new blog!

I have a new blog. It is more professional looking, and includes pretty cool things like pictures, words, and non-blue colors. This transition to the new blog is part of a bigger project to have a professional website.

I genuinely hope you continue to read my new blog, as it will be the one updated from now on.

http://blog.ryanfolmsbee.com/

-Ryan

life doesn't have an audience.

I recently found out a professor in my program is sleeping with a student. He's married with kids.

Shortly after, I learned an employee in my program was hit on by a married man during a business trip.

Pretty bad, right?

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"Who knows why people do what they do"

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I'm going to hope no one on my Lawrence Ultimate Summer League reads my blog, and say what I'm about to say.

We have someone on our team named Beau. He has a girlfriend, whom we met last week. She has a broken arm, and can't play with us this summer.

We also met her friend, a newcomer to the team that has never played ultimate before. He was Swedish, handsome, and clearly friends with Beau's girlfriend. They spoke Swedish together.

As the game went on, I began to feel Beau's antagonistic behavior towards this guy. By the end of the game it was clear Beau did not want him there.

In Beau's defense, they were speaking Swedish to each other, the second sexiest language known to man, before whatever language Chewbacca speaks.

So fast-forward to today, and I see Beau's girlfriend and this Swedish guy hanging out with another friend. They were in a fountain together.

I spent the rest of today imagining the movie that this is. A young, attractive couple playing ultimate frisbee together. Trying to make it to the championship game and win the gold. Their relationship torn apart by this new, attractive man bound to her through this mysterious romance. Their relationship crumbles before the championship game, and all hope for the team is lost. Just minutes before the game, the couple realizes the beauty of their faults, find a love unmatched, and the team reunites, bonded by a strength that takes them to victory.

There would need to be a comedian on the team, for comic relief. With zany one-liners that turns the "drama" into a "dramedy". It'll get a bigger audience.

There also needs to be a secondary storyline with another team member. The compelling, tragic story of a young black man struggling to make it in today's society. He hopes to use ultimate as a way to get into college, and free himself from the stranglehold of his crime-riddled neighborhood.  Forced to work under the shady drug dealer, this character eventually ending up in handcuffs and losing someone close to him. He finds future success in his sport, and rids this drug dealer's grip on his neighborhood in the process. This story line will mainly be Oscar bait, but it'll include a younger, up and coming actor.

The girlfriend's broken arm a face value metaphor for their struggling relationship. Held together through the couple's bandages, but the pain always persisting. Nothing but band-aids on bullet wounds. Her looking for relief, but only finding more heartbreak.

But how does that movie end? The Swedish guy confesses his love for her, and the girlfriend realizes Beau was the one all along? How does Beau come back from that? The damage is done.

Why does the Swedish guy not get a chance? Because he's not the main character? How do we know Beau belongs with her? Why would our biased opinion make Beau the better boyfriend?

But who am I to judge. Why is any of this my business?

It's not.

Because real life isn't like the movies. Things don't happen to maximize the emotional tug of the audience.

Real life doesn't have an audience. No one watches you. No one cares.

Above all else, we do things to find happiness. We all want to be happy, and we don't care how we look when we do it.

Because at the end of the day when you're alone in bed staring at your ceiling, no one is staring back.

So maybe we're all allowed to find happiness, without the threat of an audience's perception.

-Ryan

time is almost up.

So here's the thing about my funeral.

I really don't want it to be at a church. It has to be at the graveyard, and raining. JUST like in the movies. Everyone has a black umbrella.

With an American flag draped on the casket. I'm not overly patriotic, I just like how it gets folded at the end by the soldiers.

Oh, and a mysterious man needs to watch the funeral from afar. Maybe leaning against a tree? Watching.

The after-party has to have good food, too. Catered by a nice place. Where people widen their eyes, scrunch their lips, and nod when they hear it.

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"I didn't even KNOW Chipotle catered."

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Maybe something ethnic, like Indian. Not just sandwiches and pasta salad.

