Applications from the Abyss

I'm preparing a number of applications for tomorrow, including writing-based scholarship applications at school, an application for teaching assistantships, and both Film Independent and Sundance Labs. This requires, in addition to the script itself, things like resumes, informational cover letters, and bios. These are dangerous to write when you are feeling like crap about almost everything, including the script you are sending.

Example: Barrington Smith-Seetachitt
Biography

Barrington was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, where she received a pretty good public-school education, augmented by music lessons, tennis lessons, and dance lessons. Her childhood dream was to become a librarian, because the library was her favorite place, and she liked to imagine herself at the front of the room, reading books to kids at story time. Today she thinks back to her old career aspirations and realizes it probably would have made her twenty times happier than living the stressed-out, culturally bereft, financially-on-the edge life she lives.

But you know what they say--half of writing is editing.

The News

Yesterday at the grocery store, I signed up for a year of the L.A. Times. I will get the paper Thursday thru Sunday--that's four papers a week--for the weekly price of 75 cents.

And they gave me a ten dollar gift card for the grocery store.

Can a newspaper even exist on this amount? I guess not. Well, maybe. If they increase circulation, they can give those numbers to their advertisers and sell more advertisements.

And maybe hook some new readers.

Fight on, newspapers, I hope you survive!

One thing that makes my day a little brighter

I have "hidden" all my friends on facebook who use "Lil Greenpatch" as their automatic status updater.

This probably makes me a bad person.

But since I've confessed that, I'll confess something else...those "friends" were the ones who, when I saw their friend requests, I thought either "ugh" or "why?"

So is the Lil Green Patch thing proof that I already had some intuition about how our FB friendship would progress, or is it just the reason I have come up with for the hiding people I really didn't know or like to begin with?

Or do I just have a disaffinity for people who love the environment?

Or do they feel the same about me, and just needed a mass of people to spam with this very good cause, and I was one of them?

I really don't hate the rainforest.

Check List

If you have experienced five or more of these symptoms within the same two week period--especially if a depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure are among your symptoms--this could be indicative of an episode of depression.

1. Depressed Mood
A person may report feeling "sad" or "empty" or may cry frequently. YES
2. Decreased Interest or Pleasure
A person may show markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, daily activities. YES
3. Weight Changes
Significant changes in weight when not attempting to gain or lose (a gain or loss of 5% or more in a month. NO. I don't think. Maybe I have put on a few pounds. What's 5% of 135?
4. Sleep Disturbances
Insomnia or sleeping too much. THE SECOND ONE. I went to bed at 9pm last night and woke up this morning at 10AM.
5. Psychomotor Agitation or Retardation
The person may be observed to be either agitated and restless or physically slowed down in their movements. NOT SURE. Don't feel that quick, but then I'm not in a position to "observe the person."
6. Fatigue
Deep fatigue or a loss of energy. YES YES YES
7. Feelings of Worthlessness or Guilt
A depressed person may feel that they have no value or they may feel inappropriately guilty about things they have no control over. OH. IS THAT NOT NORMAL?
8. "Brain Fog"
A depressed person may have a diminished ability to think, concentrate or make decisions. OH, SORRY. I GOT DISTRACTED. YES. I THINK. IS THAT A GOOD ANSWER?
9. Thoughts of Death
A depressed person may have recurring thoughts of death, especially thoughts of suicide, with or without a specific plan. NO. Why would I commit suicide when I can go back to bed?

How many was that?

Conflicted

I have been working on decision-making as a skill my entire life, and I'm still fairly bad at it.

We have a rehearsal for a pitching event at school this morning at which attendance is not required, but requested. It will be followed closely by my niece's "princess birthday party" this afternoon--I am still in the process of pressing and cleaning my "Fairy Godmother" dress I found at Jet Rag earlier this week. Tonight there is a art show featuring someone loosely connected to my parents, and two different Birthday celebrations. And our D is visiting this weekend...his number of visits diminishing as he prepares to move to Japan in June.

