¿Donde es Usted...Jorgè Quiñones?
One of the first times I can recall meeting fellow high school classmate Jorgè Quiñones well before we started taking classes together was outside the breezeway that connected middle school to high school. He was a bigger dude and talked incredibly fast at times because he spoke Spanish incredibly fast as a first language. People would pick on him because although he was larger, he was relatively peaceful, and I don't have to tell you how often kindness was mistaken for weakness, especially in high school.
He would usually be found playing his violin, which resonated very well in the breezeway's concave, tunnel-like structure. I can't recall if I was younger and caught his playing the theme from "Cliffhanger" (guh) at an impressionable age, or if I just recognized it because I was in high school and it was just a few years after the fact. This game of Name That Movie Tune went for a little while, and I saw him again in Chemistry class.
As far as the class went...Hm. I'll start by saying this: I had done exceptionally well as far as Chem I went, and figured, "Hey, maybe I wanna be a chemist! Yeah!" So, I took the AP course the next year instead of Physics I, which a part of me regrets. However, In AP Chem, there were a total of 5 of so young minds, myself included. Now, this may be a little ignorance on my behalf, but my entire image of chemistry had been warped by my imagination (mixed with Frankenstein's lab)--beakers spitting geysers of hot fiya, invisible airwaves crackle with life--bright antennas bristle with the energy, you know! Oh, and the spiraling tube. My good lord, that's all I ever wanted to work with--I didn't quite know what real chemists actually did, so long as they used that spiral tube that the liquid goes down, and the liquid be glowing, I figured I'd be fine. Jeez. I was 17--how could somebody not have told me what it was by then!
Needless to say, AP Chem kicked a lot of my ass all up and down the laboratory. There was only one glass tube, and it was really long, and we just measured liquids out of it constantly. I'd pass the time talking about movies and making scripts with good ol Jorge. He'd always sketch concepts, and we'd have crazy Ideas. A lot of this would later become my tried-and-true process of retrofitting movies that could have been amazing...if they'd only done these things. An example of that would be me having a massive list about what to do with the Star Wars Prequels (if indeed you read past step one: "Burn Them.")
Anyway, the thing I remember most was talking about this one clip that we had both seen on the Independent Film Channel, and would spend a lot of our time pestering the teacher by reenacting its main repeating phrase, starting with "Why have you stopped?":
So, that happened a lot. My grade suffered a bit. I'd do alright, but I just didn't see the point of being there anymore--the lab felt like a C-Clamp grip on my brain. AP Chem led me to wanting to know as much as I could about movies, in that that's all I'd ever talk about. One of the instances that turned everything around was a talk from the teacher:
"Kirk, if you took all the stuff that you knew about all of these movies or whatever and applied it to these titrations, you'd be getting an A." Nuff said, right? I told him I'd try, sure.
I did not do that. In fact, my mom caught me trying to synchronize an action sequence from Hard Boiled (the Dock shootout with that awesome shot of Chow Yun-Fat escaping the shotgun blast) with some sweet metal music. I got yelled at, but things were fitting together, and I realized that Chemistry was out. I should have done something like Driver's Ed or physics and just gotten it all done with...but things would be different now, and you can't go back, so why think about it?
Where was I, Oh--Jorge! I had this weird dream last night, and the last of it that I can remember was at some place that your mind geographically makes up of all these bits and pieces you've seen. My roommate Dan and I were trying to meet up somewhere around campus, when he had to go walk an old lady across the street (he's like that, just ask anybody). The campus was split up into different areas, so I walk to where my class is going to be. From the left, coming down some massive building with steps of marble and heavy Cyrillic writing carved on it, comes Jorge, who I've never seen in a dream, ever. He's wearing an ushanka and had a few more scars on his face for some hard times he'd gone through. I figured he was in the military, for what reasons I don't know. We walked through the cold night air, and talked about how life will generally kick your ass with ruthless indiscrimination. I ended up getting to my class, which turned out to be something about "Movie Adaptation Books." It was a lame way to end a dream.
Anyway, I got thinking about all the ways some of us feel sidetracked by something--be it a physical illness, a mental block, or something you're not ready to face. I think a lot of us are caught in this vortex of having self-imposed rules that keep us under some imaginary gun, training us to say we don't have the time to do what would make us happy. Feeling like someone who's on borrowed time right now after the things that I go (and have gone) through, I feel as though I should make a bigger effort to realize my goals. I'm really glad to still feel like myself all that could have happened.
