Me Trying to Makes Sense of a Stray Thought

Dear readers,

Well this has been a while. Long enough that I feel somewhat obliged to make a post but also somewhat clueless as what the post should address. I could do something easy such as Occupy Wall Street protesters having marched into the Queens Supreme Court and making a ruckus but that hardly seems post worthy. Come to think of it the biggest thing I did this weekend was realizing that while I really wanted a post made I didn't really have much to make a post about.

One thought led to another and I decided on trying an analysis on Model Congress and seeing if it is more than what it name says. Now there is a reason I am doing this. That reason is that I have been in it for four years and I want to see what direction it is going in. In order to do that I have to see where it is now. There are a few reasons I am doing this here with the first and foremost being that this blog has become my primary blog that I am using. The second reason is that I'm not sure if many people in congress will be able to grasp what I am trying.

Model in this case means a miniature representation of something while congress means the legislative body of the United States of America. Therefore we attempt to model the congress of the United States of America. The first argument popping into my head is that we have because we have debate topics ranging from issues in the year 2050 to whether or not we like Kim Kardashian. However because those are essentially jokes it does not model the serious manner of congress and therefore fails the definition.

That is what would appear to be true. I kept thinking on it and realized how dumb I was. Those were not evidence of failure but evidence for seeing what we were and expanding it from the inside out. What I had been a part of had already expanded itself far beyond what it was. I'm not sure if I should be glad about this or somewhat disappointed. Glad because I was apart of an organization that is more than an organization or disappointed because I have no way to tell where it is heading. I am leaving many friends and likely my sister will join in the high school and while I'd love to tell them what they can expect in the next few years I can't. Perhaps I should give up on trying to understand it and just let time take its course. Maybe that makes me a failure but that is better then being nothing.

Thank you for reading me making sense of my thoughts,

Mike Hand

Deformed babies

I have a confession to make, I've had deformed babies before. They aren't always a pretty sight and sometimes they are so deformed that I have to admit that it in its deformed form has some merits over what I envisioned. In this case one of my characters was played less aggressively than I had meant when I had wrote it and I loved the take on it. However I did see a certain deformity that a saw was taken and said deformity was sawed off and made so it would all look pretty.

Ultimately I thought it was a fun experience to have the plays shown in front of us. It showed everyone what they had to improve and reminded us that everything we do is ultimately co operative to other people. It was an amazing experience and I can not wait until the next time we get to see our scripts staged.

Mike Hand

Script intensive 2

I really don't think I need my "dear readers" opening for this. I found today to be a bit easier than yesterday, it might be that I am already used to throwing out work and starting again at a different angle and that the only difference here was saving the work and comparing the two but I did find it easier. That, however, does not mean that today was not interesting. In fact it showed me that I need to work on my control of how long or short my scripts are which is a lesson well learned and will be a lesson more well practiced. I still have some work to do with script writing but I think I'm getting there, be it one step at a time.

From one step to one leap,

Mike Hand

Script intensive 1 reflection

Dear readers,

Today we had the importance of brevity instilled with in us. While any one who has ever read Hamlet would probably look upon the word brevity with an ironic sneer and a laugh about how Polonius and how he had to many long speeches others will look upon those speeches and see where they could have been shortened. Am I saying to actually go and change Shakespeare's speeches? No, that would probably make it quite terrible.

What I am saying is that the ability to shorten what one has written and what others have written is a skill that one needs if one wishes to analyze any work of literature. For example a five year old can restate the plot of a movie (and often times my eleven year old sister will speak at length about every minor plot point in any film she watches) but it takes some one who knows what they are doing to take a lengthy movie and shorten the plot to all of two sentences. It also takes a good writer to shorten longer than necessary scenes to keep there play or film interesting. That is also the reason you cannot trust inexperienced people with improv; they will drag it on longer than the scene needs to be for their own screen time.

Kind of got a little off point at the end there,

Mike Hand