updates

For the past few months, Rod would change Leesa and Stephanie's facebook status any time they were foolish enough to leave their page unattended. A smorgasbord of stati invade their respective friends' news feed. The topics, though varied, would, more often than not, come back to "poop" related jokes. Eventually, Leesa and Stephanie begin to retaliate, changing Rod's facebook to status to poop-centric updates any chance they could. But their revenge was rarely fruitful; anytime Rod's status was changed, everyone would simply write it off as yet another ridiculous Rod antic. He was unstoppable, and, for some reason, impermeable to embarrassment or humiliation.

Frustrated, Leesa and Stephanie began to craft a facebook status that would truly teach Rod a lesson. They crafted a status that hinted at Rod having experienced a potential breakdown, resulting in an extended stay in an unidentified treatment facility. The prank, however, was ill received by the public, with an outpouring of concern and support. Eventually, Leesa's inbox (both computer and text) was flooded with agonized pleas: "Is Rod okay?", "What's going on?", "Is there anything we can do?", et all. The prank resulted in more work than laughs, as Leesa had to respond to every message explaining the joke that had gone horribly awry. Defeated once again, Leesa and Stephanie succumbed to the realization that perhaps there was no way of getting even.

On February 23, 2010 , Rod walked into his bedroom, only to be greeted by a particularly fowl smell. Investigation lead to a terrifying discovery: a mound of poop plopped on his bed sheet, assumed to have been left by the house cat. Shocked, Rod got to cleaning, confused over how and why the cat would commit such an atrocious act. But when attempting to update his facebook status or tweet the event, he was faced with an alarming truth: his Rod antics — his celebration of all things poop, and obsession with the satrically disgusting — would mean that no one (no one) would ever believe him, instead believing the event to be nothing more than a disgusting joke.

Somewhere, Leesa and Stephanie smiled.

and that's what adulthood is: you wake from the nightmare and realize there's no bigger bed to climb into.

I'm sitting in this wonderful, large, plush arm chair that the Abbey litters its comfortable floors with. I love this café; I feel so peaceful and confident when I'm here. I feel like all the things I have to do are so manageable. I haven't been feeling that too much lately, so any place that gives me that kind of comfort is worthy of blogging about/talking about/venting to/crying over.

I think I've been really exasperated recently. I hate the question of what my biggest fear is, mostly because I hate questions that I have no answer to. But recently I've realized that my biggest fear (as in biggest — big, big) is not growing. Not that my fear isn't growing, but that I'm scared of not growing. The idea of not growing absolutely terrifies me, mostly because I'm surrounded by some of the most wonderful people in the world — all of which have managed to change immensely. My classes this quarter have been somewhat underwhelming, but interesting and necessary nevertheless. After my 'Introduction to Film Theory & Criticism' class last quarter, I think everything else is going to just always pale in comparison. It really changed my outlook on film and everything else I hold dear to me. It made me care about my passions differently, and it, without a doubt, helped me grow.

With budget cuts rising, financial aid dwindling and resources become scarce, I've become so much more conscious of my relation to my university. I want to get the most out of my education not just because I desire it, but simply because I pay for it. So when I find myself in an intellectual slump, there is no way it won't cause me to re-think everything around me. But I also think its horrible that I equate personal development with schoolwork, as if the two are mutual exclusive. I've talked to 5 different people about this very idea over just the last two weeks: how to separate our personal growth from academic expectations; personal desires from outside obligations. I shouldn't resent an education that is optional, that I've chosen and that I'm paying for. But I think, more often than not, I do. I look at a syllabus littered with assignments, and I think about all the things I'd rather be reading. I count the number of hours I spend researching papers I have to write, and consider all the experiences I could be having.

I chose not to go abroad because I didn't want to burden of schoolwork to interfere with time I'd rather spend immersing myself in new customs and total strangers. I'm becoming more and more happy with that decision as the year continues on. I think I need these full years spent in one place. The fact that every house I move into constantly feels fleeting (I decorate with the knowledge that they will, again, be packed up in 9 months) is enough to deal with, let alone interrupting it with a semester abroad. My twenty-first birthday gift from the parents is a big one: they said they'd fully fund a trip anywhere, anytime for however long. It's a huge thought, and an even bigger gift. I feel so lucky; it grants me the kind of peace I'm lacking daily sometimes. Supportive family, loving friends, financial freedom (knock on wood), endless opportunities, youth that (at least currently) feels both fleeting and everlasting. So why do I feeling like I'm missing something? Why can't I shake a feeling of emptiness that seems to linger?

