UFO's and Conspiracies

One of the things that I like about writing is researching. I'm working on a piece right now, as I may have mentioned, that involves some aliens. And I've thought for awhile that the protagonist might work with a guy who is into conspiracies and alien cover-ups and stuff. I want to really ground his dialogue in "conspiracy talk" but I don't really know what that is yet. So I was sorry to discover that in the last six months I have missed both the 2009 Conspiracy Con, which was in June in Santa Clara, and more recently, something called the "Alienenvent for a New Humanity" which was right here in L.A. in November, and the Annual Ventura County UFO Festival that same weekend. There is a world out there I have never experienced.

Looking forward, I have the time, but not the money to attend the "Earth Transformation Conference" In two weeks in Hawaii, and though I might be able to drum up the money, the timing of February's "19th Annual International UFO Convention and Film Festival" in Laughlin, NV, is really bad, conflicting both with weekday classes and weekend commitments.

I am happy to see, however that some of the guest speakers for that conference will be in L.A. the week before, for the "Conscious Life Expo" at the LAX Hilton. I've spent way too much time on the site today, but think I've found a few events with alien subject matter. It's no Conspiracy Con, but I guess you have to start somewhere.

The expo happens a mere couple weeks before I think my final draft is due. This is lucky, because it is before the deadline, but less lucky because it's not enough before the deadline and I feel like it will just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the community. I'll probably start trying to find some of the speakers on YouTube in advance and see where that leads me as well.

Often I start researching something because I want a couple lines of realistic dialogue, and end up wanting to research enough to make a documentary film.

If you want to find an otherworldly conference near you, you can check out this link.

Two ways about it

Today, someone in Taipei reached me via googling "Two Ways of Seeing a River." Mark Twain lives.

And me? I made it back to the gym, and my Sunday morning yoga class today after more than a week off due to illness. That's nice. I'm in a weird mood, half sad, half gearing up for things to come next. Maybe that's an appropriate feeling as the year comes to a close. For some reason as I drove home from yoga, my mind drifted to disappointments and slights. I have an acquaintance at the gym who I start to talk to, but rebuffs me (at least in my mind) with her body language, turning her back to me and moving closer to the woman she is talking to. I smile and give a wave (unacknowledged) and go on my merry way as if it doesn't matter, but the first domino has tipped, and as I get in the the car I wonder about that college friend who found and friended me on Facebook, then after the exchange of a couple, seemingly friendly, letters, "unfriended" me without a word, and as I drive I think about an old housemate who enthusiastically arranged a coffee, only to show up with minutes to spare, talk of future plans, only to disappear. I am lucky to have many friends and acquaintances who are wonderful, and seem to think I'm okay. The majority seem not too annoyed by me. I went to a party last night, hosted by my friend who I have known for over a dozen years now. And more callous part of me realizes that certain amount of attrition, which is to be expected, actually relieves some burden on my schedule, gives me more time for people who want to spend time with me...but still, those few who don't, is there something about me, something annoying, something everybody sees but I don't realize, do they have some insight the others don't? This is how the dominoes in my mind tumble sometimes.

My mom leaves on Tuesday after a five week visit in town. My sister is dropping her off here today for the afternoon. I'm thinking of taking her to Loehmann's for a little shopping, and maybe also to the museum. It has been nice having her here, not in an every moment is magical way, but in a real way, where you realize that everyone still has the flaws they have always had, but you still love them anyway, and hope they love you. Undramatic, which I think is what I expected, and yet some part of me must have expected something more. Since my dad died, this holiday seemed a kind of end point to work toward as a family, and now the future seems rolled out ahead without landmarks. But that is me looking at my mom's future, and it could be she has her own landmarks I know nothing about.

I've not worked on my script for several days now, which means I'm back in a tough position of having to do a greater number of pages each day until the approaching deadline on Jan 4. But I have not been able to drum up the anxiety required. My body and mind feel like an exhale, a sigh. I'm lying on the ground at the base of a cliff and see the large wobbling rock that I know is going to cause the avalanche, but I'm just too calm to run. I think, "when it starts to roll, I'll have impetus to move, until then, I might as well enjoy the stars."

