I Was A Teenage Embryo

Well, folks, it's been a while. If you're reading - good for you Glenn Coco, and if you're not, you can go now. This ain't the blog for you kiddo.

Today I decided I wanted to write a screenplay, and by today, I mean about an hour ago. In college, I'm supposed to study for history tests and read books about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, but that's dumb. I want to write a screenplay. My friend Jonni suggested a horror, and I wanted to do a comedy, so we met in the middle - a horror-comedy.

Now the horror-comedy genre, or the spoof genre in general generally sucks, mostly because it is a play on work that's been done, so the room for originality just isn't there like it would be for a made from scratch biscuit of freshness. And I prefer to keep it fresh.

I only like certain aspects of horror, like the fantasy. There's lots of room there. Invented little narratives about ghosts and old buildings, although a repeated element in good scary stuff, can be reinvented again and again - renewed and retrofied and twisted and turned inside out. I saw all the possibilities, but I was still craving something else.

Recently, I changed majors. I switched from "Chemistry" to a big, juicy "Undecided," and even though I hate balancing equations and performing titrations, there will still be a special place in my heart for all the sciences. So combine writing with my proverbial educational booty call, and you get science fiction. I am very tempted to write a science fiction screenplay.

Science fiction does a lot, and not just for me, but for everyone. It lets me explore stuff and read about things that otherwise I would never invest any kind of interest. It tells a great story, usually tying back to some kind of moral dilemma - and it uses or encourages the use of science, which is good for Republicans, GE, and the nuclear arms race.

Now I prefer science fiction stories that are more "what if" stories - or stories that test out hypotheses, because that's exactly what science is. Good 'ol Star Wars asks "What if there was an evil emperor at this time and a place and they could do this?" Avatar asks, "What if there was a planet and earth tried to kill it?" The plots are less of testing a hypothesis and more of introducing a fantasy and fleshing out characters in order to tell both a literal and figurative story. Great soundtracks too.

"What if" stories don't normally turn into Blockbuster hits - and my favorite "What ifs" are movies like Moon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and a classic guilty pleasure, Forever Young.

Let me give you a brief outline on how my thought process worked when I chose to investigate something science oriented to write about:

Science Fiction

Hmmm? What are some good sciency things?
I. Time Travel
1. Time Travel in General
2. Paradoxes within Time Travel
3. Parallel Universes
4. Suspended Animation
a. What's suspended animation?
b. Embryos?
c. Who the heck is Laina Beasley?

II. I was so entranced I didn't get any further.

Now, if you're a normal human being, you go through these kinds of thought processes on the internet. Maybe you don't spend hours reading BBC articles, but you do it. That's the magic of Google and Wiki-freakin-pedia.

Let me bounce a few ideas around the room. Suspended Animation.

Suspended Animation is hitting pause on life. Not time, but on life in general. I guess you could say that bears do it when they hibernate, but they're still "going." Scientists have claimed to be able to basically kill a dog for a couple of hours, draining it of all it's blood and circulating a cold preserving solution in it's blood vessels, and then bringing the dog back to life by recirculating the blood once again and shocking it's heart to get it beating.

While I was on Wikipedia, an article mentioned the case of a person named Laina Beasley. She's interesting. Long story short, she was an embryo for 13 years. Most people stay embryos for 8 weeks, but most people aren't conceived in a test tube and frozen.

So there you go, a bizarre, but not hard to conceive subject (no pun intended). Now all I need to do is make a story and a script.