He headed East on Venice towards his favorite theater. Tonight he was seeing the latest restoration of Hitchcock's "The Birds." But they reached him first.
Introducing Pic & Tale Ever heard of Very Short Stories? It's one of the must-follow Twitter accounts regardless of interests. (Okay, they do fall a bit on the macabre side of things hence the Edgar Allen Poe profile picture.) Basically it's Tweet-sized (the sanctioned 140 characters) fiction! They are conjured by Sean Hill and he even has a book with some 300 of them. Well, the idea of a story that could be that short really inspired me and so I thought I'd try my hand at it but introduce a new element to the table: iPhone pictures! Similar to the iPhone Memories, another type of post I do, these are pictures that I take and then infuse my words into for a new whole. The difference is that iPhone Memories are more snapshots of people, times and places of my life while Pic & Tale (that's what I'm calling it) will be primarily short bursts of creativity. I will likely first post them via Instagram as I did with this first one but will get around to publishing it here on the blog. I'd love to see some Pic & Tale entries of your own or, if you feel so inclined, you write a short story to match the picture. The only rule? Three sentences* or less.
* No run-ons! C'mon!
Speeding City Bus
As Martin stumbled off the curb he finally recalled the landscape of her face... He looked up. The realization hit him like a speeding city bus.
I was chatting with my oldest sister the other day. I talk with her at least weekly. She's back in Utah. She was at her computer working on her blog which she updates fairly often enough. Enough so that her family and friends know what's going on in her family's life week to week and month to month. My other sister is the same way. These women manage to both be full-time mothers (of multiple delinquents no less) and adequate bloggers, among many other things. It's admirable. It must have been our mother and her scrap-booking over the years (recently she has also turned to a form of blogging) that planted this seed in the three of us. We each have a desire to document the going-ons in our lives. Some people write journals or diaries (some people just have diarrhea), others blog, others simply tell Facebook and Twitter their every move or perhaps just occasionally check in, some do all of these things, and then others prefer to not share with the world what is going on in their lives. My father falls in this last camp. Social networking? Not for him. Blog or website? Forget about it. Journal keeping? Well, he's sure his wife mentions him enough and that will suffice. Record-keeping (of which blogging is one of myriad forms) just isn't a desire for everybody. In my father's defense, I will mention that he has written a self-published tome of his own consisting of stories and experiences from his life. (Mother did so too, I made mention of this in my first post on The Tome of J.S. Lewis.) They presented these bound pages to their children on Christmas of 2010. I need to locate those again as I did not read them all. Not sure where they are in this still fresh post-move to Los Angeles. Nancy had a blog and photography website before I even met her, but she started Our Perfect Bubble shortly after we had tied the note and drove ourselves and our belongings to the West Coast. Over there she has documented some our married life thus far, from the foods she has made to the day-dates we've gone on. Fashion and film are other interests of hers and she's thrown posts primarily about those into the mix. Her large and plentiful-pixeled pictures really are a highlight over there. So my sister asks of me what's up with my blog, meaning this one. I had one blimey post on the first day of the year and not a single one since! Yeah, that tends to be how I roll. (This is the modern day equivalent of writing in your journal once in a blue moon and ending each entry with a resolve to make it a daily practice... You either know what I'm saying or you don't. It's telling that I did that when I was younger and now I do this.) It's not for lack of desire. There's always something I want to share. It's because of that tendency that I've never been bored in my life. I blog a lot, just not about my life. Though, that's not entirely true. If you know me you might know that I publish much opinion over at The Film Tome. Thoughts on film, that's what's up. Still, nearly every review offers a glimpse into my life. Some even consist of anecdotes regarding the circumstance in which I saw a given film or my preconceived notions about it (before I saw it). Film is such a significant part of my life that I think sometimes what I'm writing over there is an equivalent to what someone else would be focusing on in their personal life. Still, it isn't all my life. I have several blogs (not counting Our Perfect Bubble which I have contributed to). Besides this one and The Film Tome I have one called All Manner of Posts which is actually what The Film Tome originally stemmed from. I have one called Euphrates which is primarily for my poetry - haven't done one on there September of 2011! As a cousin to The Film Tome I started The Video Game Tome but have since stopped posting on there with the created joint-effort of These Things We Call Video Games. It's all so unnecessarily cluttered and so here's what I've decided to do: The Film Tome, since it is very much it's own beast by this point, and These Things We Call Video Games, since it is a group project, will remain unchanged. You will ever find links to both at the top bar of this blog under "Film" and "Video Games" respectively. Any time I am writing about either of those two topics it will be posted on those two sites. Everything else? It will be posted here on The Tome of J.S. Lewis. I will be using other categories (i.e. My Life) for easy sorting and filtering and keep the Blog Archive available as a sidebar on the left. While All Manner of Posts and the like will not be immediately deleted from existence I will refrain from posting thereon. Posts about random news stories, thoughts on monkeys, so on and so forth will all be published here now. Expect me to further flesh out the top bar with the best overall topic selections. I may have to have a "Random" topic available, eh? I wonder if I have blogged about my first-world blogging problems more than anybody else in the world...
To blog or not to blog?
I choose to blog; I'm just trying to make it better and easier for myself and those who care to hear about it.
This blog sees the light of day less than a Scalopus aquaticus (pictured above, better known as the common mole). What a specimen this one is. Sometimes Pokemon ain't got nothin' on real life...
