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Hi.
This is my old weblog archive and is no longer actively updated. Please visit this link for my current blog.
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Michael's Diary -- 2001-2003 Archive
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8.07.2003
SO I'm brushing my teeth and trimming my beard, getting ready to take a shower, when I notice our slow bathroom drain is no longer draining at all. Just great. Time to plunge it out. I plunge and plunge and plunge and success in nothing but sucking huge amoutns of filthy, jet-black water into the sink, which splashes all over as I plunge. I keep plunging and finally, ahhh, success! The water goes down. Now all I have to do is wipe up the spilled water, decontaimante the surfaces it touched, and all is well.
And then I notice the gushing stream of filthy black water pouring out from the cabinet. The p-trap wasn't properly conected and my vigorus plunging caused it to slide off the drain. The floor was covered with disgusting filty black evil-smelling glop and various under-the-sink items were entirely destroyed. Cleanup took two hours and now one of the Men of Mysterious Eastern European Origin who have been working on the windows is here, Renaissance man that he is, mending the sink and muttering strange guttural oaths under his breath in his indeterminate tongue. Great start to the day! Had to cancle my calls today because of this hideous nightmare.
I will never understand why landlords do stuff on the cheap. It seems to me that cheap shit breaks more easily, leading to more pestering by tenants and less value in the proprty, whereas doing it right makes the property more valuable, and ultimately makes for less trouble as a landlord.
11:34 AM
8.05.2003
Didn't do my writing this evening, though I did do some video work. Tomorrow will be double duty. Gotta get through some Avid chapters tomorrow before I start on the baseball project editing in earnest. Had a better meditation today than yesterday. The hardest thing is to learn to be patient with yourself and your basic tendency to be distracted. Just sitting still for 20 minutes or half an hour focused on your breathing is a lot harder than it sounds.
Feeling better, still have the sense of fighting off a kind of latent gloominess, but realizing it just has to be done to stay the course. In other words . . . don't like it, but I guess I'm learning.
Screenplay-wise I am as far as I have ever been. I have 16 pages done and another 5 at least outlined. That's when things will get tricky but as I have been working through it story ideas have popped out at me. The latest puts a whole new twist on the story. Imagine if Bill Forsyth made a baseball movie. Won't mean much to many of you but that's what I'm going for.
Did quite a few things today. Couldn't remember them though until I checked my planner. Ah, yes. Captured some baseball footage into Avid, helped a customer, talked with my boss, ran some errands, and went to a community cinema thing that really didn't do too much for me. Didn't know anyone there, and fruitful as it might be to introduce myself to people I feel acutely embarassed and uncomfortable doing so. A sign, perhaps, that I should force myself to do it: sometimes making yourself do something uncomfortable is the best thing you can do.
Still, feel only partially productive. Diet went OK today, had some delicious stuff but not too much of it. Well, maybe a little too much of the pork from Charlie Trotter's but dont' blame me, blame the nice woman who waits on me there and gave me a hefty portion. Some braised cabbage and pasta salad finished the meal, along with a small piece of bread. Lunch, one of the low-to-medium-fat calzones I made last night, using homemade dough and sauce, chicken sausage, fat free ricotta (from Vigo, it actually tasted good!) and part skim mozzarella, sparingly. Really delicious! I'll make them again. Lotta work though. Breakfast was a breakfast bar, bagel w/light cream cheese, coffee and a banana. So I got my fruit & veg in there anyway.
Oh my. I really want to get started cutting this baseball thing but it's in my best interest to do it the right way . . . and that means some learning time tomorrow after work.
10:41 PM
[Personal Diary Entry]
A pretty good day today, in some respects. Got some paperwork done for work and worked for an hour or so with a customer over the phone, then caught up on some projects that have been just sitting there the last couple of weeks.
The Peter Gabriel Encore CDs from the outstanding concerts we saw in Milwaukee and Chicago finally arrived after being mistakenly rerouted to Oregon. They're delightful.
I've had a hard time focusing the last few weeks. Tend to get depressed easily and lose all motivation. Thinking about it sensibly, like, now, there's no good reason for it. It's totally irrational. Well, maybe not totally, there are some stressors in my life, some worse than other people's and some less stressful -- I guess I like to thiink of myself as a rational beast in control of his behavior, though sometimes I doubt we're as in control as we like to think. How much does hard-wired evolution factor in?
