Some Assorted Thoughts On Life and Happiness and Everything, Part I

A few weeks ago, I was minding my own business in yoga class when my instructor called me to center stage. It was time, she informed me, to learn how to do a handstand.

Let me clarify that: A MOTHERFUCKING HANDSTAND.

I noted the fact that everyone in the room was looking at me, smiled politely, and said, "I've never done that before."

Understatement of the year. My instructor proceeded to tell a long anecdote about her first handstand, which took place in her very first class with a new instructor. She was annoyed with him at the time, but eventually realized that he was offering her a special place of honor in the class. Which was my instructor's roundabout way of saying the same thing to me.

Let me give you some context: this woman is one of the greatest teachers I've ever had in any subject. I go to her class every single day. In that time, I've gained seven pounds of muscle. I've grown out of some of my favorite t-shirts. My back, my shoulders, and most importantly, my heart -- all of these have opened. I feel sturdier than ever, and yet, I feel softer than ever. Something is happening to me, and yoga is only a part of it. And my instructor been with me every step of the way, knowing how far I've come, and how much further I will go. I promise you now: this woman will be a guest at my wedding. (That should preempt any "so why don't you marry her" remarks.)

Anyway, the task before me was a handstand. So I got down on my hands and knees, kicked my feet up, and my instructor adjusted my legs into position. My wrists felt as if they were going to snap in half under the pressure of my entire body's weight. But that's a sensation you often feel with every new pose: like the lady says, what you experience at any level is what you experience at every level. I held the pose for fifteen excruciating seconds, not wholly believing my own strength. The sensation was so intense that the only thing in the universe at that moment was the presence of my own strength, overpowering everything else out of existence.

And then I dropped back down. As soon as I had done it, the first thing I thought was: it didn't count because she helped me. So I immediately tried again by myself. And held the pose for another fifteen seconds. My body and mind went supernova. And then it was over.

I still can't believe it. This handstand, along with many other things in my life, would have been an impossibility nine months ago.

But every endeavor begins with a single action, performed in a single moment.

And now I find myself here.

I Hit My Goddamn Milestone For The First Time Ever, People

Well, I finished my outline. In a record-shattering three-and-a-half months.

The movie feels fast. And mischievous. And - thank goodness - solid. It has problems, it will always have problems, but this is definitely a movie and not a crumpled up sheet of paper in my trash bin.

Last night, I was up until three in the morning, talking to Huili about The New Hotness (this seems to be a recurring phrase in my life nowadays.) He gave me a conditonal greenlight, and I'm going into a first draft in January. That cheering you hear is that of the Rebels celebrating the escape of the first assault carrier.

The eternal question when you're writing a film is: will it cohere? Will all the disparate elements, characters, action sequences bouncing around in my head pull themselves together into a movie that actually works? You spend a lot of time paralyzed by this fear, and in order to overcome it, you think. And think some more. An outline is a way of recording your iterative thought processes as you fuss over every single detail in your head, attempting to align them in some semblance of coherent narrative.

Let me give you the context of this feat. My thesis script in film school took about six months to outline, and even then, the outline utterly failed in its purpose of, you know, outlining. I rushed (if it's possible to call turning in a script a year late "rushing") a very messy script to meet my graduation requirements, and that script now lives in a desk drawer, waiting for someone to blackmail me with it. My next script, the Last Whatever, was outlined piecemeal over the period of about a year, while I worked crunch hours at the video game company. The outline wasn't a failure, but it failed to capture the necessary moments of the completed script. I know this because I undertook a page-one rewrite after a year of working on it.

In other words, I suck at outlining. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Because I'm of the opinion that a movie that reads well as an outline or treatment, it will suck as a movie. Good outlines and treatments, unlike good movies, are simple and obvious in the way they move from point to point.

The suckiness of outlines and treatments (and of writing them) aside, you do need to have some idea of the shape of your movie before you sit down to write it. Screenwriting has a lot in common with architecture in that there are obligatory structures in a film, just as there are in a building. You may not know where the bathroom is located, nor what shade of paint it will have, but you know you must have one.

Memento Mori

If you've been reading this blog, you're aware that I quit my job about nine months ago to pursue my screenwriting career full time. While I was working, I would often spend time working offsite, going to the library to do research, or writing outlines at a museum cafe.

