Writing

I'm not blogging I'm writing. That's kind of good.
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Some Random Stuff

A few unconnected people have told me that, in conjunction with building my system up for fertility, I should make a homemade chicken broth and eat half a cup three times a day, so last night, I made my first ever chicken broth from scratch. I rarely cook with meat, and even then it's usually ground up, or a fish, so dealing with a whole chicken was decidedly weird. It kind of felt all soft-skinned like a baby. Washing it under the faucet, it had such a cut little butt. And then putting in the big pot of water with a bunch of vegetables. Somehow it felt more like nurturing this kind of weird baby thing than cooking a chicken. And then, as the water heated up and I stirred it around, the air came out of the body cavity, and it was like it farted in the bath tub.

Obviously I'm weird...but the whole thing, about how we prepare animal corpses and have this socially trained acceptance to creating food out of them is pretty weird too.

Since it's summertime, and I'm unemployed--at least until my editing client sends me her pages--I have been trying to take advantage of various workshops and panels about the industry. In the past week, Paul and I have attended an industry panel discussion, two nights of a pitching seminar, a script reading workshop, and a presentation on dialogue. They each tend to each have a few nuggets of practical knowledge, but can drag a little--like any class I suppose, and so make me a little antsy, wondering, "why am I spending three hours of my Saturday morning doing this?" But at the same time, the advice is useful. Sometimes it merely reinforces things I should already know, a lot of it is familiar advice phrased just slightly different from others who have given the same advice.

And this morning's seminar actually make me really happy I'm in film school. I hear people ask questions that I know can never be answered in a single seminar Q and A session, and I think--"Wow. I could be trying to piece everything together just from this, instead of using it to add context to other very thorough and methodological teaching I've recieved." And I feel really lucky.

Something really good actually happened at the pitching seminar, which is we did our practice pitches on the second night, and the teacher, who is also a manager and producer, asked to see one of Paul's scripts. I think we have both been losing momentum in recent months and Paul especially doesn't have school to fall back on. With just this smallest bit of encouragement I can immediately see the difference in his attitude about things. He's working on the rewrite now, in preparation to sending it. I'd love to see something come of it, but even if not, he'll have a much more polished draft and a good pitch to send to other people, which is great.

From a selfish point of view, I can't help being a little sad however, because it's also a story I've been working on rewriting. The story was one of my favorites of Paul's, that he had kind of put on the back burner, so I'd said I wanted to work with it and I've just spent a couple months outlining and reconceiving, but with an older, less commercial audience in mind than what he'll have to fashion from it now. I have to come to grips that it won't be my baby--and that it never really was. But that is just a twinge--I am mostly super happy for anything that happens, because, to be blunt--WE NEED MONEY. Living under a roof is good, and truthfully hasn't seemed like any kind of certainty lately.

What else? Saw the latest installment of Harry Potter on Wednesday (Laura, sorry, I've grown to snobby to wait in lines if there's an alternative, so did the Arclight!) It was ohhhkayy. Really beautiful visually, kind of a competent paint-by-numbers in terms of the story. That said with all due respect--it's a huge challenge to translate the books, growing ever denser and more complex, to screen. But I just didn't have much sense of emotional investment as I watched.

My dad's memorial service will take place in Indiana over Labor Day weekend...specifically Sept 5, Sat, in the afternoon, so I'll be traveling to Terre Haute that weekend. I haven't quite settled on the dates...classes will have started at that point, and while I would like to leave after my class on Wednesday, I have a vague hope that I might actually get to D.A. for a class that meets on Thursday, but the school seems like it won't be making any announcements of such things until the last possible moment...probably so we won't have much time to be depressed as classes begin.

Transitions

Wednesday night, as Paul and I were listening to a Q and A after a movie, our phones flickered with calls from my brother, who was visiting my parents in Florida. Paul and I looked at each other and wordlessly slipped past the row of people into the lobby. It was after 1 AM in Florida, so even as I dialed my brother back, I already knew, my father had passed away.

The hospice workers believe (or maybe they just tell you to make you feel better) that a person has a certain amount of control over one's death, and that if a person wants people there, he will wait, and if he doesn't, he will wait for that, too. My father died a couple of hours after my mother and siblings left for the evening, and during the twenty minute period between check-ins from the hospice worker.

