methodwriter85

JJ said at one point that he had only made out with other skaters, like with Evan Lyscaek, but otherwise, Alex is the first person he went beyond 2nd base with. (I can't remember if he had actual oral sex with John after 9/11, or just a handjob.)

If Darius has ever had any interest in having sex with another dude, he would have done it at 14 at some Hollywood party and he would have told Robbie. So, anyway. JJ. If we go by what he's said, he's had sexual encounters (including jerking off and blowing) with John, Alex, Mary Ellen, and Buzz. He may or may not have hooked up with Susannah, but I honestly don't think he would have gone beyond making out with her- JJ probably knew that Mary Ellen was trying to set him up with her so he'd stop sniffing around Alex. So that gives him about four sexual partners- pretty low for CAP but in normal ranges for a 17-year old in the real world. LOL. I'm hoping Carullo makes that five. LOL. Mark has said the one thing about JJ is that sex doesn't really control him the way it does sometimes for the other characters. He's pretty controlled about it, interestingly enough. It's there and he can enjoy it if the opportunity is there, but other than Alex (and barely then), he doesn't really chase it. That does really make him very different from the other characters in this story.

If I were JJ, I'd start dating effeminate theater guys from Broadway. I can't see Will ever being interested in those types.

Well, now that JJ doesn't have to worry about image anymore, I wonder if he'll start racking up numbers. Although he does still seem a bit cautious.

Chapter 33 -When Will and Dalby have a "get to know you" talk. "New Slang" by The Shins

This is more "Cali during the Fast Times At Ridgemont High era", but check out this cool old #ThrowbackThursday picture of a teacher at Dana Hills High School teaching math: Pretty funny. Any of you guys familiar with Dana Hills High? The teacher apparently retired this year. You gotta love the teachers that are a little unorthodox and crazy. I had one like him, although I was never able to do better than a C in his class. LOL. I think these students are roughly Mark Arbour's contemporaries. Did you feather your hair like that when you were that age, Mark? LOL. Anyway, this is making the rounds on Reddit.

You gotta love 70's guilty pleasure music.

I like him for Alex, but I definitely prefer Margot Robbie as Mary Ellen: I can so picture Mary Ellen having a beauty routine that involved. In any event, that was an AWESOME shout-out to American Psycho. What really sold me on her for Mary Ellen was her big scene from Wolf Of Wall Street. Swap out the Brooklyn accent for Southern Virginia, and tell me you can't see Mary Ellen playing games with Alex exactly like this one. (Although I don't think Alex would have the balls to get back at her the way Leo gets back at Naomi in this scene.) In any event, I can just buy someone like Mary Ellen working a face like Margot Robbie's to full advantage, all-heart shaped and big-blue eyed.(Which stands to reasons Mary would have them, because blue eyes seem like a Danfield trait.) So many people in the story basically admit that Mary Ellen wouldn't get away with half of the shit she gets away with if she weren't exceptionally pretty.

I found a documentary on the Bay City Rollers, a Scottish boy band that skyrocketed to fame during the mid-1970's, and then crashed spectacularly when the ride was over. Look them up- they were a total train-wreck. Anyway, here's a tune from them: Fluffy 70's stuff...so much fun. I used to party at a college house, and somehow there was a poster of the Bay City rollers there. In 2008. I have no clue how, but I thought was kind of neat. I wonder if it was a poster that people just kept up over the years, until it had become ironic. Didn't know they weren't actually a one-hit wonder, because it seems like Saturday Night is all that is remembered. Three of the former members have reunited, and it's kind of cool to see all these people in their 50's and 60's re-living their 70's youth. Time hasn't been the kindest to the guys, but you know what? More power to them. I hope they're having a ball with this. Do you remember the band? Did you ever try wearing tartan plaid to show your appreciation for them?

Chapter 32 -When Brad goes home in the plane, and reunites with Will. "Girls" by Death In Vegas -When the grown-ups, plus Will, reunite at Escorial, determined to get down to the bottom of it. "The Weight" by the Band -When everybody learns that Buzz fucked his way through the non-straight male half of the Schluter family. "The Girl Gets Around" from Footloose the Musical

Happy birthday, Mark!

