This year’s online writing challenge, courtesy of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is almost over. It officially ends at midnight, Friday (November 30).
For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo has been annually challenging/inspiring authors and would-be authors to sit down and write a novel in only 30 days (throughout the month of November). You have to write 50,000 words, which breaks down to 1,667 words a day.
This is like the fourth year, I think, that my wife has participated and has successfully completed the challenge. She crossed the threshold of 50,000 on Sunday.
As of Monday night, she was at 51,219 words.
However, the actual story she's working on is still incomplete, so she still has some work to do, roughly 20,000 more words by her estimate.
Her first attempt at NaNoWriMo was her largest output: over 200,000 words! Gulp!
I had hoped to participate in some way as well; in spirit, at least. Specifically, just to do some writing, if not attempt 50,000 words.
None of those plans came to fruition.
My script SEPARATION ANXIETY, which I started as part of the online challenge Script Frenzy, which occurred earlier this year in June, is still waiting for me to finish it.
And so is my attempt at writing a short story of a chapter of my prose effort, the Femme Ferines (which, perhaps should be the Femmes Ferine, to be more properly French, according to my wife, but I don’t know if I care about Gallic grammar here, to be honest: I like the way “Femme Ferines” sounds, kind of mimicking Marines, in a way).
But, whatever, because I didn’t do anything to advance the cause of finishing the writing of either project.
Grrrr…
I guess I’ll be shooting for completion of some New Year’s Resolutions, then.
Hopefully, more to come…
79/33
Project 365: first entry / previous entry
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Limping along here… (78/33)
Oh, dear.
Things are just not progressing as I had hoped.
Oh, well.
Well, I didn’t weigh myself on Monday, but I did finally get around to heaving my big-ass butt-ass up on the scale yesterday.
165.5 lbs.
So, more or less, I lost half a pound this week.
Whoo-hooo!
YEEEEE HAAA!
Er, I mean... that's better than nothing, right?
Although, considering how much grazing I’ve been doing the last few days on the contents of the vending machine at work, I should be glad I don’t weigh more than what I did so many months ago when I started this meandering journey…
78/33
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Things are just not progressing as I had hoped.
Oh, well.
Well, I didn’t weigh myself on Monday, but I did finally get around to heaving my big-ass butt-ass up on the scale yesterday.
165.5 lbs.
So, more or less, I lost half a pound this week.
Whoo-hooo!
YEEEEE HAAA!
Er, I mean... that's better than nothing, right?
Although, considering how much grazing I’ve been doing the last few days on the contents of the vending machine at work, I should be glad I don’t weigh more than what I did so many months ago when I started this meandering journey…
78/33
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Happy Thanksgiving! or My Weight Loss Update! (77/40)
Yeah, I thought the timing of this post was funny, I mean, it being the national day of eating excess and everything.
Well, the last time I focused on my diet, etc. in a post, was some time ago.
At that time, I thought I'd try to get myself back on track since I was wavering at best in my diligence and focus to healthy eating, perhaps even get into the habit of logging in what I eat every day, something I gave up very early on during my weight loss adventure.
After a single day of trying to keep track, I sort of loss steam again. It turns out I eat a number of things that seem to have no calorie information: specifically, these so-called "monster subs" from the 7-11 nearby where I work.
They're cold cut subs and have no condiments on them.
They also don't explain (beyond ingredient content), how many calories there are, what the fat content is, fiber what-sis, etc.
So, being totally undisciplined, that easily deflated my efforts at food intake documentation.
Which is a lame excuse, but I'm not denying that. because, what I can do to compensate is come up with a guesstimate of what the points are for such an item. Then, since I eat those subs regularly enough, I can just enter it as a favorite food on my site at Weightwatchers online. So, really, I'm just being lazy.
Sigh.
So, in the meantime, my desire to lose weight and to be disciplined about making wise choices regarding what I eat has been non-existent.
Which explains my increased weight readings lately.
Two weeks ago, I gained after after three weeks of losing weight.
I jumped from 161.0 to 164.5 lbs! A difference of 3.5 lbs-- in the WRONG direction!
Cripes.
Which probably explains why I didn't even check my weight the following week.
This week, I added another 1.5 lbs: 166.
So, I'm only 6, 6.5 lbs away from getting back to where I started.
Well, I'm not really throwing in the towel yet, but boy, I really need to get on track.
Um... after today.
Meanwhile, today being Thanksgiving, I hope everybody has a good holiday. Hopefully a holiday spent with the family and relatives will be limited in its stress, and I also hope you have a safe journey if traveling is in your plans.
Also, I hope (jeez, I'm just a hopeful suck, ain't I?) that you do have a chance to sit down, sit back, relax and reflect, even for a couple minutes, and take stock of what blessings you do have.
And if some of those blessings happen to be living people in your life, take a minute to let them know. You'll both be glad you did.
And as we enter the holiday shopping season, which I think actually began on the Fourth of July this year: "Vaya con Dios!"
Peace, man.
77/40
Well, the last time I focused on my diet, etc. in a post, was some time ago.
At that time, I thought I'd try to get myself back on track since I was wavering at best in my diligence and focus to healthy eating, perhaps even get into the habit of logging in what I eat every day, something I gave up very early on during my weight loss adventure.
After a single day of trying to keep track, I sort of loss steam again. It turns out I eat a number of things that seem to have no calorie information: specifically, these so-called "monster subs" from the 7-11 nearby where I work.
They're cold cut subs and have no condiments on them.
They also don't explain (beyond ingredient content), how many calories there are, what the fat content is, fiber what-sis, etc.
So, being totally undisciplined, that easily deflated my efforts at food intake documentation.
Which is a lame excuse, but I'm not denying that. because, what I can do to compensate is come up with a guesstimate of what the points are for such an item. Then, since I eat those subs regularly enough, I can just enter it as a favorite food on my site at Weightwatchers online. So, really, I'm just being lazy.
Sigh.
So, in the meantime, my desire to lose weight and to be disciplined about making wise choices regarding what I eat has been non-existent.
Which explains my increased weight readings lately.
Two weeks ago, I gained after after three weeks of losing weight.
I jumped from 161.0 to 164.5 lbs! A difference of 3.5 lbs-- in the WRONG direction!
Cripes.
Which probably explains why I didn't even check my weight the following week.
This week, I added another 1.5 lbs: 166.
So, I'm only 6, 6.5 lbs away from getting back to where I started.
Well, I'm not really throwing in the towel yet, but boy, I really need to get on track.
Um... after today.
Meanwhile, today being Thanksgiving, I hope everybody has a good holiday. Hopefully a holiday spent with the family and relatives will be limited in its stress, and I also hope you have a safe journey if traveling is in your plans.
Also, I hope (jeez, I'm just a hopeful suck, ain't I?) that you do have a chance to sit down, sit back, relax and reflect, even for a couple minutes, and take stock of what blessings you do have.
And if some of those blessings happen to be living people in your life, take a minute to let them know. You'll both be glad you did.
And as we enter the holiday shopping season, which I think actually began on the Fourth of July this year: "Vaya con Dios!"
Peace, man.
77/40
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Trying to get something accomplished today… Part 2 (76/48)
Hmph.
Well, took care of some utility bill junk via the phone.
Washed the dishes.
Ate some food, specifically focusing on stuff that’s getting old or has been lying around awhile: some Indian restaurant leftovers (gone!), a frozen pizza (gone!), a banana (three left!), and had some orange juice (working on a gallon jug).
Also did two loads of laundry (so far), drying one load now. Hopefully I’ll fold that first load before I go to the meeting.
While eating baingan-bartha, and some alu paratha and panak paneer, I was channel surfing.
Caught one of those brief actor’s tributes on TMC (only a couple minutes long); usually, a current actor offers their thoughts about an earlier actor and we see clips and photos of the “tributee” (okay, I don’t know if that’s actually a word, but I know tributary’s right out!).
I missed the beginning of this one, but I could see the tribute was for Barbara Stanwyck.
I haven’t seen a lot of her movies, but I’ve liked her a lot in what I have checked out: THE LADY EVE, BALL OF FIRE, MEET JOHN DOE, and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Jeez, is that all?
I suck.
An actress was narrating the tribute and by the time it was done, I had correctly guessed who the voice belonged to (you never see the actor offering the tribute, it's always a voice-over to the images; unless, of course, the narrator happens to be in one of the clips or photos that are being shown): it was Jennifer Jason Leigh whose work I also like, but I’ve only seen some of her films as well.
I was impressed by Leigh's articulate thoughts. Not that I ever thought Leigh was stupid, but her thoughtful word-choice still surprised me. Her serious, respectful tone wasn’t expected, either, but that didn’t surprise me.
The tribute made me want to check out all the Barbara Stanwyck films I had already seen and, of course, check out many others I had not.
The same with Leigh’s body of work, including the last Final Girl Film Club selection which I missed: EYES OF A STRANGER.
Oh… crud!
I gotta get my butt moving if I’m gonna get to the meeting in time!
76/48
Project 365: first entry / previous entry
Well, took care of some utility bill junk via the phone.
Washed the dishes.
Ate some food, specifically focusing on stuff that’s getting old or has been lying around awhile: some Indian restaurant leftovers (gone!), a frozen pizza (gone!), a banana (three left!), and had some orange juice (working on a gallon jug).
Also did two loads of laundry (so far), drying one load now. Hopefully I’ll fold that first load before I go to the meeting.
While eating baingan-bartha, and some alu paratha and panak paneer, I was channel surfing.
Caught one of those brief actor’s tributes on TMC (only a couple minutes long); usually, a current actor offers their thoughts about an earlier actor and we see clips and photos of the “tributee” (okay, I don’t know if that’s actually a word, but I know tributary’s right out!).
I missed the beginning of this one, but I could see the tribute was for Barbara Stanwyck.
I haven’t seen a lot of her movies, but I’ve liked her a lot in what I have checked out: THE LADY EVE, BALL OF FIRE, MEET JOHN DOE, and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Jeez, is that all?
I suck.
An actress was narrating the tribute and by the time it was done, I had correctly guessed who the voice belonged to (you never see the actor offering the tribute, it's always a voice-over to the images; unless, of course, the narrator happens to be in one of the clips or photos that are being shown): it was Jennifer Jason Leigh whose work I also like, but I’ve only seen some of her films as well.
I was impressed by Leigh's articulate thoughts. Not that I ever thought Leigh was stupid, but her thoughtful word-choice still surprised me. Her serious, respectful tone wasn’t expected, either, but that didn’t surprise me.
The tribute made me want to check out all the Barbara Stanwyck films I had already seen and, of course, check out many others I had not.
The same with Leigh’s body of work, including the last Final Girl Film Club selection which I missed: EYES OF A STRANGER.
Oh… crud!
I gotta get my butt moving if I’m gonna get to the meeting in time!
76/48
Project 365: first entry / previous entry
Trying to get something accomplished today… Part 1 (75/48)
Well, it’s Wednesday and I have the day off.
Days off always seem to be a mind-f**k for me, to put it bluntly. I always think I have much more time available to me than I actually do. So, I always start off with grandiose plans of accomplishing all this crap and ultimately, I do very little or nothing. My brain seems to freak out at the amount of things I have to do when I get around to debating what I’m actually going to do, or what I’m going to do first of the things I want to do, and being by nature, indecisive and impulsive, I usually don’t prioritize what I need to do and impulsively start something I eventually don’t finish, so I wind up with arguably nothing done.
Boy, doesn’t that sound pathetic?
Well, it does because it is.
My wife once called me “pathologically disorganized,” unfairly, I thought, at the time.
However, even though I felt that the circumstances that triggered her outburst didn’t justify her assessment of those circumstances, the phrase now haunts me because I think it was something she’s articulated to herself about me prior to that incident, and it just spilled out prematurely, so to speak. As a description in general about myself, it actually hits the nail right on the head.
I also have this idea of the Devil sometimes… that he isn’t just a figure who tempts people into doing wrong, but is also quite content in amusing himself by watching people waste their entire lives through their ineffectual efforts at living. Particularly amusing are the individuals who have all these plans for what they’re going to do, yet somehow, years pass by and nothing happens.
That’s me, too, I think.
Alright, I’m whining.
I’m WHINING OUT LOUD!
So, in an effort to kill perhaps more than one bird with one stone, I’m going to do a multiple part post today to chronicle(ish) my efforts to accomplish something today.
I have a handful of domestic chores, some personal projects I’d like to work on, and also an Apple Corps meeting late this afternoon (one of my personal projects was to work on/finish up this drawing I started last week).
One casualty of trying to prioritize: I was hoping to see a movie at the theater today, one of the 8 FILMS 2 DIE 4 horror festival. I’m going to have to can those plans for today. NUTS!
Maybe tomorrow, but I don’t think any of the films I was planning to see are playing tomorrow. NUTS AND CRAP!
Grrrr…
Well, one more reason to check out another of LAST year’s 8 FILMS etc. on DVD, since I’ve only seen one, GRAVEDANCERS, and just recently, at that.
Crud, I have to get a review out on that, too.
Grrrr!
I’ll be back.
75/48
Project 365: first entry / previous entry
Days off always seem to be a mind-f**k for me, to put it bluntly. I always think I have much more time available to me than I actually do. So, I always start off with grandiose plans of accomplishing all this crap and ultimately, I do very little or nothing. My brain seems to freak out at the amount of things I have to do when I get around to debating what I’m actually going to do, or what I’m going to do first of the things I want to do, and being by nature, indecisive and impulsive, I usually don’t prioritize what I need to do and impulsively start something I eventually don’t finish, so I wind up with arguably nothing done.
Boy, doesn’t that sound pathetic?
Well, it does because it is.
My wife once called me “pathologically disorganized,” unfairly, I thought, at the time.
