Just by chance I checked the size limiit for my blog, and in both August and September, my blogs were over 100 mb. That's a lot of posts. I am so over my limit, and if you go over the 100 MB limit, blogger charges you $3.

I've been wondering why these past two months, I didn't have the energy to write. Well, there's my answer. I'm blogging way too much. I hate to think that my creative energy is limited, but I guess it must be. I work a full time job, and I have only so much energy to devote to my writing. The two months of 100 mb blogging led me to my first published piece in a major US newspaper, so it can't be all that bad.

With that said, I will not be posting as much or perhaps just posting shorter entries. If left to my own devices, I could blither and blather on about an any number of topics for pages on end. I really am that opinionated and judgmental about life, I'm afraid.

I'm trying to look at the positive aspect of this whole thing. Keeping my blog to under 100 mb forces me to post only those thoughts which absolutely have to be posted, and not just every single thought that pops into my head. This new stricture will help me to learn to be succinct, to the point and direct. Not an easy task, as I'm sure you've noticed.

I think I can still post every day. I'll just have to make shorter posts. And it's not even the $3 that's upsetting me, because that's a small amount. It's the thought that my creative energy is going into my on line journal, and not my stories, my screenplays or my novels. Although I do so love my blog, it's my creative that I think I really love and therefore should command the majority of time and energy.

So here's to shorter and more succinct, to the point, and direct posts.

I wonder how this shipping strike will affect our economy. I remember the fear of shipping strikes while growing up in Hawaii, where practically everything you use has arrive on ship. My parents would stock up on toilet paper and other essentials, at the news of any potential shipping stirke.

I should probably call my mom, and remind her to stock up on essentials before the stores run out of stuff. I've been thinking if things get really bad, I can mail her stuff like toilet paper and whatever else she needs from here.

I think the Pacific Maritime Association and the shippers are being very short sighted in locking out the union dock workers. They are the ones that will suffer in the long run, when business look for other alternatives to shipping. Don't these people know that the economy is really bad right now and that their actions will only exacerbate our financial problems?

The Dow is down really low today. I've seen graphs that say if you pay attention to economic cycles, the Dow should drop down even further. A news report on the radio just said that the Dow had the worst quarter since 1987. I know people who lost fortunes in the stock market crash of the late 1980's. Things feel sometimes like they are going from bad to worse economically. This shipping strike so does not help anyone, except people who are interested in break the power of the unions. The Pacific Maritime Association, what is that old saying, is cutting off their nose to spite their enemy, or something like that. And the only victims in their war, is of course, the american consumer.

A friend of mine asked me over the weekend, if there will ever come a time when Americans will ever feel safe again from terrorists attacks. I told him NO. We will never ever feel safe from terrorists attacks. The US had been lucky prior to 9/11, that's all. The rest of the world was used to having their countries attacked by terrorists, and they've lived with it longer than we have. A month after I visited London, there was a terrorist car bombing on the street that I walked to get from the subway station to my hotel. Londoners are used to the fear of terrorist bombs. People who live is Israel are used to it too. To some extent, although it's been almost 40 years, people in Hawaii are used to being bombed and I was definitely taught to expect to be bombed at some point in the future.

The people who grew up in the cold war were used to the threat of a nuclear attack and built bomb shelters in their backyards. I don't think we are very far from cold war behaviour.

It's scary to think that one day I'll wake up to another terrorist attack, not on the far away east coast, but here in beautiful and sunny California. I know we are living in a changed world since 9/11, and I am only just beginning to get it. Whether the US attacks Iraq or not, the terrorists attacks will still continue. Not going to Iraq may delay the attacks, but they will come nonetheless. And if the US and the UK do attack Iraq, I expect that the terrorist bombings will begin again and continue with alarming frequency. I feel we are a sitting duck, either way we go. And I hate and fear this thought.

For the first time ever I think, I agree with the conservative columnist Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a conservative point of view in San Francisco, but if there is one, Debra Saunders is their voice. Her column on the Homeless and Proposition N - Care not Cash was excellent.

Many of my very liberal friends agree with me for once. Something has to be done about the homeless problem in San Francisco, and Proposition N - Care Not Cash, while not ideal in any sense, at least challenges the status quo on the homeless in San Francisco. A status quo that has not been working for a long time. San Francisco spends more money on the homeless than virtually any city in the country, yet our homeless problem instead of diminishing, seems to grow exponentially every year. Something is not working with our homeless program.

If Rudy Guiliani was able to cleanup NYC of the homeless, a city with an even bigger homeless population in San Francisco, there's no reason why we can't.

Challenging the status quo on the homeless in San Francisco will get you the same kind of treatment Prez Bush received from that german politican - you'll be equated with the Nazis. I find it fascinating that homeless advocates in San Francisco insist that their way of dealing with the homeless is the only way and the right way, when countless of other cities our sizes and larger have managed the problem better and with fewer tax dollars spent to boot. I am instantly suspicious of any group who says that their way is the only way and the right way, as if their truth was set in stone.

Tim Rutten on a LA Time article on left wing thinker Christopher Hitchens Departure from the Nation wrote the following:

"The left's propensity to treat changes in opinion as apostasy always has lent its fallings-out more than a whiff of rancor." This attitude is especially true in San Francisco, where any deviation from the extreme left wing party line will brand you as a card carrying closet republican. The advocates for the homeless who are against proposition N definitely take this attitude.

Another excellent article from the LA Times on George Orwell, Misfit by Conviction, touches on the subject of idealism versus pragmatism in the politics of the author.

I've always loved George Orwell, especially his novel Brave New World. Orwell is still so very relevant today, according to the LA Times, because he never let his idealism blind him to the facts. The extreme left would do well to take Orwell's advice, because sometimes in San Francisco it just feels they are becoming increasing irrelevant and unnecessary to public policy.

I'm spending the afternoon getting caught up on the news from the various boards I visit, and linking interesting articles on the bloggie. There are so many things happening in the world right now, it's impossible for one person to pay attention to it all. The boards are great for getting caught on on the news.

The MIT free online learning is very interesting to me. MIT has such a great reputation for engineering, that I'm curious to see how they fare on courses like Economics, History and Political Science. These are the courses I will look at. For all my interest in politics, history and my job in finance, I never took these courses in college.

My interest in Politics came from my dad. He's a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, who participated in several union political campaigns while I was growing up. Finance and economics only interest me because it was part of my job for several years. When you work for a Planning and Analysis group, you learn economics on the job. History I'm starting to love because I'm finding out, once you understand the history of something like Middle East politics, it takes to a whole new level of understanding and complexity. Once you understand history, you start to see both sides of an issue and although it's harder, it forces you to rely on your own judgment regarding any issue. When you watch or read the news, it's also interesting to see how people distort facts for their own purposes, for their own spin.