I mean, if you look at actual 1970's/early 1980's t.v., they're full of blonds/blondes. Mary Ingalls, Ma, Nellie Olseon, and Almanzo Wilder on Little House on the Prairie. The female half of the Brady Bunch. John Boy in The Waltons. Half of the cop duos on Starksy and Hutch and Chips, etc etc. James Savik, who is Mark's age, listed his teen idols growing up, and all of them were blond: Jim McKeon, Leif Garret, that kid from James at 15, and Willie Ames. (He's the goofy buddy from Charles in Charge who was inexplicably a teen idol back when Eight is Enough was airing. Totally confused me.) I wonder if it's because the Californian surfer boy/girl aesthetic was really popular then. I do remember Janice Dickenson, who was surprisingly beautiful before she let surgeons hack her face up, talked about how it was hard to break into modeling back in the 1970's because she didn't look like the ideal blonde. It's kind of funny to compare to our era, which tended to emphasize dark-haired guys. The only blond teen idols I can think of from the Y2K era are the Carter Boys, Brian Littrell, Chad Michael Murray, JT & Lance (although Lance wasn't really the teen idol of that group), and the poor doomed lead singer of LFO. The preferred aesthetic of our teen idol period seemed to be more along the lines of the blue-eyed guy with spiky dark hair, like the Carlson twins. Now, frosted TIPS were popular, just not full-on blond, it seems. At least for the guys. Anyway...no, I don't really have a guy for Cam. Maybe Zac Efron? Cam hasn't really featured much of an impression on me to get me into finding a guy who fits how I picture him.

We have two brown-haired guys named Cam- the gay one from Boystown that Matt hooked up with for a bit in high school, and the straight junior that goes to Menlo with Will. He hasn't really factored much- Will thought he was cute but backed off when he realized that Cam was straight and not interested in messing around. I'm kind of feeling Damn, Daniel for the straight high school one. In requests...Tom Holland (aka Spiderman) as some cute nerdy twink? He was absolutely adorable in Captain America! Not conventionally handsome, but cute. I figure Private Tim would find him just too cute- he kind of likes that look, I think. Also, Aunt May as some hot older lesbian that Tiffany starts dating? I wondered if they were going to dress her down like they did to Dianne Lane as Super Man's mom, but they did not, and it was a total squee! moment to see her and Tony Stark and remember the time they did a 90's romantic comedy together.

Alright, this is my offer for Music Monday...a nice little uptempto pop rock song about nostalgia and the beauty of youth: Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams A snippet of this is currently playing on the advertisement screen at my work; I think as part of some classic 80's playlist. I started singing along to it, and my co-worker Devan, who's this funny sarcastic Mormon, looked at me and said, "Well, you can actually remember 1969, can't you?" Ooh, burn. I flipped him off. Then, I started laughing hysterically, and thought about all the times I'd say stuff like that to Adam when he was 30-ish and I was 23-ish, similarly to the current age gap between Devan and I. Only I'm on the wrong side of it now. LOL. But yeah, I was like, "This song was a big hit the year I was born so I feel an affinity for it," and he was like, "Well, I have a brother who was born in 1989." Nobody there knew the song, and I realized it's because 80's nights and 80's parties just aren't really a thing like they were back when I was 21. And MTV/VH1 aren't airing retrospective 80's music videos anymore like they did when I was growing up. Anyway, it made me laugh and it made me think, "Wow, karma is a BITCH."

Thoughts, Mark? He does have that classic blond jock boy look you really, really seem to like. (Seriously, has anyone else noticed that guys with this general look tend to pop up a lot in the story?) I wouldn't say he looks like a Hayes, but more along the general lines of a hunky Mid-Western blond jock boy. I always wondered if the reason why Mark includes so many blonds in the story is because he grew up in the 1970's, which someone at TWOP called the Decade of the Blonde, because it was such a dominant aesthetic during that decade for whatever reason. So many music and acting stars were blond/e at the time (Blondie, Farrah Fawcett, Peter Frampton, Mark Hamill, etc etc), and even 2 of the 3 presidents of that decade were blonde.

