i know, i know, another inexcusable gap. i'd try and tell you that i'm busy, but you'd know it's a lie. i haven't gotten any work since sunday, though i'm hoping that the holiday weekend will shine some hope on my cause. we'll see.

anyway, i've got, like, eight things i want to talk about, so bear with me.

the first thing is i've been having some very strange dreams the past few mornings. i've been kind of half waking up around 4 or 5 and then going back to sleep for a few hours after that, and that's usually when the dreams are most lucid. i've got three that i can remember pretty distinctly, and they're all crazy, so hold on.

dream #1 involved me being in seattle during a nuclear strike from north korea. interestingly enough, being in seattle was just as confusing as the nuclear strike, but i was in a dream, so i was really just kind of along for the ride. anyway, the entire dream is spent in a tour bus which was commandeered to help people evacuate, and the entire time, we all just know that the bus isn't going to get us far enough away from the blast area to save us. of course the dream ends before the bomb arrives... it was just a kind of encapsulated dread, resignation... i'll be honest, not a very settling vision.

dream #2 took place in some strange city that was a mix of the lower east side and nice. it starts off with me visiting jess brier's "new apartment" in this mystery city, which is inside a crazy building... she's way up top, and to get to the upper apartments you have to walk through the ground floor studio apartment, and then open a secret door behind the refrigerator. there are no stairs or an elevator, but a plastic sphere on a strange track, kind of like a disney land ride, that goes to all the apartments, which are not placed one above another, but at weird, random intervals, so that the sphere zig-zags back and forth all over the apartment. it takes us ages because the sphere moves very slowly, but we finally get up to jess' place, and then the dream cuts to me riding a bike down a seaside street which is busy with cars and pedestrians. i'm riding along with someone who i can't remember, and i accidentally ride up a wheelchair access ramp and end up almost crashing into a place called the café contessa. at the café, however, i run into an old friend who i can't place, who invites me to a club across the street. i call jess to invite her along, and the dream ends with her telling me that there is no way she's going out because it takes so damn long to get in and out of her apartment. this was definitely quite strange, but the place was eerily exciting.

dream #3 had me and a bunch of other people being kidnapped. the motives for the kidnapping or the people who were doing it are all a blur except that sarah t and monique were there as fellow kidnappees, and janine's friend edgar from ucsd was there as a kidnapper. there were a bunch of other people, too... the head kidnapper was a strung out skinny hipster with bad hair and circles around his eyes. at first, things were pretty normal for... a... kidnapping... but then all of a sudden shit went bad, and the head kidnapper was hauling people in and out of an interrogation room. then, i got sent out of the kidnap... place(?) and when i got back, the kidnappers had let up a bunch and everyone was having a party. at some point, i ended up falling on edgar, but because it was a dream, we didn't get up because... i don't know, we had some connection or something? it was really strange i'm telling you. anyway, the connection (maybe i should say we "shared a moment") was ruined because monique was drunk off her ass and thought we were just kidding around, and tried to join our moment. the dream was so vivid that it was replete with a "mo!" from sarah t, who was trying to give edgar and me space. anyway, mo totally ruined the moment, and i tried to recreate it by following edgar into the kitchen, where i discovered that there was a trap door in the ceiling above the sink, with a ladder coming down and resting on the counter. anyway, i knew the head kidnapper was up there, and edgar went up as well to talk to him about something, and that's when julia called me at 8 o'clock in the morning! in real life, that is. anyway. strange!

okay, so that's done.

i saw superman yesterday. my mini-review is: B, maybe B+. It looks amazing, but there's something very bland about superman, and i don't think it has anything to do with brandon routh. his conflicts are pretty mundane. the worst thing he's apparently done is to not say goodbye to lois before he left to find krypton. where's the depth in that character? meanwhile you're totally not allowed to hate superman, as demonstrated by lois who, even though the guy vanished for five years, still gets all aflutter when he's around. i was inevitably comparing superman to the first two x-men movies, also directed by bryan singer, and the complexities and motivations of the x-men are so much more captivating than superman. rogue's killed her boyfriend, magneto was in the holocaust, logan's got more emotinal issues than an episode of dr. phil... it's fantastic! superman is so unbelievably well-adjusted that his weakness in the face of krypton seems vaguely feigned. even spiderman has huge insecurity issues... what does clark kent have to be insecure about? (*disclaimer: i have not seen smallville, and it's been ages since i've seen the original superman movies... and i haven't read the comics... so maybe there's a whole wound thing going on somewhere that i'm missing) anyway. that's my take. also, kevin spacey doesn't get enough good evil lines... where's the guy from swimming with sharks? ian mckellan was able to bring it even in the most recent x-men flick, and in the da vinci code, spacey should be able to send a chill or two more down our spine than he managed.

all right, last item of the night: alexandra and i just saw a pretty awesome movie, kiss kiss, bang bang. i had heard of it here and there... it's possible it was even playing in nice at somepoint, and i just missed it, but damn, there was one well written flick. i'm not going to go on and on about it just now (what?! i'm not!) but if you find yourself in need of a movie while at the video rental store, check it out.

oh, and i went to le video to rent the thing, which is a cool independent rental place, and used my (very) old account, which had a 2-year old $7 late fee. damn those computers! damn them! alexandra laughed at me for, like, twenty minutes.