However, even though I felt that the circumstances that triggered her outburst didn’t justify her assessment of those circumstances, the phrase now haunts me because I think it was something she’s articulated to herself about me prior to that incident, and it just spilled out prematurely, so to speak. As a description in general about myself, it actually hits the nail right on the head.
I also have this idea of the Devil sometimes… that he isn’t just a figure who tempts people into doing wrong, but is also quite content in amusing himself by watching people waste their entire lives through their ineffectual efforts at living. Particularly amusing are the individuals who have all these plans for what they’re going to do, yet somehow, years pass by and nothing happens.
That’s me, too, I think.
Alright, I’m whining.
I’m WHINING OUT LOUD!
So, in an effort to kill perhaps more than one bird with one stone, I’m going to do a multiple part post today to chronicle(ish) my efforts to accomplish something today.
I have a handful of domestic chores, some personal projects I’d like to work on, and also an Apple Corps meeting late this afternoon (one of my personal projects was to work on/finish up this drawing I started last week).
One casualty of trying to prioritize: I was hoping to see a movie at the theater today, one of the 8 FILMS 2 DIE 4 horror festival. I’m going to have to can those plans for today. NUTS!
Maybe tomorrow, but I don’t think any of the films I was planning to see are playing tomorrow. NUTS AND CRAP!
Grrrr…
Well, one more reason to check out another of LAST year’s 8 FILMS etc. on DVD, since I’ve only seen one, GRAVEDANCERS, and just recently, at that.
Crud, I have to get a review out on that, too.
Grrrr!
I’ll be back.
75/48
Project 365: first entry / previous entry
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Night of the Fat Ass (70/54)
Well, this is gonna be really quick.
Monday was my weigh-in and I clocked in at 164.5 lbs., meaning I gained 3.5 lbs. last week!
I don't understand! I've been eating everything in sight! Oh, and hardly exercising, too!
It's so unfair!
Well, apparently, I've decided to be a blob.
That's not actually true.
I haven't made a decision either way, so I'm just not changing old habits.
Also, last week was 1) me dealing with a cold and 2) Halloween (AKA hey, look! There's candy EVERYWHERE!).
So, circumstances were slightly against me, so I'm not throwing in the towel, yet.
Plus, with the cold weather setting in, I can't count on sweating it off at work anymore.
So, we'll see from now until the end of the year, how serious I am about wanting to get down to 140.
Also, the Doc is within 10 lbs. or so of my weight, having lost 92.5 lbs. since January. She's actually very close to the weight she was when she first joined Weight Watchers a couple years ago and then gave up when she hit a plateau and couldn't reach her target weight. But, she's definitely on track to lose 100 by the end of the year.
Perhaps shame will kick me in the ass..?
Okay, gotta go eat another burrito.
I mean, go take a nap before work!
(dammit!)
70/54
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Monday was my weigh-in and I clocked in at 164.5 lbs., meaning I gained 3.5 lbs. last week!
I don't understand! I've been eating everything in sight! Oh, and hardly exercising, too!
It's so unfair!
Well, apparently, I've decided to be a blob.
That's not actually true.
I haven't made a decision either way, so I'm just not changing old habits.
Also, last week was 1) me dealing with a cold and 2) Halloween (AKA hey, look! There's candy EVERYWHERE!).
So, circumstances were slightly against me, so I'm not throwing in the towel, yet.
Plus, with the cold weather setting in, I can't count on sweating it off at work anymore.
So, we'll see from now until the end of the year, how serious I am about wanting to get down to 140.
Also, the Doc is within 10 lbs. or so of my weight, having lost 92.5 lbs. since January. She's actually very close to the weight she was when she first joined Weight Watchers a couple years ago and then gave up when she hit a plateau and couldn't reach her target weight. But, she's definitely on track to lose 100 by the end of the year.
Perhaps shame will kick me in the ass..?
Okay, gotta go eat another burrito.
I mean, go take a nap before work!
(dammit!)
70/54
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Monday, October 29, 2007
Monday Weigh-In OR This is NOT the Diary of Grant Williams (64/64)
Man, all I wanna do is eat.
Um, be right back…
So, way back on March 19, when I started doing Weight Watchers Online. I had my first weigh-in. I was at the juicy weight of 172.0 lbs.
After an eye-opening first week of seeing how many points I consume non-chalantly, I started applying myself a bit more towards eating better, at least comparatively speaking.
But after some initial success, the last couple months, at best, I’ve had a serious lack of motivation.
All I seem to do is feed at the vending machines at work, and get something to eat from anywhere on the way home.
Most alarmingly (well, diet-wise), in the last couple weeks, I’ve returned to the Wendy’s drive-thru… and more than once.
Anyway, Mondays are my weigh-in days.
The last couple weeks I’ve actually lost weight each Monday trip to the scales, but part of that is because prior to I went on a real eating binge and ballooned up to 164.5 lbs. I had been down as low as 157.0 lbs on August 6, which was also the weigh-in before we started our two week vacation and I became a whore for anything seafood while on the New England and Maritime Province Road Trip. You know, the native living experience, man! So, understandably, my weight went up some after that date.
I was last under 160 lbs. on September 24, being just under at 159.5 lbs.
Since then, I’ve been on a steady climb up until I hit 163.5 a couple weeks ago.
So, I’ve been fitfully trying to get back on program.
Since I started back in March, for only a few weeks did I actually pay attention to points and keeping track of what I’ve been eating.
For the rest of the time, I’ve just been logging in my weigh-in totals every Monday.
So, now that I seem to be aimless in my weight-loss discipline, plus, since I no longer have a film shoot that I was trying to be skinny for, my new motivation is accumulating blog posts.
Yes, that damn impossible Project 365!
No way in hell am I gonna fulfill that goal of 365 posts by the end of 2007, but I’m curious to see how far I DO go.
Therefore, you’ll see updates on my Monday weigh-ins, and quite possibly, some info on what I’ve been eating as I try to document what crap I’ve been putting into my chubby carcass.
And, as a reminder, my ultimate goal is to get down to 140.0 lbs.
Anyways, today I weighed-in at 161.0 lbs.
I lost 1.0 lb since last week’s weigh-in.
My reward (uh, for merely weighing in, not so much for celebrating the loss of a pound): I feed!
64/64
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Um, be right back…
So, way back on March 19, when I started doing Weight Watchers Online. I had my first weigh-in. I was at the juicy weight of 172.0 lbs.
After an eye-opening first week of seeing how many points I consume non-chalantly, I started applying myself a bit more towards eating better, at least comparatively speaking.
But after some initial success, the last couple months, at best, I’ve had a serious lack of motivation.
All I seem to do is feed at the vending machines at work, and get something to eat from anywhere on the way home.
Most alarmingly (well, diet-wise), in the last couple weeks, I’ve returned to the Wendy’s drive-thru… and more than once.
Anyway, Mondays are my weigh-in days.
The last couple weeks I’ve actually lost weight each Monday trip to the scales, but part of that is because prior to I went on a real eating binge and ballooned up to 164.5 lbs. I had been down as low as 157.0 lbs on August 6, which was also the weigh-in before we started our two week vacation and I became a whore for anything seafood while on the New England and Maritime Province Road Trip. You know, the native living experience, man! So, understandably, my weight went up some after that date.
I was last under 160 lbs. on September 24, being just under at 159.5 lbs.
Since then, I’ve been on a steady climb up until I hit 163.5 a couple weeks ago.
So, I’ve been fitfully trying to get back on program.
Since I started back in March, for only a few weeks did I actually pay attention to points and keeping track of what I’ve been eating.
For the rest of the time, I’ve just been logging in my weigh-in totals every Monday.
So, now that I seem to be aimless in my weight-loss discipline, plus, since I no longer have a film shoot that I was trying to be skinny for, my new motivation is accumulating blog posts.
Yes, that damn impossible Project 365!
No way in hell am I gonna fulfill that goal of 365 posts by the end of 2007, but I’m curious to see how far I DO go.
Therefore, you’ll see updates on my Monday weigh-ins, and quite possibly, some info on what I’ve been eating as I try to document what crap I’ve been putting into my chubby carcass.
And, as a reminder, my ultimate goal is to get down to 140.0 lbs.
Anyways, today I weighed-in at 161.0 lbs.
I lost 1.0 lb since last week’s weigh-in.
My reward (uh, for merely weighing in, not so much for celebrating the loss of a pound): I feed!
64/64
Project 365: first entry / previous entry / next entry
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Dear Diary... (44/110)
Dear Diary:
Apparently I can’t write worth a damn.
I don’t know how well I write when I am able to put up with my wordsmithing efforts, but it was a VERY frustrating bunch of hours at the keyboard last night.
My work schedule right now is such that I have a small window and opportunity to try and catch up on my blogging (my current raison de’tre) and EVERYTHING I threw up on the screen WAS absolutely pukey.
I have like 5 different subjects started and I just gave up on each topic last night. Hopefully, over the next few days I’ll be able to wrap up some of these topics with some degree of competence and post them.
Nuts.
Let’s see: 321 more posts to go this year in order to complete Project 365???
Fuh!
Let’s see when I get to Post 50!
On a related writing note…
When I was on vacation, I was thinking that two ways I could improve my writing was to read more and also deliberately attempt to expand my vocabulary.
I’ve started reading Scott (A Simple Plan) Smith’s The Ruins, based on CRwM’s recommendation. I’m currently on page 47.
I go now.
And man, Kody refuses to take "no" (ie. a shove off my lap) for an answer! This is a cat that demands to be petted... he said, trying to type with a wet feline nose insistently pressed into one typing hand, four furry feet on his lap, and a cat butt resting in the crook of his other typing arm...
44/110
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Apparently I can’t write worth a damn.
I don’t know how well I write when I am able to put up with my wordsmithing efforts, but it was a VERY frustrating bunch of hours at the keyboard last night.
My work schedule right now is such that I have a small window and opportunity to try and catch up on my blogging (my current raison de’tre) and EVERYTHING I threw up on the screen WAS absolutely pukey.
I have like 5 different subjects started and I just gave up on each topic last night. Hopefully, over the next few days I’ll be able to wrap up some of these topics with some degree of competence and post them.
Nuts.
Let’s see: 321 more posts to go this year in order to complete Project 365???
Fuh!
Let’s see when I get to Post 50!
On a related writing note…
When I was on vacation, I was thinking that two ways I could improve my writing was to read more and also deliberately attempt to expand my vocabulary.
I’ve started reading Scott (A Simple Plan) Smith’s The Ruins, based on CRwM’s recommendation. I’m currently on page 47.
I go now.
And man, Kody refuses to take "no" (ie. a shove off my lap) for an answer! This is a cat that demands to be petted... he said, trying to type with a wet feline nose insistently pressed into one typing hand, four furry feet on his lap, and a cat butt resting in the crook of his other typing arm...
44/110
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
On Vacation! Er, maybe... (34/125)
Hi!
Currently, the Dr. and I are on a long "road trip" style vacation.
Okay. THAT'S a lie.
When I started writing this post, we were on vacation, but now I'm already home and trying to finish this thing AND eat leftover Chinese food from Springfield, Mass. AND make sure my cat Kody doesn't make off with any of my moo goo gai pan combo plate as I type...
My wife and I started our vacation Aug. 11 and we came back home Sunday, Aug. 26. It was our first two week vacation together, our usual breaks being only a week long. I actually didn't have the time saved up at work to do this. Hell, I didn't even have one week's worth of vacation saved up!
But, we had planned this for several months (and when I say we, I really mean my wife, because she did pretty much the majority of the preparations for this enterprise, but, uh, I knew about it!), so whether I had enough vacation time accrued or not wasn't going to stop me from going.
My sweetie-bear has been calling this the "Sam and Dean Road Trip," a reference to the TV show, Supernatural. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about two brothers who travel to all sorts of places in the U.S. in an old Impala, armed with various weapons to fight demons, monsters, etc.
A sort of combination of the Hardy Boys meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
My wife's become a big fan of Supernatural since she bought the DVD set of the first season, so her fantasy was to drive around like Dean and Sam Winchester, playing the music (Dean's into classic rock) that is often heard on the car radio during the series episodes. She burned all these CDs with music from the show's soundtrack or compilations of songs she liked with this road trip in mind.
Our trip took us from the Buffalo, NY area to Danvers, Mass. (located between(ish) Salem and Boston) to St. Andrew, New Brunswick to Dingwall in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Halifax, NS to Bar Harbor, Maine to Springfield, Mass. and back home.
And yes, I'm behind in my blogging, but what else is new? Although my internet absence the last month or so was directly attibuted to the vacation and preparations for it. The last week and a half leading up to our departure was really hot weather-wise and work (where it's sans AC) was totally kicking my ass, so I barely had any energy to do anything when I got home, bla bla bla wah wah wah.
But the trip was great and I've been adjusting to being back. It is good to be home but my first day of work started at 7:00 am and wound up ending 12 hours later, so that was an adjustment...
Anyways, I'm back and there'll be more posts re: the vacation, plus other thoughts.
Ooh, and pictures, too! We bought a new digital camera online just before we left, so both of us were "practicing" with the new toy. Prepare to be bombarded with my damn vacation pictures!
So, just wanted to say hi, to, uh, whoever right now and let you know that more's coming!
Later!
34/125
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Currently, the Dr. and I are on a long "road trip" style vacation.
Okay. THAT'S a lie.
When I started writing this post, we were on vacation, but now I'm already home and trying to finish this thing AND eat leftover Chinese food from Springfield, Mass. AND make sure my cat Kody doesn't make off with any of my moo goo gai pan combo plate as I type...
My wife and I started our vacation Aug. 11 and we came back home Sunday, Aug. 26. It was our first two week vacation together, our usual breaks being only a week long. I actually didn't have the time saved up at work to do this. Hell, I didn't even have one week's worth of vacation saved up!
But, we had planned this for several months (and when I say we, I really mean my wife, because she did pretty much the majority of the preparations for this enterprise, but, uh, I knew about it!), so whether I had enough vacation time accrued or not wasn't going to stop me from going.
