Watched Journal: December 2025
If only I had read Bret Easton Ellis' icy book back in my freshman year of 2003. It could've been a survival guide - chicken soup for the sad college boy soul - pairing well with all The Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode on my iPod.
The film adaptation, directed by Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, isn't nearly as good. It's got jarring experimental techniques and some odd casting choices, one of them casting the late Dawson's Creek heartthrob James Van Der Beek in a bad boy role and updating the time period to then present day early 2000s.
Published in 1987, the novel is set in the '80s but timelessly nails the college vibe. A bunch of horny drunks and stoners with undeveloped brains, floating around weird college towns, wanting the ones you can't have, trying to change others while deluding yourself.
Those years are generally considered a time of reinvention, personal discovery and sampling different friends and interests. But I was often alone, adrift in unrequited romance and feeling out of place. Even though I was surrounded by people on campus, I was often in solitude; in the library, in the cafeteria, walking from one building to the next.
If there was an ideal college experience, one I glimpsed in the '.edu' era of Facebook of tailgates and road trips, it wasn't my reality. I should've valued the solitude instead of trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. But there are expectations and comparisons. It's ironic at that age how myopic you are despite your seemingly broadened horizons.
A semester can change you, or at least your major. Four years seems like forever, 30 is experienced and 40 is old. The clock hands drag during class, except for the rare ones you love. Now that my undergraduate days are 20 years in the rear view, I realize the biggest lessons learned were about myself.
But those texts are outdated. There's new research. I should've invested every penny in NVIDIA. I went to grad school in Chicago in my 30s and I felt that same disconnect. I just kept my head down and treated my masters like another job. In many ways it was.
Out of the blue my biostatistics professor said his friends in China were talking about a strange virus. In my machine learning class, I talked to MBA students about whether it was safe to travel. In February 2020, I went to a conference in Tampa for work. Killing some time before my flight home, I watched 1917 at the AMC, the last time I would sit in a theater for a year.
As the 2020s droned on, I got vaccinated. I got married. I moved to Atlanta. My college degrees are packed in the closet along with all my other papers, photos, old computers and magazines. My mom saved my drawings from pre-school. I held on to homework assignments from my creative writing classes.
About 10 years ago, I remembered an old project I did in an undergrad independent study, on Rock Hudson. My professor, Tija Spitsberg, really liked it, we talked about sending it to a publisher. But then we got busy and years flew by. A decade later I emailed her. She had just retired and cleared out her office in Dearborn.
But she still had my project. I drove out to Grosse Pointe Park and met her. She gave me the packet and some books, she was in the middle of getting rid of stuff, selling her house, her and her husband were retiring to upstate New York. I wished them good luck.
At that point I hadn't been writing for a few years. I started this blog a year later and now its been 10 years. During the pandemic I began working on a novel, something that I had always wanted to do since I was a little kid writing stories that I would read to my family.
As I'm looking back and writing this novel, it's about a much simpler time, before all the rules changed.
What I watched in December:
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