A habit of mine was to write my cell phone number on my cubicle's whiteboard, so if anyone needed to reach me (which was never), they could dial me up. When I left the company, I unintentionally neglected to erase my whiteboard, leaving my number for everyone's reference.

Since I left, my cubicle has been appropriated by not one, but two interlopers. Nine months have passed. Babies have been born. Nations have fallen. The video game I worked on is still nowhere near release.

AND MY NUMBER IS STILL ON THE FREAKING WHITEBOARD.

Along with a drawing of a Gameboy Micro that a coworker drew in order to explain the design aesthetic it shares with the Xbox 360. "That's how little the place has changed," says the former coworker.

"This is so going into my blog," I say.

My lonely cellphone number, imploring my oblivious coworkers to call me, accompanied only by a poor man's rendition of an obsolete video game handheld. If that's not a memento mori for my former employer, I don't know what is. Allow me to say that I am very happy with my current mode of employment.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

The Timeline: 2007

Let's get this out of the way: summer vacation is most definitely over. The timeline below merely covers my professional concerns, an extracurricular activity, and none of my personal life. Multiple areas of my existence seem to be expanding simultaneously, and the timing and scale of the expansion is somewhat unexpected.

This writing schedule would have been unfathomable for me as recently as a year ago, and it's still pretty unfathomable now. But I've managed to make a record amount of progress in very little time, and I can only hope that it will continue. One of the things I've realized about my day is that I still only spend a handful of hours every day engaged in truly productive creative work. The difference is that now the remainder of my day now serves to prepare me for those hours, as opposed to hindering me. More on this in a bit.

December 2006

• Home for the holidays
• Finish Lobsters vs. Butterflies outline
• Wrangle Pillow Crisis outline into acceptable shape for studio overseers
• Go to yoga class

January 2007

• Begin Lobsters vs. Butterflies draft
• Tell everything and everyone else to GO TO HELL
• Continue wrangling Pillow Crisis part-time anyway
• Go to yoga class

February 2007

• Continue Lobsters vs. Butterflies draft
• Begin making travel plans for Europe and Asia
• Do as little work on Pillow Crisis as I can get away with
• Go to yoga class

March and April 2007

• Lobsters! Butterflies!
• Pillows?
• Yoga

May 2007

• Finish Lobsters vs. Butterflies Draft
• Nicholl Fellowships Deadline. Enter. Win.
• If still working on Pillow Crisis, ponder own mortality
• Go to Europe - UK? Spain? Italy?
• Go to Asia - China? Japan?
• Go to yoga class

Summer 2007

• Put rouge on LvB (and Pillow Crisis?) and push onto street corner
• Anticipate of writers' strike and possible spec material feeding frenzy
• Make contingency plans as the money runs out
• Alternately, cancel contingency plans and count stacks of money
• Go to yoga class

The Birds

When I returned home from Dallas, my grandfather was visiting from San Jose, and wanted to go the Indian casino in Oklahoma. Every. Single. Day. It was on one of these trips that I managed to hit a $20 jackpot off a single pull of a slot machine.

On the bus ride to the casino, I saw a sight I hadn't seen since I was a boy riding in the car on the way to school: an impossibly large flock of birds, spinning like tea leaves in a cup, shifting position from one set of telephone wires to another, sitting and suddenly moving, again and again. The birds were struggling to find peace, but found themselves endlessly agitated by some unseen force. I must have seen this phenomenon countless times driving up and down Hillcrest Rd. to school in the morning. And I still have no idea what they're doing, or why they're doing it. I can't even identify the species.

You don't see flocks of birds like this in Los Angeles, and you certainly don't see this particular specimen (like a blackbird, but smaller). Birds in Los Angeles tend to be more solitary, if the occasional blackbirds and sparrows I see in my neighborhood are any indication.

When we returned from the casino, the bus deposited us in the expansive tracts of parking lot in front of a Wal-Mart. The birds had gathered in the countless tiny trees of the countless parking lot islands, and were chittering to each other in a monstrous cacophony. It's utterly lame to describe natural phenomena in industrial terms, but they are the only references I have: the noise sounded like a thousand tiny car alarms going off at once. Conversation was impossible, as was thinking. The experience was one of the most eerie and unsettling I can remember.