I immersed myself in a party last night where 90% of the people in the room were strangers. Spent my time going up to random unknowns asking them what their deal was, attempting to connect with the various party goers.

Of the 7 most noteworthy people I met, 5 of them came from divorced families. Go figure.

me rite prety one day.

It's rained the past week.

No, that's not the right term. It's been a damn biblical flood the last few days. This is of course coming from a twenty year old upper class Californian who considers a light shower the tell-tale signs of winter approaching. Though it's finally cleared up a bit (it was an uncharacteristically beautiful couple days this past weekend), I still feel the storm approaching: rains that have taken too long to fall; winds that are sure to knock tree branches from their redwood empire, inevitably blocking the one road that leads to campus; the downpour of avoided reading assignments; a gust of class days flying by, reminding me that the only thing that's quicker than a new quarter starting is a new quarter ending.

Most of all, I worry that I'm not growing. I'm not being challenged intellectually. These grades, these stupid letters that are supposed to mean something, have made it so that I look at them as some sort of barometer of intellect, as if another 'A' on an essay really means I'm growing. Last quarter, my Introduction to Film Theory & Analysis class proved to be the most demanding and challenging class I've ever taken. It was also, without a doubt, the single most influential curriculum I've ever been subjected to. I was reading theorists that I now praise like rock stars; writing about subjects and film's that have changed me as a student and, most importantly, a film lover; developing theories that would divide me in half. I hate not feeling that same challenge, that send sense of desire to be better than I am. Now, I'm reading a book that says:

"To delve into the topic further would require too much time. You can read more by researching further; use search engines like 'Google' or 'Yahoo!'."

Would you believe this is an actual quote? I kid you not. I want, more than anything, to know I'm getting better. And it doesn't help that anytime I sit down to write something new I convince myself that I can't write for shit, and that anything I've written that's been even remotely successful was pure luck and nothing more. I want to tell myself to "snap out of it", but I can't shake the feeling that my success has been good fortune, and that anything from here on out has the chance to fall to the wayside. I have to embrace the shitty first draft, but I can't. I can't weather the storm of potential failure.

How in the hell do I plan on moving to the East Coast if I can't deal with California drizzle?

Nineteen Ninety Nine.

I sit at the tail end of the new millennium’s first decade. A perfect cultural perspective, divided in half: my childhood growing up observing the decadent excess of the 1990s and my formidable years in the blatant reality of the new millennium – fleeting, promising, disappointing, redefining. A harsh reality, dumped like a brew of molded dangling carrots and ice-cold rancor.

What did my cinema see? It saw everything and nothing; the disillusionment of the people – the spectator, the mother – and the photoplay itself. It began with the unease of the unknown – a stench of fear that has emanated from the cultures of yesteryear: the ticking collapse of the stock market plummet; the echoing tick of doomsday clock’s minutes to midnight. “Reality! Reality!” they shouted, humming a prayer that only those with skin can offer. But the culture evaporated when the zeroes returned with comrades. The 2000s hit us in every realm – what did the cinema capture?

The machine. The device, the apparatus itself. Us in transit, now stalled permanently. The dripping jail cell rot of the mirror stuck to Neo’s finger as he pulled back in The Matrix. He digests the silver, delivering a scream echoed out by the bloodcurdling ambience of a server disconnect. He is agonized, tortured, but free. The apparatus was the allure of the organic in the light of its barren scope -- the green tilt of nature now replaced with the neon glow of a digital code. Reality, thus, was the scarcity, and the machine was our artificial prevention from the ‘real’. To feel the natural and the return of the organic we must unplug ourselves and face the chrome-covered intensity of actuality.

A warning. A sincere hope that the pratfalls of the horrorshow before us would never mimic the world that watches. We attempted to refuse. Now in 2009, the scaled blue skin of the Avatar in James Cameron’s titular film, offers the same sense of ‘real’. The artificial digitations of the organic, and our complacent stupor with which we watch, all rested in 90-degrees with glasses the sizes of the reel itself gazed appropriately on the screen.

