Blockbuster angst

Yesterday was pretty unpleasant. I mentioned in my last post that I had to work an eight hour shift starting at 2 o'clock. Now I'm sure anyone who is reading this who isn't a student won't be feeling very sorry for me, but that's okay. I know most people are having to do this 5 days a week, and if you don't enjoy your jobs I feel really sorry for you. We all say we gotta do this for the money but if you're in a job that is totally unfulling and is a misery it is horrible isn't it? But I would argue that it's worse for me in my job because I only go in once or twice a week, rather than doing the 5 day a week slog that some of you might be doing.

I suppose you want me to justify what I was saying in that last sentence?

No... I'm not going to.

Okay then I will tell you why.

If you're working 5 days a week in a miserable and unfulling job, you've immersed yourself into a routine. You're job, as horrible as it is, has become a habit that'd you'd probably like to break but can't. You have subjected yourself to this gratuitous and almost daily activity for so long that the misery of it has become a fundamental part of your life and so you're able to "put up with it".

I on the otherhand don't have a routine of misery and unfulfillment to put up with every day. I am my own boss and can pretty much conduct myself how I want. If I don't feel like doing any writing today I don't have to, though if I don't I'll probably feel guilty about it later and have work that bit harder to keep up (like I'm doing now in the final stages of my degree). But at least I'm in control. Then of course there's my job at blockbusters. That horrible, miserable job, that I actually kind of liked once, but now I dread having to go in. I literally find myself counting the days until I have to work again, whereas you nine to fivers are counting the days to the weekend. Do you see? For those who work the monday to fridays, the end of the week is almost like a reward for lasting another 5 days in your job. The weekend is when you get to kick back and have fun (unless you have children then I feel really sorry for you - you have no life). I on the other hand have to work those weekends. I have nothing to look forward to.

I am just having a little joke with this rant here, but I just felt like expressing a little of my blockbuster angst today. I haven't got anything against working, just so long as you're getting something out of it. Be it good money, or you love the work, or the job you're doing is doing some good somewhere. Last summer for example, I was working 7 days a week for the whole 3 months of my "summer holiday", and I wasn't even getting any money out of it. From Monday to Fridays I was working in London doing an internship that taught me a hell of a lot about screenwriting, and I even got to work on a feature film that could be getting made over the next couple of years. Then on the weekends I was working at *sigh*, Blockbusters for a little extra cash. That summer was hard work but I didn't mind it because I was enjoying what I was doing.
As long as I can get a job that gives me similar satisfaction when I finish here I will be very happy.

quickie before work

I've decided to write in my blog now before I go to work rather than waiting until after work. Chances are, if I wait until later to do my blog there's a good chance it won't get done. Either I'll forget that it needs to be done when I get in, or I will remember that it needs to be done and wait until later to do it but forget about it anyway. Also if my mates are out tonight and somehow convince me to go out after work I'll not get it done.

The downside of doing this now though is that I have to get it done within 20mins before I have to leave to get my bus. Another downside is that between now and last night all I have done is slept and write. Like I said yesterday, I can't keep talking about my uni work in every post because it will bore me. However, if I keep up with what I've been like today and yesterday evening there will be little less to talk about. I have been going non stop all day today since about 9 this morning and I'm feeling pretty disapointed that I have to go to work at blockbusters for the next 4 or 5 hours. And it gets worse. Tomorrow I have to be in work from 2 in the afternoon until 10 in the evening leaving me little time for anything else. 2 to 10 shifts are the worst shifts you can do in a job like this. It takes away most of your daytime and deprives you of most of the evening to.

I used to work fulltime in a conveinance store sized Budgens about 5 years ago and my shifts were exclusively 3pm to 11pm, five days a week with only one day off at the weekend. It became a pretty depressing job as it deprived me of a lot of my social life, and my manager kept promising to start rotating the kinds of shifts for me to do but he never got round to doing it. I think it was because I was the only supervisor that could work the evening shifts and they were shit with coming up with a replacement. I think I lasted 6 months in that job. I quit one day when they decided I should be working the whole weekend and there was a big barbecue on on the Friday.They'd known for some time that I was fed up with working the evening shifts all the time and I can tell it was going to be a long time before they did anything about it. I had told them in advanced that I needed the Friday off but they still scheduled me for it so I didn't go in.

When I came in for the next shift there was a big argument between me and the store manager, and the two assistant managers. When I said how fed up I was with working the evening shifts the store manager, Charlie, told me because of the stunt I pulled he had no intention of moving my shifts around now - this is when I told them where to go and walked out. I felt pretty good about that.