Day of the Ninja

Today, in case you hadn't heard, is the Day of the Ninja. An auspicious day to break an unintentional month-long silence, especially if you know anything about what I've up to for the past three months. Also, Naruto is a ninja. Never forget.

The short story is that I've been very busy. Pillow Crisis is back in play with our overseers at the studio, and the Lobsters vs. Butterflies outline is nearly complete. I've watched about 30 movies in the past month, read half as many books, and have spent too much time listening to the Naruto Original Sound Tracks. LvB has seeped its way through my skin and into my bloodstream, as I compulsively spend the majority of my day thinking about crustaceans and insects. Even when I would prefer not to.

Over the past two months or so, I've learned a lot about self-employment workflow. Most of my upcoming posts will concern the lessons of making your own work.

What else? I went home for Thanksgiving, won $20 off a single pull of a nickel slot machine, and managed to not buy any clothes. I caught up with a friend who doesn't read this blog, and he said, "You've had a very exciting year."

And 2006 is a bottle of melatonin compared to 2007. My next post will concern the timeline for the next six months. It involves one newly completed screenplay, brand new negotiations with the studios, Europe, Asia, and some very intriguing guest stars. And these aren't even the possibilities - these are just the ACTUALITIES.

How To Save $100k On Business School Tuition

Last week, I was pleased to begin a public speaking course (of sorts) with MBA students from the Marshall School of Business at USC. My curriculum would not be unusual at all were it not for the fact that I am not, nor have I ever, been an enrolled student at the Marshall School of Business.

I receive a lot of strange looks, as well as the oft-asked question, "Are you a first year?" My joke is, "Hey guys! I'm getting all of the networking without paying any of the tuition!" That one goes over really well, let me tell you.

Four times a month, we meet in an elaborate circular classroom that evokes the notorious Star Chamber of British criminal justice history. It's a room more suited to the wearing of robes and powdered wigs than khakis and loafers. The atmosphere is quite casual, and many people bring lunch into the room; the b-school kids are a genial crowd, if a bit vague about their actual career aspirations (beyond making a lot of money).

We go around the room and volunteer to deliver a spontaneous two-minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat. The room appoints four judges. The first two judges are the official timer and the grammarian. Then there's an "um, like, you know" counter, whose job is to count your verbal time-fillers. And finally, a judge known as "the posture police", whose task is to critique your physical mannerisms.

I've only been to two sessions, and I have not volunteered yet. Even in a relatively safe environment as a b-school classroom, the pressure of speaking before a crowd of relative strangers is palpable. But even as a mere spectator, I've already learned quite a bit about public speaking:

1) There is no such thing as speaking too slowly. No. Seriously. It's. Totally. True.

2) The actual content of your speech is completely insignificant. The smoothness of your delivery is everything. Even if you have absolutely nothing to say, if you are able to say it without awkwardness, you have won. Congratulations. You are now ready for a career in politics.

3) The ability to transition from one point to another is the layup of public speaking. You might also call this ability "improvisation". If you can master it, you've got public speaking licked.

4) The crowd wants you to succeed. They're willing to give you the benefit of the doubt a thousand times over, because they all know how hard it is. So relax.

5) Stop doing that annoying thing with your body already. It's a defense mechanism you're using to protect yourself from the crowd. See point #4. (And now we see the cross-disciplinary benefits of yoga, which trains one to confront all situations with a body balanced and at peace. It's all coming together.)

Fiscal Report: October 2006

As promised, here comes the red ink. Last month, I issued guidance that the era of large budget surpluses was coming to an end, and identified increased leisure spending as the would-be culprit. I was only half-correct.

I was utterly stumped by the depletion of my food budget this month, as I hadn't dined at any particularly fancy establishments. And then I realized that I spent the majority of October trying to fell my research stack, chopping away at the piles of books and dvds about lobsters and butterflies that sit on my desk. Due to my intense focus on research, I opted for take-out instead of cooking more often than not, and the expenses added up. Take-out, I've decided, is for chumps. It's much better to cook cheaply for yourself and occasionally splurge on the good restaurant, than to order mediocre take-out often. As my budget will attest, the two cost roughly the same.

But take-out did save me time, and as should become increasingly apparent over the next few months, the time constraints upon A Very Big If are only increasing in number. More on that in a bit.