May all beings be happy

May all beings be safe and healthy

May all beings live in peace

Happy holidays

"Define happiness, someone asked me recently. Absorption, I said instantly, and anything that gives me an inner life and a sense of spaciousness, intimacy and silence." Pico Iyer in this article I half-read in the L.A. Times.

I read it, then forgot where I read it, then went looking for it, which is how I found the Joseph Campbell quote, and then as I contemplated throwing out last Sunday's paper, which I still haven't finished, I found this one again. The idea of "being absorbed" in something as equal to "being happy" has been knocking about in my head this week, a week in which I have have been particularly unable to find that "zone" of absorption (have you noticed how the spelling changes from "b" to "p" depending on the verb form, how confusing is that?"), due to my mental state, easily influence by bodily sickness, the slippage of routine, the upcoming holidays etc. So my periods of absorption in tasks have been short-lived. Have I been less happy? I'm not sure. In that I have been less productive, I am less satisfied with myself I suppose, but there is nothing like physical illness--whether it be cancer, as it has been in the past, or simply a cold, as it is at present, to bring home how much of an "illusion" our arbitrary end-points really are. Even though I normally define my writing as the thing on which I am pinning my hopes of earning a livelihood, my opportunity for reflection, self expression, the thing that is "who I am," it really only takes one week of a hacking cough to shrink all of these conceptions to relative non-importance next to the more looming issue of simply NOT coughing, and also of finding some physical and mental comfort--a state of relative rest.

But, generally, on a day to day basis, I would agree. Absorption is what I aspire to. Falling into an act of creation, or into a book or a movie... these are the easy ones. What about a conversation? Or a walk? Or washing the dishes. These are the hard ones, but the ones where the Buddhists would encourage us to be "mindful and present." Is this also a kind of cultivated absorption? I think it's easy to equate absorption with the more "escapist" activities, but this week I have tried, to some extent, to accept the experience of being sick. I haven't tried to be absorbed in the sickness, per say, but perhaps in the qualities that surround it--being home and allowing my mind to skip from one occupation to the next. It does have a certain timeless quality, but I'm not sure it's absorption. It's more like a kind of mental purgatory, a no man's land. Even as I write this, I am aware of only being able to skirt around thoughts, regard them obliquely. As soon as I try to engage a line of reasoning head on, it has floated away.

Like Writing?

"Happiness is absorption in a cause which in the end is but illusion."

--Joseph Campbell

Filing and Listening

Since I'm sick with a cold and classes are over, I don't HAVE to go out. So I'm not going out. It takes a few days of being cooped up in the house before I actually want to start organizing. That time has come. So I am slowly going through the pile of papers on top of the filing cabinet. It's a little unfortunate that my yen for organization tends to visit me after business hours. I can call to activate the Macy's card I let myself get talked into back in October. But the AAA card that says it will renew automatically has an obsolete credit card on file, and I can only change that from 8-5. And, as I unpack my new Film Independent membership materials, and registration documents from the WGA, AND the Macy's card paperwork, I realize these will require new files, and I don't have the files. I need to go buy more files. So for the moment I can only make piles, and by the time I have a pile of piles, it looks very similar to the pile I had to begin with.

Anyway, as I do this, I am also listening to Radios by Jerome Stern. His is a name I am familiar with, as he directed the Creative Writing Department at FSU for a time, and wrote articles and texts that I used while there. He died of cancer in 1996, almost ten years before I arrived to study, but I could feel that for many of the professors there who were his friends, his loss still felt fresh, his contributions present.

