sarah HANNAH gómez

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I didn’t want to wake up early, but it was either leave the house at 7 and get a ride to campus, or wake up at a normal time and take the bus. There’s nothing wrong with the bus, but I hate relying on other people to get transported. That’s still what I did when I had my dad drive me, but somehow it feels a little different.

Still, it’s somewhat refreshing to be up this early. I don’t feel sleepy, for one, because I went to bed at 10:30 and woke up at 6:00. I’m drinking a big mug of Kona coffee and listening to Norah Jones play over the sound system at Caffe Lucé, a coffee shop I really don’t spend enough time at, because I don’t spend enough time at any coffee shops or anywhere except my house. Also, it’s not even 8:00am and I’m already ready for school, blogging and playing Free Rice (my way of studying vocab for the GRE). With the rest of the time I have before class, and the rest of the time I have between classes today, I will continue to study, finish reading Dr. Faustus and The English Faust Book for my British lit class, and work on my applications. There are much worse ways to spend the day. I was going to watch last night’s episode of “House,” but the music is nice, and this way, I’m actually being somewhat productive. Even if blogging doesn’t exactly count as directly productive to school, GRE, or applications.

I’m realizing that, even though I don’t consider myself to have the best vocabulary, I actually have an incredibly decent grasp of language. I start Free Rice at level 40, and it’s generally full of words I have never seen before. But I get 95% of them correct, just because I know enough about basic Greek prefixes and suffixes, and then I’ve taken Latin, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Learning other languages is awesome when you want to be better at English. Vernacular English may be simple and not at all romance-like, but intelligent words are much more based in Latin. And then, just to further my knowledge, I change Free Rice to Italian or German, since I’ve never taken either language, and that teaches me further in terms of roots and bases for words. Love words. They are great. Now I just need to remember them so that I can use them. But at least when I read them, I know what they say.

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A new playlist for the fall. There will be one that is much more inspired come winter break.

I posted a Facebook status today after reading the amazing story about the Chilean miners. It’s pretty amazing to see what a system for living they came up with during the two months (!) they were stuck inside. I really do have a lot of respect and admiration for them, and I wish them the best, but that’s so not the point of this post. My status was about how I bet it’s not long until Hollywood makes a movie about it and puts a bunch of white guys in it to star as Chilean miners. Brad Pitt, Ethan Hawke, or Jake Gyllenhaal will be the lead, and there will be one Mexican guy with the wrong accent to make it “authentic” (because everyone who speaks Spanish looks and sounds the same), kind of like how Rita Moreno was secondary to Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” but made it more legit, because at least she’s actually Puerto Rican.

Another thing I could talk about is how it’s actually okay for people of one race to portray people of another race in a film. Because films are art, not life. Right?

Except that art imitates life. Also, it’s really not okay, because it’s only okay in one situation, and that unfairness means that really, it should just be considered completely not okay. You should only play the race that you are. Here’s why: white people play everyone, but if I wanted to be in a movie that takes place in 1700s upper class Britain, I would be told that that would be anachronistic, because black people wouldn’t have been there. Or if I wanted to play Hillary Clinton in a biopic, I would be told that that’s not right, because she’s not black. But if Lindsay Lohan wanted to play Imelda Marcos, they’d dye her hair and do her makeup to make her look Asian. If it’s okay for the white people, it has to be okay for everyone. Or it has to be not okay for everyone. Pick one, Hollywood.

I have no doubt that in the next five years, there will be a film about this. I think that’s a little crass. It’s like movies about 9/11. Or the new movie about Valerie Plame. It’s too recent. Give it time to die. Give the people in it time to die, or at least time to scuttle back into their lives. (Also, in general, Hollywood needs to write its own stories every once in awhile and stop stealing from books and current events. That would be nice.) And, though I know this will never change because it’s not how society works, it would be really nice if, when those movies do get made, that the cast at least looked like the real people would have looked. That is, not all smolderingly attractive, and NOT ALL WHITE. This will do a lot of things: a) make Hollywood look less racist; b) not appropriate stories belonging to a group of people and decide that they belong to a different group; c) help the general public see value in people who are not usually depicted in films; d) allow struggling actors who are not usually the kind of people cast in films to be cast in films; and e) be a more valid film. The other option is for people to come up with their own original stories and do whatever they want with them, rather than taking something real and fictionalizing nearly everything about it to suit a studio’s agenda. It’s one thing to combine minor characters or take out a few storylines. It’s another to pretend something is “real” or “history” and make it as unrealistic and historically inaccurate as possible.

the belzhar

february reading in review

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the walls around us

i accidentally secretly watched the entire twilight saga

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