My sweetie-bear has been calling this the "Sam and Dean Road Trip," a reference to the TV show, Supernatural. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about two brothers who travel to all sorts of places in the U.S. in an old Impala, armed with various weapons to fight demons, monsters, etc.
A sort of combination of the Hardy Boys meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
My wife's become a big fan of Supernatural since she bought the DVD set of the first season, so her fantasy was to drive around like Dean and Sam Winchester, playing the music (Dean's into classic rock) that is often heard on the car radio during the series episodes. She burned all these CDs with music from the show's soundtrack or compilations of songs she liked with this road trip in mind.
Our trip took us from the Buffalo, NY area to Danvers, Mass. (located between(ish) Salem and Boston) to St. Andrew, New Brunswick to Dingwall in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Halifax, NS to Bar Harbor, Maine to Springfield, Mass. and back home.
And yes, I'm behind in my blogging, but what else is new? Although my internet absence the last month or so was directly attibuted to the vacation and preparations for it. The last week and a half leading up to our departure was really hot weather-wise and work (where it's sans AC) was totally kicking my ass, so I barely had any energy to do anything when I got home, bla bla bla wah wah wah.
But the trip was great and I've been adjusting to being back. It is good to be home but my first day of work started at 7:00 am and wound up ending 12 hours later, so that was an adjustment...
Anyways, I'm back and there'll be more posts re: the vacation, plus other thoughts.
Ooh, and pictures, too! We bought a new digital camera online just before we left, so both of us were "practicing" with the new toy. Prepare to be bombarded with my damn vacation pictures!
So, just wanted to say hi, to, uh, whoever right now and let you know that more's coming!
Later!
34/125
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Saturday, August 04, 2007
THINKING OUT LOUD: 150 DAYS LEFT UNTIL 2008 (33/150)
Hi-ho.
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Grrrrrr..! (32/152)
Man, I freaking hate everything.
It's hot and sunny outside, but at work it's merely hot and hotter.
I suppose the upside is, this "diet" I'm on is only succeeding(ish) because I'm losing weight at work.
I was just unbelievably irritable today at work.
What a pain-in-the-ass to have to work with.
My apologies to my fellow employess. But it's supposed to be 95 tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll pick up where I left off today considering it's a 12 hour shift as well.
Project 365, my ass.
Oh, wait. Look.
Only 364 more to go.
I'm taking a long shower.
My wife will appreciate it.
32/152
Project 365 : first / previous / next
It's hot and sunny outside, but at work it's merely hot and hotter.
I suppose the upside is, this "diet" I'm on is only succeeding(ish) because I'm losing weight at work.
I was just unbelievably irritable today at work.
What a pain-in-the-ass to have to work with.
My apologies to my fellow employess. But it's supposed to be 95 tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll pick up where I left off today considering it's a 12 hour shift as well.
Project 365, my ass.
Oh, wait. Look.
Only 364 more to go.
I'm taking a long shower.
My wife will appreciate it.
32/152
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
FEMME FERINES 2.O : a postscript (30/168)
Before I receive any actual comments to my previous blogger post (ha! wishful thinking!), I wanted to be defensive and toss in my pre-emptive (more wishful thinking) 2-cents worth re: said writing excerpt.
I just want to say, I was so excited to have crammed all those ideas into one piece of writing, I was anxious to get it front of an audience and see their reaction, if any.
Now that I've had a chance to re-read it some, with the fire of just having written now all died away, it's obvious I still need to do a lot of work with it.
At the very least, it's unfinished, and not even where I arbitrarily and abruptly ended it.
The biggest issues I think are these:
1. Agnes' weird dying fantasies are perhaps too strange for her to just have, and I think I can set that up better, at least (setting it up even a little is more than what I've done so far), so that there may be at least some logic, some contrived justification for her morbid tangents of thought. Or, that is to say, the elements of her fantasies may make more sense. As to why she has this hard-on for "beautiful tragedy," I'll be honest, I have no real justification for her fascination or obsession with that. I think that's a blatant case of "it sounds kind of funny to me."
On the other hand, instinctively speaking, there's something interesting in that, and perhaps it may articulate itself to me later.
2. Agnes' mission of crime also needs to be set up more, I think.
Ultimately, I'd like the FEMME FERINES to be a novel. but I'm also thinking of exploring the possibility of sending out some sections as short stories to possible publishers to see what kind of response I'd get.
This particular episode of Agnes having to steal a comic book to "join" these other girls (I bet you didn't even know that's what was going on, did ya? See, I need to spell it out more and I think earlier, too) would make an interesting self-contained short story.
In fact, I'm going to try to develop this bit of writing in that direction first, as a short story.
In novel form, I think, I'll break up some of the introductions to the girls into one or more chapters.
3. My punctuation totally blows. I need to consult with my "editorial staff" on that front, but I was too impatient to do so before posting.
I guess that's really it. Those are my biggest concerns. Once I deal with those, I'm sure I'll discover other problems.
Anyways, thanks for listening to my desperate attempt at covering my ass...
30/168
Project 365 : first / previous / next
I just want to say, I was so excited to have crammed all those ideas into one piece of writing, I was anxious to get it front of an audience and see their reaction, if any.
Now that I've had a chance to re-read it some, with the fire of just having written now all died away, it's obvious I still need to do a lot of work with it.
At the very least, it's unfinished, and not even where I arbitrarily and abruptly ended it.
The biggest issues I think are these:
1. Agnes' weird dying fantasies are perhaps too strange for her to just have, and I think I can set that up better, at least (setting it up even a little is more than what I've done so far), so that there may be at least some logic, some contrived justification for her morbid tangents of thought. Or, that is to say, the elements of her fantasies may make more sense. As to why she has this hard-on for "beautiful tragedy," I'll be honest, I have no real justification for her fascination or obsession with that. I think that's a blatant case of "it sounds kind of funny to me."
On the other hand, instinctively speaking, there's something interesting in that, and perhaps it may articulate itself to me later.
2. Agnes' mission of crime also needs to be set up more, I think.
Ultimately, I'd like the FEMME FERINES to be a novel. but I'm also thinking of exploring the possibility of sending out some sections as short stories to possible publishers to see what kind of response I'd get.
This particular episode of Agnes having to steal a comic book to "join" these other girls (I bet you didn't even know that's what was going on, did ya? See, I need to spell it out more and I think earlier, too) would make an interesting self-contained short story.
In fact, I'm going to try to develop this bit of writing in that direction first, as a short story.
In novel form, I think, I'll break up some of the introductions to the girls into one or more chapters.
3. My punctuation totally blows. I need to consult with my "editorial staff" on that front, but I was too impatient to do so before posting.
I guess that's really it. Those are my biggest concerns. Once I deal with those, I'm sure I'll discover other problems.
Anyways, thanks for listening to my desperate attempt at covering my ass...
30/168
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Sunday, July 08, 2007
The day I went skydiving... (25/177)
Yo.
This post originally was tagged onto a previous post, the first part of my "8 Things Meme."
But, since this account was so long, I decided to cut it off the original post and just run it separate.
That's all.
Hey, I get another post out of this! Cool!*
A dear friend of mine, Amelie (not her real name), who I was actually quite fond of at the time (well, I’m still fond of her but THEN my fondness was more actively on display) (no, not like that! Shut up!), one day asked me if I would do her a favor. Of course, I said sure, absolutely. She had always wanted to skydive. Would I want to go skydiving as well, to help her fulfill this wish?
Sure! Absolutely!
Well, that’s what my mouth said, but my brain was actually more like, “wait, what…?”
Jeez, I forget what year this was, but it was the early 80s, 1983 at the latest.
She took care of all the arrangements for the skydiving. It was going to be in the summer. Meanwhile, contemplating my options, like, what could possibly happen to me when I jumped out of a plane, I began therapy a couple months prior to that impending fateful day, in an attempt to deal with some personal issues, in case, you know, I didn’t have an opportunity to do so after the jump.
Whatever happened to her unfulfilled urges to go bowling?
It was a one-day training course in Wyoming County, NY, about 6 hours long. The jump would be a static-line jump, meaning, I wouldn’t have to pull the rip-cord myself in order to open the chute. You know how in those World War II movies, where a bunch of paratroopers are standing in line on a plane, waiting to jump out of an open door, and each one has a line attached to a wire running over the door? Every time a paratrooper jumps out the door, the line that’s attached to them is still attached to the plane, and it automatically pulls their chute open. They’re doing a static-line jump. But in my case, my line was attached to a metal ring set in the floor inside the small plane.
[NOTE: Now, we could've taken the option to pull our own rip cord as we jumped from the plane for our first jump, but the training is more involved and I think that would've been a two-day course. Also, in that situation, when you jump from the plane, you bail out at a higher atltitude, 10,000 feet (vs. 3,000, which is what we did), plus two instructors free-fall alongside you. As you plummet to the ground, the instructors watch as you pantomime pulling the cord. When they figure you’re ready, they peel away from you, and you yank away. At least, that’s how I remember it being told to me way back then. But Amelie just wanted to do the one-day deal, which was fine.]
Our training course covered what to look for after you exited the plane: how to check if your chute opened properly; if it hadn’t, what to do (no, not scream and die… jerks! No, you had to jettison this opened chute and deploy your back-up chute); what to do if you land in a tree, body of water, electrical lines, oncoming traffic, angry horned livestock; how to land properly in an open field; how to gather up your chute when on the ground.
And, of course, you pay up in advance.
I remember during that day’s training, the instructor made a point of saying how carefully the back-up chutes were packed. If someone crashed into the ground because of apparent parachute malfunction, someone from, uh, some monitoring agency? The skydiving place? People with credentials from both? (Somebody.) will come running up to the flattened corpse and immediately pull the back-up chute’s rip-cord to see if that was still operable. The instructor said there was a recent incident where something like that happened. A body mooshed into the dirt, and the back-up chute hadn’t gone off according to spectators. But these guys ran up to the sky-kill and pulled the cord, and the back-up chute immediately deployed, like an Acme product worn by Wile E. Coyote. So, in the recent death cited by the instructor, it was human error for the back-up chute not being used, not mechanical error. Or choice (You know: “Adios, cruel world, etc.”). Whichever. Why this should be a comforting story to us skydiving virgins before we hurl ourselves out into space New School Lemming Technique, I’m not sure. “So, don’t worry, you nervous ground-hugging maggots! This back-up chute is guaranteed to save your life should circumstances warrant its use. The only thing that could muck up this back up system is YOU. Your life is in YOUR hands now. Screw up and DIE. You get me? Hope you were paying attention to everything we said today. Okay, into the plane! Last one in gets to be ridiculed mercilessly all the way up, plus owes everyone a skippy cup. What are you waiting for? MOVE IT MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”
Obviously, I’m being a silly ass.
The instructors were very pleasant and patient. Not a stereotypical drill sergeant in the bunch. If anything, they were laidback.
Like dope fiends.
Dammit!
It was a long hot day and by the time I got up in the air, I was pooped. But Amelie wound up going up before me with a couple other students (the plane was pretty itty bitty), so I got to see if she was going to survive this reckless endeav--, uh… if she was going to land close to the target they had set up on the ground. The target was an area drawn out in white lines on the ground, and if Mistress Fate decided to let you kiss the earth in celebration rather than very, very, VERY quickly, AND if She also decided to let you look really cool and like you knew what you were doing while you were landing, you’d land in that marked off area (like 10’x10’ or 15’x15’- not all that huge). On the ground they also had constructed a large movable wooden arrow, about 15 feet long, maybe bigger, maybe way bigger. It looked like one of those arrows you spin in a board game, except there were no areas marked with colors like in TWISTER. When you jumped from the plane, somebody was on the ground minding this arrow. Now, the significance of this arrow was this: your chute was designed with an opening in the back, like a sliver about 4 feet long. It ran the length of the outer edge of the chute and then was shaped like a wedge, about 6” wide, I think, at its biggest opening in the middle. This opening was directly behind you, supposedly giving you 3 miles per hour of forward thrust as you descended. You had two handles hanging down from the chute, each on a cord, one on either side of you, which you pulled to go in a particular direction. If there was a lot of wind that day, you might overshoot the target. So, while you were floating down, someone on the ground was aware of the wind’s speed and direction, and their job was informing the skydiver via the arrow’s direction as to what direction the skydiver should be facing in order to (theoretically) land close to this target.
Well, Amelie had an amazing landing.
Right in the square!
Crap! The pressure was on to not only survive my fall, but to also land competently.
Double crap!
Somewhere, there’s actually super-8 footage of her landing. It was fun, and disturbing, to watch this bit of film because when her feet hit the ground, her body pseudo-crumples on impact. She immediately falls/rolls to the side as instructed. When she quickly gets up, she’s all happy and laughing, obviously, because she’s not a huge-ass stain on the grass or 10 miles from the target either. But this crumpling thing… man! When we first watched the film together, we laughed and winced watching it.
“Oh, Jesus! Look at that!”
Then we kept replaying it, like Kevin Costner replaying the Zapruder film for the jury.
“Doesn’t it look like her head’s gonna snap off? Rewind that!”
It was fun to do this because we weren’t doing this at a memorial, of course.
So, then it was my turn, and the metaphorical fledgling-skydiving gauntlet had been flung merrily in my face: land as close as THAT, you muther!
Up I go.
In the plane, the instructor attaches the buckle of my line into the metal ring in the floor. There’s a gizmo he has behind the pilot’s seat, some sort of deal he looks into to figure when to tell me to go. Probably similar to how they site bombing targets from planes during wartime, some kind of scope with maybe a cross-hair and some measuring gauge, so that they could calculate when to release the bombs. Although, in this case, instead of explosives, they just yell at you as you wait in the doorway, “Go, ya bag of meat! Go!”
