked the Batman reference. Batman was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, in 1989/1990 when I lived in Spain. I used to have Batman velcro sneakers. Ah, the '90's. Can Will reference Home Alone next? For years I would only eat plain pizzas because Kevin didn't like toppings on his pizza. And I used to pretend to set up booby traps to catch the bad guys. It was fun. You do have a damn good point about Gathan, Blue. He wasn't some overprotected kid, and you'd think he'd actually have a harder time with spending money because of the way he grew up and never knowing where the next meal would be, like the Great Depression Generation. His immaturity and impulsive spending doesn't really jibe with the background of someone who essentially had to raise his sister by himself before Wally and Clara took them in. He's 18, but he's an 18-year old with a background that forced him to be the adult as a little kid, and that wasn't really reflected here.

I know this is realistic, but god it's annoying to read about teenagers whining over love interests. Thank god JJ isn't dating because he's focused on his career and no one's interested in pre-pubescent figure skaters anyway. Gathan is really going to need to learn how to manage money better if he's going to be mayor of Claremont in '08.

Chapter 35 -When Gathan talks on the phone with Matt about Cole, then continues driving. -When Will continues his moping around about Berto, and is offered another trip to Hawaii. -When the gang gets to Las Vegas. -When Gathan makes the stunningly good decision to spend a lot of money at Vegas. "Big Pimpin'" by Jay Z God, I've been waiting for a place to use "Big Pimpin." It's not my favorite Jay Z track, but it was very big circa 2000. And it was featured rather prominently on an episode of Real World: New Orleans (2000).

Still, like I said, if Darius wants to find a party during his college years, he won't have a problem doing so. But Mark doesn't seem like he's setting Darius up as a party frat kid. Could be wrong. It would be interesting if Darius wound up transferring out. We've never had characters do that, right? Or anyone doing a 5th year? That's becoming increasingly common. My money would be on JJ doing a 5th year, or maybe a 6th, because he'll take either a whole year off or a semester off to deal with the Olympics. Or JJ might just forego college entirely while he's still competing. I don't think Brad and Robbie would be happy with that, but Jeanine would probably get them to see that while college will always be there for Jeremy James, his prime figure skating years are his late teens to mid-20's, and that's a pretty damn short window. By nature of the smaller time jumps, we're going to have to see more of this generation's college years than we did with Brad and Robbie, unless Mark intends on skipping from 2004 to 2008, which I can't see happening. Too much happened in 2005 and 2006 to skip over them, and '07 had Virginia Tech, which would frighten the hell out of the parents and grandparents while Marie/Will/John/possibly JJ are away at their various colleges. I agree. They would have played it on the school computers during downtime, and on the family computer at home as well. I do think that they would have waited until Darius was about 10 in 1992 to get him his first personal computer, and Will and JJ would have gotten theirs somewhere around 1996. Back in the 90's little kids generally didn't get personal computers. You had to wait until you were at least in your double-digits. Nowadays 7-year olds get cell phones and Ipods. Man.

Right. They may not be officially recognized, but obviously, going by the footage here, people still have crazy parties and the like by either people off-campus or in unrecognized frats. It was a plot point in Fraternity Memoirs that the frat was not officially recognized on campus, and thus they were able to get away with stuff that normal frats couldn't. The event seems to get even bigger as time went on and recongized frats were a distant memory on campus. You and Matthew are acting like Darius will be expected to live like a monk when that very video I posted the link to would completely contradict that idea, as well as Mark's own personal experience with people who attended the college.

I was just using "happy" as an adjective for the phrase frat boy. I went to a LOT of frat parties my freshman year of college; I observed them well. My grad school has a huge frat scene there; my undergrad, University of Delaware, had more of a GDI(Goddamned Independent) party scene as opposed to having a party scene focused on frats. And I'm with you on that Mark- there's no way that school would allow those kinds of parties to happen if they were that obsessed with sticking to ascetic Jesuit living. I'm thinking Darius was the best candidate to become a frat boy, but he might wind up in the ROTC instead. Will would never in a million years join a frat. Will SCREAMS GDI. John Hobart might, but if he plays varsity lacrosse for an NCAA school, then that'll be his frat instead. Same principle with Gathan and Zach(who will start college in '03.) JJ will only be at college part-time if he goes at all, and I can't see him doing the frat thing in any event.

I mean, if he really hates Santa Clara, he can transfer, but it's not exactly like Darius will have to live like a monk at SCU: Yeah. I don't think SCU is quite as restrictive as places like BYU and the like. Not if frats can get away with throwing parties like that. Although I don't think Mark is going the happy frat boy route with Darius. If he was, it would have made more sense to send Darius off to USC.

