Sunday, November 22, 2009

Week at a Close

And overall, not a bad week.

The short film script of my short story "My Panda" adapted by Paul, was named second runner up in the CAPE digital shorts contest. Prize: $100 and a mentor. The mentor is the cool part.

As a balance, my first rejection arrived (from Shenandoah) for an essay I recently submitted. Rejection is of course not the preferred outcome, but the comfort comes from the fact that it is evidence that I actually printed a dozen copies and wrote a dozen cover letters and put them in envelopes, and put those envelopes in the mail. Yea, me.

The other night I went to hear a writer speak at the Writer's Guild, and met a guy who knows a guy who runs a meditation session on Sundays. I've been looking for a place to go periodically, to encourage my own practice, which suffers without present reminders, so that seems like a nice piece of serendipity. The other thing is that I've wanted it to be nearby... a little shallow, but like with yoga and acupuncture, I'm kind of over things that are de-stressors, but involve so much traffic and logistics that they become stressors. So this one is NOT nearby, but it seems very close to Paul's parents house, and when his mom is in town, we often try to visit her on Sundays, so this might be a nice convergence. The man has a website with talks that you can stream, and I listened to the first one today as I folded laundry and was quite pleased. Just the recorded talk recalled to me the mindset that I have had in the past about finding time each day to "sit." And so I did so today. That's a little like winning a prize. too.

And tonight at poker, I didn't lose. In fact, Paul came in 4th and I came in third, 10% and 15% of the total pot respectively, so we made a profit of $60 over our buy-ins, so that was very cool, although in the scheme of all combined poker nights, we are still down by $60. However, I would never have thought that far back, Paul calculated that.

Oh, AND my new laptop arrived. It is very nice. It has glowing keys so that I can wake up in the middle of the night and type something that occurs to me, and it has a battery life that is insanely longer than my old laptop's battery. I went to two industry panels this morning and didn't even have to sit in the back by the outlets.

And, you know, I live in a nice place, in a nice neighborhood, and I get enough to eat. I have friends, and Netflix, and family. I'm quite privileged in many ways. And I have the opportunity in my life to try to make things better for others. I'm a pretty lucky girl, and I'm thankful. I don't know where that came from, just how I was feeling all the sudden.

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