Pizza Party

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It helps us communicate if we have a shared baseline for the worst movie ever. For purposes of ScottMcJ and my life, the worst movie ever was Lost In Space. It was terrible, it was random, it had absolutely nothing to redeem it other than pointless and not very impressive special effects. In the seventh circle of Hell, the damned are forced to watch and endless loop of the scene where the disrespectful but brave but reckless and handsome young jockey flies the spaceship through the center and out the other side of the exploding planet.

Every subsequent conversation we have about bad movies then, can be measured against a known quantity. "I saw Josie and the Pussycats last week." "Really? That looked cute, but not necessarily very good. How was it?" "It was terrible!!! Oh my gosh, was it a bad movie!" "How bad? Lost-In-Space-bad?" "Oh no, not that bad. Maybe only 60% of Lost In Space bad. But still, a pretty darned bad movie."

As I type this, I'm here in a movie that I o not want to see. Pollock. Boy, oh, boy. Do I have no desire to see this film. Even at free, I'm not sure it's worth it. Even spending my raw free-time watching a screen saver is a more valuable use than being in this movie.

S~, a cute girl from the CC (and so many of them are! I was commenting with M~ earlier in the evening that I don't know what it is, but social work seems to attract far more than it's fair share of the really pretty girls. I suppose they had to go somewhere instead of ice skating), is sitting next to me. She was just starting this amazing story about just coming back from her year abroad, her time work-studying in France, living in southeast Asia, staying with various host families because she didn't want to be a tourist for a year, etc.

She saved for years, apparently, and then she took this last year off to travel. Just amazing stuff. She apparently budgeted for a thousand bucks a month. Which seems like not very much. But then, she even ended up living under budget. Amazing stuff. Living out of country for a year for under twelve grand. That blows me away. I know that I tend to spend that much just on ice cream when I'm out of country. Somehow, being in a foreign country triggers an instinctive reflex to surround myself at all times with a protective layer of ice cream to insulate me from unknown dangers.

What kind of discipline did it take S~ to save like that and travel for a year? What kinds of experiences did she have? I am dying to know. And it's not just the natural interest in a lovely lass. It's selfish wondering what I am going to do with myself when I am unemployed in a few months. (God forbid, though it begins to look more and more likely.) I am thinking I need two grand a month just to live at home and eat ramen. How do you manage to do far more adventurous thing oversees for less than half the cost?

Or, I could be watching this stupid movie. Which I am. Because the lights dimmed just as we were really getting into the conversation.

And it's not 100% bad. There are some very nice visuals. There was just this silhouette of a girl taking off her coat in a hallway. Backlight. Ooh. And now she is undressing, black silhouette, lit from behind. Very, very nice. But it's still a terrible, terrible movie. I just can't seem to care about a single one of these characters or build any sort of interest in what is going to happen to them next.

Before the bad movie, we were at a volunteer party. It's apparently National Volunteer Appreciation Week. So they got us the 7 Gables Theatre, and we had a party. Standard stuff. Pizza, pop, cake.

It is funny what a universal that is. When was the first time you had a pizza and pop party? Probably something like grade school. 1st grade birthday party. And then you get older, and your world expands, and you take in new experiences and you learn to enjoy the opera and build some baseline appreciation of wine. But what stays constant? You can always pull together people with your classic pizza and soda party. Now we talk instead of playing duck-duck-goose, and hardly anytime does anyone get good toys for presents, but we still have the common elements binding us back to being seven years old.

This movie, by the by, entirely sucks. I will pay you seven fifty NOT to watch it.

M~, sitting to S~'s right, wants to be an actor. He took a year of acting classes and then got his degree in psychology. Again, I am prompted to wonder if I am the only person at the CC who isn't in psych, or thinking about moving to a career in psych. M~ takes part in community plays.

What I have learned in the last ninety minutes: Jackson Pollock was apparently some sort of artist. He made bad, splattery art (it's never grabbed me in real life, sorry). That's about all I learned. He was also a drunk. Since I'm in a roomful of crisis workers, I know that we're all also thinking he's probably got some sort of major depressive disorder or something, and that he's self-medicating with alcohol. He's also very weird around his family, so we're probably thinking there was some sort of story there adding to his mental illness.

I just clicked out of this note and jumped to Vindigo (best application for the palm, even better than the dictionary. Download it right after you download Reptoids) and discovered this movie is 1 hour and 57 minutes long. A vast wasteland of time stretches before me till they raise the lights. I purposely sat on the aisle so I could leave if I wanted to, but they did something weird with the door after we came in. I suspect we're barred in, and if I tried to leave that I couldn't. I'm worried that if I tried to leave and couldn't that it might start some sort of panic, and that someone would get hurt in the ensuing riot. So, for the good of my fellow crisis workers, I grit my teeth, and type quietly away here in the theatre.

What is it, I wonder, that brings us together to volunteer at the cc? What are our group characteristics? I'm not saying that this volunteer opportunity is a very different thing from any other volunteer activity. For anything that brings big groups of people together, you have to wonder what commonalities we have as a group besides the accident of sharing an activity.

We all have different ideas of what it is we're doing on the lines; some people come in thinking they're making personal connections with people, some are trying to save people, some are hooking people up with other help, some are just the mouthpiece of the organization. Sure, we all have this baseline concept of helping, but how we picture our role in that helping has a lot of wiggle room. I'll bet if you polled a hundred volunteers, you would get a hundred different pictures of what the CC is. What makes us a unified group? Other than the shared pain of having this movie inflicted on us?

Even just from being on shifts, I know that I wouldn't choose to be friends with all these people. And then, some of them I would love to have as close friends.

But is there any implied bond for the group? Do I have a commitment or obligation around these people? Should I be more willing to jump off a cliff for them than for anyone else? Hard to say.