No, but Oregon Trail would have been popular during Darius's childhood. It was popular long enough to reach the early '90's. Most people in Darius's age range(currenly late 20s/early 30's) would remember Oregon Trail, I think. It'd be kinda like making a reference to Where In the World Is Carmen San Diego to people Will and JJ's age- they'd get it, especially because there used to be a live-action game show and a cartoon devoted to it during the early/mid-90's. Childhood references in the story are pretty cool, like when Brad remembers how he used to wear pucca shell necklaces with an afro comb, and when Will remembers the movie My Girl. Speaking of which, I wonder if Brad is laughing his ass off at the pucca shell necklace resurgence going on now, in 2000. It'd be funny if he kept on to his old pucca shell necklaces and just started wearing them again. LOL.

I'm kinda surprised Darius didn't make a crack about the computer game, Oregon Trail.

We'll probably be at 2003 within the next year or so. And I plan on coming up with a DJ playlist for my 10th year class reunion in 2015, so this is good practice. And you guys are getting a view for what the music is like for the first half of the decade, which Mark seems to want to cover in great detail. Let's continue. Let's switch to a rock theme. 11. I think there are very few guys who were teenagers at the time that hadn't gotten into Hybrid Theory. What a great ablum. 12. , 2001 I wanted to use this one, badly, for Will. "First Date" would have been exceedingly appropriate for Will in PMS. But it's a 2001 song, damn it. 13. 14. I learned about this song because of some 9th grade drama. See, my friend Meghan was dating this guy, Brian. Then she dumped him. Friends took sides, and in retaliation someone burned a copy of 70 Times 7 on a cd, wrote "Meghan's Song" on the front, and taped the cd with masking tape on her locker in school. She let me have the cd, and I kept it for years. LOL. 15. I bought the Sticks and Stones cd from Hot Topic in '02. My friend Josh borrowed it, and the cd was seriously scratched when he brought it back. I was so pissed. 16. 17. , 2003 18. My absolute favorite song from this era. God. 19. Boys of Summer by the Ataris, 2003 "Out on the road today, I saw a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac...a little voice inside my head said 'Don't look back; you can never look back..." 20. Music really did go on an uptick in 2003, I think. That could just be because I was in 10th/11th grade and I was listening to more kinds of music by then, though.

Well, no, but Will looks like a 17-year old, green-eyed version of this guy. Remember, Will looks seventeen, not fourteen.

I am, on the dot, JJ's age. Since JJ's birthday is December 7th, it means that for the most part it's like having been born in 1986 instead of 1985. And hell yeah, I want to get into Will's pants. Wouldn't you? Will has Sean Faris's face, but with green eyes instead of brown. Man, that'd be hot as hell. Point taken about Will, Timmy.

Alright. RIght now I'm done picking music recs, and I'm pretty bored. I've had this idea in the back of my mind to start a music thread focusing on the music that came out in 2000-2004, i.e. JJ and Will's high school years. So that's what I'm going to do. (I was personally the class of 2005, but whatever.) Feel free to add any 2000-2004 picks if you have any. You guys are going to get an idea of the future music pics, most likely. 1. 2. Can't Get You Out of My Head by Kylie Minogue, 2001 3. *Note- I don't actually like this song; it was more something I made fun of when it came out in 10th grade because I went to a high school where it was cool for girls to be bisexual, so it would get all the girls out on the dance floor dancing with each other when it came on. I thought that was funny. 4. Heaven by DJ Sammy, 2002 5. Lose Yourself by Eminem, 2002 , 2003 I'm going to admit that I didn't know what "skeet skeet" meant until I was a freshman in college. 7. , 2003 8. Pass That Dutch by Missy Elliott, 2003 There's not a chance in hell Pass That Dutch won't have a scene when 2003/2004 rolls around in CAP World. I think JJ is the only one in that family who doesn't smoke pot. 9. 10. Interesting going back over this music. You'll still hear "Get Low" quite often. And "Angel" by Shaggy makes me feel really nostalgic. And of course, there was the crunk n b craze getting ushered in at the time.

Well, it's not that Will couldn't, but it's more that it's not all that appealing to him. He's more of a low-key kind of guy than a flashy rich kid. Which is a good thing, because we don't really need a Brad II, do we? Will's just enough like Brad that we can see they're father and son, but different enough that he feels like his own person. And we already have JJ as the flashy couture hound so that will still be nicely represented for this generation. I'm also very excited that Harvard-Westlake is the kind of private school that actually forces all of their students to do lunch room duty and the like. It seems like they very much want to try and keep their kids as grounded as possible, which I really like. It fits very much into the Crampton/Schluter ideal of social responsibiltiy, noblesse oblige, and being able to relate to people from the blue-collar class.