I have been to every rehearsal so far. Today is faculty/alumni day, so I guess if I want faculty and alumni to know I come to these things, today is the day I should go. However it means the performers really have people to perform to that they probably care about (and rightly so) more than me. At some point the lack of my body might mean they have to pitch to each other. Not the end of the world. And yet the guilt...

And yet the guilt if I don't write...now less than seven days from the May 1 deadline for scholarship scripts, final school projects, assistant applications.

Do I tend to have an inflated view of my own importance? Do I still have ill-tended boundaries? Should I be more protective and passionate about my own goals? Or is it just a little lazy and selfish?

My stomach literally knots up over these little decisions, on a fairly consistent basis...is that normal? No one else really talks about it.

Tomorrow our friend from Austin has a film at the Newport Film Festival. The trip is over an hour each way, and sadly our car maintenance situation is a bit precarious. But he's an old friend, and I really want to support his film. Why haven't we taken our car to the shop before (obvious reasons, we are sharing one car so it involves lots of logistics, and are scared it will be really expensive). Stomach knots already.

Unexpected

Histopingogram today. Otherwise know as a "dye test,' the radiologist puts some contrast liquid into your cervix and and then uses that to see if it comes out through your fallopian tubes.

Although he could see my left fallopian tube, no fluid seemed to pass through, implying that it is blocked. I didn't expect that.

The right side seems fine.

Two Ways of Seeing a River

From the essay by Mark Twain. I think about it often in relationship to my chosen craft.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced....
.... But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: "This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?"

I Like This

It's about eighteen minutes long, but if you are a writer, as I know a number of you are, I think you will find it time worth spending.

Tuesdays

I have Tuesdays off this semester. Sometimes I feel a twinge—not exactly of guilt, but perhaps of slackness, that I petitioned out of a required production class and now I have this “free day” that no one else in my class has. I know in my head I’ve spent years doing set work, and more years than that doing production office work, but it is indicative of the power of being placed in any social setting, that it’s difficult not to think that you should be doing—and valuing—what other people are doing and valuing. (Which is why, in general, I think it is good (good as in functional) to find social groups that can support and propel you in the things you want to do—be that writing, or political activism, or going on a diet. Although I see an inherent danger, if one dives into and accepts a value system presented by a social group, without much real, individual reflection on the matter...but I digress.)

What I have to remind myself, or maybe not remind myself, but struggle to reconcile, is that I am not at the same part of my life as most of my classmates, and although our life experiences led us all to the same school, our lives are not exactly at the same juncture. For instance, many of my “free” Tuesdays of late, have been, in fact, not free, but dedicated to doctor’s visits. Some of these are a result of my past illness, and some not.

In fact the last three, the gynocologist, the endocrinologist, and the infertility clinic, were not related, except insofar as the illness and its aftermath have contributed to our letting time pass us by. The last time we talked to a doctor about baby-making (pre-cancer) we were reassured, told we “had time,” and advised to try on our own for another year before jumping into any treatments.

Six years later, it is a different story. The endocrinologist reluctantly gave me a prescription for Clomid, but urged that we not fool around, but go straight to an infertility clinic as time is growing short. At the infertility clinic, our doctor explained that forty is not the magic number, but that it is the marker that seems to indicate a lot of changes in outcome, so they were very happy to see me some months shy of that number.

I have always been adamant that I did not want to put myself through the emotional gauntlet I have seen friends traverse, with tests and drugs, then stronger drugs, then IVF, which sometimes works, and just as often does not…

But, as the years have passed and I've realized that Paul—and sometimes I—still unconsciously referred to hypothetical kids, I figured it would be better to really consider our options now than to look back years from now and regret what we didn’t do.

The state of mind that is “future regret management” is a tricky one. Its key characteristic is that you have to believe you did all you could in the given circumstances. When I went to the endocrinologist, I thought a couple cycles of Clomid would be enough to stave off any demons of regret—that it would mean we tried. But she made it clear that without combining the drug with IUI, it wouldn’t be a real effort at all. So "trying" quickly became redefined as continuing a little further down the path.

There, our doctor explained that the Clomid IUI combo at our age only has a 5% success rate per cycle. But if we did injectable drugs (which aren’t referred to by name, but simply as “injectables”), we could raise those chance to 15-20%.

