Beer Festival

I woke up this Friday feeling nothing but jitters and a stress-induced need to drink 3 cups of green tea. I've been drinking a lot of tea recently. I'm not sure if it's because I'm always tired at 9 in the morning and I need a good pick me up other than coffee or I just subconsciously want a cheap beverage that's not water for every meal. I doubt it's a bad thing though. I felt especially inclined to fill my body with energizing fluids this morning because at 11am, I had to present my group's idea for our film to a panel of 'judges' (aka professors) as well as the dean of FAMU for our final official pitch. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least, especially since two days ago, out of the blue the dean decided he thought our story was flat and our characters needed to be dynamically challenged or else our story would fail. I mean, he was right in that our story lacked the pizzaz to send it over the edge into the realm of true originality, which is where everyone wants to be at, but it would have been nice if he decided to trash our idea even earlier this week as opposed to this fucking Wednesday. Last night, myself, Emma and Steve found ourselves intensively brooding over our story, picking out everything that we decided was wrong with it, pushing it in different directions, asking questions, plucking our brains of every last detail that we could muster, and ultimately finding ourselves with nothing but a whole bunch of reasons why we didn't like our current story. After about 2 1/2 hours of serious thought and discussion, we had finally found ourselves in a new place, a situation that we had never discovered before and all collectively enjoyed. To sum it up very succinctly, the father cannot afford to send his son off to school, so the son gets into a seemingly shady business to the father's dismay, though he ultimately finds out that his son is actually underwear modeling on the side to afford what the scholarship did not cover. I know it's not the perfect pitch, and of course it's just a jump off point, but the problem is that 80% of their feedback was about how bad of a choice underwear modeling is because it would resemble gay porn too much. That's about where my day went sour. Not only did we change our story that we've been building on for weeks for the sake of impressing our professors, they made zero mention of our previous pitches and decided what we needed to know to move on was how similar underwear modeling is to porno. I think what this taught me is that I need to take their criticisms in small doses, as there will get to a point very soon where it doesn't matter what they say. We'll be changing our film until the day we shoot, but honestly I'm ready to make it "our" film, not some twisted piece of cinema just so I can get a good grade.

I know what you're thinking. This post is titled Beer Festival, not My rants about how much life sucks sometimes. I guess this post just sorta snowballed on me. Enough about film idea pitching--it gets boring for me to write about and I assume for you to read about. It's just hard not to mention it seeing as how my life has centered around it for weeks now. But there is more to this adventurer's story than film pitching and trying to stay awake in class. After a long morning, I rounded up a group of friends and we went to a beer festival that was being held right along the river on a pier about 3 blocks past FAMU. There were 36 breweries represented at it, each one having their own tent with beers on tap. For just $1.50, you could fill your mug with any beer you can imagine--I'm becoming quite the connoisseur, if you will. Not to mention burger grills, kebabs, hot wine that smelled like liquid apple pie, cheese stands, live music (the singer was plastered), and a sunset that looked even better in its river reflection than it did in the sky. It felt like a miniature Oktoberfest, only without the tourists and a true, golden homey feel. I don't really know how to explain it, but it felt like this miniature autumn festival embodied the spirit of Prague. Kids were running around, everyone had a beer but no one was drunk, and the entire festival smelled amazing, as if apple pie met beer and birthed a sunset. Couples clutching hands walked along the river and fed the swarms of geese in the river that crowded the tents making food. I loved the sight of grill smoke rising above the rows of tents, blending into the beautifully-colored clouds that masked the sunset behind them. I wish I had brought my camera but I figured I wouldn't have room to hold it with my beer and burgers already occupying my hands and face. Steve got un-fried calamari, which grossed me out beyond the point I thought food was capable of. I think it's because when I was little, I had recurring nightmares about falling into a swimming pool with an octopus in it and it would wrap me up and eat me. Literally the worst fear of my life at this point. And now you stick a plate with mini-tentacles and baby squid heads on it? I think would rather swim with sharks than eat those disgusting suction cups. That's why I went with the tent that was cooking a mountain of potatoes, bacon and onions in a large sauce pan.

My computer is about to die and I am about to go to the movie theater up the road and see Gravity, so I'm gonna let myself go now. Sorry I've been so MIA from this blog, it's just with all of this pitching and the feeling of making no progress as I approach more and more deadlines, I have no time. Well, I do, but I choose to spend it either catching my breath and watching netflix or in class (electives started this week). I'm still alive though. Keep reading, ain't no rest for the wicked.