And god, I love SPIN!!! It's the public relations side of me coming out, who just loves SPIN and all the many ways you can tell the same story, depending on your agenda. I have so much fun listening to the commentators after political debates, and what they have to say. Sometimes it makes me wonder whether I was watching and listening to the same event as some of these spin doctors. You can just see the BS dripping from their mouths sometimes, it's hilarious. You can also tell who's a biased journalist and who's not.

On September 30, MIT will starts its Open Courseware Pilot Program. Interesting idea huh? Free online learning courses from MIT.

These are the sample courses MIT will offering.

Anthropology
Biology
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Economics
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
History
Linguistics and Philosophy
Management
Mathematics
Mechanical Engineering
Ocean Engineering
Political Science
Urban Studies and Planning

An unexpected economic effect of the war on terrorism -
No terrorism insurance bill risks property bonds. I wonder how the economy will be affected if Moody's, Fitch and Standard and Poor's downgrades these bonds.

This one is quite funny! Where's the one for San Francisco?

Subject: NEW CALIFORNIA DMV TEST

For those of you who are not "fortunate" enough to live in California,
here is a copy of the California Driver's Exam, and for those of you who
do, study real hard. This is a new exam. Since driving conditions (and
culture) are unique in Los Angeles, you may not have realized that the
California Department of Motor Vehicles has now issued a special
application and driver's test solely for the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Area.

GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA DRIVER'S LICENSE APPLICATION:

Name:___________________ Stage name: ____________________

Agent:___________________

Attorney:______________________

Therapist name:_________________

Sex: ___male ___female* ___formerly male ___formerly female ____both *If
female, indicate breast implant size: _______

Will the size of your implants hinder your ability to safely operate a
motor vehicle in any way? Yes___ No ___

Please list brand of cell phone: ________.
*If you don't own a cell phone, please explain:________________________

Please check hair color:
Females: [ ] Blonde [ ] Platinum Blonde
Teenagers: [ ] Red [ ] Orange [ ] Green [ ] Purple [ ] Blue [ ] Skinhead

Please check activities you perform while driving: (Check all that
apply)
[ ] Eating
[ ] Drinking Starbucks coffee
[ ] Applying make-up
[ ] Shaving (male or female)
[ ] Talking on the phone
[ ] Slapping kids in the back-seat
[ ] Applying cellulite treatment to thighs
[ ] Tanning
[ ] Snorting cocaine (already checked for your convenience)
[ ] Watching TV
[ ] Reading Variety
[ ] Surfing the net via laptop
[ ] Discharging firearms / Reloading

Please indicate how many times
a) you expect to shoot at other drivers _____
b) how many times you expect to be shot at while driving _____

If you are the victim of a carjacking, you should immediately:
a) Call the police to report the crime.
b) Call Channel 9 News to report the crime, then watch your car on the
news in a high-speed chase.
c) Call your attorney and discuss lawsuit against cellular phone company
for 911 call not going through.
d) Call your therapist.

In the event of an earthquake, you should :
a) stop your car
b) keep driving and hope for the best.
c) immediately use your cell phone to call all loved ones.
d) pull out your video camera and obtain footage for Channel 9.

In the instance of rain, you should:
a) never drive over 5 MPH.
b) drive twice as fast as usual.
c) you're not sure what "rain" is.

Please indicate number of therapy sessions per week: ______.

Are you presently taking any of the following medications?
a) Prozac
b) Zovirax
c) Lithium
d) Zanax
e) Valium
f) Zoloft
g) All of the above
h) None of the above
*If none, please explain: __________________.

Length of daily commute:
a) Less than 1 hour
b) 1 hour
c) 2 hours
d) 3 hours
e) 4 hours or more
* If less than 1 hour, please explain:____________________.

When stopped by police, you should:
a) pull over and have your driver's license and insurance form ready. b)
try to outrun them by driving the wrong way on the 405 Freeway. c) have
your video camera ready and provoke them to attack, thus ensuring
yourself of a hefty lawsuit.

When turning, you should always signal your intentions by: a) using your
directional signals.
b) what is a "directional signal"?

Which part of your car will wear out most often?
a) the wiper blades
b) the belts
c) the horn

The "bright" setting on your headlights is for:
a) dark, poorly lit roads
b) flashing to get the car ahead to move out of the way
c) revenge!

Your rear view mirror is for:
a) watching for approaching cars
b) watching for approaching police cars
c) checking your hair

Here's a fun link - US Drought Monitor. The map is updated every Thursday.

Another related effect of the drought - Drought has U.S. ranchers facing a harsh winter. I wonder if this will mean an increase in prices for meat and meat related products. Maybe I should be glad that I'm a semi-vegeterian and hardly ever eat meat. I never buy meat to cook. When I do eat it, it's usually at a restaurant, in take-out food, or in a packaged prepared frozen food.

Here's an interesitng link on the H1B controversy Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage. This is a paper from Dr. Norman Matloff from UC Davis, who testified for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration.

I think he's right. Two years ago, I worked for the CIO in an international shipping firm. During my time there, I produced a presentation for my boss to give to the Singapore Board of Development. My company had wanted to open a major IT office in Singapore, because the government of Singapore gives businesses tax credits. This means they're basically paying for the development cost of half your office. It's a good deal for companies, and business like Compaq have taken advantage of Singapore's generosity.

Part of my presentation focused on the fact that we would be outsourcing over 50% of our software development to Singapore. Singapore would benefit because my company would train these budding Singaporean software developers. Software development in Singapore would be cheaper overall despite the initial expense of training, because my company could hire developers for dirt cheap, compared to hiring costs for US contractors and full-time employees. My boss said it was such a good deal, and would benefit our company because we could save so much money, and also benefit Singapore because their people would be trained for free. The presentation went really well, but I left before the deal with Singapore was finalized.

I sort of thought at the time I was creating the presentation, that it would be bad for US workers, but at the same time it would be great for my company's coffers, and therefore indirectly benefitting me since the company was traded on Nasdaq. Is it bad for companies to do this? I don't know. Wall Street always rewards companies with lower operating costs by an increase in stock price.

It's a slippery slope for any company. You need to lower costs for your share prices to rise, and one way to lower costs is to move work overseas. What's a company to do? The employees benefit when the stock prices go up. The other way to get your share price to go up is to increase revenue, but that's much harder to do compared to lowering operating costs. Either way they go, companies lose. And most companies prefer to do things the easy way, and like that their stock prices are high.

Is it any wonder that H1B's are so popular, and that IT software development jobs are slowly being shifted out of the US?

I've been looking at my calorie total, and I've been gradually eating less and less every week. I'm not sure this is a good idea, and it makes me wonder if my weight loss is slowing because my body is in major starvation mode. I only lost 1 pound last week, and it looks like I'm only going to lose a pound this week as well.

