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.