Radio, Books, and Movies

A lady on Iowa Public Radio's Talk of Iowa today stated her opinion that people today are making films where people in times past would have sat down and wrote a book. She believes that this is the way things are moving currently.

I don't think I agree. Largely, I still believe in the importance of random scrubs (such as myself) sitting down and spending the time to relate thoughts and experiences to others through written word--fiction or non-fiction. Also, I don't think I have the financial ability to go make a movie. While I do occasionally make attempts to write screen and stage plays, and plan to hopefully complete a few in my life, it seems that it would be much more difficult to produce a film from them rather than a short story or novel.

I do, however, accept that, despite how important I believe it is, a lifestyle made from written literature is probably at a point where it will never allow financial success. In accepting this, I am forced to accept that I will probably never make a large amount of money from doing the things that I want to do in life. This is okay, I don't know what I would do with money anyway. Thinking about the near future and the potential of having a salary that is roughly 5-10 times what I make now is hard to comprehend. I'm getting by now on a couple of bucks a month. I'll just have to see how obligations change when I finish college.

In related news, I have really been trying to write more lately. I started a remake of a past short story I wrote and I have also been writing a story through letters to my parents from the point-of-view of me as if I did drop out of college to go explore the continent and settle in a coast city. My roommates and friends are a good inspiration, because they seem to be pursuing the same general lifestyle that I am, and seem to understand the consequences as I do.

I gnabbed an Adolescent Psychology book from the psych building on campus here. It was written in the early 90s, but still seems relevant in many ways today. I found this paragraph interesting:

What are the values of today's adolescents? Are they consistent with the common negative stereotypes of adolescents? According to one view, moral values favoring self-fulfillment have increasingly strengthened , whereas values favoring the welfare of others have increasingly weakened. In particular, there is evidence that the values of college students have become more oriented around personal financial gain and less around meaningful philosophy of life. Thus, current college students may judge selfish actions, especially actions producing financial gain, less severely than college students of prior generations.

This is pretty clear today in the way that the question "What are you going to do with that?" is consistently asked of English, Philosophy, and various Arts majors and rarely, if ever, asked of Engineering or Business-related majors. Even Agriculture kids get more credit than we do, which kind of sucks.