okay. i'm done. see you later.

i've stumbled on to the greatest two hours of x-files episodes. i've become something of a tv drama rerun aficionado, and monday nights are x-files episode marathons from 1 am to 5 am est, but for those of us fortunate enough with east coast tv on the west coast, that becomes a 10p-2am marathon, so... sweet. the two episodes of the x-files in question are the cockroach episode, which has lots of mulder-scully moments. it does happen to have cockroaches crawling inside a guys skin, which isn't pleasant, but it's a classic x-files moment. the other episode is the astrologically best girlfriends who find they have the power to kill people with their mind. they're the "hate'im, wouldn't want to date'im" girls. of course, the rest of the town is losing it's mind as well, including mulder and scully, who start to snap at each other:

Mulder: "Go ahead."
Scully: "No, you go ahead."
Mulder: "No, no, no. Be my guest. I know how much you like snapping on the latex."

anyway, the whole thing gets more and more confusing, and better and better. mulder starts drinking and scully starts smoking (things i didn't notice as strange when i first saw the show... this was the show that got my x-files cherry). oh... so great. what made it even better is that this episode, as does the cockroach episode, best encapsulates the mulder-scully dynamic in all it's uniqueness:

Scully: "The bones... turned out to be the skeletal remains not of an infant but of a beloved 14 year old Lhasa Apso, formerly known as..." [Pulls out collar] "Mr Tippy."
Terri Roberts: [enters room] "Mr Tippy!"
Mulder: "This may not be any time to mention it, but somebody is wearing my favourite perfume."

okay, so i'm done salivating over the show now... just wanted to make a comment of this lovely moment.

hasta pronto.

hey sports fans. you'll never guess what i did today.... you ready? i worked!

that's right! five hours of my nose to the grindstone. and by nose to the grindstone, i do indeed mean ass to the chair. my job today was to "supervise" the palega recreation center in the portola district of san francisco (different from portola street), which meant i sat around, handing out basketballs and answering the phone to tell people the hours of the gymnasium. i'm having a hard time thinking of other jobs that were this easy, but i'm pretty sure this is the most i've gotten paid for the least amount of work. it's difficult to tell. 

so basically, what i did was finish extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan safran foër. is there an umlaut there? if there isn't, there should be. i have mixed feelings about the book, though it probably ranks pretty high on my list of "things about 9/11." there are very few things that rank in the positive section of the list, though, to be fair, i haven't seenunited 93 and i certainly don't plan to seeworld trade center. i feel funny about saying that it's too soon, but part of me feels that that's true.

as far as foer's book goes (too lazy for umlaut), i don't think it was too soon; my problems with the book are vaguely more general, and are fairly similar to my problems with everything is illuminated, his first book. he does a flashback thing in both books where he ties in things that have happened in europe a long time ago... he's got a bit of a wwii fixation (is that gauche to say? i hope not), and maybe this is my normal jewalert going, but... BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP. the best part about foer's book is the main character, oskar, who is a ten year old (i think) who's father was killed in the wtc attack. there's something wonderfully humble about that... the only way were prepared to look at 9/11 right now is through the eyes of a child. yes. right on. 

anyway, i'm running out of room on the screen here, so the last part i'm typing blind. the best piece of anything i've ever seen done on september 11th is the nova special "why the towers fell," originally broadcast in april of 2002. nova, of course, is a science show, and it very judiciously and carefully explains the sequence of events on a scientific level, which i found extremely comforting (okay, i know that sounds weird... but there's something to be said for science's methodology, and the fact that once nova explained how the towers fell, methodology and 9/11 never occurred in the same paragraph ever again).

all right, well, i'm done. hasta mañana.

all right, i'm trying the widget again. maybe the secret is for me to not be so goddamn long-winded. here goes.

so, still no work (ouch!) and bitterness growing by the minute. i had been worried about my dad's reaction to the news that i wasn't getting any hours, mostly because he had predicted that exactly this was going to happen (and i'd feared it as well... damn me!), but i talked to him today and he seemed fairly laissez-faire about it, which i'm cool with.

the thing i keep remembering about this job that makes it desirable is the fact that i can drop it at any minute without any compunction whatsoever, which is helpful for someone entering the "do it now or never" industry of television. or wanting to enter it, anyway. 

i'll be honest... some of the negativity of the nor-cal friends towards my la plans is starting to get to me. not in a "could you stop that?" kind of way, but in a "it'd be nice if they'd leave it" kind of way. i understand their own selfish reasons (i'm a total catch, duh!) but a little support wouldn't hurt. (by the way, i can't remember who if any of the nor-cal friends read the blog, but if y'all do, know my undying love supercedes any annoyances, grievances, etc.) anyway.

the family i'm staying with has left for a two-week vacation, so now it's just me and the dogs in the house. i sort of feel like i'm not enough people for them. not in terms of doing chores and stuff, just in terms of giving them attention. they both constantly want attention, and maybe i need to be harder on them, and not give in, but they'll nose each other out of the way in order to get petted. crazy dogs.

well, i've reached the bottom of the screen, so i'm going to sign off. ~hasta mañana.