He wrote a lot "micro-fiction," very short stories or essays that today are more popularly called "flash fiction" or "short-shorts." I think he might have been amused by and written some brilliant Facebook status posts or Twitter poetry. Here's a piece from his I've taken from an old Florida State Times:

MORNING NEWS
by Jerome Stern

I get bad news in the morning and faint. Lying on tile, I think about death and see the tombstone my wife and I saw twenty years ago in the hilly colonial cemetery in North Carolina: Peace at last. I wonder, where is fear? The doctor, embarrassed, picks me up off the floor and I stagger to my car. What do people do next?
I pick up my wife. I look at my wife. I think how much harder it would be for me if she were this sick. I remember the folk tale that once seemed so strange to me, of the peasant wife beating her dying husband for abandoning her. For years, people have speculated on what they would do if they only had a week, a month a year to live. Feast or fast? I feel a failure of imagination. I should want something fantastic - a final meal atop the Eiffel Tower. Maybe I missed something not being brought up in a religion that would haunt me now with an operatic final confrontation between good and evil - I try to imagine myself a Puritan fearful of damnation, a saint awaiting glory.
But I have never been able to take seriously my earnestly mystical students, their belief that they were heading to join the ringing of the eternal spheres. So my wife and I drive to the giant discount warehouse. We sit on the floor like children and, in five minutes, pick out a 60-inch television, the largest set in the whole God damn store.

Christmas Time in the City

This is a dude dressed as Santa who is eating a sandwich while playing pinball on Hollywood Blvd. You can't really tell, but it's also raining.

I took these on Saturday after we did an improv class at Second City for Paul's Birthday. It was really fun. You can definitely see why people say improv is good for writers, as you do end up thinking of the most random stuff. Unfortunately, ongoing glasses are a bit expensive, plus the Hollywood Blvd. location would require an additional ten bucks for parking every time.

After I took these pics, we went to ice-cream, then back to our car which had a flat tire. So we changed the tire in the rain to find out that the spare tire was also flat. But you know what, it was still fun. We didn't have to change the tire, we could have called AAA.

Filler

I'm actually going to post a picture, soon as I fine the cord to download my camera's contents.

Until then, a fun fact... I think that I get about 10 hits monthly from people who search for the title "Two Ways of Seeing a River" by Mark Twain which I once referenced it in a post title. The post itself quotes and has little other commentary, which is perhaps a disappointment to people who are trying, perhaps, to write essays? Is that's what's happening? It must be an oft assigned essay, or perhaps one of those national schemes where all the kids have to read a book or something.

I can't really tell who looks at my blog, but I can often see locations, and if they arrived through a google search. This is how I know that a lot of people search for this phrase.

Today's searcher was from Pennsylvania. Another day I had a hit from Hawaii searching the same topic.

So, that's some random information.

Tonight I saw "Reverse" the Academy Award entry from Poland.

I finished a script and turned it in on Tuesday, and have been a little lazy since. I gave myself Wednesday off to transition, but I was supposed to start writing again today and it was a bit of a wash.

Instead, I slept in, finished "Chocolate" (the screenplay) on the elliptical at the gym. Went to look at these new studios that have moved in on the corner, had some Indian food for lunch...and also investigated how to become a notary since I need on again tomorrow. It costs more than I'd really want to pay for something I don't think I'd do a lot.

Immersed in Vietnam

Since last weekend I have had the luxury of thinking about only one script for a several consecutive days. It has been great. I may have already mentioned that the script is an adaptation of a Vietnamese novel that I am co-writing with another woman who has actually read the novel (which is in Vietnamese.) But during the writing I started to feel like I wanted a little more sense of place than I was finding on travel sites on the web, and stumbled across The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs. It is the memoir of a woman who spent a cumulative year or so in Hanoi in the early to mid-nineties. This was exactly the kind of thing I needed, since the script is present day--I know the nineties aren't exactly present day, but in that is is a generation post-war, and the story I am working about is NOT about the war--and the first act takes place in the Old Quarter in Hanoi, which is where she stayed as well. On top of that, her book was a real joy to read. About the only time I get to read these days is on the elliptical machine at the gym, and for several days I looked forward to the gym just because it meant I could read this book.