If anybody sees Jorge, tell him I said hey.
He would usually be found playing his violin, which resonated very well in the breezeway's concave, tunnel-like structure. I can't recall if I was younger and caught his playing the theme from "Cliffhanger" (guh) at an impressionable age, or if I just recognized it because I was in high school and it was just a few years after the fact. This game of Name That Movie Tune went for a little while, and I saw him again in Chemistry class.
As far as the class went...Hm. I'll start by saying this: I had done exceptionally well as far as Chem I went, and figured, "Hey, maybe I wanna be a chemist! Yeah!" So, I took the AP course the next year instead of Physics I, which a part of me regrets. However, In AP Chem, there were a total of 5 of so young minds, myself included. Now, this may be a little ignorance on my behalf, but my entire image of chemistry had been warped by my imagination (mixed with Frankenstein's lab)--beakers spitting geysers of hot fiya, invisible airwaves crackle with life--bright antennas bristle with the energy, you know! Oh, and the spiraling tube. My good lord, that's all I ever wanted to work with--I didn't quite know what real chemists actually did, so long as they used that spiral tube that the liquid goes down, and the liquid be glowing, I figured I'd be fine. Jeez. I was 17--how could somebody not have told me what it was by then!
Needless to say, AP Chem kicked a lot of my ass all up and down the laboratory. There was only one glass tube, and it was really long, and we just measured liquids out of it constantly. I'd pass the time talking about movies and making scripts with good ol Jorge. He'd always sketch concepts, and we'd have crazy Ideas. A lot of this would later become my tried-and-true process of retrofitting movies that could have been amazing...if they'd only done these things. An example of that would be me having a massive list about what to do with the Star Wars Prequels (if indeed you read past step one: "Burn Them.")
Anyway, the thing I remember most was talking about this one clip that we had both seen on the Independent Film Channel, and would spend a lot of our time pestering the teacher by reenacting its main repeating phrase, starting with "Why have you stopped?":
Click to viewSo, that happened a lot. My grade suffered a bit. I'd do alright, but I just didn't see the point of being there anymore--the lab felt like a C-Clamp grip on my brain. AP Chem led me to wanting to know as much as I could about movies, in that that's all I'd ever talk about. One of the instances that turned everything around was a talk from the teacher:
"Kirk, if you took all the stuff that you knew about all of these movies or whatever and applied it to these titrations, you'd be getting an A." Nuff said, right? I told him I'd try, sure.
I did not do that. In fact, my mom caught me trying to synchronize an action sequence from Hard Boiled (the Dock shootout with that awesome shot of Chow Yun-Fat escaping the shotgun blast) with some sweet metal music. I got yelled at, but things were fitting together, and I realized that Chemistry was out. I should have done something like Driver's Ed or physics and just gotten it all done with...but things would be different now, and you can't go back, so why think about it?
Where was I, Oh--Jorge! I had this weird dream last night, and the last of it that I can remember was at some place that your mind geographically makes up of all these bits and pieces you've seen. My roommate Dan and I were trying to meet up somewhere around campus, when he had to go walk an old lady across the street (he's like that, just ask anybody). The campus was split up into different areas, so I walk to where my class is going to be. From the left, coming down some massive building with steps of marble and heavy Cyrillic writing carved on it, comes Jorge, who I've never seen in a dream, ever. He's wearing an ushanka and had a few more scars on his face for some hard times he'd gone through. I figured he was in the military, for what reasons I don't know. We walked through the cold night air, and talked about how life will generally kick your ass with ruthless indiscrimination. I ended up getting to my class, which turned out to be something about "Movie Adaptation Books." It was a lame way to end a dream.
Anyway, I got thinking about all the ways some of us feel sidetracked by something--be it a physical illness, a mental block, or something you're not ready to face. I think a lot of us are caught in this vortex of having self-imposed rules that keep us under some imaginary gun, training us to say we don't have the time to do what would make us happy. Feeling like someone who's on borrowed time right now after the things that I go (and have gone) through, I feel as though I should make a bigger effort to realize my goals. I'm really glad to still feel like myself all that could have happened.
If anybody sees Jorge, tell him I said hey.