In week 1 of my new eating plan, I ate a total of 11,814 calories. I'm at week 7 now, and my calorie total for the week is 10,044. I went from an average of eating 1,688 calories a day in week 1 to 1,435 calories a day. And what's really weird is, I don't feel like I'm starving or eating less than I did before. The only difference is I don't have any days where I really went over my calorie total anymore. I read somewhere once that if you eat too few calories your body goes into starvation mode. In starvation mode, you get colder and your immune system is weakened, and you end up getting more colds. Is this what's happening with me?

I think I'm going to have to experiment with this theory and try to eat more next week. I want to lose weight, but I want to do it the right way so I don't trigger my body to go into mass starvation mode. The thought of having a cold every month is just wigging me out, since I hardly ever get colds. Being sick is so miserable. I think being sick and ill all the time puts a major stress on your body and ages you. Look at anybody you know who's been through a major illness, and you'll see that the illness completely aged them. The formerly sick also never seem to recover their youthfulness either. My skin crawls at the thought.

I've been so lucky to have been blessed in my adulthood with good health. I was an asthmatic sickly chid, who was allergic to everything. In junior high when puberty kicked in, my asthma and my allergies disappeared and I've been pretty healthy ever since. I'm definitely going to have to experiment with adding more calories into my diet. My body never seems to work like anyone else's, so it does seem possible that I'm not eating enough calories even though I now weigh 13 pounds less than when I first started. I could try it for a week to see what happens. The worse thing that could happen is I gain a couple of pounds back, but at least then I'll know that my weight loss is normal and not plateauing or slowing down.

I'm just so bummed out though, because I expected to have a 2 pound weight loss per week. I thought I would be at my goal weight by December or January. If I only lose 1 pound a week, I won't be at my preferred weight until April of next year, and that seems like such a long, long time away. I think the truth is, I'm going to have to resign myself to the fact that I'll be eating this way for the rest of my life or at least until my weight stabilizes and stays where I want it to stay, without much thought or effort on my part. But how long is that going to take? I saw a dieting site from a woman who says she's still vigilant about her eating, even though she's been at her goal weight for 3 years now. One would think one could get to a point of equilibrium where your weight would stay the same without constantly watching it. But not according to this woman.

Maybe it's true what they say in those 12 step groups. You have to take one day a time. If you look too far ahead into the future, you'll freak out because the future just seems so overwhelming. I mean it's not exactly a pleasant thought to me that I'll be inputting everything I eat into an excel worksheet for the rest of my life. I'm not that anal after all. But I can do it, I can deal with it, I can tolerate and put up with it, if I just think of it as something that I have to do today. Is this what alcoholics go through?

The The Sun UK had an interesting called Blondes Die Out by 2202. Scientists are predicting that natural blondes will become extinct by 2202, because men are dating "bottle" blondes instead of natural blongdes. The gene for blonde hair is a recessive gene and both parents have to have the gene to produce blonde babies. Since it's "bottle blondes" are preferred by men over the natural blondes, the blonde gene is dying out.

Then the Sun had a hilarious section called Save Our Blondes. The Sun is conducting a campaign for men to date natural blondes. There's a fact file on blondes which gives everything from migration patterns, mating call, feeding habits, natural habitat, etc. It's very, very funny!

I've always wanted to be blonde just for a day, to see what it's like. All my blonde friends tell me that men treat them like they're dumb, even though they're not, and that being treated that way by practically every man is not a fun experience. Still I wouldn't mind knowing what it's like to walk into a room and have every man whip his head around to look at me, since I've seen that happen with my pretty blonde friends. They hate it, but then again they're used to it. It's not the kind of thing that has ever happend to me, and I think it would be fun just for a day. Maybe.

I researched how much Pay it Forward grossed domestically and it didn't do too bad. Pay it Forward was ranked # 77 in 2000 out of about 300 movies, and grossed about $35 million.

Perhaps that's a good goal to have for a movie, rank in the top 100 for year, and make back the amount of money you spent on the movie and have some profit. I don't think that Pay it Forward had a big budget for production, but probably had a large budget for the movie star salary. Helen Hunt was commanding $ 1 million per episode for Mad about You. Heaven only knows that Kevin Spacey and Haley Joel Osment are commanding for salaries.

I must really be a sentimental person at heart, because I loved the movie "Pay it Forward". I've been reading the reviews, and they'e mostly all panned the movie. But too bad, I liked it.

Helen Hunt was great, playing the same kind of low class waitress type character from "As Good as it Gets". She sports a total bleached blonde look, and looks really scary in her outfits and her makeup. She really looks the part of a secret alcoholic mother. Kevin Spacey was also good as the scarred social studies teacher. His performance reminded me of his performance in LA Confidiential. Spacey is a great technical actor, and you have to really watch his face and all the emotions that flit through it. He's playing his usual type of character too, but he's so good at it. For a change of Spacey character type, watch Hurly Burly. Spacey looked so cute in that movie, where he played a smarmy Hollywood executive. Haley Joel Osment was also very good as the child of a alcoholic mother and wife beating father.

Although the idea of "Pay it Forward" isn't new, think of the "random acts of senseless kindness" saying, it's nice to see the concept revived again in a major hollywood movie. I've always believed in the concept of paying it forward. So many complete strangers have come to my aid over the years, that I've made it a point of also helping total strangers, or people I might not know very well. It's my way of thanking the people who have helped me, by keeping their kindness going.

The reviewer at Salon.com was so cynical. It doesn't surprise me that their online site isn't that profitable. Their writers are the type of people who never have anything good to say about anything and anybody, and who needs more that kind of cruelty in the world. Didn't they mother teach them that if they have nothing good to say, they should just keep their mouth shut? I wouldn't mind if their criticisms were valid, but it's done with such an attitude of cultural superiority. Like who made the writers at Salon.com our cultural czars? I don't think the writers at Salon.com would like anything unless it was anti mass popular culture. What a mistaken attitude to have for an online magazine, that after all to be profitable, has to appeal to a mass popular culture. Whatever.

I liked Pay it Forward. I wonder if it did well at the box office. It would be interesting to find out.

I am going through shopping withdrawal. I even logged onto the auction website for Enron just to see what they were offering. I was so tempted to bid on a laptop.

I lost my MAC lipstick last night, which upsets me, but now I can go to the mall to look at lipsticks at the MAC counter. The MAC counter is always a zoo, but maybe it would be fun to look for a different color. I've been wearing the same lipstick colour now for two years. Maybe buying some new lipstick will cure my shopping fix. I hope so.

My babes, the Oakland A's have won the American League West title!

My church is having an "Old South Dinner" in a couple of weeks. Our congregation is full of southeners, and this is their way of celebrating their heritage and past. There used to be a woman who used to go my church from New Orleans, and her house was full of old family antiques and silver pieces which were over a hundred years old. Her name was Nina, and every generation a girl child was named Nina, so the Nina I knew was the fourth Nina. She even had a painting of the original Nina on her wall.

