The Times They Are A Changin'

Well, I was right: one of the things that would get me back on my ass and posting on this blog would be packing up and going somewhere else away from the distractions of home for a couple of days.  The destination of this excursion: Bend, the rather large central Oregon town that invokes a feeling of deja vu within me, a person who has spent the last three months essentially living on central Oregon.

I haven't been here in more than a decade, and it shows in the fact that I recognize absolutely nothing.  The areas around the High Desert Museum, Sunriver, and Mount Bachelor are totally different now, packed with resorts, supermarkets, and strip malls, the folly of a rapidly-expanding tourist stopover.  I've noticed this in many places I've been; even Albany, a town seemingly frozen in time, has changed in a few significant ways over the years.  Change is the law of the modern land, but we are a species that thrives on the comfort of the familiar.

Change can upset and enrage some groups of folks, and lives can be shattered when things simply don't go according to plan.  There's a lot of tension going on between the old and the young of this nation today.  Understandable, really, since the old folks can't retire and keep on working, and the millions of young folks looking for work are left out because of it.  The average age of the workforce is shifting permanently up, and the young and old are having a tough time adjusting, getting aggressive and defensive towards one another.  They will eventually adapt, but it will take time.

In increasingly uncertain times, people will hold on to what is familiar, to what they percieve as normal.  I believe firmly to this day that I was hardwired to have a paranoid personality.  I am never off my guard, I pathologically think negatively of every situation I come to in life, and I have always viewed the unknown as something that will be the death of me one day.  The transition into adulthood has wrecked havoc on the deepest layers of my psyche, but it never showed past the quirky-yet-friendly facade I put up on a day-to-day basis.  The weight of the world is crashing down hard, and I can only hope to brace myself.

Perhaps I might view change more positively if I wasn't instinctively paranoid.  I might be able to view it as exciting, as a myriad of trackless paths with a million opportunities just waiting to be explored.  Alas, as I see it, all the paths lead into packs of wolves, endless wastelands, lava pools, and other rather unpleasant things.  Maybe the truth is that it's a little bit of both, and that our choices and outlook dictate whether we'll end up down a pleasant road or down the alpha wolf's digestive system.  Like the whole "being crazy and loving it" spiel last time, it's a matter of life being what you make of it.

Now, if only I could apply those lessons to my own life

Damn, this was another deep trip down Downer Central, I better liven things up next time.

Normalcy

I've been in a lot of those deep, introspective moods lately.  E3 is going on and by all accounts I should be excited and talking about that, but everyone else is excited and talking about that, so let's actually make the title of this blog make sense and talk about some of my experiences in life.  This is "The Bre2nan Experience" after all.

I haven't really made any new friends in the three years I've been at OIT.  Sure, I've met people, and even got a few minor friendships going, but none of the real good, steady friendships I used to have back in high school.  As much as I thought my life sucked back then, at least I had people to complain about it with.  They're all still around, and I still talk to most of them, but engaging in our good old-fashioned shenanigans is rather complicated when I am a full 200 miles away for most of the year.

And so I've been thinking lately, why is this?  What changed?  Why can't I see eye-to-eye with anyone here long enough to form any sort of connection.  Well, I think I came up with a fairly good explanation of what is going on.  Most of my really good friends have been screwed up in some way: one was a jittery autistic kid who spoke jibberish most of the time, one was a ritalin junkie who played with stuffed animals up until he was thirteen, and one pretty much goes through the same shit I do plus the occasional panic attack.  They all have slightly more issues than I do, and being in a larger social environment where I was pushed aside and openly mocked for being just a little bit different than everybody else, it felt good to know that there were people out there who had it worse than I did.

The "straight man" I became for the most part, up until I got started at OIT and discovered, at least from my perspective, that the only ones here were *shudder* normal people.  Those medication junkies I loved to hang around before didn't last long before dropping out or spending every cent to their name on Amazon purchases and weed, and since I inexplicably keep getting good grades, I linger on.

