Favorite TV Guys
I used to include this sort of thing in this blog, but I got away from it as the months went on. Still, I just want to take a moment and identify the guys currently on TV who make me stop zapping the channels. I might not watch the entirety of any show they're on (except SVU), but they do give me pause...

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs
Cleans up like a dream.





Chris Meloni of SVU
A barely stable(r) character.




Bear Grylls of Man vs. Wild
Who knew misery could be so much fun.





John Cena of WWE/Raw
You feared him in high school, but not anymore.

RE: Do "Straight" Bloggers Read "Gay" Blogs?
Many thanks to Dustin and Steve for not only reading my post on this subject (as they were quoted in it), but for taking the time to respond in the comments section. It seems that we're all pretty much thinking the same way! I could get all philosophical at this point and launch into a major wordfest about how the differences we seem to find in other people really tells each of us more about our own fears (and my fears I know all too well)... but it's finally spring in DC and it's Friday and we all want to go outside and celebrate the weekend. Thanks again, Dustin and Steve, for your thoughtful dialog on the subject!!

It Was Never About The Hills

I came to a major decision over the past weekend.

First, I'll set up the scene.

I was moving pretty quickly through the first act of my zombie movie's fourth draft, ruthlessly cutting line after line of text. And it suddenly hit me: I was bored doing this. Not procrastination-bored as in "I really feel like doing something else." Not dramatically-bored as in "this story is dull and not interesting me at all." But bored as in "I'm sitting here in front of my laptop, actively editing and re-arranging characters, dialogue and action, and I'm bored with the whole thing. Bored with dreams of being a screenwriter. No longer interested in visioning the movie as it might someday play on the screen. Tired of thinking I'll someday be able to look up my name on IMDB."

So I did the only thing I could do at that moment. I stopped writing. And I spent the next hour or so really looking at this "dream" of mine, which I've carried since I was a kid. And I could see that, while I've changed in those forty or so years, the dream itself has not. It's been been years of dreaming about attention (getting it), ego (building it), and rescue (as in "money.") The dream hasn't grown, hasn't morphed, and hasn't done anything but lay there and demand my attention when I'm trying to do just about anything else.

Now the dream has become a whiny, nagging partner, using fear tactics to keep my attention. "You'll die a mediocre person," it intimates. "You'll be totally uninteresting if you stop."

So, I'll be uninteresting, and I'll die mediocre, I told it. I decided that I would no longer write screenplays.

Suddenly, the whiny annoying voice of my "dream" had nowhere to gain traction. It kind of just layed there, powerless. And I felt... calm.

The Paradox of Time
Does this ever happen to you: It's Friday, and you look ahead to Saturday or Sunday and see a large block of time that you haven't designated for anything, and you think "I can fill that with some really quality writing time or research or working out at the gym!"

You look forward to it, you may even arrange your workspace or gather your gym clothes the night before. The weekend comes, and starting at 2pm (if that's the time you designated), you suddenly find something else you need to do. But you feel guilty.

Still, the guilt doesn't move you to your work space or the weights. The spark that was present those nights before just isn't there. Let's say you finally open up the file, look at the words glowing in front of you, or make it to the gym, but your body feels like the gun's gone off in the 100 yard dash, Literally. And you jump up out of your chair and head for the fridge or say "20 minutes on the elliptical machine should do it for today!"

One of my brothers described this very sort of thing when he had his first kid (my first nephew.) "I think of all these great things I can do, I can get done, once he's down for his nap," my brother said. "But when he's finally out, all I want to do is sit in a chair and turn into broccoli."