When I was in West Virginia, the person I was staying with, gave me a cookbook called "The Best of Southern Living Recipes". I told the organizer I would bring a "real southern dessert", which means I should spend the weekend checking out the recipes in my new Southern Living cookbook.

My sniffles have turned into a sore throat. God, I hate being sick. I took some high power Sudafed this morning, so I can get through the rest of the day. I'm sucking on cough drops on soothe my throat, and of course the package doesn't say how many calories are in each drop. My tummy has been acting up too, which just adds to my misery.

I decided not to exercise until my health is better. Exercising taxes my system further. When I've exercised in the past while sick, my colds have gotten worse. I haven't had a cold in so long, that I can't help but going over the events of the last few days to see what triggered my cold. I usually catch a cold when I don't sleep well, but I haven't had any problems sleeping.

I wonder if the stress of the 9/11 anniversary and of my job instability, has put a strain on my immune system. I was also at a street faire on Sunday before the opera, and at the opera, there were many people coughing. I can just imagine the germs flying through the air for the three hours I was at the opera.

I'll just have to take it easy for the next couple of days and over the weekend. If I can sleep for 12 hours straight, my cold usually goes away. But it's hard to sleep when you wake up coughing, or because your throat is so sore you wake up parched several times a night.

I watched Dragonfly last night. A friend recommended it, and she was right, I liked it. I like stories about the suprernatual, because it makes me wonder if it's true. The ending of the movie was hokey as hell, and probably would have been better if it was based on a true story. I wondered if Dragonfly was based on a true story, but the reviews said it was wasn't. Kevin Costner had some great moments on screen, portraying a man trying to cope with the tragic death of his wife. He had some lines that were so honest about the grief process, and about what the bereaved think about "helpful" people who try to help them out of their grief. I'm glad I saw the movie, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

Tom Stoppard said one thing that's been bugging me all day. The play he was discussing "Night and Day", which was written in 1978, has a scene where a woman feels guilty for committing adultery in a hotel room. Stoppard said that in 1978 adultery was shocking, but that in 2002 adultery is more or less acceptable. When has adultery ever been acceptable? I was so shocked he said this. I supposed he's right when he says, we're not shocked, but he was sort of saying that a one night adulterous affaire in a hotel was okay in 2002.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I would be freaked out if my husband told me he had a one night stand in hotel. I was freaked when boyfriends fooled around, and promptly broke up with them, telling them if you can't be faithful to me when we're exclusively dating and there's no pressure, you're not going to be faithful to me when we're married and we're fighting, bored or sometimes sick of each other. Plus with all the diesease going around, the guy was not on jeapordizing their health but mine as well.

I watched my mom go through this with my dad, and grew up watching her go to pieces every time this happened. My dad was severely old fashioned and european and thought it was his right to have affaires, as long as he didn't leave the marriage. I remember hearing him tell my brother that fooling around for men was perfectly acceptable, but not for women. I saw first hand how infidelity destroys people. My parents never divorced but spent the rest of their lives, until my dad died, torturing each other over my father's infidelity. The things my mother went through were gross, sordid and dirty. I'm not sure how my mom survived my father's history of affaires, but my mom is strong and I know I inherited my strength from her.

Maybe adultery is acceptable in London and other places, but never in my world. The woman in his play has line which goes something like "hotel rooms have another morality". Stoppard said that there's an interrupted clap that happens in the audience. Some people clap, but then then stop themselves since they know to clap is wrong. It makes me wonder if those people clapping have had one night stands in hotel and are in committed relationships?

What's interesting about watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary is that the issues of the civil war still exist in our society today. What Burns fails to show in his documentary is what the south believed about the civil war. I believe that a a person from the south would say that the civil war was fought over state's rights, and not slavery. Slavery was essential to the southern economy, and the south was trying to protect their economy and their way of life. I'm not saying that slavery was right, because it was and is so incredibly wrong, but at the time of the civil war this was not the prevailing view.

It would have been more thought provoking if Burns had shown what the Union and Confederate's reasons for the civil war, and then tried to reconcile both points of view, or have the scholars who speak in the documentary reconcile the two viewpoints. State's rights is still a hot button issue today, as it was in civil war times. I'm not even sure if the two sides can be reconciled. I think it's like everything else in life, that it's a spooky high wire balancing act, and that there are good reasons for state's rights and government's rights. And depending on the issue, I find myself on either side.

I know it's important to try to simplify issues to understand them, and to say it's black and white, that it's either this or that. But I don't think that's possible. I think it can be this and that. This must be my classic post modern situational ethics coming through.

It's important to me to see both sides of any issue, because I think that's the only way to understand something. I'm not sure that Ken Burns' Civil War documentary does that. His documentary is fantastic. I just think he shrank from confronting the very serious issues of the civil war, issues that still haunt american society today and probably will forever.

My blog is acting all wonky again. When I click on my blog, it doesn't even show up. What is going on?

I am in a oddly silent mood today. I didn't feel like posting last night either, but here's a recap. Tom Stoppard was great. He sat on stage with Carey Perloff, the ACT head chick, for about an hour and talked about his play. The last 15 minutes was devoted to questions from the audience. Tom Stoppard has delicious english accent. I think my dialect acting teacher would have called it a "regimental accent". He rolled his r's, he said "um" and paused before every sentence, as if every word and thought mattered to him. He used big words, which is rare in celebrity type interviews.

Other things of note. He spend three years researching before he writes a play on a subject that he knows nothing about. He said that "narrative structure or the architecture" of his plays, is the most important thing to him and allows him to create stories. Perloff said he was the one of the few writers, who neatly and seemlessly ties up all the details and loose ends in his plays.

I ran into two people I know, but decided not to speak to them. On the way to the theatre, I saw this guy whom I met in acting class. I had to do a scene with him, and he flaked out on me. He's a nice, and has even been in a few plays, but he's very strange, and I didn't want to deal with him.

At the Tom Stoppard event, I saw this woman who I used to work with at my last job. She used to always put on airs about how rich she was, and how she and her husband went to symphony and just did all these great things. No one in my group could stand her. She was also a serious food nazi, as she seemed to be allergic to every food on the planet, so eating out with her was so unpleasant to say the least. I spent to many lunch hours hearing her torture waiters, and then complain endlessly about the food when she got it. A friend in the office told me that she was spreading vicious rumors about me in the office. I didn't want to speak to her either, even though she was sitting two rows from me. She's the type of person I don't feel guilty about ignoring. She kept looking at me, but I just looked the other way. It's mean I know, but I don't see why I should be civil to someone who was spreading a vicious rumors about me in our former place of employment.

The Tom Stoppard event was kind of like a who's who in SF Bay Area theatre. There were many actors there I recognized from plays, who were part of the audeince. I think that the man who played King Lear in a production last year, was sitting in my row. This man is a great actor, and always gets cast in a major role every year.