And no cans of soda, stabbed into a mountain of ice. What is this a family reunion?

Open bar.

When I was a kid I wanted to be cryogenically frozen. I liked the idea of not dying.

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"Why does no one like us?"

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I bet I'd be really good train conductor.

You turn it on and you move forward. You're only going one place, and only getting there one way.

That just sounds like how you find peace.

14 days until I'm officially a scrub. Pray for ya boy.

-Ryan

got two pages, or about 30-40 seconds.

It's surprisingly difficult to tell a compelling story in two pages.

A production company is accepting 2-page screenplays about the world ending in 2 hours. It can be about anything, it just has to be 2 pages.

What would you do if you had 2 hours left to live?

I don't think the movie wants to explore the answer to that question. I think that question asks you what's important in your life. Family. Loved ones. Being with them during your last moments. Saying goodbye to the people you feel deserve it the most. Hearing it from the people you wish didn't have to say it to you.

I don't think a good script will have these kinds of moments. It doesn't have the emotion I'm looking for.

For two hours you are allowed to be exactly who you are. No rules, no society, no pressure. Complete freedom from every invisible wall we have put up as a society. What would you do?

Trash a Dick's Sporting Goods?

Kiss that girl from work that sits in the cubicle down the hallway and to the right? The one that you're pretty sure has a boyfriend, but took you 20 minutes to build up the courage to ask what her plans were for the weekend?

Or maybe you'll just sit on your porch with your spouse and open that bottle of wine you were saving for your anniversary next month.

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"It goes to show, people will up and go mad when they believe their life is over."

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I read somewhere that the average person can hold their breath for around 30-40 seconds. That really doesn't seem like a long time at all.

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"I don't want no scrub. A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me."

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I don't have a lot of time left. My unemployment has reached an expiration date, but the world hasn't seemed to notice. I saw myself having a job by this point. Working a 9 to 5 that turns my early afternoon leisure coffee into an early morning required coffee. Taking a long lunch and hoping my supervisor doesn't notice. Cracking jokes in the break room about that one coworker that totally looks like Jim Carry in that one movie.

Instead I'm in a coffee shop working on scripts. Thinking about the end of the world. Wondering when I officially reach "scrub" status.

But lately I've realized that new beginnings don't necessarily work out the way you want them to. You only have a certain amount of control over your life, and you can't spend it wishing you had full control.

No, I didn't steal that from a Zach Braff monologue in a Scrubs episode ending.

But random happenstance seems to play a bigger role than I thought. And lately that seems like a good thing. After all, the universe isn't out to get me. 

Seriously. 30 seconds doesn't seem long at all.

-Ryan

meditations in his own emergency.

I started reading "Meditations in an Emergency". It's a book of poetry written by Frank O'Hara in the late 1950s. I first learned of the book after seeing it in an episode of Mad Men.

The poems vary in length and meaning. Some are pretty short, and some require a comfortable chair. But you can't help but feel some similarities between them. Frank's voice becomes yours when you're reading them.

To me, they speak to the helplessness we feel from our environment. Our internalized disconnections we place on ourselves.

That feeling you get when you're at a party and you don't know anyone.

When you're laying in bed and you realize how quiet your world is.

I think that's what he meant by "meditations in an emergency". Those times when you are lost in translation with your own thoughts. Staring off in the distance trying to find an answer to a question you're not even asking yourself. We meditate for answers.

It's hard to tell what it was Frank felt disconnected from. But I wish I knew. An unfortunate car accident ended Frank's life in 1966, so we may never know what Frank felt when he wrote this book.

I jumped around, but the first poem in the book is definitely my favorite.

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To the Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught  
in some moorings. I am always tying up  
and then deciding to depart. In storms and  
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide  
around my fathomless arms, I am unable  
to understand the forms of my vanity  
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder  
in my hand and the sun sinking. To  
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage  
of my will. The terrible channels where  
the wind drives me against the brown lips  
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet  
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and  
if it sinks, it may well be in answer  
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

          -Frank O'Hara

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-Ryan