pop culture clichés catch up with you sooner or later

[openended]

Title: pop culture clichés catch up with you sooner or later: side a: track three: 99% of us is failure
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mark. Mark/Callie friendship.
Summary: She's two and you’re letting her watch John Stewart?

track one: teardrop
track two: once upon a time

Comments

[eighteenthmarch]

This fic reminds me of a movie I saw about a South African gangster who (long story short) ends up with a baby and doesn't know what to do with it. So he makes it a diaper out of newspapers and leaves it in a shopping bag under his bed and feeds it powdered milk from a can. But he's trying, you know. And that's so very Mark. He has no idea how to deal with (or love) a child, but I think he hates to see someone hurting.

The friendship with Callie feels true and real. And getting advice from Derek's mom last chapter made perfect sense. But I'm not sure if I buy Derek and Mark being on this fast track back to friendship. Even if that's what's happening on the show. I guess I'd expect Derek to be a bit of a bitch about it at first and then for the kid to bring them together over time because Mark needs Derek's help.

I would not object to a visit from Addison. But I don't know if there's realistically any way for that to happen.

a t-shirt given to him by his sister proclaiming that hyperboles are the greatest thing ever... That's definately the NERDIEST SHIRT EVER. Have you used that in another fic? I seem to remember reading that before. Months ago. -Mark has a sister?

Saturday morning cartoons have distinctly gone down in quality from when he was a kid... So true. I think it's the little details like these that make your stories feel so real. It's fantastic.

[openended]

What movie was that? It just sounds so ridiculously absurd that I think I need to see it.

Regarding their friendship: the concept of time on the show is a fairly fluid and complex and actually impenetrable thing (Bailey's nine-month pregnancy taking up four episodes versus taking three seasons to get through one year of internship, etc) so I feel that I'm validated in creating my own timeline. I guess I don't understand what purpose Derek being a bitch about "it" would really serve in this context.

AHA I LOVE THAT SHIRT (it actually exists and, sadly, I don't own it). No, in Dropsonde I had Rachel (for some completely inexplicable reason) wearing a shirt advertising a Scandinavian sperm donor agency with the tagline "Congratulations! It's a viking!" And yeah, I decided that Mark has a sister. She'll show up later.

Thank you.

[eighteenthmarch]

The movie was Tsotsi. It won an academy award for best foreign language film a year or two ago. There were some really great scences in it, but towards the end it got really "moving" and "powerful" which kind of annoyed me.

It's not the timeline that bothers me. It's that Derek seems so willing to completely forgive and forget (which is apparently happening in the show as well as here). Part of it's that I'd like to think Addison meant enough to him that he'd at least hold a grudge about the adultery, instead of, "Hey, you slept with my wife. Let's put it behind us, grab a beer, and then I'll help you raise your kid." Part of it's that I don't think Derek could resist the urge to be a bitch (read: give Mark a hard time) about "it" (meaning the situation, not Caroline) because he seems to really enjoy irony. Part of it's that I kind of hate Derek and tend to expect the worst from him. If Derek was reluctant to get too close to Mark again, instead of already being back to thinking of him as his brother, then the story could be about them rebuilding their friendship (well, more so than it already is) as well as about Mark building a father/daughter relationship with Caroline.

Sadly neither do I. My brother has one that says "Speech-language pathologists are all talk" written in phonetic alphabet. The nerdiest thing I own is an umbrella with Botticelli's Venus on it. But that's a different kind of nerdy. I don't think I've read Dropsonde.

You're welcome.

[openended]

My Netflix queue is filled with Fraggle Rock and Dead Like Me because there are no "good" movies recently out on DVD that don't have the adjective "moving" attached to reviews. If I wanted to be depressed (because "moving" is rarely happy, which is dumb), I'd watch the news or read Tolstoy or stop taking my meds in the morning. All three of which are remarkably cheaper than a movie. /mini-rant at modern movie industry

Not to be crazy defensive writer, but this is the third out of at least a definite seven (I haven't decided what to do with Side B yet) and I'm a stickler for detailed outlines before I even start writing the opening paragraph of the first chapter - it's the only way I'm ever able to finish anything or not run into impenetrable writer's block. So while you have valid points, some parts that you've problemetized now have been planned to be addressed later on for a couple weeks.

I once had a shirt that proved that 1 = 2. Nevermind that you needed to do some nifty division-by-zero to get it to work out.

[eighteenthmarch]

It's still worth watching. The opening scene is fantastic. And I laughed watching him newspaper the baby.

Well, now you've gotten me really excited for the rest of this.