Meanwhile, I remember being really exhausted when I got in the plane. The door leading into the open air opened up (or was it already open? I can’t remember accurately anymore) and the instructor told me to get into position. I shimmy over to the opening, and then carefully sit on the edge of the doorway, my legs dangling out. I feel like a bunch of lead. I look outside and man, am I high in the sky. I see a couple of the Great Lakes on the curved horizon and I’m thinking, “Man, I’m actually going through with this, huh?”
The instructor yells: “Ready?”
“Yeah!” I yell back. “I guess,” I think to myself.
I look out. I get more in position, my foot on a metal step that sticks out, which gives me something to push off of from the plane. So this is 3,000 feet up, huh? Huh.
My instructor yells: “Okay, GO!”
“Okay!” Man, I’m just a big, pooped lump sitting in an open doorway of a small plane. Long day, man…
Instructor: “GO! NOW!”
Right. Hell, I paid the money, I might as well…
Not quite in slow motion, but sort of surreally, I remember both exiting deliberately, and feeling like I just kind of, fell out. Then, my training kicked in, but it felt like I remembered to do everything after a 3-second delay. For instance, when I jumped from the plane, I was supposed to arch my body back as I pushed forward away from the plane, my arms out. That was the form I practiced on the ground while hanging from a swing set sans its swings. But as I dropped through the air, THEN I remembered to do it. I was also supposed to count, to make sure I allowed enough time for my chute to deploy before I assessed how successful the deployment went. But I think I was already staring up at the open chute for several seconds before I thought, “hey, aren’t you supposed to count?” “Oh, right! One-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc…” So, I think being tired was my main excuse for the dragged out way I did everything. Luckily, everything went fine.
My chute opened, it didn’t trail me like a dead jelly fish, or form a “bra” (where one of the lines unfortunately gets caught dragging over the entire chute, thereby forming a brassiere-like chute with two cups rather than one large cup). So, I could relax and enjoy my singular view.
I floated down through the sky, and in the distance I saw the curved horizon and lakes Erie and Ontario. The sun reflected brightly over the water’s surfaces. Ridiculously, I started singing. I don’t recall what, but it seemed I should do something to celebrate the moment and that was all I could think of.
I then remembered to look down and check out the direction that the arrow was pointing in. Way, way down there was a comically dinky arrow. I really had to look to find it. But I did, and then made a slight adjustment in which way I was facing, pulling down on one of the steering lines dangling by my head. Then I hung around and looked some more at the sight.
My ears had popped. Singing was strange because of that, because I could only hear myself in my head, like I was next door to my voice. Plus, my choice of song was not that inspired. I forget what it was, but it wasn’t anything clever or earthshaking. It could have been a Sousa march I was singing. The usual silliness from me.
At regular intervals I’d look down at the arrow and make adjustments if necessary. I remember at one point thinking it seemed that even though the arrow appeared to be getting gradually larger, like everything else on the ground, it also seemed like the distance was staying the same or further. Instead of looking down at the arrow directly, it seemed that I continued to look down and off to one side all the time.
Eventually, I was close enough to the ground that I started to realize something. I remember starting to make out small figures moving on the ground. People. Running people. Then I looked closer at the arrow. No one was actually at the arrow. Ah. Crap. No one seemed to be “steering” me. I then decided to just aim my ass (okay, my front, actually) straight at that damn, definitely growing arrow and hope for the best.
I adjusted myself a 30 degree turn to my left and tried to be as heavy as possible. Meanwhile, I’m also noticing all these trees surrounding the landing strip, looking closer than I realized. Nuts. I really didn’t want to land in a tree. For the simple reason that if I was going to land in a tree, I had to adopt “Defensive Posture ‘S’ for ‘Freaking Squirrel Motherfreak” to protect all my physical parts that were, you know, the worst areas to be pierced by a branch, such as my armpits, my crotch, etc. But, I really didn’t have the energy to go through that defensive effort and consideration. So, I focused on being as dense as possible, like planet Jupiter dense. Soon enough, I knew that when I eventually plowed into the earth I wasn’t going to be anywhere NEAR the target square on the ground. As things on the ground loomed larger in quicker and quicker fashion, I wondered if I’d land ANYWHERE near the property of the site at all. The boundary of the nearby woods crept closer but they weren’t going to be an issue after all. Hooray! No armpit and crotch grabbing for me!
It looked like I was gonna hit field, specifically field just beyond the landing strip, behind a small hill.
In MY super8 landing footage, you see me exit the plane and the chute pop open. As I get closer to the ground, for some reason I never get bigger. My body and parachute disappear ever so lamely in the distance behind a hill. My parents remember watching the plane, seeing me jump out, watching my descent, and then Amelie running over to them, agitated, breathless, upset, and apologizing to them PROFUSELY about no one minding the arrow and directing my descent and apologizing about dragging me into this exciting venture, and then my parents turned back and watched me get, well, smaller as I got closer to the ground, disappearing behind a hill.
Or, as my mom told me, “Amelie was so upset! She kept apologizing to us. ‘I am so sorry! I am so sorry!’ But this seemed typical of you, so we weren’t too worried.”
At a hundred or so feet above the ground, and that ground coming up VERY quickly now, I remembered to look up at the horizon and not down at the ground, as per my training. The ground comes up so fast, you’ll always misjudge your landing if you stare down at the dirt in order to time your roll/fall. Instead, you are to look at the horizon and prepare yourself to act as soon as your legs make contact. Which I did. I rolled/fell immediately upon impact, and I was okay.
Although, man, when you finally touch earth, you hit it hard.
My best friend Steve came running over from around the hill, super8 camera in hand. I quickly restaged my landing for humorous effect. Getting up slowly from the high grass, I feigned a comical look on my face depicting the effects of a jostled brain after landing. Amelie came running over soon thereafter. Her expression was a curious combination of elation and apology as she saw me standing there safe, unscathed and un-tree impaled. She breathlessly told me all about how they had forgotten to man the arrow and how she gave them a proper tongue-lashing.
I remember that for at least a week after doing this, I felt invincible, like I could do it over and over again. But now?
Uh-uh.
Screw THAT noise.
*I am SO cheating.
25/177
Project 365 : first / previous / next
This post originally was tagged onto a previous post, the first part of my "8 Things Meme."
But, since this account was so long, I decided to cut it off the original post and just run it separate.
That's all.
Hey, I get another post out of this! Cool!*
A dear friend of mine, Amelie (not her real name), who I was actually quite fond of at the time (well, I’m still fond of her but THEN my fondness was more actively on display) (no, not like that! Shut up!), one day asked me if I would do her a favor. Of course, I said sure, absolutely. She had always wanted to skydive. Would I want to go skydiving as well, to help her fulfill this wish?
Sure! Absolutely!
Well, that’s what my mouth said, but my brain was actually more like, “wait, what…?”
Jeez, I forget what year this was, but it was the early 80s, 1983 at the latest.
She took care of all the arrangements for the skydiving. It was going to be in the summer. Meanwhile, contemplating my options, like, what could possibly happen to me when I jumped out of a plane, I began therapy a couple months prior to that impending fateful day, in an attempt to deal with some personal issues, in case, you know, I didn’t have an opportunity to do so after the jump.
Whatever happened to her unfulfilled urges to go bowling?
It was a one-day training course in Wyoming County, NY, about 6 hours long. The jump would be a static-line jump, meaning, I wouldn’t have to pull the rip-cord myself in order to open the chute. You know how in those World War II movies, where a bunch of paratroopers are standing in line on a plane, waiting to jump out of an open door, and each one has a line attached to a wire running over the door? Every time a paratrooper jumps out the door, the line that’s attached to them is still attached to the plane, and it automatically pulls their chute open. They’re doing a static-line jump. But in my case, my line was attached to a metal ring set in the floor inside the small plane.
[NOTE: Now, we could've taken the option to pull our own rip cord as we jumped from the plane for our first jump, but the training is more involved and I think that would've been a two-day course. Also, in that situation, when you jump from the plane, you bail out at a higher atltitude, 10,000 feet (vs. 3,000, which is what we did), plus two instructors free-fall alongside you. As you plummet to the ground, the instructors watch as you pantomime pulling the cord. When they figure you’re ready, they peel away from you, and you yank away. At least, that’s how I remember it being told to me way back then. But Amelie just wanted to do the one-day deal, which was fine.]
Our training course covered what to look for after you exited the plane: how to check if your chute opened properly; if it hadn’t, what to do (no, not scream and die… jerks! No, you had to jettison this opened chute and deploy your back-up chute); what to do if you land in a tree, body of water, electrical lines, oncoming traffic, angry horned livestock; how to land properly in an open field; how to gather up your chute when on the ground.
And, of course, you pay up in advance.
I remember during that day’s training, the instructor made a point of saying how carefully the back-up chutes were packed. If someone crashed into the ground because of apparent parachute malfunction, someone from, uh, some monitoring agency? The skydiving place? People with credentials from both? (Somebody.) will come running up to the flattened corpse and immediately pull the back-up chute’s rip-cord to see if that was still operable. The instructor said there was a recent incident where something like that happened. A body mooshed into the dirt, and the back-up chute hadn’t gone off according to spectators. But these guys ran up to the sky-kill and pulled the cord, and the back-up chute immediately deployed, like an Acme product worn by Wile E. Coyote. So, in the recent death cited by the instructor, it was human error for the back-up chute not being used, not mechanical error. Or choice (You know: “Adios, cruel world, etc.”). Whichever. Why this should be a comforting story to us skydiving virgins before we hurl ourselves out into space New School Lemming Technique, I’m not sure. “So, don’t worry, you nervous ground-hugging maggots! This back-up chute is guaranteed to save your life should circumstances warrant its use. The only thing that could muck up this back up system is YOU. Your life is in YOUR hands now. Screw up and DIE. You get me? Hope you were paying attention to everything we said today. Okay, into the plane! Last one in gets to be ridiculed mercilessly all the way up, plus owes everyone a skippy cup. What are you waiting for? MOVE IT MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”
Obviously, I’m being a silly ass.
The instructors were very pleasant and patient. Not a stereotypical drill sergeant in the bunch. If anything, they were laidback.
Like dope fiends.
Dammit!
It was a long hot day and by the time I got up in the air, I was pooped. But Amelie wound up going up before me with a couple other students (the plane was pretty itty bitty), so I got to see if she was going to survive this reckless endeav--, uh… if she was going to land close to the target they had set up on the ground. The target was an area drawn out in white lines on the ground, and if Mistress Fate decided to let you kiss the earth in celebration rather than very, very, VERY quickly, AND if She also decided to let you look really cool and like you knew what you were doing while you were landing, you’d land in that marked off area (like 10’x10’ or 15’x15’- not all that huge). On the ground they also had constructed a large movable wooden arrow, about 15 feet long, maybe bigger, maybe way bigger. It looked like one of those arrows you spin in a board game, except there were no areas marked with colors like in TWISTER. When you jumped from the plane, somebody was on the ground minding this arrow. Now, the significance of this arrow was this: your chute was designed with an opening in the back, like a sliver about 4 feet long. It ran the length of the outer edge of the chute and then was shaped like a wedge, about 6” wide, I think, at its biggest opening in the middle. This opening was directly behind you, supposedly giving you 3 miles per hour of forward thrust as you descended. You had two handles hanging down from the chute, each on a cord, one on either side of you, which you pulled to go in a particular direction. If there was a lot of wind that day, you might overshoot the target. So, while you were floating down, someone on the ground was aware of the wind’s speed and direction, and their job was informing the skydiver via the arrow’s direction as to what direction the skydiver should be facing in order to (theoretically) land close to this target.
Well, Amelie had an amazing landing.
Right in the square!
Crap! The pressure was on to not only survive my fall, but to also land competently.
Double crap!
Somewhere, there’s actually super-8 footage of her landing. It was fun, and disturbing, to watch this bit of film because when her feet hit the ground, her body pseudo-crumples on impact. She immediately falls/rolls to the side as instructed. When she quickly gets up, she’s all happy and laughing, obviously, because she’s not a huge-ass stain on the grass or 10 miles from the target either. But this crumpling thing… man! When we first watched the film together, we laughed and winced watching it.
“Oh, Jesus! Look at that!”
Then we kept replaying it, like Kevin Costner replaying the Zapruder film for the jury.
“Doesn’t it look like her head’s gonna snap off? Rewind that!”
It was fun to do this because we weren’t doing this at a memorial, of course.
So, then it was my turn, and the metaphorical fledgling-skydiving gauntlet had been flung merrily in my face: land as close as THAT, you muther!
Up I go.
In the plane, the instructor attaches the buckle of my line into the metal ring in the floor. There’s a gizmo he has behind the pilot’s seat, some sort of deal he looks into to figure when to tell me to go. Probably similar to how they site bombing targets from planes during wartime, some kind of scope with maybe a cross-hair and some measuring gauge, so that they could calculate when to release the bombs. Although, in this case, instead of explosives, they just yell at you as you wait in the doorway, “Go, ya bag of meat! Go!”
Meanwhile, I remember being really exhausted when I got in the plane. The door leading into the open air opened up (or was it already open? I can’t remember accurately anymore) and the instructor told me to get into position. I shimmy over to the opening, and then carefully sit on the edge of the doorway, my legs dangling out. I feel like a bunch of lead. I look outside and man, am I high in the sky. I see a couple of the Great Lakes on the curved horizon and I’m thinking, “Man, I’m actually going through with this, huh?”
The instructor yells: “Ready?”
“Yeah!” I yell back. “I guess,” I think to myself.
I look out. I get more in position, my foot on a metal step that sticks out, which gives me something to push off of from the plane. So this is 3,000 feet up, huh? Huh.
My instructor yells: “Okay, GO!”
“Okay!” Man, I’m just a big, pooped lump sitting in an open doorway of a small plane. Long day, man…
Instructor: “GO! NOW!”
