Scorching Back

Out of curiosity, I decided to read up on my last blog entry. Where was I in my life the last time I got down with this whole gig? Turns out it was a quick recap of that day's filming of The Last Request, complete with pictures of Dan in his now iconic Cop costume. That was in August of 2009, over two whole years ago! And God, how long before that were we actually posting on a regular basis? It seemed like this weblog's battle with the cancer that was Ian William Xavior Gillies lasted for an eternity, before finally succumbing to his devious design.

Point being, a lot has happened since the days of The Last Request. There's been a failed movie about a lamp salesman, a failed movie about cardboard people and a librarian, a failed movie rip-off of Majora's Mask, a failed movie about a guy in a coma, a successful movie about a girl in a coma, The Time Machine, a failed movie about a love quadrangle between Donglondos, Inglondos, Serdos, and Lisa, etc., etc., Laddera/Windwoka, etc., etc., Clyde Widdleston, etc. OH, and we also have a script for our most ambitious movie ever, The Last Request 2: One Final Request, but a certain SOMEONE who plays the second most important character ever had to move to Washington, DC! To make matters even worse, we can't even use the Onion Studios name anymore. What a joke!

On a more individual level, I finished my junior and senior years at Villanova as a math major, and now I'm doing a one-year education program, still at Villanova, so very soon I will be able to teach your children about numbers, functions, and derivatives, oh my! It's weird, though, the way I transitioned into my life as a grad student. I graduated in the middle of May, and the first class for my grad program started the last day of May. I had become so familiar with the campus, contextualized by a certain group of people that I became very comfortable with, and then suddenly, upon my return, it was empty, quiet, ravaged by construction. It definitely wasn't the same place where I was living just two weeks prior. It was as if a crazed Doctor had snatched up all its happy inhabitants, leaving the once-peaceful community in a deathly silence, or as if an inexplicable explosion had grossly deformed a once beautiful place and made it quite dangerous to traverse, with stalactites falling from the ceiling and dragons crying blood from their eyes and breathing fire on you.

You get the idea.

Well, summer has come and gone, and the people have returned to campus. And now we're halfway through the fall semester. Here I am, on a typical Tuesday afternoon, sitting in the library, wasting away time between my one class that ends at noon and my other class that starts at 5. Oh, and that's another detail I've neglected to mention. The time between classes wouldn't be an issue before, but now I'm living at home in good-old Langhorne, and I drive forty minutes down the turnpike to school each day, so I can't just go home and come back. Now, I can't claim to have known Steve Jobs, but goodness, bless that man, because without my iPod, I probably would've gone crazy by now. Wondering what's coming next on my shuffle during my morning commute always keeps me interested. Will it be The Decemberists? David Wise? Koji Kondo? The Chili Peppers? Michael Giacchino? Vanitas Mori? Yasunori Mitsuda? The excitement always builds!

But I digress. What does this all have to do with food? On Monday and Wednesday, when I have only one class, I go back home and eat there, where the food is always delicious. But on Tuesdays, my hands are handcuffed, and I'm not nearly as talented or cocky as Clyde. I can go to one of the fine dining establishments on campus, which I have done on a number of Tuesdays. But, as you may or may not know from my blog posts of yesteryear, those have a tendency of leaving much to be desired. Another option is to take the 15-20 minute drive to the King of Prussia mall, and eat from its food court, which I did a couple of weeks ago. The Chic-Fil-A was quite delicious, but I wasn't sure if it was worth getting back in my car for that long. I mean, that's wasting time in my car that I could be spending pretending to do work in the library!

So today, I decided to go to one of my favorite spots as an undergraduate: Campus Corner. Ah, the memories come flooding in! I got the legendary "Daily Special," consisting of two oversized slices of cheese pizza, a side of french fries, and a soft drink. I don't know, maybe it doesn't really live up to the legend. When you're stranded on a college campus with very limited options for the better part of four years, something that's "okay" to "kind of good" can be overblown to "great" and "super!" But such are the benefits of being without a car, without having instant access to whatever you want. It's those little moments of joy, the ones that you don't take for granted, that truly last in your consciousness, even if those moments are firmly embedded in the past. Whether it's eating at a dumpy pizza joint with some pals, or making a movie about a detective playing chess in a damp basement with a taped-together camera, THAT, my friends, is life.

I still need to figure out what to eat on Tuesdays, though!