Avatar preaches the beauty of the organic and the desperate need to preserve its natural allure, yet it is a plea made through the machine, the inorganic preaching the power of the tangible. Those in the Matrix pods are depicted as victims to the development of the real, and we truly do succumb to its ease: “it’s not organic, but it’s close enough”. Now, we watch the cinema not for how it reflects reality, but how it resembles it. The goal is to force the unreal to mimic until it reaches secondary existence, a sort of doppelganger to the substantial – the cluster of starspark freckles scattered along the electric blue flesh of the Na’vi’s, looking as if it mimics the ‘real’ feel of Cameron’s cat-smurf blanket of skin.

We are watching the birth of the matrix. We aid in the disintegration of reality itself. I watch with disbelieving eyes as the people lay within the pods in an electronic embryonic state of being – electronic replaces umbilical, our eyes sag because we’ve never used them before. I laugh disbelievingly, nodding my head in faux-critique posture until days later I am transfixed like a saucer eyed cub at the artifice of reality on a screen that preaches disconnect as a virtue: “look at your size in comparison to your creation – the machine has surpassed you”.

I am hell bent to experience the experience. I arrive an hour before the electro-cinematic rolls tape. I am eager to become the pod, allowing the cinema of attractions to continue onward. I sit back and am presented at. The fetal positions that humans-turned-batteries find themselves in within the hollowed human grapevine looks comforting, and I slowly find myself crossing my legs a little closer than before, until I find both legs atop my cushioned theater seat, feeding the machine (both the cinematic, that, in the wise words of Christian Metz, doesn’t exist until I watch it, and the industry machine itself).

How have we gotten here in only ten years? The shift from the warning of 1999 to the complacent and subtle transformation in late 2009; we face extinction on a mass level, and I return to my fetal position for another fix of the fantastical, larger, brighter, closer to both reality and the audience. I am blinded, and worst of all, I am becoming the very thing I shook my head at so confidently. In the era of the nines, I rallied against the necessitation of the plug in. Now my cinema depicts the organic as only achievable through the process – Jake Sulley feels more alive within the electronically accessed natural world – and through the spectatorship. The nines are over; we are at the tail end of the zero decade, and our warning to ourselves went unnoticed, resigned simply as spectacle, not statement.

The Promise of the 'More'

Dear James Cameron,

There is something between an artist and a ringleader – the same way there is something between a speaker and a politician – that is a far better suited title for you and your cinematic cohorts. You don’t quite pillage our cultural landscape as much as you promise to. But we’ve seen what you’re capable of: taking the purposefully melodic horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, and transforming it into a wartorn battlefield epic in Aliens, a film whose differences from its predecessor transcend simple pluralization.

What have we done to deserve this feast for the senses, devourer of the spectacle? A punishment for our culture’s abundant love of excess, perhaps – the equivalent of the parent who, one finding you smoking a cigarette, forces you to finish the whole pack. But we haven’t smoked just one in years. We’ve fallen for the desire of more, the desperation for more, the drug-infueled fix for the senses, the shutting down of the brain and the vicarious orgasm of the external: my eyes, my ears, but not my mind. Stimulation on a mass level; I feel dirty.

A marketing campaign built entirely on meaningless bombardment – first of the visual, then of the narrative. You have promised us this, and only this: we haven’t seen this before. But we have, just as much as we haven’t. So I ask you, rather bluntly: what the fuck is Avatar? What is it really? Not what it should be, or what it was 14 years ago. But what is it now? What do you want it to be/hope it to be/need it to be – not for you, but for us.

Because what would have simply entertained nearly a decade and a half ago is now left as more an analysis of us, our culture, our desire. You’ve produced something that you felt we needed before we needed it – a choice of your own accord. Now, we’ve seen it all, but we are still immersed in an industry, a society, that tells us ‘we’ve seen nothing yet!’