Additionally, a large sum was spent on the Household Improvement Initiative, which I'm pleased to report, is a success. Although my apartment will never aspire to any status greater than Late 90's Dorm Room, the interior of my freezer compartment is immaculate, and no longer a exhibit of natural history.

UNDER BUDGET SPENDING CATEGORIES

Entertainment: 114.57
Dining Out: 5.51

Total: $120.08 under budget

Tonal Shift

I'm headed into a period of time where the number of things I must accomplish and the amount of time I have to accomplish them are not commensurate. There's been a definite shift in tone for my grand adventure; whereas the early, salad days of the endeavor had the promise of an eternal spring break, we're now settling into a definite back-to-school rush. Some brief updates:

• Outlining my new writing project (Lobsters vs. Butterflies). It's coming along slowly but surely; a little too slowly, for my tastes. I've been plowing through every movie that is remotely related to the project, and the Los Angeles Public Library is dutifully delivering new research materials to my local branch on a weekly basis.


• Serving as a frequent demontration model in yoga class. For some reason, I am called to serve ever more frequently by my instructor; this would not be so worrisome were it not for the fact that she often calls upon me to demonstrate poses I've never done before. I know I'm getting good at this because the adjustments my instructors are making to my stance are becoming downright nitpicky - we're talking millimeters here.


• Upgrading to the six-out-at-a-time on Netflix. Between the daily red envelopes in my mailbox and the yoga classes, it's hard to declare a bigger indulgence. The problem I had with the four-out plan was that I was watching movies faster than Netflix could send them to me. I have at least twenty more movies to watch in the name of researching LvB, so I consider this a temporary upgrade.


• Optimizing my daily schedule. Back in the salad days of my tenure on Pillow Crisis, I engaged in ad hoc scheduling of my day. It worked back then, but without a writing partner cracking the whip, productivity and focus have flagged a bit. I have at least one post coming up about schedule optimization for the self-employed.


• Cleaning the apartment AGAIN. This is really a process that never ends, but I need to reach and maintain a certain threshold of cleanliness within the next two weeks. My roommate is off on a jaunt to Taiwan and Thailand, which provides me with a slight advantage: whatever I can clean, will stay clean. (For now.) I am devoting an hour each day to housekeeping, because that's the only way my humble adobe will ever be presentable.


• Thinking quite a bit about travel. After all, the blog's description mentions travel as a unique selling point, and to date I've only visited cities on the North American contienent, none of which have been new destinations for me. I've been thinking a great deal about Italy lately; I'd like to see Florence and Venice (before it goes under).

Jury Duty: Day Seven - The Verdict

The pulse races when you read a guilty verdict to a defendant. You are very much aware that you are defining a significant portion of a life's trajectory. And the court reminds you of this act, by asking each juror to verbally confirm the verdict.

Last Friday, I voted guilty to convict a defendant accused of two counts: driving under the influence, and driving with a blood alcohol level of .08% or above. Until I voted guilty, the jury was hung, with myself voting against the rest.

I wasn't convinced that the prosecution's case was strong enough, as the field sobriety tests were inconclusive, the field breathalyzer was unreliable, and the defendant's reading at the station breathalyzer was well within the stated margin of error.

What changed my mind was actually looking at the prosecution's exhibits. Buried within a stack of papers were the calibration records for both the field and station breathalyzers. Looking at the numbers yielded some telling findings. First of all, the field brethalyzer's deviation from normal was about .013 grams per 1000ml - for the sake of discussion, we could suppose that the unit was overstating the defendant's blood alcohol content by .013 on a reading of .099. Which places the defendant well above legal limit.

But what if you throw out the field breathalyzer (as you should, since the unit died with two weeks of the field test)? Well, it turns out that the prosecution wildly overstated the margin of error for the station breathalyzer, much to the detriment of its case. The prosecution stated that the margin of error for the station breathalyzer was + or - .01. But a quick perusal of the station's calibration logs reveals that the machine never deviated from a test sample by more than .001. In other words, the machine was a whole order of magnitude more accurate than the prosecution claimed. The defendant's reading of .08 was almost certainly a .08.

The practically infallible accuracy of the station breathalyer established (for myself) the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. So I changed my vote. And we ended jury deliberations after an hour.