Right. Hell, I paid the money, I might as well…
Not quite in slow motion, but sort of surreally, I remember both exiting deliberately, and feeling like I just kind of, fell out. Then, my training kicked in, but it felt like I remembered to do everything after a 3-second delay. For instance, when I jumped from the plane, I was supposed to arch my body back as I pushed forward away from the plane, my arms out. That was the form I practiced on the ground while hanging from a swing set sans its swings. But as I dropped through the air, THEN I remembered to do it. I was also supposed to count, to make sure I allowed enough time for my chute to deploy before I assessed how successful the deployment went. But I think I was already staring up at the open chute for several seconds before I thought, “hey, aren’t you supposed to count?” “Oh, right! One-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc…” So, I think being tired was my main excuse for the dragged out way I did everything. Luckily, everything went fine.
My chute opened, it didn’t trail me like a dead jelly fish, or form a “bra” (where one of the lines unfortunately gets caught dragging over the entire chute, thereby forming a brassiere-like chute with two cups rather than one large cup). So, I could relax and enjoy my singular view.
I floated down through the sky, and in the distance I saw the curved horizon and lakes Erie and Ontario. The sun reflected brightly over the water’s surfaces. Ridiculously, I started singing. I don’t recall what, but it seemed I should do something to celebrate the moment and that was all I could think of.
I then remembered to look down and check out the direction that the arrow was pointing in. Way, way down there was a comically dinky arrow. I really had to look to find it. But I did, and then made a slight adjustment in which way I was facing, pulling down on one of the steering lines dangling by my head. Then I hung around and looked some more at the sight.
My ears had popped. Singing was strange because of that, because I could only hear myself in my head, like I was next door to my voice. Plus, my choice of song was not that inspired. I forget what it was, but it wasn’t anything clever or earthshaking. It could have been a Sousa march I was singing. The usual silliness from me.
At regular intervals I’d look down at the arrow and make adjustments if necessary. I remember at one point thinking it seemed that even though the arrow appeared to be getting gradually larger, like everything else on the ground, it also seemed like the distance was staying the same or further. Instead of looking down at the arrow directly, it seemed that I continued to look down and off to one side all the time.
Eventually, I was close enough to the ground that I started to realize something. I remember starting to make out small figures moving on the ground. People. Running people. Then I looked closer at the arrow. No one was actually at the arrow. Ah. Crap. No one seemed to be “steering” me. I then decided to just aim my ass (okay, my front, actually) straight at that damn, definitely growing arrow and hope for the best.
I adjusted myself a 30 degree turn to my left and tried to be as heavy as possible. Meanwhile, I’m also noticing all these trees surrounding the landing strip, looking closer than I realized. Nuts. I really didn’t want to land in a tree. For the simple reason that if I was going to land in a tree, I had to adopt “Defensive Posture ‘S’ for ‘Freaking Squirrel Motherfreak” to protect all my physical parts that were, you know, the worst areas to be pierced by a branch, such as my armpits, my crotch, etc. But, I really didn’t have the energy to go through that defensive effort and consideration. So, I focused on being as dense as possible, like planet Jupiter dense. Soon enough, I knew that when I eventually plowed into the earth I wasn’t going to be anywhere NEAR the target square on the ground. As things on the ground loomed larger in quicker and quicker fashion, I wondered if I’d land ANYWHERE near the property of the site at all. The boundary of the nearby woods crept closer but they weren’t going to be an issue after all. Hooray! No armpit and crotch grabbing for me!
It looked like I was gonna hit field, specifically field just beyond the landing strip, behind a small hill.
In MY super8 landing footage, you see me exit the plane and the chute pop open. As I get closer to the ground, for some reason I never get bigger. My body and parachute disappear ever so lamely in the distance behind a hill. My parents remember watching the plane, seeing me jump out, watching my descent, and then Amelie running over to them, agitated, breathless, upset, and apologizing to them PROFUSELY about no one minding the arrow and directing my descent and apologizing about dragging me into this exciting venture, and then my parents turned back and watched me get, well, smaller as I got closer to the ground, disappearing behind a hill.
Or, as my mom told me, “Amelie was so upset! She kept apologizing to us. ‘I am so sorry! I am so sorry!’ But this seemed typical of you, so we weren’t too worried.”
At a hundred or so feet above the ground, and that ground coming up VERY quickly now, I remembered to look up at the horizon and not down at the ground, as per my training. The ground comes up so fast, you’ll always misjudge your landing if you stare down at the dirt in order to time your roll/fall. Instead, you are to look at the horizon and prepare yourself to act as soon as your legs make contact. Which I did. I rolled/fell immediately upon impact, and I was okay.
Although, man, when you finally touch earth, you hit it hard.
My best friend Steve came running over from around the hill, super8 camera in hand. I quickly restaged my landing for humorous effect. Getting up slowly from the high grass, I feigned a comical look on my face depicting the effects of a jostled brain after landing. Amelie came running over soon thereafter. Her expression was a curious combination of elation and apology as she saw me standing there safe, unscathed and un-tree impaled. She breathlessly told me all about how they had forgotten to man the arrow and how she gave them a proper tongue-lashing.
I remember that for at least a week after doing this, I felt invincible, like I could do it over and over again. But now?
Uh-uh.
Screw THAT noise.
*I am SO cheating.
25/177
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Monday, June 25, 2007
Both cool AND weird: check out Neil Gaiman's blog! (22/190)
Hi.
Well, I have one week left to finish up the first draft of my screenplay for SCRIPT FRENZY.
If I do somehow accomplish it, most definitely it'll need another draft because the first draft will be CRAVING improvements left and right.
But...
that's not why I'm posting right now.
In this crazy world of blogs and bloggers, it's a strange phenomenon, I think, to be able to anonymously rub elbows with famous people and the such through their blogs.
One of those celebrities whose blog I occasionally I take a peek at is Neil Gaiman's.
Besides the fact that it's NEIL GAIMAN'S blog (he is the legendary writer behind the Sandman comic book from Vertigo/DC and author of several fantasy books including Stardust and American Gods ), it's also cool to check it out because of his curious intineraries and people he calls pals that appear in the blog.
Like, one day I was checking out the thing and he was talking about this wedding he was attending.
There was a picture of the groom. He looked like a friendly enough sort, almost like a big leprechaun, whether he was Irish or not. Well, it turned out this large red-faced "pixie" was ... freaking ALAN MOORE!
ALAN MOORE!
The only image I have in my head of freaking ALAN MOORE is of him looking very serious/dour/sinister, with long, LONG hair hanging down from his head, unglamourously, almost like a cape about his face.
He looked seriously dangerous or seriously humorless.
And that's always the image I have of him in my head.
And then... this Lucky Charms thing!
Anyways, he married his long-time girlfriend, Melinda, the artist for the self-described pornographic comic, LOST GIRLS, which Moore also wrote.
But, that's ALSO NOT why I write about Senor Gaiman's blog.
Why is this: for two weeks, Gaiman has a guest blogger taking over posting duties, and this guest blogger is his daughter, Maddy Gaiman.
I just find the whole business of reading this stuff a bit screwy. And charming. And just so cool and weird.
So, thought I'd share.
Here's her first post.
22/190
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Well, I have one week left to finish up the first draft of my screenplay for SCRIPT FRENZY.
If I do somehow accomplish it, most definitely it'll need another draft because the first draft will be CRAVING improvements left and right.
But...
that's not why I'm posting right now.
In this crazy world of blogs and bloggers, it's a strange phenomenon, I think, to be able to anonymously rub elbows with famous people and the such through their blogs.
One of those celebrities whose blog I occasionally I take a peek at is Neil Gaiman's.
Besides the fact that it's NEIL GAIMAN'S blog (he is the legendary writer behind the Sandman comic book from Vertigo/DC and author of several fantasy books including Stardust and American Gods ), it's also cool to check it out because of his curious intineraries and people he calls pals that appear in the blog.
Like, one day I was checking out the thing and he was talking about this wedding he was attending.
There was a picture of the groom. He looked like a friendly enough sort, almost like a big leprechaun, whether he was Irish or not. Well, it turned out this large red-faced "pixie" was ... freaking ALAN MOORE!
ALAN MOORE!
The only image I have in my head of freaking ALAN MOORE is of him looking very serious/dour/sinister, with long, LONG hair hanging down from his head, unglamourously, almost like a cape about his face.
He looked seriously dangerous or seriously humorless.
And that's always the image I have of him in my head.
And then... this Lucky Charms thing!
Anyways, he married his long-time girlfriend, Melinda, the artist for the self-described pornographic comic, LOST GIRLS, which Moore also wrote.
But, that's ALSO NOT why I write about Senor Gaiman's blog.
Why is this: for two weeks, Gaiman has a guest blogger taking over posting duties, and this guest blogger is his daughter, Maddy Gaiman.
I just find the whole business of reading this stuff a bit screwy. And charming. And just so cool and weird.
So, thought I'd share.
Here's her first post.
22/190
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
8 THINGS MEME: Part One, Items 1-3 (20/209)
Okay, I took up the challenge to do this meme from Sylvanwitch.
And boy, I am reminded yet again how indulgently long-winded I am. Therefore, Part One of this supposedly quick, disposable meme.
But, that means I get another blog post out of it! Yes!
The rules are as follows (courtesy SW):
1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (I'll tag you, but don't feel obligated.)
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
8 BRIEF FACTS ABOUT ME:
1. T, MY NAME IS NOT ALICE
If I remember correctly, I’m named after a character from a book my mom was reading (or had read), and he was a knight: Sir Terence. (And that’s how I spell it: one “r”, no “a’s”). I mention this in case there’s any confusion as to why a guy who’s Dutch-Chinese-German-Indonesian has an Irish first name.
…and that’s wrong.
Terence is NOT Irish. Crap. All these years I was mistaken. I googled to double-check ethnic origins of my first name and apparently Terence is Latin in origin, from Terentius. D’oh! Also, according to this little chart, it’s a popular first name (top 1000), peaking in 1950-60, in the top 300. So, I’m part of the popularity herd (I was born in ’60). Or a bunch of moms really dug this mysterious book.
Ut-everway.*
*Okay, this was a confusing attempt at Pig-Latin (get it? Yeah, I’m lame). The problem of course, was trying to make it readable to get the right pronunciation, because to just drop the “w” would leave you with “hateverway”, which LOOKS like it reads as, “HAT-everway,” doesn’t it? So, I attempted to spell it semi-phonetically. Mixed results ensued. Curses!, he cursed.
2. I, NUDIUS
For several minutes, I walked about in public in the nude in broad daylight. It was on the nude section of a beach in the Netherlands when I was 18. It took a while to walk to that section of the beach, too, from the regular public area where my mom and relatives were situated. But, determined to find it, I kept trucking. I realized I was getting closer when I’d see occasional “foxholes” in the sand where I briefly spied very undressed couples lying in them. Finally, I arrived: there was a large sign erected, written in several languages, explaining that this was the nude section of the beach.
A lot of the flesh-baring sun-lovers there were mostly middle-aged or older. Although, chasing after each other in the waves, playing, were a couple naked young men. I took a deep breath, yanked off my swim trunks, and pseudo-calmly walked on au naturel.
Other then the two young men, there weren’t any real leering memories I have of the experience, no feverish memories of hot naked young Dutch maidens bronzing in the altogether on the sand, perhaps wearing only wooden flip-flops.
The public beach did allow topless bathing, so I was able to get my eyeful that day, oh, don’t you worry, troubled readers.
Back at the El Nudo Sands, I saw a very old guy, all dressed up in a black suit, stooped over considerably, making his way with a cane as he went across the sand. But, as I said, mostly older, flabby people were displaying their sensual wares.
Another guy (in his 30s, 40s?) walked along starkly and as he reached the multi-lingual sign, almost without breaking stride, simply bent over and put on his trunks and continued walking into the non-nude section of the beach.
Finally, when I saw a couple unattended German Shepherds roaming the beach and water, their tongues hanging out hungrily, I nervously threw on my trunks to protect my modest but unprotected dangling meat.
3. THE SUMMER I STARTED THERAPY
I skydived once from 3,000 feet.
Ah! I remember it well!
I jumped out of a small airplane, and it was only at that point, when I left the safety of the plane, that I discovered that Lady Luck had decided to stiff me that day and, instead, she had taken this one inopportune opportunity to attend a sale at the mall, because my chute refused to open.
After my initial panic, I calmly assessed my situation, and then decided on my best course of action, which was… to start flapping my arms like a delirious, desperate bastard while simultaneously praying (although, it sounded more like hysterical girlish screaming. At best, it was hysterical girlish screaming in tongues.) Somehow, though, through sheer will, adrenaline - whatever - I actually defied physical logic enough to slow my whistling descent to the degree that my dark-green jumpsuit was no longer in danger of bursting into flames from friction.
My featherless, flapping, gibberish-screaming body crashed into a conveniently placed old barn, leaving a hole in the wooden roof that was distinctly in the shape of my body, just like a cartoon (it’s not just a funny bit, it’s physics!). Although my one eye was skewered upon entry by a sliver the size of a chopstick, the other eye that was more adept at winking and signaling morse code was still operational, and for a fraction of a split second, I saw a soft bed of hay beneath me.
Perhaps God had a miracle up his sleeve yet.
I reflexively cried, “Yes!” in optimistic jubilation. Unfortunately, bad luck trumped the Almighty (damn you, damn mall sale!), because there was a pitchfork in the hay as well. While still screaming “Yes!”, I was impaled on the business end of said fork, which had been left standing pointy-side up against a hay bale (uh, one word: “fucking unsafe you fucking farmer fucks!” ). Because of the speed of my descent, my body did not stop at all at the point of four-tined quadruple-puncture impact, and instead, my body quickly ran the length of the handle and rammed to an abrupt, dusty stop into the dirt floor, forcing another body shaped imprint, this time several inches deep into the earth. Since I hadn’t the time to finish screaming “Yes!” like a deluded idiot, the ground crammed immediately into my screaming maw, where it then exited by squirting out of both my ears like I was some Charles Addams themed Play-Doh Factory. The pitch fork’s tines had struck me squarely in the chest, and surreally, tore out both my lungs, which hung grotesquely like a bloody, spongy mop over my flattened carcass.
