Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I’ve just been informed that I’m under the scrutiny of Scoble:

Scobleizer (Scobleizer) added you as a friend!

Check out Scobleizer’s profile here:

twitter.com/Scobleizer

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If you take a look at how many 1000s of friends he has, you come instantly to the conclusion that you’re not special:

I’ve always wondered if celebrities, or even pseudo-online-celebrities, can have friends in the random sense. Every person coming up to them must be instantly suspect. For example, people who contact me randomly have a good chance of being accepted, because I am not a useful resource with tons of contacts. And, it’s pretty obvious when someone is contacting me for an in at where I work, or some bit of advice I’m not allowed to give, or help with their blog. For a celebrity, though, everyone must seem to want something besides their friendship.

My friend has produced this 16mm short as a student at the New York Film Academy, check it out:

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it tries to tell a life story that often comes up when college kids start dating. I’ll leave the rest of the interpretation up to you. There’s a somewhat odd foreign / white concepts going on in the shots and the almost predatory way the handsome man strolls up and starts scrutinizing a studious asian girl reading something, but a small amount of stereotyping probably sets up emotional context faster than building it carefully yourself. It’s a short 10 minute affair!

I went to see Pan’s Labyrinth today. I didn’t have any expectations for the movie, and it blew me away. From the start the fact that it was a movie entirely in Spanish was almost unsettling, except that I speak Spanish. I had expected it to be in English, but somehow the pain and suffering in the movie was more poignant for the fact that it was foreign.

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, of Hellboy fame, the movie has garnered an amazing 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 8.5 on IMDB, and six academy award nominations. John Wirt for the Advocate wrote:

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth brilliantly melds the realms of fairy tale and brutal 20th-century history. Beautiful, horrible and deeply affecting, it’s the 21st century’s first film masterpiece.

Here are a few of the movie posters, to pique your interest:

The plot, without giving too much away, is about a young girl who’s lost her father. Her mother has married a Spanish military officer to escape her loneliness, but they both hate him. The girl is swept up in magic and prophecy as the real world around her plunges into chaos and violence. At the end of it all, you’re struck with two options–to believe that what the young girl experienced is true, and redeem the story, or to deny it to her imagination, and realize the stark reality of the world. There’s no way to choose between the two because the story is told in such a way as to make both equally possible.

If you want to see more, Apple has a trailer you can download! While unsettling, the movie’s grandiose themes and visions overcome its horrors. I highly recommend watching it.

I rarely write about my personal life on this blog, but this story is interesting enough to warrant the diversion.

This Christmas, I had carefully planned a trip home to Phoenix to visit my family. I was to fly out Friday evening, and return Wednesday morning. Then, I planned to spend a few days relaxing in NYC before going back to work. I have gifts for all my family members, and my grandparents who were in town for the warm Arizona winter season from icy Canada. A few of my friends from high school also wanted to see me.

Then something new, exciting, and amazing came up.

The girl I had started seriously dating offered to host me with her family in Shanghai. Wow. I was touched by the invitation, but at first I thought it was just a politeness. I checked it out anyway and found that I could buy a ticket from Phoenix to Shanghai on Tuesday, and returning to NYC the next Monday. I thought that if it were possible it would be the best week spent anywhere of my life–something I’d remember forever. When I came to understand that she really wanted me to come, I purchased those tickets and looked forward to the most lovely Christmas of my life!

Then, a minor mishap tumbled up all my plans.

I had to get a rush L tourist visa to visit China, so I went to the embassy in NYC, documents in hand, Friday. I was there when it opened, and they told me to come back at 2 PM. I didn’t realize that they closed there are 2:30 PM, because their website led me to believe something else, and because I was very tired at the time. When I came back they were closed. I couldn’t take the same flight home, and when I got back to Queens, I found by calling airlines and online that there were no tickets to Phoenix, and then back to NYC Monday night / Tuesday morning.

Calling Expedia I found that my Shanghai tickets were not actually issued yet, and that I could have them canceled and buy NYC to Shanghai tickets. So the new plan is to pick up my visa at 9 AM Tuesday, take a cab to JFK, and arrive in Shanghai later (much later, it’s a 16 hour flight) to spend the remainder of Christmas with my girlfriend and her family. I will visit my own family sometime later in February, since I still want to hand-deliver their presents. In spite of this trouble, I am determined to everything possible to make the trip to Wendy work.

At the end of it all, the experience is a jumbled mix of love, disappointment, excitement, my own incompetence, sacrifice, planning, fate, disruption, tranquility, and happiness. I lose the dollar amount of the flight to Phoenix, but I have a chance to see them soon to make it up. I lose the chance to spend Christmas with my family, but I gain the chance to have a wonderful time with Wendy.

I went out with some friends to a bar near k-town that seemed heavily frequented by Koreans. My friends were quickly intoxicated by a lemon drop, margarita, water, and a glass of red wine, but my shot of patron silver and riesling didn’t go far enough since I’d just eaten dinner.

It’s not often that I write about my personal life on this blog, but my actions and this experience are incomprehensible even to me. Perhaps my readers will find something in the telling of the story.

My friends and I had a good time chatting away mindlessly until it was around 11:30 and then decided to settle up and leave. I took the responsibility of the tab, since it was small and half mine anyway. Here is where the strangeness begins, for I decided to accumulate more debt onto my tab.

There was a group of three young Korean women eating dinner in the corner of the lounge not far away. As they seemed to be enjoying their meal, I figured it would be fantastic to surreptitiously pay for it, imagining their simultaneous perplexity and delight. If I’d done it as an introduction, there would be a good explanation and no reason to write this post. At the time however, the sheer idiosyncrasy of the situation was compensation enough.

To the ladies whose dinner I purchased, I hope you enjoyed the rest of your night. To myself, why do you delight in the paradox?