Another thing people who work with the dying say, is that they will often see their patients, in the days before their deaths, looking into empty spaces, their eyes following things unseen. Some believe they are seeing angels. As a quasi-Buddhist, I have a very loose definition of angels, but I hope my father had some help in his transition to another plane of existence, I hope he felt he was moving toward something as well as moving away. I hope he did see angels.

Having visited so recently, I didn't go to Florida as it became clear things were coming to an end. I offered to help my sister with her kids here while she went because I wanted her to have the opportunity to see him again. My dad and I had a few good, honest moments when I visited, and we said a real, very heartfelt goodbye when I left, so I have no regrets on this point. Still, it has been a odd week, filled with early mornings, precocious questions from a four and a six-year old, and making peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, intercut with reports via telephone. Sometimes the change in circumstance seems remote, as I laugh with my friends or play with the kids. And then, in a quiet moment, I find myself sobbing.

There will probably be more on this topic in the future, but for today, I thought I'd share these pictures from my visit a few weeks ago. The photo of me and my mom is a tiny bit blurry--my dad was unsteady when he took it. The picture of my parents I am glad for. We are not a particularly photogenic lot, so a good picture is a lucky one, and here my father looks very much like himself. His gaze looks focused, his bemused smile will be familiar to those who knew him.

The one that I cannot help loving on an artistic level is the last one. It is the last picture I took, or will ever take, of my father, and for me it captures so much of this moment in our lives--I can feel the connection between my father and my mother, their determined and studied commitment to their path. I see the sharpness of my father's shoulder blades beneath his shirt, his concentration on the ground beneath his feet, the way he dominates the frame, even as he prepares to walk out of it forever.

Context Snapshot # 1

This blog has various functions. One of the bigger ones--conceptually if not in practice, is a kind of "witness to the world" thing. I have this fantasy that if my blog landed in some electronic time capsule discovered later by aliens or the round- blobs-of-video-watching-dough that humanity evolves into, they will have some sense of the experience of being living during this time. Kind of like when they find day-to-day letters from some pioneer woman chatting aboutlife and describing the dress she's been pining for in the Sears and Robuck catalogue.

Talking to a friend recently, it occurred to me, that what is lacking in terms of "witness to the world-ness" is context. I do a fair-to-middling job of recording various things that happen to me, me, me. And the aliens will probably be able to extrapolate something about our society from my scintillating comparisons of hummus varieties on the market or growing paranoia at the DMV. But for their benefit--and/or more likely my own, should I skim through these posts in a few years--I should probably try to periodically, to give a little snapshot of what's happening in the world right now.

But, because I am aim to be not so much a journalist as an honest recorder of the human experience, my experience in fact, I should probably battle the temptation to seem intelligent and informed by researching and fact-checking etc., but instead note a few news as they actually filter into my awareness.

So, for example:

In the last couple weeks:
-American pop idol Michael Jackson died. He was really popular during my youth. Had a big impact on the who music video industry. Late a subject of scorn due to accusations of "meddling" with young boys, and his mask-like visage--a result of way too many plastic surgeries. In death however, all seems forgiven, as there are tributes galore, and many a grief-stricken shout out on various social networking sites.
-Iran elected a new leader, and a lot of people there felt it was fraudulent, and there have been riots and protests and violence. And I don't know what's happening now, as the whole thing seems to have largely faded from the news.
-There's this thing going around called "Swine Flu." There was a lot of hubbub after the first few cases, with warnings that it was going to develop into a global epidemic. Now, I believe it HAS turned into a global epidemic, but only 300 people have died, and they seem mostly to be the very old, young, sick-with-other-things-too people who die from other kinds of flu as well, so it, too, has really diminished in terms of news coverage.
-Sarah Palin, who vaulted to fame as John McCain's running mate in the recent presidential election, has retired as governor of California.
A recent study has shown that Colorado is the only state in the union that has an obesity rate of less than 20 percent.

In case you (or the future aliens) are wondering, I get and forget my news from the following sources:

-A BBC newsfeed in my menu bar that I don't remember installing.
-A New York Times feed that comes to my email.
-The actual, made-out-of-paper Sunday L.A. Times, though often I don't get through the whole thing.
-The bank of televisions at the gym. (However, because I generally use the elliptical machines, which are in the third row behind the treadmills and the stationary bikes, I am too far away to read the subtitles. I can tell you that they were talking about -Sarah Palin on "The View" this morning, and I can tell you that Whoopi Goldberg had a lot to say on the subject, but have no idea what that was.)
-Occasionally, but rarely, other people's blogs, or links posted on Facebook.