Welcome!

Well, it’s a new year, and that means its time once again for me to commit to something I know I’ll regret once I get busier. And I know this year will be an interesting one because I’m already almost an entire week behind in putting out this intro post. I’ll try to actually finish off a full year this time, and it should be easier because I’m not committing to two posts a day (in fairness, reading one chapter of Les Mis a day for five months almost destroyed my will to live and I just could not continue with that insufferable novel). I also want to do more with pictures and memes this time around, which is partially why I have this slightly worse looking new site; BlogSpot doesn’t have a limit to how many unique pictures your blog can support at once. I consider it a plus for the memes.

Let’s celebrate!

Ehhh…. Never mind. Let’s not.

You know, settling on a topic for this year’s blog was an interesting journey. Up until very recently, it was going to be about the wild and wacky dreams that I have every night, the strange plots that I find myself living out and the bizarre locations I find myself wandering. The means to this end was that I felt like I wanted to deconstruct familiar elements of my dreams to explore my past in a way that wasn’t just straight up recounting nostalgic tales from my childhood; I don’t think my life thus far has been interesting enough to warrant anything like that. But there was one interesting consistency, a continuous thread, within that failed idea that seemed to run through many of the dreamscapes that I experience – In these dreams, I often find myself wandering a nearly empty rental store, browsing shelves full of used VHSs & DVDs. It is always near closing, the sun has set and my eyes are tired for bed, and although I cannot see them, my parents are somewhere nearby waiting for me to choose something for us to watch together over the weekend.

 

Like most people, I would assume, cinema is dear to me. Fiction in general, sure, but there’s something about the experience of sitting down and watching a movie with loved ones that will always feel magical. Furthermore, there’s something about the movies themselves that I can definitively say have shaped the way I behave and the way I perceive significant life events like love, loss, success, failure, and everything in between. And this is a hard blog to prepare for – my last blog’s simple format of reviewing book chapters and old films that allowed for me to stockpile entries well in advance, allowing for two whopping reviews a day. The problem is, I don’t exactly know what I’m getting at with this grand idea of how movies made me who I am. But I do know that the Star Wars prequels are burned into my memory as those movies I’d watch while eating Shrek-themed Eggo waffles in my footie pajamas at my little Little Tyke Playskool picnic table before Kindergarten started at noon. And the fact that Eggo waffles permanently remind me of Shrek is weird, yo. And that’s what I want to explore.

This is distinctly different than my love for childhood movies like Aladdin or Pinocchio, which while timeless and permanently rewatchable, aren’t movies that have impacted me deeply or elicit overwhelming emotions (look, I don’t know why I cry when I watch Shrek 2, I just DO!!!). Similarly, this is distinctly different than movies such as Up or, I don't know, Bambi or something, that elicited memorable emotional responses from me but aren't iconic or nostalgic enough to warrant an in-depth discussion.

One gimmick that this blog was meant to have was meant to have as well was that I’d assign homework for next week, such as a few video clips from next weeks movie/show to get the juices flowing and the nostalgia growing. But considering I’m late with this post, as well as I don’t really know which movie to review on Sunday even now, I’ll just include the clips within the review itself. So yeah, let’s hope for a blog this year that doesn’t suck this time around.

Let’s try it one more time with the memes. Just for practice. Something less tryhard, maybe. Dare I say, something not horribly offensive. Subdued but sophisticated. Can I have a literary reference?

Maybe I should just steal memes like everyone else.