I'm starting to freak out about writing my screenplay. I'm writing a story from a guy's viewpoint and I'm like, I don't the first thing about being a guy. I finished the outline for my screenplay and handed it to my screenwriting teacher tonight. She's supposed to call me tomorrow night to discuss. YUK! I am so not looking forward to it.

I like my screenplay but I think I have very weird taste in stuff. Nobody likes the stuff I like.

The enormity of my project is really getting to me. 200 pages of a dysfunctional father/son relationship from the son's pont of view. What a trip!!! I don't even know why this story is so important to me. It's not my story. I'm not a son, I'm a daughter. All my friends think I'm trying to therapy out my own father dying and me not being there to say goodbye or make my peace before he died. I made my peace years later, but I guess a part of me thinks would I be any different if had made my peace. This story is my way to find out.

God, I blame my friend Kim for all this. She took me to her company's tailgate party to see the Oakland A's play the SF Giants in Oakland. I was a baseball fan but only because I liked going to Candlestick and sitting in the bleachers on a sunny day and watching a good game of baseball with a bunch of friends and eating lots of hotdogs.

It was Kim who told me about the hot young players on the A's team. How they're all under age 25 and totally cute. They had those great commercials in Oakland, showing the A's jumping up and down on some bed. She was right. There were so cute. And compared to an older team, they looked ever more like little boys playing a grown up game. I kept seeing little boys in little league, which then became very little boys learning to play catch with their fathers.

Then came the 2000 world series. The A's versus the Yankees. Those A's really gave New York a run for their money in that short series. New York would breeze through their games with the Mariners, but with the A's, they had to fight for every game. There were such different teams too. The A's played new metal and new hard rock music in their stadium, music I really like. The Yankees played 70's and 80's music. The A's barely looked like they could shave, while the Yankees, except for Derek Jeter looked positively geriactric.

Nowhere was this age disparity more evident than in game 4 of that series. Barry Zito, the funky and cool pitcher originally from LA, you know the original incense surfer dude, pitched in that game and whacked Yankees by a huge score. During the game, the A's looked like a team right out of the college ranks and the Yankees looked like a team full of fat but professionals athletes biding their time.

Then came the actual world series with the Yankees and the Mets and all the stories of hometown boys finally playing on the team of their childhood or not, as the case often is. I loved the profile of Al Lighter from the Mets He was the good, true and humble baseball player who just always wanted to play for his home team.

Somehow between my crush on all things Oakland A's and hearing all those stories about famous baseball players talking about their father, Playing Catch with Dad.

Even the title is new. I originally called my story "Little League Baseball Dreams" The idea sat on my writing shelf for the longest time and I never finished it. But now in my screenwriting class, the baseball story has morphed into screenplay I'm trying to go wtith the flow and be relaxed about it, but its hard, very hard.