And that’s how I died that summer day in the 80s.
At my funeral, that irresponsible clothes-whore, Ms. Luck, was appropriately apologetic looking, while still looking stunning in the new floral print dress and wide brimmed hat she bought at the mall…
Okay, seriously, I actually DID skydive from 3,000 feet.
And after twenty-plus years, I remember it, um, okay.
If you want to read my recollection of that day, go here. I originally had it here, but it runs roughly 2700 words, and for the simple concept of an "8 Things meme", it seemed overwhelming. So, I've decided to break it off and post it as a separate entry.
Meanwhile, I WILL finish this meme, just not right now, because, um, I'm a bonehead.
NOTE: I’ll tag my people after I finish the 8 items in Part Two, coming soon…
Later!
Oh, and P.S.: I would include a link to Sylvanwitch's original post, except it's a locked blog entry, so no "general public readers" can read it. Sorry. And hence.
20/209
Project 365 : first / previous / next
And boy, I am reminded yet again how indulgently long-winded I am. Therefore, Part One of this supposedly quick, disposable meme.
But, that means I get another blog post out of it! Yes!
The rules are as follows (courtesy SW):
1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (I'll tag you, but don't feel obligated.)
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
8 BRIEF FACTS ABOUT ME:
1. T, MY NAME IS NOT ALICE
If I remember correctly, I’m named after a character from a book my mom was reading (or had read), and he was a knight: Sir Terence. (And that’s how I spell it: one “r”, no “a’s”). I mention this in case there’s any confusion as to why a guy who’s Dutch-Chinese-German-Indonesian has an Irish first name.
…and that’s wrong.
Terence is NOT Irish. Crap. All these years I was mistaken. I googled to double-check ethnic origins of my first name and apparently Terence is Latin in origin, from Terentius. D’oh! Also, according to this little chart, it’s a popular first name (top 1000), peaking in 1950-60, in the top 300. So, I’m part of the popularity herd (I was born in ’60). Or a bunch of moms really dug this mysterious book.
Ut-everway.*
*Okay, this was a confusing attempt at Pig-Latin (get it? Yeah, I’m lame). The problem of course, was trying to make it readable to get the right pronunciation, because to just drop the “w” would leave you with “hateverway”, which LOOKS like it reads as, “HAT-everway,” doesn’t it? So, I attempted to spell it semi-phonetically. Mixed results ensued. Curses!, he cursed.
2. I, NUDIUS
For several minutes, I walked about in public in the nude in broad daylight. It was on the nude section of a beach in the Netherlands when I was 18. It took a while to walk to that section of the beach, too, from the regular public area where my mom and relatives were situated. But, determined to find it, I kept trucking. I realized I was getting closer when I’d see occasional “foxholes” in the sand where I briefly spied very undressed couples lying in them. Finally, I arrived: there was a large sign erected, written in several languages, explaining that this was the nude section of the beach.
A lot of the flesh-baring sun-lovers there were mostly middle-aged or older. Although, chasing after each other in the waves, playing, were a couple naked young men. I took a deep breath, yanked off my swim trunks, and pseudo-calmly walked on au naturel.
Other then the two young men, there weren’t any real leering memories I have of the experience, no feverish memories of hot naked young Dutch maidens bronzing in the altogether on the sand, perhaps wearing only wooden flip-flops.
The public beach did allow topless bathing, so I was able to get my eyeful that day, oh, don’t you worry, troubled readers.
Back at the El Nudo Sands, I saw a very old guy, all dressed up in a black suit, stooped over considerably, making his way with a cane as he went across the sand. But, as I said, mostly older, flabby people were displaying their sensual wares.
Another guy (in his 30s, 40s?) walked along starkly and as he reached the multi-lingual sign, almost without breaking stride, simply bent over and put on his trunks and continued walking into the non-nude section of the beach.
Finally, when I saw a couple unattended German Shepherds roaming the beach and water, their tongues hanging out hungrily, I nervously threw on my trunks to protect my modest but unprotected dangling meat.
3. THE SUMMER I STARTED THERAPY
I skydived once from 3,000 feet.
Ah! I remember it well!
I jumped out of a small airplane, and it was only at that point, when I left the safety of the plane, that I discovered that Lady Luck had decided to stiff me that day and, instead, she had taken this one inopportune opportunity to attend a sale at the mall, because my chute refused to open.
After my initial panic, I calmly assessed my situation, and then decided on my best course of action, which was… to start flapping my arms like a delirious, desperate bastard while simultaneously praying (although, it sounded more like hysterical girlish screaming. At best, it was hysterical girlish screaming in tongues.) Somehow, though, through sheer will, adrenaline - whatever - I actually defied physical logic enough to slow my whistling descent to the degree that my dark-green jumpsuit was no longer in danger of bursting into flames from friction.
My featherless, flapping, gibberish-screaming body crashed into a conveniently placed old barn, leaving a hole in the wooden roof that was distinctly in the shape of my body, just like a cartoon (it’s not just a funny bit, it’s physics!). Although my one eye was skewered upon entry by a sliver the size of a chopstick, the other eye that was more adept at winking and signaling morse code was still operational, and for a fraction of a split second, I saw a soft bed of hay beneath me.
Perhaps God had a miracle up his sleeve yet.
I reflexively cried, “Yes!” in optimistic jubilation. Unfortunately, bad luck trumped the Almighty (damn you, damn mall sale!), because there was a pitchfork in the hay as well. While still screaming “Yes!”, I was impaled on the business end of said fork, which had been left standing pointy-side up against a hay bale (uh, one word: “fucking unsafe you fucking farmer fucks!” ). Because of the speed of my descent, my body did not stop at all at the point of four-tined quadruple-puncture impact, and instead, my body quickly ran the length of the handle and rammed to an abrupt, dusty stop into the dirt floor, forcing another body shaped imprint, this time several inches deep into the earth. Since I hadn’t the time to finish screaming “Yes!” like a deluded idiot, the ground crammed immediately into my screaming maw, where it then exited by squirting out of both my ears like I was some Charles Addams themed Play-Doh Factory. The pitch fork’s tines had struck me squarely in the chest, and surreally, tore out both my lungs, which hung grotesquely like a bloody, spongy mop over my flattened carcass.
And that’s how I died that summer day in the 80s.
At my funeral, that irresponsible clothes-whore, Ms. Luck, was appropriately apologetic looking, while still looking stunning in the new floral print dress and wide brimmed hat she bought at the mall…
Okay, seriously, I actually DID skydive from 3,000 feet.
And after twenty-plus years, I remember it, um, okay.
If you want to read my recollection of that day, go here. I originally had it here, but it runs roughly 2700 words, and for the simple concept of an "8 Things meme", it seemed overwhelming. So, I've decided to break it off and post it as a separate entry.
Meanwhile, I WILL finish this meme, just not right now, because, um, I'm a bonehead.
NOTE: I’ll tag my people after I finish the 8 items in Part Two, coming soon…
Later!
Oh, and P.S.: I would include a link to Sylvanwitch's original post, except it's a locked blog entry, so no "general public readers" can read it. Sorry. And hence.
20/209
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Surreal sparrows: more dream fragments (12/269)
Man, I started this post, like, a while ago, at least a few weeks.
Mainly, I was just happy that I’ve been waking up with some faint memories of dreams lingering about my skull. It’s been a long, long drought for me. Hence, the screwy, artsy-fartsy, briefly alliterative, Capistrano reference.
I still haven’t dug out that breathing machine again—that $1000 breathing machine—that we purchased to address my sleep apnea, but I think I’ve been trying to sleep longer lately. Which is sort of an explanation why I haven’t posted much recently, but not entirely. Anyways, longer durations of unconsciousness may be a simple explanation for the fitful re-appearance of dreams in my life.
But, I’m a little annoyed that I’m having difficulty remembering these damn dreams! Is it because I’m out of “practice”?
Like a couple days ago: I had some dream where Bruce Springsteen was involved. Somehow. I don’t know how. That’s my point. I don’t remember anything else.
And this morning, there seemed to be a lot of business going on in my head with rain slickers, yellow rain coats, maybe other kinds of rain gear, but there was a lot of putting them on and taking them off, and there were SIGNIFICANT REASONS as to why, but those reasons escaped me upon awakening.
Grrr!
A few weeks ago I had a long dream that focused on some fictional celebrity figure, at least in the scenario I dreamt. In the same way that Bill Gates of Windows notoriety or Steve Jobs of Apple fame have become famous and influential figures upon our society, this imaginary dream personality had made an equally significant impression on our lives and they way we lived.
But the specifics..? Ah, couldn’t really tell you.
He had something to do with our everyday architecture and the way we looked at constructing our cities, professionally and residentially.
He was a popular philosopher, spouting practical, thoughtful, insightful wisdom that was accessible to the masses, like Christ’s proverbs or, um, I guess Confucius’ cookie fortunes (sorry, that was sort of meant as a joke but I guess that came across really dismissively), but he also was a genuine genius, like R. Buckminster Fuller, so that when you met him and heard his casual but enthusiastic discussion of his thoughts and ideas, there was no denying his brilliance.
And he very cleverly disseminated his thoughts/proverbs/fortunes via… origami. There would be mass-produced folded paper birds, the kind where you pull the tail and the wings gently flap?
Except, in the dream, instead of delicate and beautiful, the one origami sample I held was pretty fat and clumsy looking. Picture the aforementioned paper bird and now add a huge-ass cube for a body. Like the size of a Chinese food container.
The “idea” in the dream was that it was pretty impressive and wondrous to behold, like, “ooh, how did they do that?” But in waking hindsight, it was pretty un-wondrous and quite laughable.
But all over this fat paper bird were handwritten this wunderkind dude’s aphorisms, with those magnetic ink markers. Gold or bronze colored ink. And I remember in the dream trying my damndest to remember one of these wise gems.
Of course, no such luck.
And the kicker?
This guy had something to do with skateboarding.
He rose out of the ranks of skateboarders.
But I never saw him. I just knew of his existence and his impact on “our” world.
Weird, man.
But, I’m dreaming again!
And THAT’S what makes me happy.
12/269
Project 365: first / previous / next
Mainly, I was just happy that I’ve been waking up with some faint memories of dreams lingering about my skull. It’s been a long, long drought for me. Hence, the screwy, artsy-fartsy, briefly alliterative, Capistrano reference.
I still haven’t dug out that breathing machine again—that $1000 breathing machine—that we purchased to address my sleep apnea, but I think I’ve been trying to sleep longer lately. Which is sort of an explanation why I haven’t posted much recently, but not entirely. Anyways, longer durations of unconsciousness may be a simple explanation for the fitful re-appearance of dreams in my life.
But, I’m a little annoyed that I’m having difficulty remembering these damn dreams! Is it because I’m out of “practice”?
Like a couple days ago: I had some dream where Bruce Springsteen was involved. Somehow. I don’t know how. That’s my point. I don’t remember anything else.
And this morning, there seemed to be a lot of business going on in my head with rain slickers, yellow rain coats, maybe other kinds of rain gear, but there was a lot of putting them on and taking them off, and there were SIGNIFICANT REASONS as to why, but those reasons escaped me upon awakening.
Grrr!
A few weeks ago I had a long dream that focused on some fictional celebrity figure, at least in the scenario I dreamt. In the same way that Bill Gates of Windows notoriety or Steve Jobs of Apple fame have become famous and influential figures upon our society, this imaginary dream personality had made an equally significant impression on our lives and they way we lived.
But the specifics..? Ah, couldn’t really tell you.
He had something to do with our everyday architecture and the way we looked at constructing our cities, professionally and residentially.
He was a popular philosopher, spouting practical, thoughtful, insightful wisdom that was accessible to the masses, like Christ’s proverbs or, um, I guess Confucius’ cookie fortunes (sorry, that was sort of meant as a joke but I guess that came across really dismissively), but he also was a genuine genius, like R. Buckminster Fuller, so that when you met him and heard his casual but enthusiastic discussion of his thoughts and ideas, there was no denying his brilliance.
And he very cleverly disseminated his thoughts/proverbs/fortunes via… origami. There would be mass-produced folded paper birds, the kind where you pull the tail and the wings gently flap?
Except, in the dream, instead of delicate and beautiful, the one origami sample I held was pretty fat and clumsy looking. Picture the aforementioned paper bird and now add a huge-ass cube for a body. Like the size of a Chinese food container.
The “idea” in the dream was that it was pretty impressive and wondrous to behold, like, “ooh, how did they do that?” But in waking hindsight, it was pretty un-wondrous and quite laughable.
But all over this fat paper bird were handwritten this wunderkind dude’s aphorisms, with those magnetic ink markers. Gold or bronze colored ink. And I remember in the dream trying my damndest to remember one of these wise gems.
Of course, no such luck.
And the kicker?
This guy had something to do with skateboarding.
He rose out of the ranks of skateboarders.
But I never saw him. I just knew of his existence and his impact on “our” world.
Weird, man.
But, I’m dreaming again!
And THAT’S what makes me happy.
12/269
Project 365: first / previous / next
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Dear Diary: The Whining Game (11/292)
Published March 15, 2:25 pm
Good lord.
I canNOT believe how bad I am at this.
And “this” refers to two different things: maintaining my blogs and living like a human being.
Last week I attempted to inject some posts into my three blogs, because I haven’t been keeping up with that as much as I’d like. So I attempted a “Blog Post Cram Week,” which, strangely, at face value, actually accomplished a teeny bit of what I was trying to accomplish: create more blog posts within a specific period of time. But, I couldn’t even maintain a daily output. I did four. In a week.