I was kind of thinking instagram-guy-turned-model Matthew Noszka for Dally, but then again, I keep thinking this guy has more a mid-Western cornfed guy look to him: In any event, I'd figured you like him for something, Mark. You gotta thing for those beefy blond jock types, after redheads. But yeah, he's from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has more of a mid-Western vibe to it. I could see him more as a Claremont youth or some guy in Boystown. Although we're just guessing he's like a younger "type" of his father. It could very well turn out that he's a nerdy, unattractive redneck, like how Wade thought Ethan would be the hot guy on the soccer field and it turned out to be the chubby awkward kid. LOL.

I think what JJ adds to the story is a viewpoint that we're not going to get from Will. We're not going to see Will putting up with snobby blueblood circles, and we're not going to see Will hanging out at the opera. We're also not going to get bitchy (but often very true) observations from Will, because Will tends to believe the best in people unless they repeatedly give him a reason not to, while JJ has to like you before he even considers deigning you with his discussion. The other difference is that Will is largely "settled", in a sense. Will at 16 is probably not going to be very different from Will at 26. Meanwhile, JJ still kind of feels like he hasn't really totally formed yet; inchoate-like. I think the years he missed out on normal teenage socializing adds to that, but he's making me think of something that director Richard Linklater said. People who are hard-core athletes are never really allowed to grow up, because their whole life is focused on getting to that spot. When that dream is over, then what do they do now? JJ basically gets to grow up now.

Well, it's all a moot point now. It's got to be weird for JJ to be going back to school, after dropping out in 9th grade.

The Human League were an 80's British synthpop band, best known for their 1982 monster hit, "Don't You Want Me." They had some other, lesser-known songs, including this top 10 hit from 1983: Man, Phil Oakley rocked the hell out of the 80's androgynous look. And this is just a song that would be fun as hell to dance to. The thing of note about them is that the two female back-up singers/dancers were just ordinary teenaged girls that Phil found dancing at a night club, and asked him to join a band. Any of you guys remember this now-obscure oldie?

Chapter 30 -When Brad goes to his super-secret meeting. "Extreme Ways" by Moby (Instrumental) I've actually never seen the Bourne Identity. It seems to have been the movie that cemented Matt Damon's box-office star status, while Ben Affleck's career started skidding until The Town came out. Ben did have a very admirable comeback streak this decade, but it's funny to think about how when they first started out at the end of the 1990's, so much of the attention was on him to be the next big thing, and then Matt Damon wound up having the much better career during the 2000's. -When Will tries to compose himself over the events of the day, and then has a very awkward conversation with Buzz's son. "Atmosphere" by Joy Division (instrumental) -On his way back home, Brad ponders the events of the day, and then hears Will's relief over the phone. "May It Be" by Enya

I mean, the ending of her coaching JJ sucked, but otherwise, JJ was kept pretty much out of trouble and he made it all the way to being national champ under her guidance. JJ may be a bitch, but other than flunking out of 9th grade, he's been pretty well-behaved during his teen years. Edited to add: That's the great thing about character development. Sometimes they really surprise you, like real people do. The kid who proclaimed that he would be on the Wheaties box at age 20 is not the kid who made the decision they did. I had pictured JJ as being a guy willing to do absolutely anything to get ahead, and in reality, no, he's not. Anyway, that's why I kind of figured you worked towards this point with JJ. It definitely didn't come out of nowhere. I'm interested to see if he's going to decide he wants to do some dumb kid things to catch up because he was the good boy all these years, or if he's basically going to remain prim n proper with some bouts of fun. There are a lot places you could take JJ, which you couldn't with the career he had.