hey. i'm using a very exciting new widget to post, so let's see how it works.

i went to see the da vinci code today. if you've spoken to me within the last few weeks, i'm sure i've expounded on the lackluster nature of the book. surprisingly, i didn't think that it was that bad. one of the biggest advantages the movie has over the novel is that you don't have to read dan brown's awful writing to get through the story. you go through the same plot elements, especially in the beginning, with much less over-dramatization. you don't have the constant "...and then, he saw something in front of him that would change everything... forever!" followed by a totally unrelated chapter. it's the band-aid equivalent to reading.

another thing that makes the movie more palatable than the book is the fact that the book was written to feel like a movie. there's no way you can go through the pages of brown's novel and not think that somewhere in the recesses of his mind lay a movie script. the book is flashy, and has plenty of twists and turns, but lacks depth and substance, which is pretty much how i would describe your average hollywood fluff piece. okay, so the first problem with this new blogging widget is that as you keep writing the widget doesn't stay the same size, but keeps getting longer and longer, until the widget runs right off the screen. at the moment i'm about to do exactly that, and there's nothing quite as exciting as typing blindly. also, for someone as long-winded as myself, i feel unbelievably boxed in. gorammit.

okay, i've copy and pasted into the normal posting box... disappointing.

as strange as it sounds, the movie turns south when they start meddling with brown's plot. now, i'm a big a critic of brown's as the next guy, but man, oh, man. what i think it ended up being is that the screenwriter, incorporating the two most significant qualities of hollywoodization--laziness and desiring flashiness--went overboard. it's kind of like the physics experiment where you throw a ball out of a car when it's going 60 mph, and you throw the ball at 20 mph (or whatever) and the ball ends up going 80 mph. they took a book, which was already plenty hollywood (which i guess i'm using as an arbitrary adjective to describe blockbusters and the like) and tried to make it more hollywood. they ended cutting out parts that didn't need cutting out, and adding stuff that just made the whole damn thing stupid. however deficient brown may be as a prose writer, he's not a bad plot maker, a fact laid bare by the total wrenching of the plot at the end, so kudos to him for that.

anyway, time to walk the dogs. there are other observations to be made, but we'll leave that for another time.

à la prochaine

so, still no work. i've been eligible to work since monday, and still no work. the worst part about this on-call position is that it's not even like a substitute teacher, who i imagine has a window every morning during which he or she will receieve assignments: my assignments could come in any time, for me to start as late as 5 o'clock. anyways... i'm trying hard to stay productive and not be bitter.

for one, i've got plenty of writing i want to do... spec scripts mostly. it's still been a challenge working on these scripts, though not a prohibitive one. the thing that really is killing me, though, is, according to a friend who is in the tv industry in la, i should have a spec script for a one-hour drama, and one for a traditional (a la seinfeld) and narrative (a la sex and the city) comedy. sadly, the popularity of the latter has led to an extreme shortage of the former. i've been watching "how i met your mother" which is just, i'm sorry, not very funny. in fact, the biggest boon to the show appears to be doogie howser, who plays what i imagine is supposed to be the kramer equivalent. granted, we'll see how funny i can make it once i write my spec of it, but, oy vey on a wheat thin, you know? it really makes me respect the guys that did seinfeld and newsradio... even friends gets some mad props.

lately, through all of this park and rec muckity-muck, i've been thinking about how much easier it would be for me to give hollywood and the tv writing thing the finger and just go to a teacher credentialing program somewhere in san francisco, get my teaching degree, and be done with it already. i wouldn't have to deal with los angeles or kissing ass or anything. i could get an apartment here, and try to start having something of a normal life.

but i'm not ready to give up on the dream yet... and that's all right... right? right. oy vey, again.

all right, i'll keep my eyes peeled for words of wisdom for tomorrow.

until then.

i got up at 7:45, showered, shaved, ate a good breakfast, and waited by the phone to get my first every work assignment from park and rec.

it never came. i waited around all morning, watching an episode of ER, two episodes of Judging Amy, an episode of Deep Space Nine, with each episode, i kept thinking "i need to be doing something uninvolved so that the second they call i can drop everything and go," but eventually frustration and disappointment seeped in... awesome! i salvaged the day by joining a gym (but not actually working out, please) so that was something... but still, whew. it took my all day to get out of the rut.

fortunately, as i do my e-mail stuff before bed, addams family values has been on, and i've thought it would be good to relate some of the funniest lines:

[morticia is in labor]
doctor: mrs. addams, would you like anaesthesia?
morticia: no, but do ask the children.

[at debbie's bridal shower, margaret, cousin it's wife is showing off her new baby]
margaret: what.
debbie: i didn't say anything.
margaret: no, what--that's the baby's nickname. from the obstetrician.
morticia: isn't she precious.
margaret: we've had offers.

[they go to try and pry fester from debbie, who's keeping him from the rest of the addamses]
Morticia: You have enslaved him. You have placed Fester under some strange sexual spell. I respect that. But please, may we see him?
Debbie: Don’t even think about it.
Morticia: You have gone too far. You have married Fester. You have destroyed his spirit. You have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But Debbie…
Debbie: What?
Morticia (reproachfully): Pastels?

