Going away for the weekend

Better make sure everything



is in its place.

Arizona Loves Tool

Well, I start another job tomorrow.

Pretty damn exciting.


My life is saturated in group work right now.

For one of my projects we need to create a storyboard for a single scene from a feature, also of our creation. One of the girls in the group panics Friday morning last week and insists we all meet THAT NIGHT. She sends out about a hundred emails and sets the time for six o'clock.

Six rolls around and I'm outside the library. Five minutes later I am joined by this kid Mike. He and I stand around and bitch about group work while we wait (well, mostly he bitches and I wonder out loud when we can go home.) In our time together Mike basically tells me that he hates group work because he's so much smarter than everyone else and always gets suck doing all the work. I make a note to myself to secretly hate Mike for this and after half an hour we eventually give up and go home.

On Sunday I get an email from Mike and the girl (Casey) stating that they have written the plot summary for the movie. In the half hour we had together back at the library one of us made the joke that we should save time and make the project right then. The premise would be good group members waiting impatiently for bad group members. It was actually kind of funny AT THE TIME. So the plot summary arrives (after a secret Mike/Casey meeting) and low and behold that's exactly the film we are supposed to be making.
Jesus.

Monday in class I make a big fuss about how bad the story is and announce that I will rewrite it myself. Placing most of the blame on Mike for the lazy construction of the assignment, I make him the main character. I deliberately turned it into a kind of Portrait of the Artist written vicariously. I give Mike a huge ego in the story, rename him Steve, and have him try to sabotage his group to prove to his teacher that group work is worthless.

The film was intended to make fun of Mike in a not so subtle manner. Unfortunately, however, I put in a minor part taken from my real life. There was one point at the beginning of the semester when I was talking with my prof in his office hours and I mentioned a few of my fellow students not by their names (which I didn't know), but by the nicknames I quietly laugh to myself about in class. In the story Steve does the same thing though, as a lesson, the teacher makes those particular classmates his group.
Anyway, my prof caught this instantly and, mixed with the obvious this-is-about-someone-in-this-group autobiographical approach, automatically assumed it was about me. So basically, I wrote an entire scathing story making fun of MYSELF.
Nice.