Progress. We do nothing but progress, but to no secure endpoint. Oneupsmanship on a grandiose level; I fear for the worst. Above all, I fear you, Mr. Cameron, are a puppeteer of this ambiguity. There is something larger – necessary even – in what Avatar seems to be presenting to us. But I know that it’s aware. Christian Metz speaks of the voyeur within the cinema, that film is not aware that we watch it, but needs us to in order to exist – it doesn’t want to know that it is being viewed, yet demands it.

Its one spoken word – “this is great” – is all we need as viewers. We watch, and the film demands that we care. And, perhaps most importantly, we are in the last legs of being able to pretend we have a choice. At 20, I stand at a point of reflection. Half of my consciousness inhabits the last half of the Twentieth century, while the other half persists through the first part of the Twenty-First.

“We have evolved! I swear it!” And what better place for that false promise – accusation, even – than through the photoplay, the cinema itself. You have taken on a debt of reflection, promising to show us things we’ve never seen before, and things that we can never see again. Because what film does is transcend the spectacle and capture the moment of evolution – on a cultural level, a mechanical level, and an internal level.

But what the early Twenty-First century has shown us is that there is no separation for film to document. The cultural landscape has become externalized, mechanical in nature, and absent in objective spectatorship. We watch to feel on a personal level – our only moments of internal solitude in an age of constant accessibility and expected voyeurism. And so there is your film, which comes to us mere weeks before we embark on the unknown, and continue down the already downtrodden new millennium’s second half.

These weeks of apparent anticipation should be looked at with a nervous eye – one that asks us all to make a decision as to which way we will go: the route of the tangible, the internal becoming externalized, and our cinema reflecting that. Or a refusal. A refusal to heed the promise of the ‘never-before-seen’, avoiding at all costs the empty, and, instead, demanding something more: something to hold on to; something that is not as fleeting as the memory of the moment the cinema showed us something, but the cinema itself.

We’ve disregarded the tangible ages ago; even the romantics, with a tendency to hold on for too long, have traded the photobooth strip of pictures for Apple’s Photo Booth album. We don’t touch anything. And so a film – about humans being transported into the body of a ‘non-human’ creature – begs the question of what it is that Avatar is doing? Depicting us, perhaps, exactly as we are: desperate to be submerged in the mechanical, loosing touch, but gaining power -- or a secondary sense of it. We are placed into the Avatar, and we loose ourselves as we gain a notion of 'our selves'. That is what the Avatar does, but what is it that Avatar is doing?

The answer is nothing and everything: it is progressing us, but without the tangible, without realism or motion on our part or its creators. So, instead, I await, with befuddled enthusiasm for subject matter which neither interests me nor intrigues me for its actual value, but instead for its zeitgeist defining prowess, its ability – or audacity – to claim refuge in the neither-regions of our cultural consciousness, as something surpassing cinema or experience, becoming both and neither in the process. This is not film.

Sincerely,

Rod Bastanmehr

'The Ice Queen Cometh'

The September Issue

Directed: R.J. Cutler

Starring: Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington

A&E Indie Films, PG-13, 88 minutes

In the prickly world of fashion, few are allotted enough time to fully grasp what makes a seemingly frivolous industry the $300 Billion powerhouse that it is. A mere glimpse into that world leaves you as a mortal standing amongst a host of Greek gods. To understand the intensity of this world – the icons built – literally – from the ground up and the casualties left along the way– you need to be keenly aware of every decision being made behind closed couture doors. But with that being nearly impossible, the closest we can get is an insight into the person behind all of those decisions, if there even is a person to identify. Because Anna Wintour knows that she is less a person and more a manifestation of the industry as a whole: brooding, silent, undeniably influential. So when she sits in irritated silence waiting for an Yves Saint Laurent designer to show her the beginnings of a new line, her impatience is both palpable and understandable: Anna, like fashion, waits for no man.

“There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous,” she purrs in the film’s opening scene, in an accent filled with as much equestrian seriousness as there is ice-cold rancor. That same testament could be applied to Wintour herself, as the myth of her power, over both the magazine she lays out and the industry that lay before her, has now reached iconic status. It’s no secret that Meryl Streep’s deliciously cruel and Oscar nominated performance in The Devil Wears Prada was based on Wintour – a fact that everyone from Streep to Wintour herself adamantly denies. A variety of Prada’s name-checked designers and fashion notables even declined to appear in the film for fear of displeasing Wintour, furthering the rather concrete definition of her enigmatic power: the ability to control even those productions for which she has no role in.