The Secret Birthday Post

Today was not really a "secret" birthday, but it was kind of a secret. What made it kind of a secret was the fact that I switched the date of it on Facebook to an earlier date. I did this for a few reasons.

1) I'm not really a birthday person. If you are one of my friends who really loves having birthdays, and actually makes a list of things you want, and you have not just one, but several birthday parties, who likes to turn your birthday into a week long series of events, please know, I love you. But I don't really like your birthday. I don't like eating at restaurants with big groups of people and having waiters circle around us and sing alternate non-copyrighted versions of "Happy Birthday." The optimal number for a dinner out is four. Six is acceptable. Anything more than six means that I'm eating with the three people next to and across from me, but I have to shout and somehow at the end of the evening the bill will be astronomical. I'm not a fan of going to bars in large groups either, or even to Vegas. I will go club dancing in a large group, for a "girls night out" thing, but I'm embarrassed to dance in a circle, and eventually I will leave you and dance alone. I like bowling, but once you have a butt in each of those five chairs, you don't need more people. I will go camping with a a large group--but that's an entirely different thing, and really, who does birthday camping? I get the reasoning for large birthdays, because you like all your friends and you don't get to see them enough, I feel that. If I was to have a birthday party, despite everything I just said, I would want to invite everyone. But right now is not the best time to have a birthday party, which brings me to

2) I'm just too busy....really. Not busy with glamourous stuff or even some high-stress job. I'm just writing. But i'm writing on deadlines which require a certain amount of output each day, and if I don't complete that output I cannot leave my house. Which would suck if I had arranged to meet 23 of my closest friends at the bowling alley. Today I skipped breakfast, the gym, getting dressed, and managed to write ten pages before 5pm. Yeah me. But yesterday I finished at midnight. If I were more devil-may-care, or just capable of surviving on less than six hours of sleep, I'd just say F**k it, I'm going out, I'll write when I get back and I'll sleep when I'm dead, but I am not like that, mostly because I am OLD. which brings me to

3) I'm old. Not old as the hills, but significantly older than my counterparts at film school / facebook friends. I'm told that these folks are my network, that someday in the future, we will trade favors and give each other jobs. And I'm a little old to be someone's assistant. I understand that. My fellow students are not unaware of that. Still, no need rub anyone's face in it

So there you go. After all of that, if you are wondering, I had a lovely secret Birthday. Four friends--who are the kind of people who remember these things -- remembered, and wrote or called, which is about perfect. So did my family. Everyone else just went about their normal lives. I, as I mentioned, wrote this morning. I went to the gym around 5pm, then decided at the last minute that my ideal birthday evening would be to go catch part of the broadcast version of the Metropolian Opera, and then go swing dancing--which is a very hard thing to get Paul to do when it's not my birthday.

So that's what we did, and it was a lot of fun.

Early December

Yesterday was my dad's birthday. He would have been 80. Rest in Peace.

This is always a weird week anyway. Cancerversary. Like unmarried couples who have a hard time choosing a date to commemorate--the day they met, the day they fell in love, the first time they had sex?--I have a hard time pinpointing the highlights of my whirlwind relationship with cancer.

Was it the day the ultrasound technician first detected a mass, shortly before Thanksgiving? Or a few days later when a specialist looked and said it was almost certainly cancer. Or was it this first week in December, when we traveled to the big city of Melbourne and met the surgical team. The surgery, I think was December 4th or 5th, and I think at the body level, these are days that resonate, simply because this is the experience that left a physical scar, and it hurt. Pain is memorable, the memory of it lives in your cells for awhile. I don't mean scientifically, although maybe that too. And although we always concentrate on the fact that the surgery removed "the cancer," this included, of course, removing over half my large intestine and (as a bonus), my appendix.

For a few days I've had some abdominal discomfort. Bad food choices, or is it also psychological? Do you think that people who have phantom limbs feel them more acutely around the anniversary of their loss?

I want to go research that right now. I am suddenly fascinated by all aspects of phantom limbs, but I cannot, because I need to stay on task and work on screenplays.