Then I watched the Civil War series. The Battle of Gettsburg was so interesting. If Robert E. Lee hadn't miscalculated the strength of the confederate army, I wonder if the civil war would have gone on longer. Gettysburg was such a turning point in the war. I sat watching the events unfold on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and said "God, the Union army was so lucky!"

Shelby Foote mentioned that Willaim Faulkner wrote in his novel "Intruder in the Dust", that every southern boy could envision himself at Gettyburg on the morning of the third day feeling that the South still had a chance to win. Pickett's Charge was a tragic disaster, and I cannot imagine what the common confederate soldier must have thought as he marched into what he knew was his certain death. The confederate army was slaughtered, literally and emotionally. The narrator said that whole regiments were wiped out during Pickett's Charge.

I would like to watch that movie "Gettysburg", but the Blockbuster I rent movies from has the box for it but not the videos. I should probably ask one of the clerks where the movie is.

I saw a blue bird on the way to the work. Whenver I see a blue bird, I always say to myself "it's the blue bird of happiness and it's a good sign". Blue birds are so rare here.

From a NY Times online article on Dr. Phil McGraw, the "life strategist" who has his own show on TV.

"Dr. Phil McGraw argues that the key to anyone's authentic self can be reduced to "10 defining moments, 7 critical choices, 5 pivotal people."

I've been thinking about what I would put on these lists.

Off the top of my head for 7 critical choices:
1) going to college where I did;
2) moving to San Francisco instead of New York City;
3) leaving my long term five year job, where I was comfortable and well paid, but unbelievably miserable;
4) pursuing creativity which I'm now exploring with writing;
5) decided to divorce, because I was so incredibly unhappy.

Off the top of my head for 5 pivotal people:
1) my acting teacher who told me I would be great writer one day;
2) my junior high english teacher who told me smile and be proud of where I came from, my background and what I would accomplish in the future;
3) the priest who served our church throughout most of my youth, whose sermon on the The Lord's Prayer, shaped much of my spiritual thinking and leanings.

Off the top of my head for 10 defining moments:
1) my public relations failure - when the peace rally that I was organizing took place on the same day as the Tianemen Square incident and we got zero publicity and I took a ton of heat for it - my most memorable professional failure;
2) deciding to walk out on my alcoholic boyfriend, whom I loved very much, because being with him was killing me;
3) looking down a cliff into the ocean one night at Big Sur, when the vastness and beauty of the world hit me for the first time;
4) noticing the mountains in the back of the mall back home on Kauai, and watching a white bird fly across, reminding me that I was born and grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

I'll have to think about these lists some more. Perhaps my off the top of my head lists will change, once I really sit down and think about what defines my "authentic self".

Blogger and Blogspot were acting so wonky yesterday. It was so slow and freaking me ever so incredibly out. Today it's much better.

I can't get enough of that Daniel Beddingfield song "Gotta Get Through This". It's my theme song for this very unstable period of my work life. I try not to worry about work too much, but it's hard. I've stayed in this job longer than I did in my previous two jobs. It's just been so nice to be stable just for a little while.

I've made the dance station a preset on my radio, and when NPR is doing something boring in the morning like pimping music or books, I put on the dance channel. NPR was pimping a blue grass artist this morning, and I was almost tempted to listen to their report, but when I switched to the dance station and the Daniel Beddingfield song came on. I felt like I was in a musical, singing along and driving along 19th Avenue in the very heavy fog. I love fog, but not when I have to drive through it in rush hour traffic in the morning.

I just heard on the news that there was an earthquake in London. How scary! Who knew London could get earthquakes? Now they'll know what it's like to live in California.

I'm wondering if I should give up on my blog. I've been messing with it now for about four hours. Talk about major procrastination! I should take that class my screenwriting teacher is leading on Procrastination for Writers. I probably need a class like that right now. My screenwriting teacher wants to meet with me before I start on the second draft of my screenplay. She's offered to hold me to a deadline, so I keep on writing. I should do meet with her, but she said I'd have to pitch my new story.

God, I hate pitching. It's something I know I have to get used to doing, but I hate it. My screenwriting teacher told me that if I want to sell a screenplay, I'm going to have to get really good at pitching so I can do in front on movie executives in Hollywood. Pitching your screenplay is like doing a 90 second sales pitch. It's totally nerve racking.

Part of the reason I'm trying to get back into shape is because when I go to down to Hollywood to pitch my screenplay, I want to feel as self confident as possible. Being the weight I am makes my self confidence go to negative 10. Not even a zero, but a negative 10. The other reason had to do with health. Being heavy was elevating my blood pressure, and now that I've lost some weight, my pressure has gone back to normal. My blood pressure isn't where it used to be, but I had low blood pressure anyway and I would prefer it to be normal. Having low blood pressure presented a whole other set of health problems for me, so I'm praying my pressure stays normal. My resting heart rate or my pulse is low too, hovering about 55. I wonder if that's too low.

I know I want to finish my screenplay before November. I think I'll do that National November Writing Month contest again. You write 50,000 words in 30 days in novel form. That contest was so much fun to do, and is a great exercise in disciplining yourself to write every day. You have to write 1,667 words a day, every day for 30 days, to get to the 50K total. It's exhaustiive, but at the same time so exhilerating. You're doing a 120 page freewrite because you have to keep writing to make your quota. You can't go back and edit. Maybe the NANOWRIMO will snap me out of my procrastination. It's free too!

I've been trying to change my blog colors, but everytime I made a change, something else went wrong. I think I'm back to my original colors, and everything is working except my tracker. I emailed the tracker site to ask them to look at my template.

I really want to change my blog around, but my limited knowledge of website building prevents me from making too many changes. I've been looking at the other available canned templates, but I don't like any of them. I guess I should just pick one, and then try to modify it, but that's such a pain.

I know if I just have to buy a book on building your own website, I'd figure it out. It would take awhile, but I'd figure it out.

If you see my template changing from time to time, it's because I'm experimenting. I'm just so bored with the look of my blog.

Turandot was great. Since it was very warm today, the opera house was a little stifling. All those bodies close together and all that breathing makes for a stuffy balcony. The sets by David Hockney was fantastic, although I couldn't see all of it because I was up so high. I rented opera glasses, and that made sitting so high up not as torturous as I thought originally.

The balcony is an interesting place to sit. There is such a variety of people, including the very young and the very old. It's fun to see teenagers at the opera, or parents and their kids. I'm always amazed at the types of people you see at an opera, and the spent the breaks checking out what people were wearing. There was an older woman who was done up like Frida Kahlo. I don't think it was intentional however. She looked so fantastic, like she stepped out of a painting or something. I loved her.