Over on the t.v. show Nashville, they're currently doing an "rich teen tries to emancipate" themselves storyline. The circumstances are completely different, but it made me think back to the VERY strong (myself included) reactions to the emancipation storyline in Paternity. I still think it bothered me because as someone who grew up with people who were really getting abused by their parents, it bugged me that Will couldn't make it work with Brad, but I also get why Mark did it. He didn't want Brad and Will constantly at each other's throats until Will turned 18 and went off to college (which might have been what it was like with his own son), and there was no way that wouldn't happen if Brad was still in charge of Will's life. It also conveniently allowed Will to be able to do things like own land and travel more often, without Mark having to advance the story to 2004-2005. It served a purpose- it allowed Will to be this grown-up in his peer group, and Mark could have him do things a normal 14/15 year old couldn't, while we waited for the rest of his co-horts to get a little older and catch up in maturity. (See: JJ.) I'm still not entirely sure that Brad has ever really recovered from the damage that Paternity did to his character, though. I still have a really hard time rooting for him. And it also bugs me how Jeanine was just dragged through the mud. I liked the spunky, cool lesbian we met in Man In Motion, who instantly took to Preemie JJ as his mother, as he desperately needed one since his egg donor was getting it on at the local crackhouse. I'm not sure the bitter, stagemother bitch was out of nowhere, because you could see how being the "mother" but not REALLY being a full-blown member of the family while she could barely connect to her one biological son that was basically elevated to lord of the manor would eventually lead to some really bad things. I think ultimately, what bothered me about the storyline was the idea that the unconventional family unit that Brad set up back in 1986 with Jeanine, Robbie, and their three boys "failed", slowly crumbling apart from the time that Robbie said he wanted to try dating other people in late 1999, to Will's emancipation at the end of 2000, and then the final end during 9/11. I just really, really hope that Matt, Tiffany, and Wade have better luck, LOL. (Think about Maddie and Riley- they would be 15 years old right now!) I do think Tiffany would have never, under any circumstances, accepted the kind of treatment that Jeanine got from Will. Of course, Tiffany's different- she's not some poor nanny that the heir apparent decided to knock-up in order to get some offspring going. She herself springs from some pretty solid Midwestern upper-class stock, even though her parents were crazy the grandparents were supposed to be pillars of Grosse Pointe, MI society. I liked that she was kind of coy when asked about how much she has- probably not Wade money by any stretch of the imagination, but she's not hurting.

When JJ turned 16 in the story, I was saying something about how JJ should get his GED because it would free up his time from home schooling, and I think you or Blue said something about how it'd be completely unacceptable for his family, and either you or Blue agreed about that. That's all kind of a moot point now that JJ retired and he's actually going back to high school. Again, I really like the St. Anne's choice- it really does sound like a perfect place for him. And I love that he apparently has to do a seminar- it'd be a great way for him to engage his intellect on a deeper level than we usually see from him. I kind of wish we had done more with the school side of the character lives. Menlo really encourages study abroad, which would have been interesting to see Marie and Will do. Some of these places are places we haven't seen characters in, like Guatemala and India.

I think Claire's kids are supposed to represent more ordinary (if still rich) teenagers- still having fun without having an eye on a dedicated future career just yet. It is kind of funny though when you think about how JJ, Will, and Zach were all prodigies in some way, and JJ/Will's reaction to John's totally lame but totally normal high school band. I still lean towards the idea that Will should end up a marine biology professor some day. JP would LOVE it.

It was the 1970's. It was a thing back then for people to do their own thing and go against the establishment. I mean, the thing is, Armand was taken in as a ward, but he wasn't actually JP's or Stefan kid. I'm sure they probably brought it up, but I'm also sure that Armand shot them down, and they decided not to press him on it. However, with their grandchildren, I'm sure they'd threaten to pull their trust funds if they tried pulling not going to school. I remembered suggesting that JJ should get a GED when he turned 16, and Blue just went off on how that JJ's family would never allow that. I do think if JJ's going to be among snobby East Coast prep school elites, he's really going to have to up his educational game or else he's going to look stupid when he's not talking about art or classical music. He doesn't come off as very well-rounded in the learning department.