And it’s that power that becomes The September Issue’s central focus, one that has the ability to either drive the fashion industry forward or halt it at her simplest of whims. Most quiver at her most basic of requests, citing it as the desires of a megalomaniac. But what director R.J. Cutler does is focus Issue not on Wintour herself, but the magazine she presides over like a cathedral’s head priestess. “More like the pope,” corrects contributing editor Candy Pratts Price in her fashion-savvy drawl, elongating all the ‘A’s of her words two syllables too many.

It’s industry clichés like those that prove to be true the longer Cutler fixes his gaze on Vogue as opposed to just the notoriously recluse Wintour. Likewise, during an intimate boardmeeting, where the staff discusses the unexpected revival of feathered garments as seriously as the discoveries of nuclear materials, – and with equal loathing: “What exactly do they expect us to do with these?” cries one editor. “Wear them,” another dryly retorts. – staff members throw around turns of phrase like “coat is the new jacket” with straight-faced seriousness. And why shouldn’t they? For Vogue, this is a matter of life a death: to remind them that “it’s not brain surgery, it’s fashion” would only further their stress, allowing daydreams of simplicity if they were to just follow through with a medical degree.

And it’s clear that Wintour likes it this way. But does this make her the ice queen, the Devil, she’s been painted as? No – it makes her an editor. And, from what Cutler shows us, a damn good one, giving Vogue half of its now famous totalitarian infrastructure. The other half belongs to Grace Coddington, the former British model whom, after a scaring car accident, took a job at Vogue (starting the same day as Wintour herself), eventually becoming their creative director and, as Wintour states, their resident genius.

Coddington manages to steal the show right from under Wintour’s dominating grasp, become the unsung hero of the magazine and, as a result, the film itself. Her befuzzled charm, preaching the rhetoric of an industry long since changed and emanating the essence of late-70s counterculture, allows her to be the middleman between Wintour’s illuminated throne and the throngs of workerbees that shuffle through the Vogue halls in mandatory high heels.

Don’t, however, assume that this means Coddington and Wintour permeate through a single lense. Far from it: Coddington may be the only voice that ever – ever – defies Anna’s now legendary orders. Where others hold their breath, partly out of fear and partly to allow Anna the appropriate amount of proximitized oxygen, Coddington is quick to disobey, even going so far as to admit she sometimes enjoys Wintour’s exasperation. In one scene, Wintour, perhaps jokingly, necessitates the airbrushing of an extra’s stomach in a photo (the extra, awkwardly enough, is the very cameraman filming the documentary). Coddington, desperate to maintain the ‘everyman’ juxtaposition in the high-glamour shot, quickly phones the retouch department, demanding they heed her order to cease any retouching, regardless of Wintour’s demands. It’s the equivalent of the unnoticed knight defeating the dragon. And it’s breathtakingly exciting – at least, far more than it should be.

But it’s their symbiotic, and arguably codependent, relationship that allows moments such as those to be exempt of any spite. Because what Cutler aims to show is that Wintour is only as good as Coddington allows her to be. It’s Anna who makes the decisions about what goes into her self-proclaimed bible, but Grace who provides her with the appropriate materials to make said decisions. In one scene, Coddington, while readying a model for a shoot, realizes that she is the last living editor to prepare a model’s wardrobe herself. It’s duties like those that grant the humble Coddington the title of ‘genius’. But it’s also those actions that force an indecent attachment to her work. Coddington’s gift is realizing the surreal, often fantastical, photoshoots that place Vogue above the rest. Wintour’s gift is her decisiveness, knowing when and how to actively moderate her enthusiasm.

And as viewers we can’t help but side with Wintour, regardless of if we really understand the decision being made. “That fur garment seems out of place.” Obviously – I mean just look at it! “Evening gowns are too overdone.” Sure, of course they are. “There isn’t enough color on that rack.” I suppose the rainbow is rather tame. We trust Wintour because while many have been quick to preach her abundance of authority, no one has ever been able to deny her intuitive brilliance. Predicting the death of the supermodel long before celebrities adorning the covers of magazines became, pardon the pun, en vogue, Wintour has managed to become the final word in fashion because she’s spent so long staying two-steps ahead of it. We are bound by Anna’s words because of the startling context she’s been placed in all these years before September Issue was filmed. So when Coddington whimpers at the realization that the world of Vogue has, much to her dismay, changed to alarming degrees (celebrity covers being one), we can’t help but assume that Anna simply knows what she’s doing. It seems just a little too late to introduce us to anyone else claiming they know it better.