[morticia is reading "the cat in the hat" to rupert, who has turned from a gomez-like baby into a blonde, golden haired cherub].
Morticia: “We looked, then we saw him step in on the mat. We looked, and we saw him – the Cat in the Hat.” Are you enjoying this? To think… a child of mine. (She continues to read) “I know it is wet, and the sun is not sunny, but we can have lots of good fun that is funny.” (She flips to the last page of the book.) Oh, no. He lives.

anyway, i could go on, but i won't. suffice it to say, i'm hoping that this no-work streak doesn't continue, but i'll be honest, i'm not setting my alarm for tomorrow morning... let their call wake me.

hasta mañana.

if i can skip days, then i'm also allowed to write twice in one day, right? right.

so, i never mentioned anything about this retirement party for my journalism teacher, ms. swan. it was a very cool affair... she's a funny person, with a general demeanor that i would be hard-pressed to put into words. quirky would definitely be one of those words, but reserved would be one as well. quiet but frank. she's very good at methodical explanation, and uses lots of hand gestures and head nods.

anyway, there were many assembled guests there, though most of them were from the five years between my graduation and the present... and good god, are we old! yes, okay, not as old as the teacher-folk, but man-oh-man... we were hanging out with babes.

i feel like i wanted to say something else about that, but it's gone.

tomorrow i start work, and i'm definitely playing the whole "i'm flying by the seat of my pants, but i'm not going to let it unnerve me" game, which, let me tell you, is not easy. i called in to the assignment desk message machine tonight to let them know i was down for hours tomorrow and all this week... so now i'm really in it. i realized i still have very little idea of what i'm going to be doing or where i'm going to be doing it, and i'm trying to take solace in the fact that they'll hopefully give me plenty of time to get there on the bus. okay, time to stop living in the future. time for the now.

now's pretty chill. i like it.

hasta mañana.

yesterday was the test, the cbest. it was pretty much exactly like the practice test in the book i bought, which was good... no surprises. actually, there was one surprise in the form of a reading comprehension question; it was a very poorly written excerpt from what seemed to be a knock-off of kipling's just-so stories. i had to sign a very fancy statement saying i wouldn't discuss the test outside of the test, so i won't go into total detail, but let's just say the questions seemed to be more geared towards the third graders that the passage was intended for, rather than potential teachers.

i finished the four hour exam with an hour and forty-five minutes remaining, which of course led me to believe that i had made huge errors. i started going over my answers, but then thought, "well, if i couldn't pass this test on a once-over, i'm not sure i belong in a classroom," and then amscrayed. i know that's a bastardly thing to think, but... man. i really think that the lowell (my high school paper, for thems that don't know) should do a story where they give a cbest to fifty students (or something like that) and see how well they do. i know, i should probably just stop being a bastard, but, well.... no.

after the test, i went and hung out with jennifer. we got mexican food and hung out in a bar to watch the usa-italy game. we were pretty much the only white people in the bar, and i'm pretty sure jennifer was the only woman, but it was a pretty friendly atmosphere. what blew us away, however, was when the usa scored it's only goal (it was a tie game, 1-1), the bar erupted with cheers and clapping. jennifer turned to me and poignantly said "how can anyone accuse immigrants of disloyalty when they cheer like that for a u.s. goal?" right on, man, right on.

anyway. today is father's day... happy father's day, dad. i had originally thought that i was going to be the only family member absent for this special occaision, but not anymore: bernie is still up at his jazz festival in rochester, anna is at her pre-camp weekend upstate, and i learned today that mom is going to dc later this afternoon for some nih stuff... so poor dad is all alone! sad! what i should've bought him was a ticket to san francisco, but i didn't know. wow, bad son.

so, remember to call all your fatherseses and tell them happy f-day. or d-day. or... p-day?

tomorrow: i start work. scary.

hasta mañana.

i think that years are entirely unsatisfactory as a method of measuring time. they don't seem to pass at a constant rate. they imply length, but in fact are very very tiny. for instance: today is the retirement party for one of my former journalism teachers, ms. swan. she's worked in schools forever and ever, but she's finishing today her 10th or 11th year at lowell. so i go ahead and think, "wow, that's a pretty good length of time," and then i think about my short three years there, and then, then i'm forced to confront the fact that my short three years there began almost eight years ago. what?! eight years... a period of time that, when i started high school, was more than half my life-span, and now is just over a third of it. okay, so my mathematics may be meaningless, but goddamn!

i've started writing my spec script for "grey's anatomy..." and let me tell you that it's very strange. it certainly is not as easy as i was anticipating it being, which is fine. i've spent the last week or so figuring out what's going to happen, and i'm hoping, now that i have an outline, that it won't be quite the same labor to put it into actual writing. but if it is, i guess that's okay. right?

i got a call from park and rec this morning saying that i already have a paycheck. i was confused for a second, because i haven't started work, but then remembered that we're getting paid for the orientation, which is nice. it won't be much... less than a hundred bucks, certainly, after taxes, but it's the first money i've earned on my own since being back from france, and it's nice to feel self-sufficient. of course, then i remembered how i have another €150 in my french bank account, and how nice it would be to have that here, and feel like an idiot for not just closing the damn thing. money sucks.

i was panicking about being a bad son, by not being with my dad on father's day, and not having got him a gift, when i remembered that barnes and noble does this crazy thing where they'll deliver books the same day you order them, but only in manhattan. anyway, i tried to call home in order to set up the reception of these gifts, and my dad answers, so i had to pull a "just wanted to see how you guys are doing" kind of thing. i was pretty bad at it. i finally got anna on the phone, and tried to clue her in onto the plan, except she told me that she's going to be away this weekend, too (in addition to myself and bernie)! if i didn't know my dad thought of father's day as such a fake holiday, i'd feel like the world's most terrible person. but he does, and i don't.

all right, well, happy father's day to all those dads reading my blog. oh, and, dad, if you're reading this, pretend you didn't read the last paragraph. Cool.

hasta mañana.

The song of the day is “why you’d want to live here” by death cab... I’ve been getting very anti-la reactions from my friends here as they learn about my new plans. One thing that sucks about plans is the number of times you have to repeat them to people, because the more times you say it, the more ridiculous it sounds. The cracks in one’s plan seem to be more and more obvious as you go over it again and again. Oy vey.

So, I’m taking this stupid test on Saturday, the California Basic Educations Standards Test, or CBEST. I’ve been doing some practicing in this workbook I got, and let’s just say that the basic education standards aren’t setting the bar particularly high. One question asked “What is the definition of the word ‘major’ as used in ‘major networks’?: A. officer B. large C. subject D. legal E. important” And I’m sure that’s probably one of the easiest questions I’m going to come across, but I would hope any graduating eighth grader would be able to answer that, let alone the teacher.

I was thinking earlier, and perhaps this is elitist and bastardly of me, but I wonder what the statistics are in terms of a correlation between someone’s college GPA and their CBEST pass rate. I figure at some point, people in a certain GPA bracket pass without exception, and if this is so, shouldn’t you be able to become exempt from the test? To rephrase, what, exactly, is this test testing that hasn’t been covered in college, or in the myriad other standardized tests taken before in my life? The answer: poopyface.

Of course, I’ve complained about how this test is sooooo beneath me, and now I’ve found that I think I left my admissions ticket in New York. (There’s always that one thing that gets left behind... too bad I didn’t think of it sooner). So, I guess I’m not that smart after all. I exploded the contents of my suitcase looking for it, which is something I’m not proud of, being a guest in someone’s home. In the end, though, I’m feeling hard pressed to get super upset about it... teaching has taken it’s place for the moment as a fall back position, and in a worst-case scenario where they flatly refuse to let me take the test without the little slip of paper with my name on it, I’m out $40, which sucks, but at least it’s not $100. Anyways, I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time on hold tomorrow morning trying to get in touch with the people. It would be a kind of bureaucratic perfect storm, if they didn’t let me take the test... I need a test, which is super-easy, to prove I’m up to standards to be a teacher, a profession which is extremely understaffed; however, I’m missing the piece of paper they mailed to my house saying I’m supposed to take the test, and therefore, cannot take the test, and cannot become a teacher. Yes, yes, I shouldn’t have forgotten the paper, but well. There it is.

I was walking today with Katherine, the daughter of the family I’m staying with, and we were talking about various cities one might live in. She’s going off to college in 2007, and so the various metro- cosmo- and regular old polises are at her fingertips. We got to comparing New York and San Francisco, as I am so wont to do, and we got to talking about smells. I think it’s no secret that new york more or less stinks to high heaven, but one does get used to the smell, so that it’s only neglected garbage dumpsters and sewage problems that really get to you. San Francisco, though, whether because of the ocean or the higher tree to concrete ratio, or whatever, doesn’t smell like that; at least, not most of it. There are the sketchy parts, of course. Sarah T and I walked through the tenderloin on Turk street, and I could almost get that New York whiff.

But what really got me was how, on the MUNI train after landing yesterday, I was sitting next to the door, and it opened at the first above-ground stop, and the air that wafted in was so unbelievably clean and flowery... man. It was the breathing equivalent of when you drink a cold glass of something, and you feel the cold liquid snaking down your esophagus. Anyway. I’m done. Sorry for the long absence, I’m going to try and be better about it. I’ll fail, sure, but I’ll try.

Hasta mañana.

today i went with my parents to visit a friend of theirs who lives in the bronx. he's a doctor at west point, and he's been in iraq for one or two tours of duty, working in an army hospital. he's an old friend of my dad's--i believe they were camp buddies together--but he's always lived on the east coast, so i've never known him especially well. anyway.

this was the first time that my parents had seen him since he'd been back from iraq. the last time i'd seen him was when we went to his middle son's bar mitzvah in jersey, which must have been at least three or four years ago. since then he'd divorced his wife and moved out of jersey... needless to say, a lot has happened without adding in iraq.

my normal standby mode for people who've been in traumatic situations is that they don't want to talk about it. maybe that's stupid, and i think that's certainly something that kept me from being a good reporter during my various forays into journalism, but whatever gene or codec or protein sequence that inspired such cautiousness in me does not exist in my mother's genome. we had been sitting at the (very jewish) lunch table (bagels, lox, whitefish salad, some nice sliced tomato... such a lovely table!) for no more than five minutes before my mom plunges in for details. it's somehow not so bad when she's doing it, the nervousness that fills me when i ponder asking difficult questions (a nervousness that stems most likely from the fear that i'm going to cause my subject to cry) seems to be absent when someone else is doing the dirty work. and it seems that he's willing, if not happy, to talk about it, especially in the medicalese that my mom can understand.

the conversation is fascinating to say the least, and i find that as much as i know (or think i know, or would like to think i know) about the situation, i really know very very little. he tells us that terrorists are blowing up bombs very close to his OR, and they operate right through them. he talks about "terrorists" with the same fervor and genericness that the president does, and that's unsettling. he has a very clear caste system in his mind of americans, iraqi civilians, and the enemy. they treat iraqi civilians that are hurt as bystanders by the americans and the terrorists (why isn't the word "insurgents" used? why not "the enemy"?) but not iraqis that are hurt by inter-sectarian violence; a matter of practicality, i'm sure, but difficult to justify in the sense that we share no responsibility in it. i start to think that the war has done things to his political schema... i can't say "bad things," but things.

and then, there is another side, a side that sounds more familiar to the sf-ny bleeding-heart liberal. showing us pictures he took in iraq (how he was able to take so many pictures i have no idea) we see the words "KBS" printed over and over again. "KBS shuttle bus" "KBS food supplies" "KBS fuel"... we ask what kbs is as he tells us it's halliburton. he says that the only reason we're fighting this war is so halliburton can make a profit. he sounds sure of it, and it's hard to think of this guy sewing people up on the battlefield with those thoughts kicking around his brain. perhaps it's a partitioning kind of thing... the perfect example would have been "as darwin was able to come up with evolution and also remain a christian," but wikipedia tells me that he stopped attending church with the death of his daughter, annie.

in the end, the most confrontational thing about his trip to iraq was what was going on over there that he had to deal with, that is, as a surgeon. it sounded like a great majority of his work had to do with soldiers who were injured in roadside bombings. there were many different acronyms he used to describe the various explosive devices, none of which i can seem to remember, but he did show us many pictures of some of his patients, and television and movies may be able to dull the blood-and-guts blow, but it can never get rid of it. all in all, he did 400 surgeries during his tour (i think he was there for just under a year), which means so many surgueries a day.

anyway, i'm falling asleep as i type, which is probably not worthwhile for any of us. best to all, and to all a goodnight.

so i feel like i had lots to write about today, but little is coming to mind. i'm a bit tipsy, and my typing is sluggish, so i'll go with one thought that i had just before i got home.

i was walking along 23rd street near 5th ave which currently has lots and lots of scaffolding. anyway, the scaffolding had this crossbeams going from the outermost to the innermost poles of the scaffolding, and these crossbeams were spaced at even intervals along the sidewalk, and i couldn't help but think of a church.

this got me thinking about churches. most people i know find their passion somewhere that's not a religious institution. i started thinking that there was probably someone who would consider walking along 23rd street beneath the peaks of the scaffolding their own sort of urban church. i'm using church in the most base of meanings: simply a place of spirituality. anyway, this forced me into "what would my church be?" kind of question, and being slightly more tipsy then than i am now (because it was about forty minutes ago), i spiraled out with lots of questions about "my church." so, i decided to make a few standard questions about "my church:"

1) What kind of room/building is your church?
2) Who is the priest/priestess of your church?
3) Is there a symbol of your church?
4) What would be the gospel of your church? Who wrote it?
5) Would you have hymns in your church? What would they be?

So, thinking about it, this is what I came up with:
1) & 2) My church is a classroom, the priest/ess is a teacher
3) I wasn't sure about this. my instinct was to say a question mark, but that seemed to easy. I think, though it's equally cheesy, that i might use these things they used to sell in this stupid garden store on west portal in san francisco. they were decorative stones to put in your garden, but they had words engraved in them. usually just one word, and most of them were really stupid: "love," "life," "beauty," all that kind of shit. but they had one or two that had "imagine" engraved in them, and something about that word carries a lot of weight with me... so part of my sees a really big version of those stones hanging in front of my church... a big fuck-off boulder with the word "imagine" across it.
4) the gospel of my church would probably be "as i lay dying," especially the addie chapter. maybe supported by "song of solomon."
5) the hymns would be random songs i guess i feel i connect with... certainly "if you're feeling sinister" would be in there; probably selections from "free to be... a family" by marlo thomas as well.