Of course, Blockbusters isn't like that. It's only a part time job, and the hours are flexible there. I'm just really really really really bored of working there now. I've been working for blockbusters for almost 5 years now since I started going back to college and I can't wait to quit that job the moment I'm finished with uni.

A new look for the blog

I've given the blog a new look. When I wrote my last post (yes it was the day before yesterday - so what?) I thought I might try out something new. I don't really know how to fully customize it for myself so I chose one of the templates available on the site. I think the template was called "Harbour", and it kind of has that beach front theme. Seeing as I'm living in Bournemouth not far from the beach (well, it's about 2 miles away, and technically I'm in Poole), it would seem quite an appropriate choice.

I suppose I should talk about the progress I'm making on my work, though I'm starting to get tired of writing about that all the time now. Even when I'm not writing about it on this blog, it is quite a popular topic of conversation with me and my friends as well, because most of my friends here are scriptwriters too. Some of us have even taken to banning the use of certain words as well, such as the word "dissertation". My house mate Paddy insists that we should call it "the long essay", or "a series of short interlinked essays" - or something like that. I've taken it a step further and insisted that any talk of the "dissertation" be forbidden, almost like I'm refusing to acknoweldge its existence. I know that is the metaphorical equivalent of burrying my head in very deep sand, but everyone has their own special way of dealing with crisis so don't knock my own tried and tested methods.

But I will say that I'm starting to enjoy the writing of my major. I'm kind of attacking it from all angles at the moment. I've been fleshing out my characters, planning out the plot, writing a treatment, and I'll probably start writing scenes that probably won't even end up in the finished product tomorrow. This isn't usually the way I work when writing. In the past I generally plan the thing out from an idea, into a synopsis, then an outline, treatment, and then a step outline before I even start writing the script.

Most of the time this is probably the best way to work because it allows you to develop your stories in a very linear and organised way. But I've got so many ideas in my head for this script, and a variety of possibilities of which way it could go that I have to get everything out onto the page in anyway I can. So at the moment my final major screenplay is in a slightly chaotic state of development but I'm finding it quite an exciting way to work. Anyway, it shouldn't be long before chaos eventually gives way to order and I'll have a very well planned out script to write.

An extra 5 hours for me to waste tonight

Woo hoo! I'm not working tonight!

I somehow got it into my head that I should be working at Blockbusters tonight but I just phoned them and found out I'm not supposed to be working until Friday. It feels like I've gained 5 extra hours in my day today. It's almost like having a terminal disease and finding out you have longer to live than you were originally told (though not that much like it, it is kind of like a non-terminal less tragic equivalent - there's an earlier blog post where I make a very similar joke to this about a guy on death row so I don't need to go into this any further. Yes, I am a "one trick pony").

So now I have 5 extra hours to spend tonight I suppose I should use them productively. Which I could do. I feel as if i'm in a very productive mood today but I think that mood came about from thinking I didn't have much time to be productive in the first place. If I could fool myself into thinking that I had work in the evening when I don't every night I could always be in a productive mindset and get loads done.

Another reason for my enthusiasm to get some writing done is a book I started reading today. I got it from the library and it's one of those inspiring books about freeing your artistic self and overcoming creative blocks. What I've read so far isn't anything particularly new, but whenever I first start reading a new "self help" book that I haven't read before, be it on writing, or NLP, or anything like that, the first few chapters always leave me feeling like I can achieve anything. They're really inspiring, and absolutely convince you that this time will be different. That this time you're going to follow everything they say to the letter. You're going to put the effort and the time into this and it's going to change you're life in ways you never thought possible.

Then a few days later you come down from that strange high you found yourself on. Gravity has caught up with you and it has dragged you down. It's almost like sobering up. That enthusiasm and hope has faded away and you're back to your old ways because you never really worked at it long enough to get out of your old ways.

So if this always happens with these books, if it is always the way that when you're first start reading them they leave you inspired and enthusiastic for a short while before the novelty wears off and you're back to how you were before, lazy and unmotivated, what can I do to change this?

I think I may have it. What if I keep buying new self help books and just read the first few chapters?

The advice in all of them is very much the same, but that's not what you need from them anyway. You want to feel inspired and full of hope that you're going to change you're life and all of those books are very good at doing that on the intial first read. However after that it is like their charge runs out. You try reading that same introduction again and it doesn't have the same kick that it did before, much like subsequent heroin trips will never rival the feeling of that first taste (according to what i've been told of course - I wouldn't know personally... Honest).