Timing, in fact, riddles the entire film with deftly amounts of poignancy. Cutler chronicles the creation of Vogue’s now legendary September 2007 issue, which came in at a record breaking 800+ pages, the biggest in Vogue’s 114-year history. But we viewers watch this film in 2009, during the largest fiscal breakdown since the Great Depression, and during a time where the printed press is slowly going the way of the dodo. The people are clamoring with a demand so high,” says one Neiman Marcus executive, “that it’s outstripping the product.” Today, however, fashion houses are unable to spend the money to ship high-end couture to a country that rarely has the courage to proudly wear it. September Issue preaches the efficiencies of a time seeped in excess – one that serves as a sickening reminder of, perhaps, how we got into this mess in the first place.

But as Wintour herself reminds, “fashion is not about looking back, it’s about looking forward”. And after what seems like an ungodly amount of minutia-focused precision, the staff simply wipes the slate clean, and begins discussing October, taking only a brief moment to celebrate their record breaking success: over 13 million people are said to receive a copy of September’s Vogue, making it 1 in ever 10 women, an astronomical percentage. Coddington takes a look at the storyboards for the issue, counting something, but unable to get anywhere past “two”. Turns out, she was counting the number of spreads that she didn’t work on. She is clearly Cutler’s semi-protagonist, unfairly forcing one to label Wintour as the film’s “villain”, which is exactly what one would expect and Wintour would deny.

But there is an unmistakable fog that hovers over the film as we watch her exert her domineering control over every aspect of the magazine’s production: how then, after all, would Cutler ever manage to finish a film without her dominance rearing its head in the cutting room? It wouldn’t, and it’s perhaps alarmingly clear that the “fresh light” we’re supposed to see Wintour in is as orchestrated as the very photoshoots Cutler’s chronicled. But in one of the film’s final moments, Cutler pans over the final layout for the 2007 September issue, catching an image of an odd rubber dress from a “textures” shoot that Coddington had adored and Wintour had cut. Much to Coddington’s pleasant surprise, and ours as well, it has magically resurfaced, placed in the final print, bound for the newsstands. And it’s here that Cutler gives a subtle and remarkably untainted example of Wintour’s decision-making – one that could be argued for the betterment of the magazine or as a gift for a colleague. Could this mean the thawing of the ice queen? Like all of Wintour's decisions, it remains unquestioned.

The Kindness of Strangers

The cacophonous maze that is SFO (San Francisco International Airport) allows for vulnerability on a large scale. We, the flyers, are shuffled around from level to level, escalator to baggage claim, all in the hopes of sitting in a carpeted cylinder that hurdles through the air at ungodly speeds. It's no wonder I feel more connected to the people around me in an airport than I do anywhere else. Because in an airport, you are bound to find people going where you're going, all just as confused as you are. It's like being surrounded by people in their 20s.

There are numerous facadés: the clear "I know where I'm going" strut of faux-confidence, the subtle "I'm a tourist, enamored by the beauty of this building, but don't want to seem like one" eye darts, or the "I should have gotten here 40 minutes ago" mad dash. But with the various comings and goings that have people shuffling around the gateways is a kind of surreal comfort. I realize it more and more everytime: I love airports. They bring out the best and worst in people.

Flying in from San Diego yesterday, my checking in resulted in annoying wardrobe changes (suspenders are rarely a good idea when walking through a metal detector) and unneeded defending of my identity ("yes, security, that is me in my license photo. Yes, I am aware I look different. No, I haven't considered shaving. No, that's not a bomb, it's a bowling ball candle"). But aside from the post-9/11 formalities (the same ones that come with being a middle eastern with a desire to fly), the airport really is wonderful.