I know I'm more than capable of being a "consistent blogger." Last year I posted some 150 times on The Film Tome (and-then-some on other blogs). Why then do I not update this one very oft? I am much more excited to talk movies than I am to talk about my life I suppose, but at the end of my life what am I going to be able to leave my posterity to know about me? Sure, they'll know I was downright obsessed with film and I would be delighted if any of them shared that passion, but they may want to know about other aspects of my life (AKA The Film of Jared Scott Lewis.)
A year ago this day I wrote a post entitled "2012." It was valuable to look back at what was going through my mind and down through my fingers that night. Hindsight makes them invaluable. That, more than anything, should be the fire that fuels my drive to improve my dedication to this personal blog. So many things have transpired since then. I was in China at the time meeting my girlfriend's family. Since then we both graduated from BYU, we tied the knot and we moved to California. Some of the biggest milestones one confronts in one's lives and I've knocked a few out in one fell swoop of a year!
2012 will be a year I'll never forget. 2013 may not have as big events (in fact, I kind of hope it doesn't), but there are aspects aplenty in my life that I am working on improving. As I type this post my dear Nancy is in the other one putting together her first post of the year for The Perfect Bubble, a blog that she started this last year that is a far better documentation of our lives together than you'll currently find here. She also blogs about some of her favorite things there. Anyways, said blog post is about some of our New Year's Resolutions (five each). One of mine was to improve in my record keeping. In addition to daily journal entries I wanted to post on this blog once a week. So far, so good.
Here's to a New Year. Cheers to you and yours!
P.S.
My first summer out of high school I worked in Alaska (this was 2006). It was a hellish job, housekeeping, but I honed wanted habits, labored, and was constantly inspired by the mystere of that region. My brother-in-law was a body builder at this time (a great fit for my so-athletic-it-makes-me-ill sister). He pressured me into going to the Gustavus High School gym on some of my mornings there. In the weight room there were motivational phrases black-marker-ed onto the wall. One day we brought our own utensil and left our mark. Here's what I wrote:
If I ever return to that small town in South East Alaska I will seek out the building, the specific wall therein and see if my "tag" is still there. That inspection will just be for kicks, because I haven't forgotten or stopped striving to do what I wrote that day. Not by a long shot.
Yesterday I made the biggest decision of my life. I asked a twenty-two year old gal (who was born and raised on the other side of the world) to marry me... to be my wife. Her name is Zhou Kehui, but a lot of us call her Nancy. I often think of my life in terms of the ultimate film. In the grand screenplay that it's based on the scene when she first appeared went something like this... INT. APARTMENT - NIGHT
A BEAUTIFUL ASIAN (20) walks through the apartment door.
Time stops for the AVERAGE-LOOKING WHITE KID (21). She literally entered through the door of my home at that time, passing a threshold into my shabby apartment and also walking into my life. The rest, as they say, is history.
Yesterday morning I drove Nancy past that very apartment building. "I used to live there," I reminded her. She commented on it being the place where we first met. The drive took us to 9th East in Provo, Utah where I headed North to Rock Canyon Park. We passed the MTC and the Provo Temple along the way. It was a brief, landmark journey. I had asked Nancy the night before to help with a service project. It was a test, a final test I suppose. Would she be willing to get up on a Saturday morning and do some good for the community? I had informed her that we were going to help pick up trash at the park. She wasn't happy about it (who would be?), but after some coaxing she tagged along. We reached the park. I parked. Nancy got out of the car with one of those big, pitch-black garbage bags. I took my time getting out (I had to stuff the ring box in the left pocket of my jeans - not easy). Nancy, bless her soul, was already starting to pick up trash. We walked around and couldn't find the others. She was confused. I wasn't. I suggested we just clean on our own. Nancy was on one side of the picnic tables and benches, I was on the other. I wasted absolutely no time. I got the ring box out of my pocket and got on one knee. We hadn't been "picking" for more than a minute when I called for her. "Oh Nancy! Look at this!" I was beside a chain-link fence, pointing down in a ravine it protected me from. "Look down there. Do you see that?" She came over to where I was. Again, she was confused. I wasn't. She was wondering what I was so eager for her to see. When she was standing beside me I produced the open ring box and popped the question. "Oh my gosh!" (She said this when she saw the ring, before I even asked.) "What the heck!" (She said this after I asked.) "Yes." (She said this a few seconds later once she had caught her breath. She had started to cry immediately.) I have such an accurate record of those events because I had set my iPhone to record (audio only) in my shirt pocket. Yesterday Nancy made the biggest decision of her life. She said, "Yes." In truth, it was not a descision made yesterday. It had been a long time coming and we had already been planning a wedding this year. We were both anticipating a proposal, but I was lucky enough to have a bit of a surprise for her. I wanted to do something film-related for the proposal (Nancy and I both have a passion for film and filmmaking) so I decided to do a loosely-based reenactment that we would post to YouTube and Facebook in order to announce our engagement. We did that yesterday afternoon. I had a vision of what I wanted it to be and it turned out even better (usually it is the other way around). My roommate helped us shoot the short film with Nancy's iPad using the 8MM app. After we were done shooting I edited the raw footage on the iPad with the Silent Film Director Pro app. Technology. See the result below:
