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Didn't get as much sleep last night as I'd hoped. My plan upon getting home from work was a quiet evening, perhaps watching one of the GreenCine discs that had just arrived, Wait Until Dark and the second disc of the first season of Six Feet Under. Except that Lynnee called to announce an impromptu first meeting of our fledgling (or would that be nascent?) sketch/improv comedy group. Went well for the first time, I think. Promising. It helps that the other two people actually have experience with this sort of thing, unlike Lynnee and I, who are pretty much just untrained smartasses. Afterwards, we went to Pop's, Harmony's (new?) bar at 24th and Bryant. Never been before. Nice place. Stayed later than we should have, really, but hey, the jukebox has Holy Wood and Red Headed Stranger. That officially makes it The Greatest Jukebox in the world. Remember when you used to think about jukeboxes in terms of singles, not albums? Speaking of such things, the other day I was burning the eighty zillionth version of an mp3 mix CD I've been fiddling with for several months (and will no doubt to continue to for several more) when I suddenly found myself missing singles. Oh, I love the sheer convenience of digital music, of having several hours of music on a single small disc, and I wouldn't ever want to go back. Still, there was something to be said for going through a stack of singles, not knowing what you want to hear until you find it. LPs were neat too, but the little rush from a good 45rpm record just can't be beat. Or being able to play a record backwards with your finger, if you were so inclined. "Revolution #9" and "Darling Nikki" being the most obvious choices, of course. (I have no idea if any of my music software can play mp3s backwards. Probably cool edit pro, which I've figured out how to use to normalize wav files, but it's too highfalutin for me otherwise.) I'm sincerely glad I grew up with analog music, that I remember what it was like. 2:57pm In spite of The Boss forbidding me on Monday from doing anything other than my Girl Friday duties while at work, and his insistence that the guys in the SEO department (which is where I might be moving) would consider training me or even answering my questions to be a burden, I've spent the last two workdays rewriting a report for them. With The Boss's blessing. He even told me to make it my top priority. This morning he looked at what I've done so far, and very much to my surprise, he's happy with it. He had a few minor, almost arbitrary semantic objections (to things which weren't my wording in the first place), but otherwise, he says I'm doing a good job at it. Whew. Yay. This might work out after all. Even if it's still difficult sometimes to concentrate on what the cute Bill Pullman-esque boy is saying. 6:12pm A rare late day at work. It's one of the dangers of moving up this particular ladder: I may not be able to always jet at the crack of half past four. And I certainly won't get paid overtime. From a utilitarian standpoint, if my salary is enough so that we don't have to worry about paying the bills, it'll be worth it. Everything else will fall into place.
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From the official text of the Governor's State of the State address yesterday:
I'm going to say, "Come to California. Come and do business here. Buy our fantastic products. Visit our special attractions, and hire our workers, who are the most productive in the world."
I am a salesman by nature. And now most of my energies will go into selling California. If I can sell tickets to my movies like Red Sonia
[sic] or
Last Action Hero, you know I can sell just about anything.
And California is the easiest sell I've ever had.
Further proof that if you're not careful, trying to be clever can make you look like an idiot (as I've personally demonstrated countless times). I can only conclude that his speechwriters were suggesting he could make people pay to see a lousy movie. However, Last Action Hero was actually the biggest flop of 1993. It eventually broke even in foreign and video sales, but its domestic gross was less than its budget, which means he did not sell it. To my way of thinking, True Lies would have been a much better example, a heinous movie which was a big hit. 10:35pm The revived writing group met tonight, though only half the members were there. So, of course, it made perfect sense that I may have written my strongest piece yet for the group. (Not strongest overall, but for the group.) It seemed to go over well, even for what's essentially a Nikos Kazantzakis/Poppy Z. Brite/Helen Fielding melange. The audience reaction when I read it on Saturday should be interesting. I've finished the first draft of my Twilight Zone script. It needs polishing and tightening, but I figure the first big hurdle has been cleared. For assorted reasons, the show date has been pushed back from the last weekend of February to the first weekend of March. As a result, it's now going to be the opening weekend show, along with m. i. blue's episode. No pressure there. The reading with Lauren Wheeler and David West at Modern Times is going to be on my birthday, June 16. For my last birthday, of course, it was with (e) and Shauna at Adobe. The birthday reading thing isn't so much a "tradition" as "something I hope to do every year." For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm accomplishing something.
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The cast for my Twilight Zone is confirmed: Lynnee, Liz Young, Maddy, Jon Fast (who played Maddy's father in Night of the Living Dead), and Seeley Quest. Granted, something could change in the next eight weeks—it always does, doesn't it?—but, damn, I am so psyched. Some very talented people are putting a lot of faith in me, and I hope I don't let them down. 9:29am I remembered my lunch today. (Yesterday's non-crisis was solved by a quick trip to the local Mollie Stone's for pita bread and hummus.) Maybe that's a good sign, I don't know. What I really wish I'd brought yesterday was the Rescue Remedy, since the negative portent came true in the form of a rather unpleasant talk with The Boss about my future with the company. He has this way of being both encouraging and demeaning in the same breath, saying he thinks I'm intelligent and capable and would be perfect for this other position in the company, then describing scenarios in which I inevitably fuck up. When I object, he always tells me to calm down. Because, you know, I'm being a hysterical woman and all. (Which, in a sick way, is encouraging. not once in the six months I've been here has there been anything resembling a pronoun slip, a veiled-or-otherwise reference to me being a tranny, anything like that.) He also doesn't want me to do any training or research into the position while I'm at work—if I want to "take the initiative," he says, I should do it on my own time. Between my desire not talk about my personal life and the fact that objecting would have cast me in a bad light, I didn't tell him I don't have time away from work, that I need my time away from work to be spent doing other things. To sum up metaphorically, if dramatically, it feels like he's telling me I should fly for him while refusing to pay to unclip my wings. He claims, however, that if in a few weeks I've learned what I need to know, the position is mine. I told him I was worried that I would do all the work and get myself trained, and he wouldn't give me the job. He assured me that wouldn't happen. Oddly, he didn't sound at all offended by me suggesting that he was a liar. Kelly says he likes it when people stand up to him, call him on his bullshit. I think I may have scored a few points, I don't know. It helps that the two people I'd be working under, including the cute Bill Pullman-esque boy, are supportive of me getting the position. The Boss insists he'd be "shoving me down their throats" if he promoted me, that they would perceive it as purely his idea and bitch and moan loudly. That, he insists, is "just the way people are." Indeed, I took "took the initiative" and spoke to them before the talking to The Boss. Which, of course, bothered him. Seems I took too much initiative. I'm learning to loathe that word. Towards the end of the discussion, I asked if there was any hope of me getting a pay raise while remaining in my current position. I'd made several less-than-veiled references to the the fact that Maddy's unemployment is about to run out and she hasn't been able to get a job in spite of all the interviewing. He said he'd talk to his accounting person. An hour later, he told me that starting with the next pay period, I'd be getting a raise. He was a tad vague with the details—figuring out how I'm paid is like an algebra word problem—but it sounds like it'll be enough to cover rent. This is without necessarily moving on to the other position, which I still hope happens. It all has a slight Faustian tinge, but even Faust had to buy cat food. 2:25pm The slightly delayed (but not at all missed) "favorite movies of the year" list. Which is not the same thing as the "best." Whatever the best movie was, I probably didn't see it, and I'll bet you didn't either. For as many movies are produced every year, the odds are actually against the best one (if such a thing can be defined, which it can't) getting wide distribution. One of these, perhaps. And, since someone's surely thinking it: yes, fine, I'm only saying that because I didn't see Return of the King, which is without a doubt the best movie of the year, and I shouldn't be such a snob. Happy? My slightly arbitrary favorites were Far From Heaven, Winged Migration and Gerry—movies which, at the time, really made me feel like I was having a unique experience. These weren't the only ones (Spider comes to mind), but I saw so few movies this year, I figured I should keep it short. Maybe if I'd seen over a hundred, I could justify a top ten list. Oh, honorary mention from last year (since I didn't see until well into this year) is Soderbergh's Solaris. The rest of the movies I saw this year, most of which didn't suck either: By Hook or By Crook, Bubba Ho-Tep, Dirty Pretty Things, Finding Nemo, He Loves Me He Loves Me Not, House of 1000 Corpses, The Italian Job, Lost in La Mancha, The Magdalene Sisters, A Mighty Wind, Monster, Naqoyqatsi, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times, Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary, Southern Comfort, Spellbound, Spider, 28 Days Later, Unprecedented, Urban Warrior and Whale Rider. Wheee.
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Back at the office. I left my lunch at home. It's not a huge crisis. There are places nearby where I can get food, some of it halfway decent. I won't starve. It's just an icky portent. 2:40pm The first week of September '01, I was putting together a mix CD which included Willie Nelson's cover of Paul Simon's "American Tune." By the end of the second week, amidst the wave of pseudo-patriotism, I'd pulled the song. It has yet to find its way onto any other compilation. I'm actually still fond of it—it's dark, beautiful, and not exactly a flag-waving ode to patriotism—and yet it's just never felt right to me after The Great Overshadowing. Anyway, while a lot of us were heartbroken when Willie teamed up with crypto-fascist Ford huckster Toby Keith, all is forgiven: he's released an anti-war song. He's even said he hopes the song causes a backlash with conservative country music fans. Aw yeah. That's my boy. I'll bet Toby never speaks to him again.
don't know a soul who's not been battered
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A few months back, a kittypr0n DV master disappeared. I couldn't find it in the apartment or the car, and it wasn't at the studio. I came to the unpleasant conclusion that I'd lost in transport somewhere, perhaps when I was getting other things out of the trunk of the car. Then, last night when I was dropping off the tapes for broadcast this month, it was returned to me. It had been at the studio all along, even though they'd said before that it wasn't. I didn't ask what happened. I don't really care. It slipped through a crack, and now it's returned. And, while I wouldn't want to lose any of them, it included the episode with Michelle and Rocco's cat Petunia. Sort of a sentimental favorite with us. And now it's back. Yay. Official photos from Hitch-hiker's Guide are up. Good lord, but my hands are huge. 11:55pm Me at K'vetch tonight: crash, thud, klunk. Just goes to show that I'm usually not as clever as I'd like to believe.
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