Upon landing, I had planned to take the first Marin Airporter back home, a travel of ultra-convenience considering there is an airporter terminal right outside Hamilton. However I somehow managed to miss the bus, even though I was a good ten-minutes early, resulting in me having to wait an additional hour for the next one. That is until Jesus took the wheel and granted me the gift of two strangers who happened to be driving to Petaluma, passing Hamilton on the way. They offered me a ride, and at first I kindly thanked them but told them it wouldn't be necessary. Eventually, they convinced me that it really wouldn't be a burden considering they were driving right through anyway. I obliged and thanked them profusely. Just to be on the safe side, however, I began to secretly draft an email to my stepdad where I typed up their car's license plate number, their names, descriptions of what they looked like, where they were from, any fact that could help find me once I was kidnapped and raped for days on end. But it proved unneeded.

David and Jennifer were coming back from what they affectionately dubbed their "second honeymoon" in the Victoria Islands, Vancouver. They have two sons, ages 17 and 20, and have been married for at least 25 years, if not more (David says 25, while Jennifer firmly believes it's been 27). Having gone to school in Mill Valley, they knew Marin County well, informing me of what my hometown was like before the dot-com boom hit San Francisco, making Marin County one of the most desirable locations in the country. "Mill Valley was just as rich as it is now," they assured me, "but people weren't in as big of a hurry. The town was a little more honest then."

David is a self-proclaimed comic geek, having become one in the later stages of his life. At 50, he is a wonderfully, cheery man, big in both heart and size. From what I gathered, he's a cub scout leader (perhaps for the very troop he was a member of as a child), whose Star Wars obsession has only recently begun to die down (mention that George Lucas lives in his hometown and he'll only begrudgingly mention that he still has yet to see him). But looking at David, you'd never guess him to be a follower of such things. He calls himself a farewhether sports fan, with no real interest in any of those national teams - something he and I were able to connect on. Throughout the duration of our far-too-short car ride, we spoke of comic books and their ability to aptly convey a social critique that is not possible in any other medium, his thoughts on the Star Wars prequels, his memories of the opening weekend of Episode I, and how he and I may have actually been in the same theatre for the premiere of Episode III.

Jennifer told me of their trip, recounting her desperation for a bear sighting that all residents of the Island claimed was inevitable (for the record, she didn't end up seeing one and is convinced that it's all a big lie). She told me of their hikes, their whale watching, their delicious meals and random cravings for Mexican, which she attributes to the "if I can't have it, I want it more" mentality. Their son is attempting to write a screenplay, something they're supportive of, even if they're unsure of its end result. She and David playfully bickered, but there was undeniable love between them, and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. After a trip to San Diego and a week in Wyoming, I found myself more in awe of their relationship than any of the 'natural beauties' I've had the pleasure of seeing this summer.

They dropped me off and I begged them to let me either pay for gas or their airport parking, but they refused, simply asking me if I wanted them to stay until I was picked up. I told them it wasn't necessary and, after a thousand more thank yous, we parted ways.

There is a kindness that emanates from people in the strangest of times; potentially the same people who control, comment and condemn others whom they know nothing about. I wish, perhaps more than I can ever explain, that I could understand why that kindness shines through when it does, but the point is simply that it does. And I was lucky enough to experience it first hand. There are times when I loose my faith in the people I'm surrounded by. And, as a result, it takes those soul shaking interactions to remind me that my skin and clothes don't matter too much.

It's an honesty that comes with the strangers who help those that can give them nothing but thank yous and good wishes. And it says something when I experience these interactions in the strangest of places and the oddest of times. Had I not asked Jennifer to watch my bag as I went to break a $5 for the airporter, she would never have known where I was heading, never would have noticed the bus leave one level above where I was, and never would have bothered to offer me that ride. And whether she realizes it or not, her and her husband changed me.

My stubborn refusal to heed the warning of never talking to strangers resulted in an, albeit, temporary, interaction that has managed to leave a long lasting impression on me, reminding me that the most important thing we can do as people is to fill the void between us with random acts of kindness, small in theory but gargantuan in effect. In a time where disillusionment is plentiful and rewards are a rarity, I am lucky to have experienced this first hand.

I am luckier, however, that I wasn't kidnapped and asked to put on the lotion. Seriously, worst end to a summer ever.