Sunday, October 21, 2012

Love Begins/ bullying/ sexual harassment

Oct. 14 Love Begins: I saw this TV movie last month on Youtube.  I thought it was a boring and mediocre.  I only watched it because the actor Wes Brown was in it.  I'm not really into romantic dramas, or stories set in the 18th century where there's no TV or internet.  It's really the story that matters, and there wasn't a really good story.  It's based on a book by Janette Oke and she has written a lot of these of kind of stories.

It started off well with horses riding on the wild west, kind of reminded me of the TV show Heartland.  They introduce the characters of a young woman Ellen, and her little teen sister Cassie.  Their farm is falling apart, and their parents have passed away.  Clark (Wes Brown) and his friend Daniel are in town and starts hitting on women.

They then get into a fight with 2 guys and the Sheriff breaks up the fight.  That was an interesting scene at the cafe and breaks a window.  Clark and Daniel are arrested and thrown in jail.  They both plead guilty or wait a month before a judge comes into town.  Daniel uses a fork from a meal and breaks himself out of jail, while Clark stays in prison.  This shows Clark has morals.

Daniel goes to California to get to the gold rush.

Clark: Can I work off the bills and damages I caused?
The Sheriff says yes, and gets him to work for Ellen and Cassie's farm.  
Sheriff: If you run, I will shoot you.  Your word to stay is good enough.
That's realistic.

Ellen doesn't trust Clark because he's a criminal because he started a fight.  There's a little conflict.  Cassie tells Clark that Ellen's boyfriend went to the gold rush 2 yrs ago, and he never got back to her.  She didn't go with him.

Ellen and Cassie talk about how Clark has the same mannerisms as their dad, so I guess to set up how Ellen falls in love with him.

There's some continuity when Sheriff tells Clarke that his friend Daniel was arrested.

Ellen and Clark talk, and he tells her he will leave town after his work is done.  She doesn't want to get attached.  They go to the town dance.  The 2 guys who were part of the fight then shake hands with Clark and apologize.  There could have been some conflict started her again.  Ellen and Clark bond and dance.  They have Sunday dinner together.

Clark pays off the cafe owner Millie who he and the guys got into a fight at.  He apologizes and pays her back so he redeems himself. 

There is a storm, and Clark gets up on the roof as it's pouring rain to fix the leak on the roof.  He falls off it.  Some conflict.

Ellen's ex-boyfriend Jake comes back into town and he's rich from the gold rush.  I didn't predict that he was coming.  He wants her to marry him.  The climatic ending as Ellen will either choose Jake or Clark.  Clark is getting ready to leave because he sees Jake.

Ellen then tells Clark that she's in love with him and they get married.

Pros: One scene I liked was when Ellen and Clark were going to kiss, and the cow then moos loudly.  lol.  The dialogue was accurate because that's how people talked back then.,

Writing: The entire time you were reading it, did you think it was interesting?  This TV movie, reminded me of my script called Garret, I wrote back in 2009.  I had finished writing The Vertex Fighter, and Garret was like Fighter, with the character's names changed.

It had the same storyline as Love Begins, where the Girl's Boyfriend leaves.  She then meets the New Guy.  Boyfriend comes back, and Girl has to choose between them, and she picks the New Guy.  Come to think of it, it's kind of like Twilight.  Bella and Edward are together.  Then in the 2nd movie, Bella is with Jacob. 

Oct. 15 Writing tip: The Writer in Residence Conni Massing gave me a tip about characters falling in love.  They have to transform each other, or at least one of them changes.

Oct. 19 Bullying: Sophie Leake sent this to me through my blog called "10 Tips for Parents of Kids who are Being Bullied."  The Amanda Todd suicide has an effect on me.

The parents should be there for their kids, and listen to them and be available to them.  #7 says to block cyber bullies and #5 says to "save harassing communications" like emails because you can use it as evidence that this person harassed you.

If you see someone being bullied, you can report to a teacher.  It kind of reminds me of workplace bullying.  That co-worker at the Soup place yelled and swore at me, and I reported it to the manager the very next day.  She yells at me some more, and then I tell the manager again.

#8 says get him into an activity or hobby outside of school to build his self-esteem.  He can make friends in those activities.  #9 says to nurture his self-esteem and says he's really important to the family.  #10 says counseling helps too.

I would say you can do homeschooling.  In Edmonton there's Fresh Start where you can do the classes in a self- study way.  This 15 yr old girl who worked at the Soup place with me said she took it.  She did the Science 14 module in 3 days.  Another young woman who worked there for a short time, said she did Fresh Start too.

http://www.aupaircare.net/blog/10-tips-for-parents-of-kids-who-are-being-bullied/

Examples:
Once again, I'm going to bring up that girl who's in a religion that doesn't allow her to talk to boys.  If people found out who she was, she was going to be harassed because she is so unusual.  It's kind of like finding out a guy's dad is in jail, or his mom is a teen mom.

Well at my jr. high school, which is like a middle class backgrounds, having a dad in jail is so bad.  If the school was inner city, ghetto, poor neighborhood, than it's not a big deal.  If a lot of kids dads are in jail, or not around than it's normal. 

Politeness backfires: I found this article I clipped out from the Edmonton Journal in Aug. 2012.  It was written by Misty Harris.  It's called "Being polite can backfire: study."  According to hundreds of participants in this study: "..psychologists find etiquette overrides disagreement in casual conversation, with people consistently withholding negative feedback due to social norms."

The example in the article was how a jerk is telling rude jokes at a party, and he's deluded himself into thinking he's funny because the listeners are just listening to be polite.  The listeners aren't being truthful about how they feel.  They talk about delusions like being overconfident in your dancing abilities.  But it's deadly if you're overconfident in cleaning your gun.

Sexual harassment: I'm going to bring this up again.  It was back in gr. 10 and this guy was sexually harassing my friend thinking he was so funny.  He knows it, and she knows it, everybody there knows he was joking around by pretending to be attracted to her and hitting on her.  He was saying all these sexual things to her and I felt uncomfortable.

He was aggressive and I knew that if he kept it up, she was going to cry right from the get go.  He was so ignorant, lacked emotional intelligence that he couldn't see that he was offending her.  I tried to get him to stop at the beginning, but he wouldn't listen.  He did this for 20 min.  Two other girls who weren't even friends with my friend could tell that she was uncomfortable.  They told him to stop, but he wouldn't.

I knew that the only way he would stop is when she cried and she yelled at him to stop it, and that it wasn't funny.  I knew he wasn't going to listen to anyone else telling him to stop, unless it came from my friend.  The entire time she was moving from one side to the other side, but he kept following her.  It escalated that she threw some of her chips at him, and he thought it was a joke.

After he saw her cry, he was shocked.  He was trying to make her laugh, and he made her cry which is the opposite.  I'm sure he felt really bad, guilty, and stupid that he didn't know that his behavior had this negative effect on her the whole time.  I hope he learned his lesson.  I think he did learn his lesson because his face and eyes totally became serious. 

He was stunned and then quiet after that.  After my friend cried, she walked away and totally left the place.  She was upset, scared, and disgusted.

I'm not going to say my friend was overly sensitive.  Imagine a unattractive guy you're not interested in who's hitting on you.  You know he's just joking around, but it's not funny.

Side note:
On a side note, and it's totally besides the important point of sexual harassment, but here's a comedy tip: Don't do one joke/ theme for an entire 20min.  He kept saying various disgusting things the whole time.  That's the thing with my mind, I always have something irrelevant to put in.

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