I think it could work. I'm pretty certain that there is an almost inexaustible supply of books on creativity and writing that I can keep dipping into for those little rushes of inspiration and enthusiasm. There should at least be enough to keep me motivated and writing long enough for me to write at least one succesful script and retire to play Xbox or mess about on Facebook until the end of my days. If that fails to work then I guess I will be spending the rest of my life playing xbox and messing about on Facebook until the end of my days, because I'm not doing much more than that at the moment anyway.

Taking liberties

I watched another one of those documentaries yesterday. Yep, the kind that seems to push all the right buttons to send me into a state of rage. It's called Taking Liberties, and it's a documentary about how our civil liberties have been eroded away during the ten years that Blair has been in power to supposedly "protect" us from terrorists. Though as this documentary shows, many of the abuses of power by Blair and the police force have not been used to target terroists, but basically anyone who disagrees with what the government are doing.

The documentary opens with a three coach loads of protesters from London going to an anti-war protest at a US military base only to be stopped shortly before their destination by the police. The police run a thorough search of everyone on the coaches, they find only some toy soldiers, scissors, and dust masks, then they force everyone back on to the bus and forcibly escort them back to London. According to the police, from the items they found they've deemed the protesters as dangerous and might cause a breach of the peace.
So the police put everyone back on the bus and prevent them from reaching their destination to conduct a peaceful protest march. At one point a guy tries to step off the bus to try and talk to the police because what they're doing is illegal and a load of policeman come up to the door and hold it closed so that no one could get off. For the whole of the journey back to london they have police vans and motorcycles with them all the way preventing them from stopping or getting off anywhere.

This is just one example of the abuses of the powers that the government has given the police. Now I've never really been a person who hates the police, and even when I was younger I considered becoming a policeman, but over the last year I have come to have very different ideas to what purpose the police actually serves. If you look at the way the government likes to tackle crime their strategy has always been to invent new laws, throw more police at it, and give the police more "powers" to deal with crime. Powers such as detaining suspects for a whole month without charge, or the power to stop and search someone under the terroism act section 44 without having to explain to the person why you've stopped them and why you're searching them. Recently a few friends of mine have joined the police, and one of them was saying to me how great this law was - admitedly he was joking around a little bit about it when he said it.

The government keeps giving new powers like this to the police perhaps in the belief that they will use it responsibly, but the fact is that the police are human beings, human beings who are given power over other human beings, and you can't trust people to act responsibly when they are in a position of power. So although they may be given these stop and search powers to "protect" us from terroists, what's to stop them abusing this law to stop and search anyone? In the documentary you see examples of police using anti-terroism laws on people who are obviously not terrorists but protesters. This is an obvious abuse of power.

But there are other abuses of power shown in the documentary that are even worse. Such as a man who was a suspect in a terror plot and was found to be completely innocent by a jury, however despite being an innocent man he was still placed under house arrest following the trial and hasn't be able to leave his house for 2 years. An innocent man but still a prisoner.

Or the fact that our government condones torture by allowing CIA "torture flights" to refuel here in England before being sent to other countries such as Uzbekistan and Algeria where suspected terrorists are tortured into answering questions for the CIA. The American government obviously thinks that by not torturing people themselves on American soil they are somehow free from the guilt (nevermind what American soldiers have been doing in Guantanomo bay). However even our government is implicit in the crime as the documentary states that, under international law flying people from a country that doesn’t torture to one that does is illegal. Any government who facilitates this are seen as being complicit in the crime of torture themselves.


Anyway, the other night I had a dream about nuclear war. It's not the first time i've had a dream like this in the past few months. In the dream we're more or less waiting for the bombs to drop. For whatever reason, the people in charge of our country have gone to war with another country and they've launched a nuclear attack at each other. All through the dream I'm terrified of what is about to happen but I'm also feeling angry. I'm angry because I have no control over what's happening. I'm anrgy at the people in charge who have taken the lives of myself and everyone elses in their hands and about to kill us all. I'm angry and helpless. Then the bomb drops. We hear the blast, see the huge flash of light and we're still alive... but not for long. Despite surviving the bomb blast we now have to suffer a slow and painful death from radiation poisoning. The whole time I'm thinking about the people who caused this to happen and how helpless I felt to stop them.

These are probably the scariest dreams I've ever had and I'm not having them because I fear nuclear conflict. I think I have these dreams because of how helpless I feel to affect change in a world that desperately needs sorting out. For a long time I have felt that peaceful protest is not enough. Yes it has had it's victories, but really it's effect is more symbolic. It's just you standing up and saying "no, i don't agree with this!". For me this is just not enough.