I wouldn't say Will's my favorite character. That would be JJ, but that's because he's my namesake and my birthdate-sake, and there are ways in which JJ is like me that it scares me at times. LOL. Will is a great character, though- I like that you see how he's like Brad, but also how much he's not like Brad at all. I can't see him being all that bowled over by a 500k cufflinks, for example. Or driving a flashy sports car, either. He seems a bit more grounded and down-to-Earth than Brad is. I think he at 22 would be more likely to take a love interest on a camping trip to Yosemite than he would to exotic locations the way Brad does/did. I like that a lot- it keeps things from being stale to have some fundamental differences between Generation 3 and Generation 4.

I think the best solution for Detroit would be controlled shrinkage- congregating people in nearly empty neighborhoods and putting them in okay-to-thriving neighborheads. Then reverting the empty neighborhoods into wild prairie, maybe some urban gardens or parks. Here's an article that talks about how that would work: Shrinking Detroit Back To Greatness This could work, but you would have to get people willing to relocate their property to other areas.

You got to remember that not every possible thing can be elaborated on, not with the hundreds of characters that exist in this universe. If Mark accounted for every single character in every single scene, we'd have much, much longer chapters. You also have to remember that Will's only really been more than a background character since we got to Millenium in 1999. That means the years of 1986 to 1998 aren't really covered much in Will's life. 1987 to 1990; 1992 to 1994, and '96-'97 aren't covered, period. So there's ton of grandfather/grandson bonding that presumedly happened when Will wasn't a focus or in years that weren't covered. 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1997....lots of things could have happened in these years that we never saw. That is what is a bonus about when Mark has multiple year skips- we get to try and figure out what's changed in the family, and why things are different. I imagine Stefan and JP having a crazy experience in Studio 54 in 1977. God, '77 was such a crazy year.

Here's a parody of the Pure Michigan ads that have been running. Michiganers, is there a grain of truth to this? Detroit. God. That places makes me wanna cry looking at it. I feel so sorry for the people who come there and have to see their home city disappearing into a ghost town like that.

I desperately want to watch Derek and Jackson have sex with each other. I'm slashing these guys hard.

I really, really want to see Tyler Hoechlin and Colton Haynes from Teen Wolf make out. They'd be one hot-as-hell couple.

I really, really wouldn't expect Zach to get enlightened anytime soon. If he gets to go to college on a football scholarship he'll just get worse. The kids are lucky that their parents aren't going to be extending out any invitations for Zach to visit California anytime soon. I like that for now, Will seems totally over John. That's pretty realistic. I liked seeing Cole again, and I like seeing Gen 4 just enjoying themselves in the car, teenagers on a road trip. Darius probably has the most freedom out of all of his siblings, not just him being 18 but because he doesn't have the target on his back that Will has as a consequence of being Brad's favorite child. There's something awesome about being a freshman in college- the amount of boundless freedom and possibility you have. There are some times I would give anything to be 19 years old again...

Okay. That's fine. Still, the point remains. I wonder if Stefan's going to invest in the 2000's Orange County real estate boom. That probably would have seemed like a no-brainer at the time. I like that you're getting someone who cares more about the environment. We haven't really had that much in terms of environmental concerns brought up yet, and given the kind of early 90's politically correct TV shows that these kids grew up with, it makes sense that they'd start bringing that kind of thing up. Kids develop their social schema according to the culture they grow up in, and stuff like Captain Planet, Pocohantas, and Fern Gully was a part of it. I mean this is seriously what we grew up with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiEf2W8RwO0&feature=related "Never Talk To Strangers", Ruff McGruff Taking A Bite out Crime, D.A.R.E., and "Don't Litter" were big slogans/campaigns for the child of the early 90's. We were also told that we needed to have Higher Self-Esteem and Celebrate Diversity.

The irony to Will's speech is that the Schluters wouldn't have nearly been so rich if they HADN'T profited off the surburban sprawl of Alameda County in the 1970's. Suburban sprawl is of course a contributing factor to gas use, which contributes to why we have to drill in increasingly dangerous areas. It really is connected in a circle, a loop that never ends.

Chapter 34 -When the family waits around in the E.R. for J.P.'s surgery. Goran Visjnic and Erik Pallendino. Goddamn. - When Will goes on his "Save The Environment" youthful idealism speech. and Opening Theme from Captain Planet / A '90's childhood definitely included a lot of t.v. about how we needed to save the whales and such. I loved that Will absorbed all of that. It sounded straight out of the Fox Kids Saturday morning lineup. Time for an admission: In 2nd grade, inspired by Captain Planet, I took a pair of toy handcuffs and cuffed myself to the Jungle Gym to protest whaling. My teachers could barely keep a straight face. I was one incredibly precocious child who wanted desperately to be Wheeler. - When the kids ride through the West, and pick up Cole, Matt's best friend.