The style of dress went from a young girl in a tshirt with cutoff sleeves, black bra strap showing, torn jeans and a body to die for, to my Frida Kahlo lookalike, to women in ball gowns. I don't know about you, but a ball gown at a 2 pm opera matinee is a little excessive in my view. A definite non-city, out of town, from the country/suburb look.

I loved the music of Turandot, but in the program I'd read that Puccini died before finishing it. Since the ending was a littel abrupt, I wonder what the ending was supposed to have been like had he not died. One article writer speculated that Puccini would have added a consumation scene between Turandot and Prince Calaf, which would have made the ending less abrupt. Oh well.

This is one of the most accessible operas that I've seen. The music is modern in that the singers get one chance to sing their bit. There are hardly any repititions like in other operas. I read about this in the brochure. And it's true. The singing is so much more dramatic because the singer has to put everything into the song, which makes for a highly emotional opera. I could hear sniffles in the third act, which meant people were crying.

The singer playing Prince Calaf, John Villars, was quite handsome as the prince. Turandot was sung by Jane Eaglen, who is an English Soprano, and Liu was sung by Patricia Racette. Nessun Dorma got a around of applause at the end.

I really got the feeling for what a macho guy the prince was, and how manly he was. He was so self confident that he would win Turandot. You do feel sorry for Liu the slave girl, and wish that the prince would fall in love with her instead, but then if he did there wouldn't be an opera. In marrying Turandot, the impoverished prince gets back what he lost, and I think this is what drives him partially, although I also believe that some people do fall in love at first sight.

What's diffcult to understand, is how Turandot goes from a heartless princess to one who can fall in love. To me it's almost as unimaginable as Juliet killing herself in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet starts off as a young teenager, and at the end becomes a mature woman who would kill herself because her lover has died. Very few actresses can pull that transition off. I'm not sure if the opera manages this kind of transition either, and again one has to wonder how different the ending of the opera would be had Puccini lived to finish it.

Turandot reminded me of the sleeping beauty myth, but in a twisted version. The prince in The Sleeping Beauty story has to cut through a wild thicket to enter the castle and kiss the princess awake, who was put under a spell by an evil witch. Turandot takes revenge of men, because some ancestor hers was raped, and in the end the prince kisses her and she comes to life. I was also reminded of the Shakespeare's play, The Taming of the Shrew. It's the universal theme of the icy, bitchy woman woman who must be tamed by the macho manly man, who himself must also undergo trials to have his love. And of course, true love triumphs in the end for the lovers.

I found myself identifying with both Liu the slave girl and the icy mean princess. I have played both roles in my life. The woman dying of love for a man, who doesn't know she exists or if he does, sees her as only a friend. And the icy woman, who lets no man near her out of some reason known really only to herself.

I never identified with the prince though, but I think that's only because I don't believe in love at first sight. I've met guys where I instantly knew that there was amazing chemistry and rapport, but I've never called it love at first sight. Lust at first sight maybe, but never love at first sight. I wonder if it's a guy thing, more than a chick thing.

The only experience I had that would come even remotely close to a love at first sight experience was in college. I saw sitting out with some friends enjoying the sunshine, when I saw this guy walk across campus. I immediately told my friend to check out the guy; he was really cute. I then told her, that I was going to go out with that guy some day. I never thought further about what I had said that afternoon. The following school year, that very same guy sits down next to me at a lecture on Russian Music. We talked for a bit and that was it. A couple days later while at a bar with a friend of mine, I again run into the guy.

To make a long story short, we both ended up going out with this guy, her first, then me. Very funny, I think. My girlfriend confided in me later that she thought he only really liked me, and went out with her to get to me. Whatever. He really was cute, and I think he's now a playwright in NYC. He was quite the romantic, and wrote me a poem, which I still have and one day will probably frame. He was into Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan at the time, so the poem reflects both these influences.

Not sure if this story quite makes it as a kind of love at first sight, or even one of those spooky coincidences story, because my college did have only 1,200 students, which meant that there was high probabality that I would run into this guy again at some point. I'm still chuckling at the memory of my friend and I dating the same guy, one right after the other. How college like!!

I watched the first episode of Ken Burns' Civil War series, and I have to agree with some reviewers. The series is very slanted towards the North, and towards slavery. Shelby Foote was in the series, and I want to get all his books on the civil war. In my elf girl chronicles story, I'm making the elf people were an agrarian culture which is the south was ike during before the civil war. I want to model some of the fighting in my story, on how the south fought in the civil war. The elf people are battling against the humans, who have more modern equipment and the civil war is perfect research material for my story. I also want to give the elf people many of the southern values of service in the military, strong family ties to the land, etc.

There will be no slavery though. The only slaves in the story will be the elf people, who are turned into slaves at the end and who were treated very much like the american slave population was in the time before the civil war. The humans will makes laws that will destroy elf culture, break up the families, take away freedom and landownership rites, keep the children apart from the parents, separate husbands from wives, etc. A background in civil war history, and a history of life in the south will defintely come in handy for my story.

I spent all afternoon cleaning out my computer, since it's been running very slowly this week. I copied a bunch of file to cd, cleaned out my mailbox, deleted old programs I never use, etc. I should probably upgrade my PC one of these days, since the old pc is an dinasour from 1998. Ideally what I'd like to do is just get a new hard drive, but keep my monitor, speakers, two two cd drives, scanner and printer. I'd like to replace my hard drive with a laptop, and use a docking station to connect to connect to all my peripherals. One of these days.

With my new austerity spending plan, I'm in no position to buy a new computer right now anyway. The only thing I can see purchasing is a Samsung laser printer, for printing out my screenplays and stories. The old color printer takes too long to print, and it freaked out when I printed my 117 page screenplay a fw months ago. Those Samsung laser printers run about $100-200, and I can definitely find a way to fit this amount into my budget.

I only lost a one pound this week, but at least I'm still losing. In six weeks, I've lost 12 pounds. Using the Dieting for Dummies formula, I recalculated my calories, and I now to need start eating less than I was before because of the weight loss. Sigh. Maybe two pounds a week is too ambitious and too austere of an eating plan for me. I stopped exercising for two weeks, and I'm sure this has affected my weight loss rate. Exercise definitely helps.

On a brighter note, I tried on a pair of jeans that used to fit me four years ago and it almost fits. I'm not quite ready to wear it, but at least I can button it without too much difficulty. I'm wearing a pair of stirrup pants, and they're very loose which feels very strange since they've always been snug. When I have lose weight in the past, the weight comes off my hips and thighs first before anywhere else, so maybe this explains my loose pants.

Tomorrow I go to see Turandot, and I'm excited about it, even though I'll be up in the rafters with the rabble rousers.

No musical selections today. I had the radio on and listened to this program called "Shamrock and Thistle", which is an hour long program of celtic (mostly irish) music. Now I just have the classical music station on.