Of course, we would exceed our spending cap of $3000 before completing one cycle, but what if, in the future, a few thousand dollars doesn’t mean that much? How do we explain our decision to spend what at the time seemed like a lot of money for something that we knew was unlikely to work? (And who exactly am I explaining myself to, in these imagined conversations, is a topic for another post.)

By doubling our investment again, we could again double our chances:
$12,000 equals one round of IVF with a 40% success rate.

This is something we’d never considered. I have never wanted to subject my body to something that extreme, and how could we justify spending that amount—and let’s be clear, that money source would be yet more student loans-- on less than a 50-50 chance of bringing a kid into the world—and that’s without even thinking about how we don’t really have the resources to raise any but a completely healthy baby once he’s born.

So that’s a step we decided we wouldn’t take, and decided we would be fine with that. No regrets.

Until we considered that everything would be cheaper in Thailand.

And that’s a whole other can of worms.

First how ever, I need to get through the first round of tests.

The next one is on Tuesday.

The New Frugality?

Got a long overdue haircut yesterday at a place in Venice a woman in my Wednesday writing group (that I never go to because I have class) recommended. They have an advertised $20 first haircut. I figured the standard cut was probably $35 or $40, but caught a look at the price list as my stylist was snipping, and saw it was $75. Apparently you can go in for a shampoo and blow-dry (no cut) for $40.

It's strange how people have different benchmarks for this things...some cut their hair at home, some go to SuperCuts and get the $9.95 special, and some pay a couple hundreds bucks in Beverly Hills and consider it a necessity, not a luxury.

I'm a bit of a SuperCuts snob, for no good reason except that I went one or twice in my distant past and felt like they didn't have the time or the savvy to go in to my hair and do a lot of the texturing and de-bulking that other places do...but my experience was not in L.A. and not for many years, so I am mainly operating on a kidn of prejudice there--that a fast haircut is like fast food.

I haven't been to a manicure place in years, and figure I can paint my nails at home--others would never consider that. Really nice nails are part of who they are, and they get them done.

My $20/worth $75 hair cut is fine, for what is essentially a "holding pattern" cut...i.e. something to make it look okay while I try to actually make a decision about what to do next, but for my next go round, I think I'll be returning to K-Town, where I get a very precise cut for $25

Status Updates

If I wanted to change my Facebook status much more often than I do, here are some I could but may or may not ever use:

The "check engine" light has transitioned from intermittent to permanent.

I would like our house better if we had floor lamps. Pools of light are better than an onslaught.

Thinking about working this summer but unsure. Should I intern. Should I forget everything and just write? Opinions or ideas for part-time jobs?

Paul observed that it's better to be an early adopter of technologies because the small group who do it first have a bonding experience that can't be re-created later. BTW, we both added the Twitter app this week.

I just found out that one of my friends who is vehemently and vocally anti-Facebook has a Twitter account. Ahh, the arbitrary lines we draw.

Time for bed.

Only in L.A.?

I had to pick a new dentist from the Doc-finder on my insurance website.

She was nice enough I guess, but it was a little weird that when I left she gave me a DVD for a "business opportunity" that appears to be a pyramid marketing scheme: Prepaid Legal Services

Things I Can Make in My Ricecooker...

...according to the recipe booklet that accompanied it:

Almond Cream Coconut Flan
How Spinach and Artichoke Spread
Midnight Omelet for for Two
Fresh Tomato and Corn Summer Salad
Steamed Southern Corn Pudding
Maine Fisherman's Chowder
Hungarian Beef Goulash
Fresh Tropical Fruit Bread Pudding
Dark Chocolate Truffle Cake
Pepper Steak Burritos
Golden butter Corn Bread
Game Day Chili Cheese Dip
Italian Cheese and Broccoli Bake

Apparently, if I ever am in a place without an oven or a stove top, I can use the rice cooker.

Actually I knew this, because when I first moved to Tallahassee, it took me several days to have the gas turned on, and I did get innovative with the rice cooker.

However, in the near future I plan to look for some recipes online that involve rice.