I had no idea my xanga was so...yellow. I had been entertaining the idea of starting a new xanga (lord knows my brother does so all the time. he currently operates as canonian, previously known as golfnstuff previously known as poochyb) but the idea of leaving behind all my old entries stopped me whenever I brainstormed for a new alias.

I started this xanga somewhere in the middle of sophomore year, and i forget who or what drove me to do so...but pretty soon my entire group of friends all had one, though i was one of just a handful who updated everyday. It read like a poorly thought-out school girl's diary, which in fact it was. I littered it with enthusiastic movie reviews (back then few movies ever disappointed me), lame online conversations i had with friends, and generally upbeat quips about life.

Senior year, or was it in new york, my xanga took a turn for the serious. I wrote about love in one popular entry which my friends and i discussed at school the next morning during our ten-minute break. There were the long, depressing entries i wrote at four AM, while my roommates snored softly from their beds, oblivious to the incessant tapping on my dell (incidentally, the three of us had the exact same laptop while everyone else at NYU had macbooks). Those late night/early mornings i tapped my heart out - sad, mad, and utterly unable to sleep, and basically revealed to all who knew me that, yes, I was deeply unhappy and xanga was my posterboard for this.

Xanga was my prozac nation. i had never fancied myself an elizabeth wurtzel fan - her book spoke to me, but then I wanted to put it down and place it in the donation bin at my local library. some books mirror how you feel and then you get rid of them so they don't oppress you. xanga was, no is, my book. i have been more faithful to it than any diary i have ever kept. despite long "droughts" i constantly brainstorm on what to write next - but i am torn between not wanting to take it too seriously and not being serious enough.

No matter. I've decided to start afresh. The new year, as they like to say, is just around the corner. I can almost smell the dew of 2008 - fresh, clean, unevaporated, and i want to celebrate it with a xanga whose background doesn't make me bristle and pour into it an attitude that is positive and wholly energetic. i'm not undergoing some radical change, but i am "on track" in the most personal sense - i know what i want, and i want xanga, just as it had before, to be proof of this.

happy holidays, my xanga friends. hope to see you here.

Earlier in the semester I suffered the horrendous experience of getting a B on a philosophy test. Honestly now, can those things even be graded fairly? According to my bald professor, he of the too-big shirts and spotty ties, yes. His MO goes something like this: Lecture them (and pepper your speech with an alarming multitude of "ahs" and "ums" and "essentially") until they threaten to bleed from the ears and fill all three faces of the chalkboard with my tiny, nauseating chicken scratch until I run out of chalk, and, at the end of five straight weeks of lecture throw an incredibly vague list of ten or so test questions, ask them to answer two (to the best of their ability) and proceed to go over them with a fat red marker. If the student successfully transcribes each word from the chalkboard onto their paper, stating no opinion or conclusions of their own whatsoever, then award them an A. If however, the student answers the question using her own words, her own knowledge garnered from outside the classroom, and if she writes in clear, interesting sentences...then give her a B. A B shows that you respect her attempts and perhaps her presence and input in class discussions, but an A means you like getting your ass kissed.

ANYWAY. This led me to pursue the rather detestable notion of "extra credit" normally referred to by me as "desperate measures for idiots around the time of final grades." I'm no idiot, mind you, but I do like A's, whether or not they mean anything to me three months down the line. What was the extra credit offered by my professor? Something completely unrelated to philosophy and world religions and...well, LIFE in general. This is what he said:

"The philosophy club will be screening the film, "Equilibrium." If you watch it and write a paper on it, I'll give you five points extra credit."

Five points extra credit added to my disfigured 85 = 90. An a minus will suffice, I suppose. While grateful for the opportunity to boost my grade, I stood still in front of the classroom, before his podium for a good two minutes as the rest of the students (the ones who neither need nor want extra credit) filed out.

"You want me to watch "Equilibrium?" I said, aware that my face was most likely contorting to something not unlike the aforementioned 85, "Isn't that the awful movie with christian bale and lots of guns?"

The professor chuckled and nodded. "Yes, it is...but it's a pretty philosophical movie. It talks about choices and emotions and why we have them. It's not that bad."

According to the reviews I read so many years ago, it was in fact, THAT bad. It had prevented me from seeing Christian Bale, a long favorite of mine (ever since "Empire of the Sun." Everyone please please please watch that movie.) and had, up until a few days ago, been absent from my notoriously long netflix list of all the movies all the actors I had ever loved on it. Grudgingly, I went home and added "Equilibrium" to the top of my queue (wow what a fun word to type.)

Now. Let's talk about the movie. For starters, it features a panoply of heavy hitters. There's Bale of course, and also, Emily Watson ("Gosford Park"), that one dude who's German and who looks like a bad guy but is a good guy in this movie...and um, Taye Diggs, who I'm sure was cast for comic relief. Not much was funny about the film, and the bad actor who played the bad guy was probably immediately "scheduled for (hollywood) combustion," -to use use the movie's farcical dialogue- after the film premiered. God. Awful.

The premise of the film is not unlike that of the Matrix or of...the Matrix 2 and 3. Basically, it's somewhere in the distant future after World War 4 and humans everywhere are under this new regime created by some dude they call "father." They live in Libria, a land where they are free of that which is most costly in the future: emotion.  The ultimate goal of "Father" then, is to use his elite team of Clerics (Bale and Taye Diggs), intensely trained sentinels who serve to find and destroy all sense offenses and their offenders, and stamp out sense offenders: people who love art, books, thinking, music, and basically all sensory pleasures for humans, including puppies. Clerics, aside from being able to avoid gunfire, perform any type of Japanese Martial Arts (I'm absolutely certain the director has yellow fever) and prick each other with snide comments, can detect when people are feeling, the ultimate crime in Libria. 

This is, I suppose, the film's major, crippling weakness. How can Clerics taking their regular intervals of Prozium be void of emotion yet register it in others?

Every few hours of every day, a bell rings and the denizens of Libria, clad in communist inspired bleak wear, pause on the streets, at work, on the toilet, to take a small contraption out of their pockets loaded with "intervals" of Prozium and inject themselves in the neck with this drug. Prozium, the creatively named (because it doesn't sound like prozac. at all. nope.) worry-free intravenous wonder med, is designed to suppress all human emotion: happiness, love, sadness, regret, guilt...etc. This pill works wonders for the people of Libria because the audience can CLEARLY see how expressionless their faces are, and how robotic and scheduled their lives have become. The women taking their intervals tie their hair up in severe looking buns and are from afar, indistinguishable from the men.