Gah.
I have ideas for posts (well, “topics” may be more accurate; “ideas” sounds much more original than what I have in mind), I just can’t seem to get my brain on track to process what I want to say and thus articulate those ideas into any coherent or worthwhile writing.
Say… maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I don’t actually write as well as I think I can. A fact I’m reminded of each time I try reading the crap I’m trying to assemble together.
So, I’m a crappy writer or an inconsistent one at best. I have some moments, but in general, it’s forgettable stuff.
And maybe I’m not that inspired or insightful in my observations, either. Yippee… just some more humility fodder for me to gnaw on bitterly.
Grrrr….*
In opposition to this realization of my failings is my self-awareness and public reputation (amongst my friends) for having a penchant for not finishing or following through on my ideas.
So as I delay posting pieces that I’m (futilely) wrestling with until I “like” them, time trundles on like it do, has did, and will does (ha ha ha ha… Boy, THAT was seriously self-indulgent… but it cracked ME up)…
Which is more important? To try and write better OR try and produce more material for my blog -- my clumsy/gratuitously indulgent writing and lame thoughts be damned?
Umm…
Well, considering that my attempt at improving something (like a drawing, as a for instance) usually means re-working/erasing and re-drawing a piece continually within an inch of its life, and STILL not finishing it because I continue to be dissatisfied with my efforts, then perhaps it’s time to be focused on completing things FIRST and my so-called “quality control” can take a backseat for a little bit.
Having said that, be prepared, oh, sweet, disinterested reader, for some lame-ass movie and comic book reviews, among other things, to come.
MEANwhile…
I am not very happy with the way I’m living my life. I think I’m doing a bad job of it.
Since my mom died-- besides trying to deal with that emotional development, which has been going alright (I think)-- I’ve been mostly trying to assert myself more in terms of the way I live. Like, trying to live my life like it means something to me, like actually pursue those things I’d like to do before I move on to the next phase of my soul-journey (i.e., croak).
Now, part of me is well aware of the expression, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
A corollary to that would probably be, “okay, MAYBE you can, but the learning of the new trick ain’t gonna happen overnight, that’s for DAMN sure.”
Recently, there were some indications at work that things were looking brighter in terms of my shift schedule.
A month or so ago, my company bought up another local printing company, which was located in the Hamburg (south of Buffalo) area. We print a weekly shopper type of paper, delivered free to homes and financed through the various types of advertising our sales staff is able to sell. The company we bought out printed a similar product but not as many editions, roughly half as many as we print.
Now that we own this other company, we now print their additional papers, too. These new runs are referred to as our “South” editions.
Over a year ago, in an attempt to attract more advertisers, my company added a day to our advertising deadlines (at least for two-thirds of our editions), moving it from Thursday to Friday. But, we also tried to deliver our papers on the same weekend schedule that we always had. What that meant was, where we once used to print all twenty editions on a Friday during the day, starting at 5:00 am and finishing when we were done, approximately 10-12 hours later, the total number of editions were now split into three, with one-third to be printed Thursday overnight, and the other two-thirds to be printed Friday overnight, so that the papers would still be ready Saturday morning. With two presses and two press crews available, this meant both crews working a Friday graveyard shift each week, and alternating the duties of printing on a Thursday graveyard shift. Originally the night shift started at 1:00am, which was brutal. But over several months, it’s now evolved to 9:00 pm, which is brutal in a different way, but the way positive side is you get done earlier in the morning, like 3:00-5:00 am.
Personally, I disliked working this so-called third or graveyard shift. My body and mind always fought against having to go to bed in the late afternoon to rest up for the upcoming shift, and generally speaking, when you’re working a third shift, you usually do a whole week of it, so theoretically your body adjusts to the different schedule, not just one or two days suddenly tacked on at the end of the week.
Plus, working Friday night into early Saturday morning always screwed up my sleep and rest on Saturday, so my weekend seemed like only a partial weekend, like one and a half days.
But, what are you gonna do? Well, I suppose if it really bothered you, you could find another job, and when I say “you,” I guess I mean “me.” And apparently it never bothered me enough to do that, never bothered me enough to go beyond being bitchy and crabby on those days I did the “stupid” shifts.
ANYways… so we now have these new guys added to our web press staff from the company we bought.
The Thursday night and Friday night shifts are staying the same, but Friday also has a day shift running the “South” editions, starting at 6:00 am and finishing when we’re done, which has been around 5:00-5:30 pm. So I figured we were going into a big rotation of schedules: one week you do Thursday night, one week you do Thursday and Friday night, and finally, one week you do Friday day.
Rinse.
Repeat.
‘Til you die!
Well, after a month or so of the Hamburg guys working with us, I’ve been scheduled the Friday day shift three times out of four. The second time I was scheduled (rather than getting the double graveyard shift) the reason I got was that one of the pressman was on vacation so this was more of a seniority issue. I somehow have become the “senior rollman,” mostly through other guys quitting or getting fired, not through some cool Thunderdome scenario, and my boss who was helping one of the Hamburg pressmen run the “South” editions on Friday wanted me to do the rolls (loading the paper into the stands). Normally my boss just supervises, he doesn’t actually run anything.
Well, okay. That made some sense.
But then, last week, it seems that the new guys don’t really like the new Friday day shift. When they used to run their papers at Hamburg, I think the editions were split up over a couple days. But for our company’s purposes now, it makes more sense to gun through them on one day at the end of the week, hence...
So, they don’t seem to like the extended shift. They’d rather run a shorter shift (6-7 hours, more or less) on the graveyard shift.
Huh.
So, my boss asked me if I had a preference for the Friday day or the graveyard shifts and I coolly said: “Ooh! Ooh! Friday day! Friday day!”
Starting work at 6:00 am and working 11-12 hours be freaking damned: it would be a return to “Thank God it’s Friday!” and going home to a Friday night at home ALL NIGHT long, and waking up in my own bed to a whole day of a Saturday.
Plus, the other issue was the serious possibility of my flirting with a car accident driving home from a graveyard shift. I’ve had my issues staying awake in the past while driving.
There are numerous anecdotes of me sort of zoning out while standing up at work around 2 or 3 in the morning.
So, I figured from a safety perspective alone, the biggest plus to working Friday days and saying adios to the night shift was safety.
Which is why rear-ending that car driving home from work late Friday afternoon pissed me off so fucking much.
Usually, when I leave for home after a night shift, I stop by at a McDonald’s and order me a bunch of food to eat on the way home. Well, I sometimes do that after a regular shift, too. That’s how I usually deal with being tired when I drive, unless I have no food or am REALLY tired. Then I just pull over into a convenient parking lot and snooze for a half-hour or two.
Well, I was about 15 minutes away from home and I was starting to get really tired. There was a market I was passing by but I figured I’d only be picking up cookies or potato chips to eat if I went there, which didn’t seem very healthy. Tim Horton’s was also nearby but a bunch of sweet Timbits also seemed a bad choice.
Five minutes later, I’m thinking, no, I should really get something to eat to get me home the last little bit. I keep drifting off. Suck! Maybe that Arby’s coming up in a couple minutes, get me a couple cheddar beef sandwiches...? Shoot, I’m always eating fast food! If only I could focus on getting home, just get home. Crap, I think I really need to eat something, though. Okay, Arby’s. Haven’t eaten there in a while. Cheddar roast beef sounds…
BANG!
I zoned out just long enough, that the guy in front of me, who had to suddenly slow down because the guy in front of him suddenly turned into a parking lot, had the swell fortune of me introducing my Ford Contour to his car’s ass-end.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.**
God, I was in SUCH a crappy mood after that incident. The guy I drove into was nice and calm and seemed content, if not eager, to try and fix his loose bumper himself. Yeah, his car looked fine. The bumper moved a little when you pushed on it. I asked him if he could still open his trunk and he tried it and could. (Unfortunately, this question comes from a previous experience YEARS ago of me inflicting damage on another poor motorist’s rear-end). Anyways, this dude didn’t seem anxious to get his insurance company involved and I was miserable and guilty enough not to pursue it. Okay, I did scribble his license plate number down from memory on a greasy napkin, just in case I actually screwed myself by not having any of his info. Meanwhile, I must’ve slid under his bumper and his trailer hitch destroyed my grill and punched a dent into my car’s nose above my bumper, just right of center, shattering my driver’s side headlight frame, and crimping the edge of my hood.
“Safer shift,” my ass. I suck.
That night I was in a plenty shitty mood.
I said barely anything to my wife. I had no words. I was just bile-filled and darkly clouded, which really made me a prick to deal with because I was cleaning up our living room. My wife had some people visiting the house the next day, so I had to remove my clutter, so, you know, they had some place to sit down. I had dragged down a bunch of crap from my workroom to the living room in an effort to clean it out, but that (the workroom rehab) was still taking forever. So I was slowly returning said crap to same messy room.
But my dark, bitter silence was being misinterpreted by my poor wife as anger and resentment towards her for having to clean for her benefit, which was not the case at all.
But I never corrected her. I just stewed in ugly silence.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I finally blurted out to her about my accident.
She was very understanding, undeservedly, and said I should be able to tell her things like that.
I can. I really can.
I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time the previous night to do so.
Anyways.
Cue long, long, long sigh.
Eh.
Que sera sera.
11/292
Project 365: first / previous / next
*Hey, look at me! I’ve magically turned into an irritable little dog!
**For a suitable interpretation of these last two lines, you may want to check out Rod Steiger’s performance as a Mississippi police chief in 1967’s IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT when he learns that Sidney Poitier, the black man he picked up at a train station for suspicion of murder, is a homicide detective from Philadelphia visiting his mother. Totally different circumstances. Similar emotional reaction.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Dream... (9/308)
I woke up from a dream tonight.
Which is cool, because it seems I haven't dreamt for the longest time. I used to dream alot, but that seems like years and years ago.
I love my dreams, even the scary ones, and I try to remember them, for story ideas or self-analysis, or most likely, both.
But a few years ago, I was disagnosed with sleep apnea and I got one of those machines where you wear the breathing mask at night. Well, for a short period of time I was wearing it, but then I stopped and it's been a couple years since I have. The last couple times I did, I woke up in the middle of the night with my throat really sore from being dried out, an occasional consequence from the breathing mask and forced air. For those people with sleep apnea that use the machine and also suffer from a dried out throat, they have another machine with a water reservoir, which I guess acts like a humidifier for your throat.
But, I haven't gotten off my fat ass to go about getting one.
And I really should. Because if I'm not sleeping properly, I'm probably setting up my heart for an early heart attack, and that, dear bored readers (ooh, plural! I'm being optimistic!), will completely screw up my strategy to live at least as long as my dad in order to squeeze in some sort of creative career that I never seemed to have pursued properly while I was younger.
I just turned 47, my dad's 81, and my mom just died: the theoretical prescriptive elements for motivation to step out on my journey of creativity.
Uh, more on that at a later date.
But the dream, the dream...
Unfortunately, it's a bit unclear.
Apparently I knew this guy who somehow wound up on the wrong end of a chase/warrant from the authorities.
I'm in someone's apartment and the hunted friend is there and also one of the "feds"(?). The fed reminds me facially, a little, of actor Aaron Eckhart (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING).
I seem to have gotten into some conversation with Agent Eckhart that there's been a mistake.
My "fugitive/hunted/whatever friend" is always in the background, never fully appearing front and center in the dream. I seem to have gotten involved enough in this scenario because of him that I've replaced him in terms of importance.
Anyways, through some vague chain of circumstances, the feds are after my pal (and me because I'm with him). Is my friend Native American? He's not white, which is my sense of him, not becauise I really ever see him clearly in front of me. I wonder if the semi-recent events of the manhunt for Ralph Bucky Phillips influences this thought (the manhunt took place in the Western New York area, so progress of it was constantly in the local news). Although, nationality-wise, I'm an Indo (Indonesian-European) and that's actually what I was thinking was my friend's nationality as well when I woke up.
But Agent Eckhart seems accessible and I've been trying to reason with him about the circumstances that lead to our being caught up in this manhunt by mistake.
There's the sound of a bullhorn from the street outside? It's daytime.
It's Eckhart's superiors. They're coming in for us.
There's a sense of urgency because of this but I don't seem to be making a point of pleading our case to Eckhart any more urgently.
Suddenly, two older men appear in the apartment, specifically the kitchen. I quickly see them through the kitchen doorway. They came in unseen through a window via the fire escape? They're wearing brown, thick jackets, with a dark red plaid interior lining, like hunting coats, rather than FBI or some other appropriate agency gear.
I also have the sense that their motivation is more corrupt than just bringing in a suspect or fugitive.
NOW I proceed to talk quickly to Eckhart explaining the details of our involvement.
My friend (and by implication, me-- I guess I was tagging along) came to this apartment to visit someone. But that someone was part of this investigation. My friend was not involved with what Eckhart's superiors think he was involved with. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eckhart doesn't know what to do. I can tell he's thinking and he knows he has no time to process this.
My feeling is, it's not a matter of just going with the authorities and straightening it out back at headquarters. If we get taken in, that's it.
I look back at the other two men and suddenly one has a hunting rifle and he's raising it to his eye, taking aim towards me. The other man with him seems to be along for the ride, or at least, letting this one dude take the lead. Without saying anything, their body language seems to say that they're on a hunt as hunters not a manhunt as federal authorities. This further informs my sense that they are corrupt and are hunting us down to conceal some sort of evidence of wrong-doing.
I suddenly run towards a back door and stuff explodes off a nearby dining room table as a shot is fired at me.
As I scramble to escape, apparently I ain't in the mood for this being chased and shot at shit because I struggle to pull myself out of the dream.
I open my eyes and I'm on the couch, Kody (short for Kodiak) is a warm ball next to my chest.