I think I'll read all night and finish "The Jungle Book" and "The Age of Innocence". I'd like start reading my new books, which I borrowed from the library, Salmon Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart. I rented two movies, Dragonfly and Pay it Forward, in case I get bored reading. I'd also like to do some writing tonight, either 1,000 words for my short story or 500 words for my screenplay.

Ken Burns' Civil War series is being replayed on TV starting tomorrow. Although supposedly the series has a "northern slant", I'm going to tape it anyway. Ever since I read that Civil War book in WVA, I've been dying to see this documentary. I wish they would rerun Ken Burns' Baseball series. Instead, they're rerunning many of his shorter documenteraries. He's such a good filmmaker, I'm tempted to tape everything he's done. I have Jazz on tape, and love rewatching it. I love jazz music, and find the history of it fascinating.

A cute thing happened while I was standing in line at the grocery store tonight. I watched a man buy a bouquet of flowers with his other groceries, and after he paid give the bouquet to the cashier as a gift. At first I thought the man was the cashier's boyfriend and I thought, "he's a nice boyfriend to bringing flowers to his girlfriend at work". But then I noticed that the cashier had a confused look on her face. She kept looking at the door where the man had walked out and shaking her head. It made me wonder if that man was her boyfriend. When it was my turn in line, I asked her "did you know that guy?". She laughed and said no. She then explained to me that the man came into the store all the time, so he was familiar to her. She had never spoken to him socially before, and didn't even know his name. Then I told her, "Maybe he has a crush on you. Did he ask you for a date or give you his number?". She said no. Then I told her that maybe he left his card in the bouquet, so she checked but found nothing.

Then I told her, "A total stranger gave you a bouquet of flowers, and you don't eve know his name or have his number. God, that is so cute! That guy is so sweet." The cashier laughed and handed me my receipt.

I think it's such a cute story, and what a sweet gesture. A regular to the grocery store buys a bouquet of flowers for the woman who once in awhile is his cashier. I don't think he was trying to pick her up either, because he never told her his name or left his card and number. I'm going to have to put this scene in one of my stories.

I've had flowers handed to me by total strangers before. It's so sweet, and they've always left their name and number. I've never called any of them back, but I was so grateful to them for the gesture and the flowers.

The cashier was so taken aback by the man's gesture. She was very young, probably under 21, and didn't know what the heck to think. It might have been the first time a total stranger gave her flowers. When it's happened to me, it's such a rush and such a trip. The first thought that always went through my head was "oh my god, this guy might be my soul mate and if he is, I want to marry him." When I've told friends about receiving flowers from a total stranger, they've always said, "did you get his number? Maybe you should marry him." When I thought about the experience later, I felt so flattered that a total stranger went to the trouble of buying a gift for me. One guy handed his bouquet to me and said, "these aren't as beautiful as you". AHHHH. How sweet. I was so not looking particularly attractive that day either. It was a Saturday morning, and I had left the house without taking a shower. I was wearing red sweats, a baggy tshirt, and a green down jacket, and browsing through the stacks of a used bookstore. I'm sure I was quite a sight.

Actually, I've never received flowers when I thought I was looking very attractive. I've only ever gotten flowers when I've felt and looked dirty and skanky. I told a friend of mine about this issue, and she said I looked more approachable when I wasn't dressed up. So weird. All the books tell you that you should look your best when you want to attract lots of men. This dictum probably applies to every other girl except me.

I just love that the grocery store clerk received flowers from an appreciative customer. It's such a cute story!

I've been looking at my expenses again, and things aren't quite as bleak as I thought. If I get laid off, I can file for unemployment. I can trim down my expenses to absolute bare minimum. I also have about 3-4 weeks of FTO that I haven't used yet. Here are my scenarios, none of which involve tapping into my savings:

3 months severance + FTO money + unemployment = I could survive for 14 months without a job

2 months severance + FTO money + unemployment = I could survive for 10 months without a job

1 month severance + FTO money + unemployment = I could survive for 7 months without a job

FTO money + unemployment = I could survive for 2 months without a job.

I'm talking living at a bare minimum here, plus $150 for my health insurance cobra payment. Without the cobra payment for health insurance, I could go a few months longer.

My company had a layoff when they moved part of the office to Sacramento, and the people who got laid off received 3 months of severance. Three months of severance would be ideal, but I listed all the scenarios.

I've never looked at a lay off scenario before, because I've only ever been laid off once and that was when I was right out of college and it was my first job. I'm glad I did this little exercise, just so the thought of being laid off won't be so scary financially. I mean, I will freak out in any case, but now at least I know it might not as bleak as I thought.

I'm feeling better today, after a serious freak-out yesterday. I don't have enough information on my job to panic just yet, and I just need to wait and see what's going to happen. I'm working on a project right now with another senior VP in our corporate office in New Jersey, so things can't be that bad.

I found this description of the neighbourhood I live in on SFGATE.com. I moved to this area because I wanted to be within walking distance of Golden Gate Park, and I wanted to be near the ocean. I can bike or walk to the ocean from where I live , and Golden Gate Park is just a four block walk away. Most people in this area prefer to live by the Bay, but since I grew up on an island, I prefer to live near the ocean. Living near an ocean reminds me so much of home. This neighborhood is also not as expensive as others, and the parking isn't that bad. It's quiet too. Negatives: no gyms, no yoga studio, could use some better shops, no gourmet grocery store so no proscuitto. Pluses: a See's candy store, a great hardware store, a ballet school where you can take classes, great restaurants, a great picture framing store, lots of fresh veggie/fruit stands, two major grocery chain stores.

The Inner Richmond is a practical and comfortable neighborhood with a citywide reputation for fantastic restaurants. It's often called "New Chinatown" because it's almost as full of Chinese groceries and restaurants and Cantonese chatter as Grant Avenue, but most tourists overlook it, as did early S.F. residents, who wrote off the entire Richmond as a "Great Sand Waste" between the City and the sea.

The Richmond did almost became a miniature Colma, housing the municipal and Chinese cemeteries. But after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, Irish and White Russian immigrants and Middle Eastern Jews bought homes in the area. Two waves of immigration after World War II brought Japanese residents and added to the sizable Chinese population.

Since then, the Inner Richmond has become a bustling multicultural soup with cute stucco houses, grand mansions, easy access to the Presidio, a plethora of inexpensive eateries and a good variety of shops. The Richmond lacks the hype of the Mission, and the fog does roll in a little earlier in the afternoon, but on its main dining and shopping drag, Clement Street, you'll find great Burmese, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean restaurants, Chinese bakeries that sell siu mai (steamed meat dumplings), BBQ pork buns and other dim sum for under a dollar and produce markets that offer bitter melon, several kinds of choy (greens) or 10 lemons for a dollar. Browse the stacks at one of the city's best bookstores, suck down some Hong Kong-style pearl tea (complete with marble-size tapioca balls) or sit down for a French bistro meal, and you'll come to appreciate the modest neighborhood that has sprouted from the sand dunes.