We almost made minimum wage that day.

Jury Duty: Day Six - Deliberations

After a couple short days of testimony, today we had our first day of actual deliberation. I'm playing the contrarian, cracking a lot of jokes, and annoying the FUCK out of some of my fellow jurors, many of whom just want to go home. They have full-time jobs, after all. Guess what? I don't. So let's deliberate, motherfuckers!

The justice system in the United States appears to be quite wobbly, but still servicable. Generally speaking, I'm apalled by widespread lack of understanding of "presumption of innocence", as well as "margin of error". But on the other hand, I'm encouraged by the feeling that most people seem to want to do the right thing, if given a proper chance. And enough cookies.

As with our surfeit of sugary confections, there is no shortage of distractions in the jury room. Today, we discussed a wide range of topics, ranging from Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys to stoplight avoidance strategies. And one of my fellow (and older) jurors had the gall to hit on me while we were in the jury room. And this is not some ambiguous flirtiness I'm citing to boost my ego - we're talking full-on forearm touching, which in my experience, is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Ladies, please - I'm trying to administer some justice here.

Fiscal Report: August & September 2006

I'd like to issue some forward guidance, and warn our investors that this month most likely marks the end of large budget surpluses. We foresee substantial increases in leisure spending across the board, and the increases are, at this time, not within our capacity for projection. However, it is a testament to our sound financial planning that a large percentage of surpluses was earmarked for a budget category named "Utter Frivolity", an as-yet untapped source of supplemental leisure funds.


UNDER BUDGET SPENDING CATEGORIES: AUGUST

Groceries: $98.79
Dining Out: $79.25
Auto Fuel: $42.91
Unallocated: $157.89

Total: $378.84 under budget


UNDER BUDGET SPENDING CATEGORIES: SEPTEMBER

Groceries: $119.10
Dining Out: $40.05
Entertainment: $81.94
Auto Fuel: $97.91
Unallocated: $155.91

Total: $494.91 under budget

Jury Duty: Day Three

This was quite possibly the most difficult day of service. I spent all six hours listening to testimony, some of it impossibly dull. My rate of yawns per hour skyrocketed, despite some truly catty performances from the trial lawyers.

Something that bothers me about the legal process: the judge neither specifies nor defines the law that applies to the case before the trial. Instead, this absolutely crucial information is not disseminated until all the evidence has been presented, a sequence of events that seems quite backwards to me. Sitting on a jury is an evaluative process, and to begin the process without all the necessary information feels like a deeply flawed approach. However, not knowing the exact criteria by which I will decide the defendant's innocence encourages me to take really good notes. Which may be the point.

Jury Duty: Day Two

Well, I'm on the jury. I have a feeling I should have kept my mouth shut and been more inscrutable, as that strategy seems to have been effective for a fellow Asian-American juror candidate who was excused.

The trial should last until Wednesday. I get $15 a day, and a free weely Metro pass. I also get Monday off, so I can at least make an appearance at the Center for Hot Moms during my tour of duty.

I'm not allowed to discuss the case, but I'm finding the experience at least somewhat interesting, as I'm interacting with people I wouldn't normally encounter during the course of my day. Not only that, but I get to hear some deep and dark secrets from total strangers. And trial itself, despite being a lowly misdemeanor trial, has no shortage of theatrics from the players involved.

Jury Duty: Day One

The great irony is that when I was punching a clock, I couldn't get on a jury to save my life. But as soon as I quit my day job, the justice system issues a summons.

I spent most of today reading in the juror lounge in the Washington Blvd. courthouse, a masterpiece of 70s Brutalist architecture with space-age lighting fixtures and oak-veneer walls. My fellow juror candidates represent a fairly accurate cross-section of Los Angeles - it's like the cast of Crash up in there.

"Is there an elderly black woman?" asks my roommate. "Yup." "Gotta have the elderly black woman."

We were this close to escaping the courthouse without being called to a courtroom, when a judge summoned us at 2:30. We spent the next two hours receiving lectures about the criminal justice system and answering jury selection questions from the judge and lawyers. I'll be back tomorrow, to find out if I'm actually selected as a juror. There are 24 candidates, so my odds are even.

I'd much rather be in yoga class.

The Arrival of Autumn

Something my yoga instructor reminded me of today is that last Saturday marked the beginning of fall, and the end of summer.