I fumble for my glasses on the cluttered table next to me and I see it's only 12:40 am.
I thought it was going to be 3 or 4 in the morning.
Oh, crap. I remember I left my car in the street...
My explanation of the circumstances that led us to being chased seemed more complicated in the telling to Agent Eckhart, but it seeemed to make sense.
In my re-telling here, I told it more clearly and it made sense, but it's quite possible that my actual explanation made no sense whatsoever during the dream, even if it seemed to make perfect sense.
My lack of urgency after the bullhorn moment makes me think of my mom's recent illness, specifically when she was finally back home.
Part of me has regrets that I wasn't more aggressive in trying to get to the bottom of her sluggish recovery, that perhaps there were signs that she needed to go back to a doctor or the hospital, but I wasn't sensitive to those warning signs. I should have behaved more urgently.
Perhaps that's why I forced myself awake... I know the resolution of this scenario will not be favorable to me.
9/308
Project 365: first / previous / next
Which is cool, because it seems I haven't dreamt for the longest time. I used to dream alot, but that seems like years and years ago.
I love my dreams, even the scary ones, and I try to remember them, for story ideas or self-analysis, or most likely, both.
But a few years ago, I was disagnosed with sleep apnea and I got one of those machines where you wear the breathing mask at night. Well, for a short period of time I was wearing it, but then I stopped and it's been a couple years since I have. The last couple times I did, I woke up in the middle of the night with my throat really sore from being dried out, an occasional consequence from the breathing mask and forced air. For those people with sleep apnea that use the machine and also suffer from a dried out throat, they have another machine with a water reservoir, which I guess acts like a humidifier for your throat.
But, I haven't gotten off my fat ass to go about getting one.
And I really should. Because if I'm not sleeping properly, I'm probably setting up my heart for an early heart attack, and that, dear bored readers (ooh, plural! I'm being optimistic!), will completely screw up my strategy to live at least as long as my dad in order to squeeze in some sort of creative career that I never seemed to have pursued properly while I was younger.
I just turned 47, my dad's 81, and my mom just died: the theoretical prescriptive elements for motivation to step out on my journey of creativity.
Uh, more on that at a later date.
But the dream, the dream...
Unfortunately, it's a bit unclear.
Apparently I knew this guy who somehow wound up on the wrong end of a chase/warrant from the authorities.
I'm in someone's apartment and the hunted friend is there and also one of the "feds"(?). The fed reminds me facially, a little, of actor Aaron Eckhart (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING).
I seem to have gotten into some conversation with Agent Eckhart that there's been a mistake.
My "fugitive/hunted/whatever friend" is always in the background, never fully appearing front and center in the dream. I seem to have gotten involved enough in this scenario because of him that I've replaced him in terms of importance.
Anyways, through some vague chain of circumstances, the feds are after my pal (and me because I'm with him). Is my friend Native American? He's not white, which is my sense of him, not becauise I really ever see him clearly in front of me. I wonder if the semi-recent events of the manhunt for Ralph Bucky Phillips influences this thought (the manhunt took place in the Western New York area, so progress of it was constantly in the local news). Although, nationality-wise, I'm an Indo (Indonesian-European) and that's actually what I was thinking was my friend's nationality as well when I woke up.
But Agent Eckhart seems accessible and I've been trying to reason with him about the circumstances that lead to our being caught up in this manhunt by mistake.
There's the sound of a bullhorn from the street outside? It's daytime.
It's Eckhart's superiors. They're coming in for us.
There's a sense of urgency because of this but I don't seem to be making a point of pleading our case to Eckhart any more urgently.
Suddenly, two older men appear in the apartment, specifically the kitchen. I quickly see them through the kitchen doorway. They came in unseen through a window via the fire escape? They're wearing brown, thick jackets, with a dark red plaid interior lining, like hunting coats, rather than FBI or some other appropriate agency gear.
I also have the sense that their motivation is more corrupt than just bringing in a suspect or fugitive.
NOW I proceed to talk quickly to Eckhart explaining the details of our involvement.
My friend (and by implication, me-- I guess I was tagging along) came to this apartment to visit someone. But that someone was part of this investigation. My friend was not involved with what Eckhart's superiors think he was involved with. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eckhart doesn't know what to do. I can tell he's thinking and he knows he has no time to process this.
My feeling is, it's not a matter of just going with the authorities and straightening it out back at headquarters. If we get taken in, that's it.
I look back at the other two men and suddenly one has a hunting rifle and he's raising it to his eye, taking aim towards me. The other man with him seems to be along for the ride, or at least, letting this one dude take the lead. Without saying anything, their body language seems to say that they're on a hunt as hunters not a manhunt as federal authorities. This further informs my sense that they are corrupt and are hunting us down to conceal some sort of evidence of wrong-doing.
I suddenly run towards a back door and stuff explodes off a nearby dining room table as a shot is fired at me.
As I scramble to escape, apparently I ain't in the mood for this being chased and shot at shit because I struggle to pull myself out of the dream.
I open my eyes and I'm on the couch, Kody (short for Kodiak) is a warm ball next to my chest.
I fumble for my glasses on the cluttered table next to me and I see it's only 12:40 am.
I thought it was going to be 3 or 4 in the morning.
Oh, crap. I remember I left my car in the street...
My explanation of the circumstances that led us to being chased seemed more complicated in the telling to Agent Eckhart, but it seeemed to make sense.
In my re-telling here, I told it more clearly and it made sense, but it's quite possible that my actual explanation made no sense whatsoever during the dream, even if it seemed to make perfect sense.
My lack of urgency after the bullhorn moment makes me think of my mom's recent illness, specifically when she was finally back home.
Part of me has regrets that I wasn't more aggressive in trying to get to the bottom of her sluggish recovery, that perhaps there were signs that she needed to go back to a doctor or the hospital, but I wasn't sensitive to those warning signs. I should have behaved more urgently.
Perhaps that's why I forced myself awake... I know the resolution of this scenario will not be favorable to me.
9/308
Project 365: first / previous / next
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Some sad, terrible news... and beyond (7/312)
A day that I’ve been dreading for the past several years (but doing very little in terms of preparation for) occurred on February 7, 2007.
My mom unexpectedly passed away.
The dread I speak of wasn’t because she was severely or terminally ill for a prolonged period of time. Although, my mom’s health did take a sudden turn for the worse more or less out of the blue on December 7, 2006 and for her it was all downhill from that day on. But my secret anxiety at the inevitable passing of one of my parents came simply from a few facts:
I’m an only child;
aside from my parents, all my blood kin live outside of North America;
and we all succumb to death at some point.
For the last several days I’ve been thinking of various posts I wanted to do relating to my mom in some way, but the most important, initial information of her dying was a stumbling block for me. So, I’m just blurting it out here and I apologize for that.
Understandably, this event has made an impact on me, and in true blogger fashion, I hope to share-- well, process is a better word-- that impact with the “world” via my puny posts.
Yeah.
Anyways, more to come.
Love and kisses,
Elly’s kid
7/312
Project 365: first / previous / next
My mom unexpectedly passed away.
The dread I speak of wasn’t because she was severely or terminally ill for a prolonged period of time. Although, my mom’s health did take a sudden turn for the worse more or less out of the blue on December 7, 2006 and for her it was all downhill from that day on. But my secret anxiety at the inevitable passing of one of my parents came simply from a few facts:
I’m an only child;
aside from my parents, all my blood kin live outside of North America;
and we all succumb to death at some point.
For the last several days I’ve been thinking of various posts I wanted to do relating to my mom in some way, but the most important, initial information of her dying was a stumbling block for me. So, I’m just blurting it out here and I apologize for that.
Understandably, this event has made an impact on me, and in true blogger fashion, I hope to share-- well, process is a better word-- that impact with the “world” via my puny posts.
Yeah.
Anyways, more to come.
Love and kisses,
Elly’s kid
7/312
Project 365: first / previous / next
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Where have I been? What's going on? (4/355)
Gah!
I can't seem to focus on anything!
So, I'm just puking SOMEthing out here before several weeks more go by without posting anything.
Meanwhile, THIS damn blog!
And: yes, yes, YES... I know it's BEYOND stupid that I'm keeping three blogs (on myspace, livejournal, and here on blogger). However, I'm compensating by not really doing much with them... isn't that something?
Seriously, I liked the idea of each blog focusing on an interest of mine, and ultimately, each particular blog being a sort of tool to help me go further into each interest (comics, film). Ultimately, I wanted this pursuit to culminate in my actively creating work in each medium.
Well, my livejournal (movies) is the closest to having any sort of success like that. I've actually worked on a few low-budget movies. Okay, not my own, but helping on others' film projects is still filmmaking. Perhaps this year I can include my own personal projects on that list of filmmaking.
But, this third blog is different, and intentionally. I decided to address my other interests here, the ones that I usually ignore because I'm distracted by my creative daydreaming (or even work and sleep).
Specifically, these are areas that are more intellectual or abstract, I guess, instead of tangible creative pursuits, although comics and film have their intellectual dynamics as well. They just aren't purely intellectual to the degree these topics are.
For instance, I'm talking about: politics, spirituality, charity, and um, other issues i can't think of right now.
I have my opinions, but I usually don't voice them because I only know so much, and I really haven't made the effort to actively expand on what I know and decrease what I don't know (Oh. My. God. I'm starting to descend into Rumsfeld territory here). Actually, "what I know," is a misleading crap statement... "what I know" is more accurately "what I believe to be true," or something that I think of as a "valid theory." Again, having arrived at said (thin) theory, I've usually done very little to try to confirm or deny the theory's validity.
And this is because I'm either cowardly (to learn the truth or defend my views), lazy and/or undisciplined to focus my mind on these topics with any sort of regularity.
Personal cowardice aside, I also think the principle of "out of sight, out of mind" is at work here with regard to these topics. Which is why I think, as a practical example, going to church regularly is good, because at least once a week, theoretically, I'll be forced to consider some of these issues (well, primarily spiritual issues). True, a purely primitive reason for going to church, but isn't that the basic reason why we build a church in the first place?.
But, that's the point where I'm at. Primitive. Simple.
So, in a way, this blog will focus on my weaknesses. Not so much to simply expose them to whoever few readers there are, but hopefully to embarrass me into some sort of action that these subjects seem to imply should be taken. In other words, a discussion on charity seems useless if it doesn't motivate some charitable work of some sort (or is that purely a theory of mine? Ha!).
And it was only a couple nights ago while driving that I articulated this blog's distinction to myself (in terms of its relation to the other two sites): this site focuses on my weaknesses.
But, again, not to denigrate myself for having these weaknesses, but as a starting point for attempting to shore up those weaknesses and perhaps, optimistically, convert them into surprising strengths.
Okay, considering I have fragments of several blog posts on the back burner because I can't seem to finish them for one reason or another, I'll end here and act as if I finished saying something here.
No, seriously. I'm done for today.
4/355
Project 365: previous / first / next
I can't seem to focus on anything!
So, I'm just puking SOMEthing out here before several weeks more go by without posting anything.
Meanwhile, THIS damn blog!
And: yes, yes, YES... I know it's BEYOND stupid that I'm keeping three blogs (on myspace, livejournal, and here on blogger). However, I'm compensating by not really doing much with them... isn't that something?
Seriously, I liked the idea of each blog focusing on an interest of mine, and ultimately, each particular blog being a sort of tool to help me go further into each interest (comics, film). Ultimately, I wanted this pursuit to culminate in my actively creating work in each medium.
Well, my livejournal (movies) is the closest to having any sort of success like that. I've actually worked on a few low-budget movies. Okay, not my own, but helping on others' film projects is still filmmaking. Perhaps this year I can include my own personal projects on that list of filmmaking.
But, this third blog is different, and intentionally. I decided to address my other interests here, the ones that I usually ignore because I'm distracted by my creative daydreaming (or even work and sleep).
Specifically, these are areas that are more intellectual or abstract, I guess, instead of tangible creative pursuits, although comics and film have their intellectual dynamics as well. They just aren't purely intellectual to the degree these topics are.
For instance, I'm talking about: politics, spirituality, charity, and um, other issues i can't think of right now.
I have my opinions, but I usually don't voice them because I only know so much, and I really haven't made the effort to actively expand on what I know and decrease what I don't know (Oh. My. God. I'm starting to descend into Rumsfeld territory here). Actually, "what I know," is a misleading crap statement... "what I know" is more accurately "what I believe to be true," or something that I think of as a "valid theory." Again, having arrived at said (thin) theory, I've usually done very little to try to confirm or deny the theory's validity.
And this is because I'm either cowardly (to learn the truth or defend my views), lazy and/or undisciplined to focus my mind on these topics with any sort of regularity.
Personal cowardice aside, I also think the principle of "out of sight, out of mind" is at work here with regard to these topics. Which is why I think, as a practical example, going to church regularly is good, because at least once a week, theoretically, I'll be forced to consider some of these issues (well, primarily spiritual issues). True, a purely primitive reason for going to church, but isn't that the basic reason why we build a church in the first place?.
But, that's the point where I'm at. Primitive. Simple.
So, in a way, this blog will focus on my weaknesses. Not so much to simply expose them to whoever few readers there are, but hopefully to embarrass me into some sort of action that these subjects seem to imply should be taken. In other words, a discussion on charity seems useless if it doesn't motivate some charitable work of some sort (or is that purely a theory of mine? Ha!).
And it was only a couple nights ago while driving that I articulated this blog's distinction to myself (in terms of its relation to the other two sites): this site focuses on my weaknesses.
But, again, not to denigrate myself for having these weaknesses, but as a starting point for attempting to shore up those weaknesses and perhaps, optimistically, convert them into surprising strengths.
Okay, considering I have fragments of several blog posts on the back burner because I can't seem to finish them for one reason or another, I'll end here and act as if I finished saying something here.
No, seriously. I'm done for today.
4/355
Project 365: previous / first / next
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