I guess I should go on to ask which holidays are most important (halloween) and what significant traditions there are (annual one-day fasting) but i'm tired and, as i've mentioned previously, not entirely sober. so let's leave it there. if anyone wants to leave their own church rundowns, please do so.

otherwise, hasta manana (for some reason, the ~ function isn't working! damn!)

ps. there are two women outside my window (i'm guessing their black by the sound of their voices, but i have no proof) who are having a soul-off... one is singing "hey-hey-HEEEEY-heyyy-hey" and the second one is singing back "hey-hey-HEEEEEYYY-heyyy-heeyyy" and then starting again "heeeyyy-HEEEYYY-heeyy-heeyyyyyyyyyyyy" and the first one responds "heeeyyy-HEEEYYY-hey-heyyyyeyeyeeeyyeyeyyy" and so on and so forth... it's amazing how i can be inside my parent's apartment and still be so totally connected to the city... phew!

so, today, i went witih a bunch of other people to see our old friend greg burke's sketch comedy show at upright citizen brigade. greg was the sports editor on the paper for a year during my time there. he's a great guy, very funny and easy to work with. anyway, we had been to his previous show and had recieved such a warm reception afterwards that we basically had to go to every show afterwards (i mean that as a good thing).

anyway, we're there tonight at this bar in chelsea afterwards, and, having not seen him in what i want to say was a year, we do the whole "what's everyone doing now?" roundabout. and when it's my turn i tell him that i've got my park and rec job in san francisco, and i'm about to tack on my dreams of televisionwriting when i remember that greg has gone out to la and done the starry-eyed kid hoping to make it big, except, having been acting since he was a little kid, i don't think his eyes were quite so starry. anyway, he'd gone out to la and though i've never asked him directly about it (i ascribe that hesitancy to the fact that i don't see him that often, and that i wouldn't want to awkwardly open what could be painful scars... you know, failure scars). because no matter how many times i say it or how many people i tell, it still does seem a little fantastic, this plan, and not a little cliché. the only way to make it more cliché would be if i were from a little town in kansas (to be fair, i am technically from a little town in missouri, which is practically the same thing, but we all know that i'm not actually from missouri).

and i do this whole song and dance several times a day. i guess what made me notice it tonight was that my hesitancy didn't stem from any particular desire not to hurt greg's feelings, but from some sort of self-defense mechanism for something that may not even need defending, i.e., a bitter greg burke says "so, you're heading out to hollywood, are you? good luck, they'll skin you alive!!!!! muahahahahaha!!!!" okay, he probably wouldn't laugh like that, but you get the picture. anyways. this thought didn't have a logical conclusion, and i need to go to bed for trip to ikea with amalea and brad: take 2. wish me luck and happiness; that's what i'm wishing you.

hasta mañana.

today i saw x-men 3. that's right, i'm about to become the 94,882nd person to blog about it, and that's just on blogger: who knows what untold stretches of text have been created on other blogging sites!?

anyway, disappointment. my knowledge of the phoenix saga is not what it should be, but taking a quick glance at the wikipedia page (hold on, i'm about to turn into a geeky puddle of goo), i can see that there is litte relation between the movie and the phoenix saga. for one, the phoenix saga seems to involve a lot of aliens and names and characters that i've never heard of. i'm not against that, i'm just saying: whoa. not that it mattered, because they were pretty much done with that storyline about five mintues into the movie. great. awesome.

the reason the movie wasn't as good as the last two, however, had more to do with the total lack of character development. the last two movies had this great way of telling you about someone's situation, pulling you onto their side (or, at least, forcing you to understand where they were coming from), and then throwing them into these situations where you actually cared what happened to them. not so much in this film. there are half-a-dozen new characters, and absolutely none of them get a decent backstory; even angel, played by ben foster of six feet under, who looks to be one of the main four characters from the movie posters, has about 20 minutes of screentime, almost no dialogue, and though we see a scene from his childhood, it does absolutely nothing to inform us of who this kid is, outside of a petulant teen with wings. lame! he doesn't even do any contributing to the team fight effort, which we all know is the hallmark of whether someone is an x-person.

the lackluster quality of the movie (and truly, it's because it followed two superb films that it is is so lackluster) has led me to really hate the definitive one-timeness of movie making. yes, it's expensive and costly to make films, but part of me would love to see something along the lines of a film-off: give two production companies the same outlined script, and see who makes the better movie. yes, it makes no sense, but... christ. what a waste.

all right. i'm fading fast. until next time.

to quote the genie from aladdin, "boy, do i feel sheepish." anyway, that's how i feel about my multi-day blog lapse. or perhaps it is a relapse. difficult to say.

i'd like to blame the lack of entry on the lack of inspiration, but that's a non-starter, since i'm supposed to write, inspired or not.

today i finally got health insurance. my brother's recent "event" spurred my parents to spur me onto some type of coverage. it's pretty scary what life without health care means... my mom postulated that bernie recieved something along the lines of $10,000 worth of treatment. what? that's madness, i tell you, madness! anyway, the situation becomes increasingly complicated when we factor in the, uh, fact that i don't know what i'm doing/where i'm going to be this fall. over the last few days i've been coming to terms with the significance, and more importantly, the immediacy of my decision to venture into la-la-land. but at the same time, it's kind of exciting in the whole my-life-is-beginning-now way. anyway.

i guess that'll do for now. i found the above image to help illustrate my first point. enjoy.

so bernie is fine. he had his appendix removed last night at 12:30 am, lucky him, and he's now currently recovering.

last night i minutely freaked out, actually around 12:30-ish, thinking that if something had gone horribly wrong i wouldn't know. i wandered around the house for a while, debating as to whether i should wake my dad to ask for any developments, or let him sleep. in the end, i decided that if anything serious had happened that someone would have woken me up, and went back to sleep (though it wasn't easy; i was supposed to take amalea and brad to ikea at the crack o' dawn, and tried to get to sleep early, but my sleep cycle wasn't having any of it). thank god: had i decided to knock on dad's door i would have found that he wasn't there, but had gone to the hospital to sit with my mom while bernie was in surgery... anyway, his absence would have prompted a more major freak-out, i imagine, so it was nice to avoid that.