I've now started doing *shudder* job interviews.  Great!  I felt like the crazy guy in regular everyday interaction, but now when I get a shave and a haircut, dress down in business attire, and start talking about my future ambitions, I feel like a downright imposter.  "Detachment" is a pretty good one-word description; I've never really felt like just part of everyone else.  I was different, I knew it, and it forever skewed my psyche.  My old adaptation mechanism that had served me well all those years wasn't going to cut it at OIT or in the business world, and now I have been forced once again to cope with the social detachment that has followed me throughout my life, now with the only respite being the calm spots between waves of crushing loneliness.

So how do I survive?  Where do I go from here?  Well, it's obvious, isn't it: I need to learn how to be the screwed-up guy and love it.  It's only when I'm not ashamed of my own quirks that I can really gain back the confidence I once had when I surrounded myself with people who were (or at least I percieved them to be) crazier than I was.  It's gonna take some doing, lifetime patterns of thought can't just be willed out of existence, but it's something I have to do, and something I will do as part of my first steps into the rest of my life.

Double Feature: Thor and X Men First Class

Damn, Marvel have been on a roll with the move releases this year, haven't they.  "Thor"s been out since the beginning of May, "Captain America" is coming out in July, and this month Fox decided to join the fray with their most recent attempt to revive their X-Men franchise.  Just coming back from X-Men and having long delayed giving you all my thoughts on "Thor," I'll be double-featuring them right here.

"Thor" is just plain awesome in a way that movies have not been awesome since the '80s swords-and-sorcery boom.  It isn't a comic book movie in the traditional sense, but a space fantasy epic that looks and feels very similar to the 1980 "Flash Gordon" movie.  It's all-out, 100%-commitment weird, and it is AWESOME for it.  Screen time is divided between the space-fantasy wonderland of Asgard and 21st-century Midgard (Earth), and the schism can be felt not only in setting, but in acting style.  Everyone from Asgard is putting on their best Shakespearian melodrama, and everyone from Earth acts basically how everyone from Earth acts in your average modern Hollywood movie.  It's awesome, end of story, go see it if you have even one drop of geek blood in you.

This is one of those things that underscores the recent trend that comic book movies have gone through.  The movement is towards more authenticity to the comic books, which means more of the characteristic weirdness will be translated to the screen.  We've seen it in "Kick-Ass," "Scott Pilgrim," and "Watchmen" (to a lesser extent) and we're beginning to see it being carried over into the Marvel movie universe and likely into DC's with "Green Lantern."  The only property that has been sheltered from this trend is Batman, for which the Chris Nolan films remain, and have every intention of remaining, cerebral crime dramas with occasional appearances from Batman.  Nothing wrong with that, but it does put blinders on the focus of the Batman mythos in this context.  The "Batman: Arkham Asylum" video game shows you much more of Batman's brand of weird.

Speaking of comic book weirdness, let's move on to "X-Men: First Class."  Brian Singer is back in charge as the producer, and he's brought the Hammer of Retcon down upon "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" giving us a prequel to the two movies he was involved with.  It's hard to have faith in a series that's been circling the drain for a good portion of the last decade, but I can safely say that "First Class" redeems it all.

The themes of discrimination and struggling with being different are back in the limelight, as well as the relationship between Erik Lensherr (Magneto) and Charles Xavier (self-explanatory) in their earlier years.  Yes, the series is done sucking Wolverine's cock, as he's demoted to only a brief cameo as much more interesting characters are given the screen time.  The two leads give surprisingly good performances, even considering that they were played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the previous films, and the rest of the supporting cast holds their weight as well.  Cold War tension and '60s class elevate the whole production as the film runs with a plot that would be right at home with one of the old James Bond movies and runs with it.  There's no restraint here; nothing was cut in fear of it looking stupid, from the yellow Spandex uniforms of the X-Men to Magneto's horned helmet at the end.

X-Men is definitely out of the toilet for a while, and Thor is off to a flying start.  And it's only just begun; there's still "Green Lantern" and "Captain America" to talk about.  Guess this calls for another double-feature come July.