may 29, 2000: the gig is up

School gave up the ghost with a whimper, and now I feel like Harrison Ford at the end of the director's cut of Blade Runner: ambivalent. I'm in between gestalts right now. Gripes about higher education are strictly passé, and my dreams (term used loosely) of salaried employ are as yet unresolved, so I'm not allowed to complain winningly about the postindustrial grind. Emphasis on yet. I'll write more when I have something compelling to say.

april 26, 2000: a work in progress

I don't really have much to say just yet. I'm twenty-two. My birthday's October 25th. That's pretty much it.

Well, okay, maybe a little more. I'm currently a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. That gig lets up at the end of May—in roughly a month, as of this writing—which is annoying, because it means I'm going to have to update this page pretty soon.

I'm glad to be finishing up my studies. I think higher education is a boondoggle in a lot of ways—increasingly a bourgeois affectation, a thinly disguised Machiavellian exercise. There's a lot of pre-professional emphasis these days. Unstructured learning and individual initiative are actively discouraged. Most of my professors are more grade-conscious than their students. The current scholastic models are antiquated. There needs to be a paradigm shift—something that takes into active consideration recent leaps in our understanding of multidimensional knowledge acquisition. The old, linear teaching methods are hopelessly outdated. They're not organic (in much the same way as most classrooms are constructed in a perfunctorily non-ergonomic fashion). It's the twenty-first century. So why does it feel like 1904?

But enough about school.

Someday, I'd like to be a filmmaker. Not necessarily a Stanley Kubrick, mind you (too self-involved, remote), but not a Steven Spielberg either (too ingratiating, self-conscious). My favorite directors these days are Alex Proyas, David Fincher, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam—people who make these completely genre-redefining, budget-busting flights of mainstream fancy that manage to subvert norms even as they reinforce them. That's having your cake and eating it, as far as I can tell. So I want my cake.

I don't want to become a full-blown auteur immediately, because I'm young and have a lot to learn; but I'd love to dabble in stuff that's more abstract and functional to start with—advertising, music videos. Sooner or later, in the fullness of time.

I'm currently preoccupied with finding a job. Something in new media, publishing, or entertainment. Once that's out of the way, I'll have more time to pursue my long-term goals (see above). Would you like to hire me? I'm available.

That's all for now.