like i said, i was supposed to ikea it with amalea and brad, but i was called in for duty (not that i wasn't happy to do it) and had to call them at 7:35 to cancel. i'm sure it was obnoxious for them, but fortunately, sickness in the family, especially the immediate family, is one of those clear-all excuses. not that i needed an excuse, but, you know. i assembled a suitcase for bern with a bunch of stuff, including my major dvd collection and a small library of books. that was my way of dealing with it; my mom's way is to explain symptoms to the rest of the family--none of whom hold medical degrees--in full-throttle medicalese. i end up doing a lot of "what's that?" "oh, and that is...?" "and what's special about retrocecal appendicitis?" but i guess it's okay. dad likes to absorb impact for the rest of us... a lot of "everything's going to be fine," but not in a patronizing way, in a "don't waste your time worrying" way, which i don't mind so much. anna... well, who knows. she just keep plugging along.

as far as bernie goes, he seemed in high spirits. one thing that's dififcult to glean sometimes is how a person feels when you yourself are pain-free. he was on some grade-a pain killers, so for a lot of the time, he was very talkative and jokey, but every now and again he'd wince, and i'd say "oh right, he's just had surgery." he said he wanted to keep the appendix, but apparently they'd already incinerated it. maybe as an example to the rest of his internal organs: "you guys think you get ectomied and placed in a fancy jar of phermaldehyde to just hang out for all eternity, but this is what happens when you fuck up. not pretty, is it, tonsils?" anyway. he seems good, considering.

i on the other hand, am on the verge of collapse, so let this post serve it's purpose.

hasta mañana.

once again, i bring it right down to the wire for posting. okay. i'm done self-flaggelating. for now.

it looks like maybe my brother has apendicitis. gross. my mom swung into doctor mode so fast that i didn't even see them leave. anyway, i think the two of them are at the hospital, and my mom won't accept any offers of help or relief or anything. maybe it's a mom thing more than a doctor thing... or maybe it's some weird hybrid of a mom/doctor thing... anyway, it's hard to gague how serious it all is, because she doesn't give me the real skinny. i usually can get more or less accurate information from my dad when she fills him in, but it's not the ideal way to find out what's going on. i'm supposed to go to ikea tomorrow with amalea and brad, and i can't tell if i should blow it off to... i don't know, be around? my sister was saying that it's my turn to get some sort of serious medical condition: dad tore the achilles, mom broke her leg, bernie's appendix is either bursting or burst (burst is a strange verb because it seems to be almost entirely unconjugatable:
present: i burst, you burst, he/she/it bursts, we burst, they burst
past: i burst, you burst, he/she/it burst, we burst, they burst
past participle: had burst
future: i/you/he/she/it/we/they will burst
gerund: bursting
there are more tenses, but they're all the same... anyway) and anna made up some weird thing about how she had the flu three times or something. i veto that as counting as a serious medical condition, and tried to counter with the fact that i sprained my ankle in a foreign country, which i'm pretty sure qualitfies for double points, bringing it up to a serious medical condition, but i don't think she bought it.

all right, well, like i said, i'm getting up early tomorrow. weekends seem to be busy days for me.

hasta mañana.

perhaps this is better, blogging in the morning. i'm not really blogging about anything in particular, so this is probably as good a time as any.

yesterday, i still managed to have not shaken off the hoogy-boogies i'd been feeling in relation to the impending decision about whether or not to make a real try (and therefore, any try) and doing this tv thing.

i was on the bus, and had this weird feeling in my stomach; not nausea, but rather a feeling i usually experience when there's some sort of boy involved. anyway, it wasn't as bad as when the boys are involved, so i kind of had room to get to know it, you know? i started thinking that it was my soul aching, a kind of ridiculous thing to think, but anyway. i kept feeling like i needed to barf something up (again, not due to nausea, but) just to get it out of my system, and then i started thinking that the thing that needed barfing up was my soul. this led directly into the creation of a story where a new young kid hoping to make it big in hollywood (wow, it sounds disgusting everytime i say it) learns how to vomit up his own soul. see, he wants to make it big in the tv industry, but he doesn't want to become one of those viper-types who steamroll everyone at work and at home. so, everyday, on his drive to work, he barfs up his soul, which is a pale blue-lavender color, about the size of a volleyball, very light, and gooey. he puts it into a ziploc bag (why not something more safe? who knows?) and leaves it in the refrigerator (because you have to refrigerate your soul) at work, and then is both vicious and ass-licking to the right people at the right times. at the end of the day, he gets his sould out of the fridge, and swallows it back down, so he can go home to his boyfriend (naturally) and be a good person, have fun with his friends, talk with his parents and say nice things. eventually, of course, he loses his soul somewhere (maybe someone else accidentally takes it and eats it, and then they have two souls? maybe not) and his life falls apart because suddenly his this soulless asshole in all aspects of his life. i don't know what the story means, but it was fun to think about.

anyway i think that covers me for today. or yesterday. whatever. peace!