I'm inclined to pick fall as my favorite season - a preference I elegized in one of my scripts - despite growing up in a place in which the leaves don't turn. My wardrobe is heavily tilted towards cooler weather, I don't have to be so obsessive about wearing sunblock, I can stock up on school supplies, and the tone of the days turns a bit more serious.

I don't really think it's a coincidence that I happen to be starting a new writing project and performing website maintenance at this time. And now that I think about it, every infatuation and/or relationship I can remember began in autumn. There's clearly some sort of internal Aztec calendar at work here, demanding the modern equivalent of fresh human sacrifices at the appropriate solar-mandated moment.


Tetris at the Hollywood Bowl.

I forgot to post details about the Video Games Live concert. Essentially, if you have to ask what this is, you're probably not going to be interested. The VGL concert consists of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra covering video game music from the seventies to the present day. The quality of the show was acutally a bit lacking - the sound engineering was problematic, and some repertoire selections were questionable. But the show began on a stroke of brilliance: the orchestra performed a stirring rendition of the score from Pong. Which, as you may or may not know, consists entirely of two notes, repeated over and over again, as the pixel bounces between the paddles and the walls.

The best part of the show is merely sitting at the Bowl and chilling. The actual music on offer is kind of irrelevant, really. And with ticket prices for VGL starting at $3, you can be sure I'll be back next year.

"Site Maintenance"

As you know, we here at A Very Big If are committed to providing you with the best possible blog-reading experience. As part of that commitment, we recently performed some "site maintenance". Unfortunately, as part of this "site maintenance", certain content went offline, including some reader comments. We sincerely regret the disappearance of the content. Thank you for your attention and understanding.

The $1400 Apartment

This is the view from my brother's new apartment: a two bedroom-two bath affair located near the University of Texas at Austin campus. The building was brand new, and in fact, had not actually been completed when we arrived. The asking price? Fourteen hundred dollars a month.

For comparison's sake, one of my friends recently moved into a studio apartment in a very nice area of Los Angeles. A studio. As in no second bedroom, no full-size kitchen, no second bathroom, and no separate living room. The asking price? Fourteen hundred dollars a month.

Let's take a closer look at Jon's apartment:


Hey kids! Can you spot the three things in this photo that don't belong in a Los Angeles apartment? 1) The laundry machine. 2) The free fridge. 3) The wine rack.



The living room, with the kitchen in the background.


The kitchen. Note the marble counters and the modern appliances.


The living room. Note the polished concrete floor.


The shelves in the living room, and the door to Jon's bedroom.


Jon's bedroom. Sup ladies.


One of the two bathrooms.

The Hollywood Tooth

I was at the endodontist's office to check the status of a tooth that the doctor had repaired about nine months ago. It's impossible to evaluate the tooth visually, as the problematic area is inside the bones of my mouth; I don't have any symptoms, either, so an x-ray is necessary. So the doctor took an x-ray of my tooth, told me nothing had changed, and asked me to return in a year. She told me we won't know for a full year whether the tooth is healing properly - that's how slowly a tooth heals. So even if I were able to see the affected area (which I can't), I would still be unable to see any progress due to the glacial rate of change. And the first thing that popped into my head was: this tooth is an excellent allegory for Hollywood.

Pillow Crisis is on hiatus. We sent the treatment off to our contacts a few weeks ago, and proceeded to hear absolutely nothing from them. A week passed. Then another. Then another. Huili went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I leveled up my characters in Final Fantasy Tactics. Another week passed. Finally, we decided to reinitiate contact: even if our contacts hated the thing, it would still be valuable to get the studio notes for use as a calibration tool.

Out contacts returned the message. They were really busy, and still hadn't read the entire treatment. However, they liked what they read a lot. I'm inclined to believe in the sincerity of the liking, but sincere liking is not exactly a primal motivation in this industry.

So we continue to wait. My career, like those of many others, is an extremely stable mixture of waiting and non-committal liking which may or may not precipitate into action.