All this is a deep and meaningful way of saying I distract easily. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes it is very bad. Today was a day when for the first time in a while I had the sense of -- really pushing myslef into a positive headspace by force of will. And of necessity, I guess. I know that anyone reading this will probably not know what the fuck I am on about, but that's OK. I don't really do this exercise foir other people -- it's a practical exercise for me and most helpful, though I often must be circumspect in a public forum and leave any random readers guessing as to the particulars.
Anyway. The long and the short of it is, some forward motion today after feeling dreadfulyl becalmed the last few weeks. Realized as I forced myself to do some work on my screenplay that one of the things that holds me back is a real dread of failure, of not being able to do what I'm trying to do -- or maybe even worse, a fear of succeeding. These are great little insghts to get on your personality. I just identified this inhibition, if you can call it that, today when I was desperately casting about for something to take my mind off the lunch-hour writing time I have sworn myself to. I never really noticed it before but deep down inside at the base of this feeling of being easily distracted was fear. I really recognized it and was kind of shocked but not unpleasantly. These sort of insights can be really surprising or horrifying, but generally, instructive, so I am going to be a little more conscious of this.
That this insight followed on the first morning meditation I've done in many months is both interesting, and direct feedback on my decision to meditate.
I hope the Lithuanian workmen will be gone tomorrow and not be tap-tap-tapping on the windows anymore. It's been like the Berlitz bloody School of Languages around here since this window replacement project began.
But enough about me. G planned her brithday spa activites at the ritzy NYC hotel we'll be staying at for her birthday weekend, and her crazy, funny friend Fish has a birthday that weekend too and has planned a weeklong celebration as well, and I've got some aces up my sleeve... it will be a fun trip. Can't wait. Cooked us up some nice sausage calzones for supper tonight, light but very satisfying and tasty, watched a little TV and burned a couple of CDs. Time for bed, wanna kee the ball rolling tomorrow.
12:48 AM
8.04.2003
Well, an OK beginning to the week thus far. Got up, breakfasted, did a little organizing. Challenges presented to my meditation today were time (I snoozed for an extra 45 minutes) and noise (there are men outside banging on my window and speaking in eastern European tongues, the second stage of the apartment building's window replacement; a cell phone alarm to end the session). Still, not a bad 15-minute sitting after many months away, much more still and less frustrating than usual when trying to get back in the habit.
Now, planning software repaired, begining the day in earnest with a tedious work-related chore, then on to useful things.
9:36 AM
If you've ever read this diary before you'll know that one of my personal struglles, and I think it's a common one, is following through on things I commit to. Even if they are things that I know are useful, necessary, and sometimes even fun, I lose myself in the moment and don't make the choice to follow through all too often.
I have often found that applying attention to this brings me around a bit for a while, but without sustained attention and focus on the things, the goals and the steps that I really have to focus on to move forward with my plans for life, things slip, stagnate, and I end up in a cycle of wekaness -- furnish my own evidence that I can't get XYZ done.
So my big theme for the week is persistence. Consistently applying pressure, however small, in the direction of an aim. I feel good about it this week and I am going to get back to diarizing online as it is always a useful to use this tool recapitulate, recalibrate, and understand.
In the every day life portion of the program: saw The Dead last night down in Joliet. Bad traffic on the way back meant we didn't get home until 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning. Quite tired today. Mostly, just let the dust settle, ate Chinese food and watched the quite frankly awful Daredevil, which is laughable in bits. The Dead show was so-so. Musically, on the ball, but the performance never really elft the ground for me. They just don't, or can't, explore some of the corners that Garcia did and it's increasingly apparent to me, now almost 10 years on from his death, how that aspect of the band was really the most important to me. Some other players, Steve Kimock and Bruce Hornsby for example, seem to be able to go "there" in ways the Dead's lead player, Jimmy Herring, does not. His sound and his approach are very clean and crisp, but maybe too clean and crisp for me.
Friday viewing was The Lost World, the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, the first feature to make use of stop-motion effects (executed by Willis O'Brien), complete with an orchestra doing live accompinament. Fun, bud really a prototypical B movie, more interesting for the historical importance of the SFX than for any particularly artistic accomplishment.
12:15 AM
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