Profit before people

I watched the Michael Moore documentary Sicko last night, and as I expected it got my blood boiling. The film is all about the so called "American health care system", and it opens quite nicely with the story of two people who needed medical treatment but couldn't afford it because they didn't have health insurance. One of them was a guy who lost the ends of two of his fingers in an accident. The hospital told him they could save the middle finger for $60k, or his third finger for $12k. The guy could only afford to save the third.
After telling these two stories Moore says that this film is not really about the people that don't have health insurance, it's about those people in American who (in theory) have health insurance.

Over the course of the movie Moore demonstrates through various real life cases how health insurance companies frequently deny the proper health care and refuse to cover the medical bills of people who take ill or are injured. And they'll try to deny claims for just about any reason, such as one woman who got cervical cancer at the age of 22 and her health insurance company refused to cover her medical care because she was too young to be getting cervical cancer!

Decisions to deny claims like this happen all the time with any sort of insurance company, because like every other business it sets up shop to turn a profit. Insurance companies don't offer people "health insurance" because they want to be there for people when they get sick, they offer people health insurance in the hope that they don't need it. So what often happens when people get ill or have some sort of accident they will look for ways that they can deny their claims.

One part of the documentary got me thinking about where I work at Blockbusters. Blockbusters at one time or another are always running deals and promotions, and the idea is that we the employees must try and convince the customers to take our promotions. So if a customer brings up one DVD we have to try to get them to take 2 dvd's under "2 for £7" promotion. Our store is in constant competition with other stores, if we score a high percentage of deals there can be perks for our store (though the bonuses will generally go to the store manager), if our store performs badly (like it has recently), then the store manager can get in trouble, receive warnings, or even be demoted for consistently poor performance.

The same system works for the medical professionals who work for the medical insurance companies in America, only their targets are slightly different. Basically, they must ensure that a certain percentage of health insurance claims are denied. I think in the documentary they said it is something like around 10%, which some may think is a small amount, but these are peoples lives, and it doesn't matter if this 10% of people really need the treatment, they're going to be denied their claim if the company can find a loop hole around it. So under this system, the medical professionals who deny a higher percentage of claims than anyone else will recieve all sorts of bonuses and pay rises, while the ones who don't could possibly lose thier job. When you have a system that works like this then only the most effecient and cold hearted people will be working in these companies.

This is what you get when you put profit first, and that is the aim of every business on the planet. It is one of the main reason why capitalism is so wrong because it treats greed as a virtue. Watch Sicko, watch Corporation if you haven't already, and perhaps like me you'll find yourself taking an anti-capitalist stance as well.

Feature script tutorial today

Right, I gotta leave for work in half an hour, I'm all changed into my uniform so i'm ready to leave as soon as the clock strikes half past. This also means that I gotta write this blog pretty quick, but it shouldn't be a problem as the way i've been writing recently it's been turning into more of a "stream of conciousness" type activity anyway.

I was thinking i should probably take a look back at what i've written in this thing since i've started it as I think there is a definate shift in what i've been writing, and one or two people I know have pointed this out as well. One of them said it's gotten better recently as you can tell it's not as thought out as before. My early efforts used to take me well over an hour sometimes, and despite the fact that I wanted to write it without caring what people reading it were thinking, i couldn't help but be affected by those kinds of thoughts. But i don't really have those thoughts that much anymore, mainly because I think the novelty of writing this has worn off so I'm putting in a different kind of effort now. It's more relaxed and I like that.

So, I had a tutorial for my feature script today. It went okay. My tutor didn't try to tell me my idea was bad, so I guess he okayed it (or, it's just too late now to be fussing around with ideas and I need to write something). Plot wise I should be fine, he said I know the genre pretty well so i shouldn't have any problems with that, but it's the emotional story that should be my main concern right now. He's helped me to see how important it is for the plot, in particular in reference to the main source of antagonism in the story, that I know what personal demons the characters have. Without explaining my idea here (and I don't think I can be bothered to do that right at this moment, it will take some time), this will not make that much sense. Suffice it to say that at least one of the characters needs some sort of tragic or traumatized past that will effect or even cause the main problems in my story. Confused? Probably.

At the end of the meeting it was agreed that I should have at least half a first draft of the script done by the beginning of March, it sounds like a lot but at the same time, when you get on a good roll it is possible. Besides I've written a whole 60 page script in 24 hours before, so having 45 - 60 pages written in a month for a half a first draft doesn't sound like a particularly difficult feat to achieve does it?