In the meantime, I'm on to my next writing project: Lobsters vs. Butterflies. My intention is to finish this script within six months, which is an utterly laughable ambition, given my project history. But LvB has a simplicity and an energy that my other projects lacked, and I have a pretty good feeling that nine months is wholly doable. This was supposed to be my "easy" project, but if there's one thing I've learned from myself and other artists, it's this: there is never any such thing as an easy project. There will always be unforeseen difficulties. Already, LvB is requiring more research than I had anticipated, which implies a graduate student-like existence for myself. Admittedly, my graduate school is located in California and has very low graduation requirements, but still.

Rise From Your Grave

So I'm back from Dallas. One thing I've noticed about trips home is that time seems to pass more slowly when I'm there. I suspect this temporal phenomenon has much to do with the utter lack of responsibility I have to shoulder. Someone else cleans up, someone else does the groceries, someone else gets the mail.

My visit to Dallas seemed to be some sort of Zen koan revolving around the utter futility of making plans. My trip was originally scheduled to last only a week; just long enough to visit my parents and help my brother move into a new apartment in Austin. And then a ridiculous chain of events began to unfurl, straight out of the first act of a Hollywood road movie.

My youngest brother's apartment wasn't finished. So I spent a week longer in Austin, surviving off of microwaved fried chicken and biscuits, as the tardy contractors rushed to finish the project. We spent much of our time hanging out in a temporary condo, surrounded by unassembled, boxed Ikea furniture as we competed for high score in Metroid Prime Pinball. I also ate Thai fajitas while watching the sun set over Lake Travis, hung out in UT Austin's library, pondered the fashion choices of Austin coeds (they all dress like desperate housewives), and got to know my brother's girlfriend's pets: 2 cockatiels, a dog, and a hamster. For sheer comedic value, there is nothing quite like the sight of a dog playing with a hamster. If I ever wanted to know how a hamster expressed the notion, "WTF?!", that curiosity has been satisfied.

(One thing I can recommend in Austin is the bookstore Book People - it's easily one of my top five book shops of all time. You know how Barnes and Noble has little handwritten recommendation cards for about twenty volumes in the store? In Book People, every other book has a card like that.)

On our last day in Austin, my mom arrived to help us move into the new apartment. The three of us, along with Jon's roommate, set up an efficient assembly line, in accordance with the principle of division of labor developed by American industrial tycoon Eli Whitney. Together, we assembled a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room's worth of furniture, all in about eight hours. This might very well be a record of some kind.

Then, as my mom and I drove back from Austin. We encountered a classic Texas thunderstorm. The kind of storm that may or may not erupt into a fullblown tornado. Visibility diminished to about a ten foot radius, allowing me to just barely make out the tail lights of the car before me and the headlights of the car behind. Lightning strikes were followed almost immediately by thunder, suggesting an extremely proximal storm center. The rain hammering on the car's roof was deafening. Simultaneously, all traffic on the interstate slowed to the pace of a funeral procession, as everyone switched on their hazard blinkers and their headlights. As we crawled beneath a massive, elaborate highway interchange, I saw torrents of water spouting off the freeways, incongruously reminiscent of tropical waterfalls. I pulled off the freeway, and we waited for about half an hour for the storm to wither. My mom, having glimpsed the Nintendo DS Lite, decided to play some Zoo Keeper, and I read a Scandinavian novel. In over a decade of driving, this was the very first time I've ever had to stop the car because of the weather. For some reason, it had been decided that I was to leave Austin as slowly as possible.

Then my mother decided to have back surgery. She's doing quite well, and the hospital discharged her early. I spent about a week in the hospital as she recuperated, eating surprisingly decent hospital cafeteria food and plowing through more of the Scandinavian novel. Meanwhile, my middle brother developed some strange ear malady. His earlobe swelled to the size of a walnut, and doctors were unable to ascertain the cause of the condition, and just preemptively decided to cut the ear open. So I spent a lot of time with my family, cleaned out much of my parents' garage, did some gardening, discovered a long lost cache of old video games, reached the halfway mark in Final Fantasy Tactics, and most importantly, began the outlining for my next story (more on this in a bit). Lobsters and butterflies have never been more exciting.

A pretty good vacation (from my preexisting vacation), all in all.

And now it's over. There's a been a sudden shift in the tone of my life upon my return; more urgency, more nervousness. Pillow Crisis is on hiatus (more on this in a bit), I'm beginning a brand new writing project, and I am opening serious and formal inquiries into recent individuals and events that have given me pause. It's an exciting time.