I told Mr. Zaft I would respond to his questions about my post-modern relativism so here goes.

Seriously, though. How can one claim to accept the teachings of the Bible (for example, the 10 Commandments) if they are situationally interpreted? Is murder wrong for some people but not others?

This is a hard one for me. If you take this commandment literally - thou shall not kill, then what about the following types of people:

1) law enforcement people like police - are they murderers because they sometimes have to kill people in the course of their duty? I for one, am very grateful that the police do exist? But if you interpret the commandment of "Thou shall not kill", then all law enforcement persons are murderers. If the police are considered murderers, what does one call a serial killer or a person who makes a career out of killing?
2) military personnel - you know, the people who defend our country. These pepole must also kill in the line of duty. Are they murderers? I know it's not politically correct to say, where I live, but I happen to appreciate the military and what they do to protect our country. And yes, sometimes to protect our country they have to kill. What about the soldiers who fought in world war 1 and 2? Are they murderers?
3) the founding fathers of our country - those american revolutionaries. There was much blood shed in the creation of the United States of America. Were these people, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for creating our country, murderers?
4) member of juries or judges who sentence people to die - are these people murderers? True, they did not commit the actual crime, but they decided that a person should die. In intent, juries and judges are as guilty as the person who flips the switch or administers the injection.
5) the jail personnel who administer capital punishment - are they murderers too? They kill people, sometimes it's their job. Are they murderers as well?
6) The president of our country/the congress - he is the commander and chief of the country's military. It is on the president's orders, that the military kills. Or our congress. Congress can declare war, and the last time I checked, war involved murder on a massive scale. We are deciding to go to war with Iraq. Does this mean we shouldn't go because well, we'll be approving the murder of the Iraqi people and whoever else happens to be there at the time the planes are dropping the bombs.
7) Those people in states that have capital punishment? Are they murderers, because well they did approve the murder of people who commit crimes?

Do you see my dilemma? Do you see why sometimes post-modern relativisim is not such a bad thing? Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in "The Scarlett Letter", that when people start a town, the yfirst create two things, a church and a jail. Our whole notion of law and justice is based on punishment and enforcement. For societies to exist, we've had to create a system of law enforcement, so a community of people can live together in relative peace. If we condemn those that punish and enforce, then what happens to society and community?

Personally, I do believe that killing another person is a sin, yet I find it hard to condemn those who would kill to protect others or who would kill because it is part of their job. I have a hard time with capital punishment, because for me, it means we as a community approve of murder. If you can help me with my moral dilemma, please let me know.

The stock market indexes are so low right now. The Dow is below 8,000. And the Nasdaq is at 1200+. I still remember back in early 2000, when the Nasdaq was at 5,000. This is so not good for the economy, the country and anyone's pocket book right now.

Bad news at work today. Our VP of operations, who was in charge of our west coast office and my boss, went on an extended leave of absence. His wife died tragically of breast cancer, and the poor man needs time to grieve. The move was sudden and unexpected, and our whole office is like really wigging out. What does this mean for our office? I called my ex-boss, and he said I will probably report back to him in our VP's absence.

I hate unstable work situations, not that this job has been very stable, but today's news is the worst. I don't blame my VP. He needs time to grieve, and he was getting very depressed since the death of his wife. But still.

I've spent all morning, reevaluating my expenses. I'm preparing for a worst case scenario, which is they hire someone new and he starts reorging the whole office. The one good thing about my new eating plan is I don't spend very much money on food, drinking or eating out anymore. Those kinds of expenses are already at a minimum, and since I plan to eat this way till the end of January, I don't have to face a cut in food expenses.

I've decided to stop buying clothes, which I was thinking about anyway, until I'm at the weight where I want to be. I love buying clothes and jewelry, and it is quite an expensive habit since I have very expensive tastes. This will save me at least $200 a month. I just don't know how people can wear the same thing month and month out, but I guess I'll find out. Since I'm losing weight, some of my other clothes are starting to fit again, so in a sense it's sort of like having new things to wear.

I've decided to not spend money on any concerts and other entertainment events for awhile, but will still attend movies. Movies are so much cheaper than Broadway type plays anyway, plus there's always a bargain matinee.

I've got to put more money away into my savings and pay off more debt, so I'm in a better financial position if I do get laid off and have to go on unemployment. If worse comes to worse, I have my IRA and a long term savings account I can tap into. But I'll only do that as a last resort. One of these days, I'll need money to retire, and one of these days I'll have enough money for a down payment on a place. My retirement and long term savings account are definitely only a last resort option.

If the economy weren't so bad, I wouldn't be worried. It's never taken me that long to get a job in the past. But not now. I know people who have been unemployed since last year, and they still haven't found a job. It's a tough job market out there. I think it's going to get better by the end of the year, but the end of the year seems like such a long way away.

In my bible study class tonight my minister called me a "post modernist" thinker, after I told him that I though a person's interpretation of the bible can change depending on where they are in their life. I had to look up a definition of post modernist thinking on Google, since I hadn't heard that phrase in a long time and didn't quite remember what it meant.

When I looked up definitions for post-modernism, I realized he was right about me. I do believe that beliefs needs to be understood in context. You have to know the history of the belief, because we don't experience life in a vacuum. It's six degrees of Star Wars. Remember when Obiwan Kanobi tells Luke that your understanding depends on your point of view, so he could say from a certain point of view that Darth Vader killed Anakin Skywalker. It all comes back to Star Wars.

But I think I've been a situationalist since I was a kid. I remember sometime in grade school, I'm thinking 4th grade but I'm not sure, a teacher asking the glass what we would do if someone were to break into our house, and there was a gun near by. Would we shoot the person in self defense and be justified? Would we not shoot the person because killing is wrong? Was there such a thing as absolute law. She then went around and asked everyone in class what they would do and why. This is the kind of exercises you get in class when you're taught by ex-hippie liberals.

I don't remember what anyone else said, but I do remember very distinctly what I said. I told her that there was no such thing as absolutely right or bad, that it all depended on the situation, that there was no such thing as black and white and life was all different shades of gray. I remember my teaching looking at me, and telling me that I was a situationalist.

How I became a situationalist is a mystery to me. When I look over at my education, I was definitely taught from a very young age to always question authority, to never take anything at face value, to always study and learn before making any kind of judgement. That it was my responsibility as an educated person, to use my mind and my intellect to navigate my way through life. Strange huh? Were other people taught this? That education was valuable, that learning was life long process and that one should never stop learning. Blame my idealist, ex-hippie teachers for this.

What I learned in college only reinforced the kind of education I received in school, and I went to public school all my life. College taught me 1) always use primary source documents; 2) question all secondary documents because it's interpretative - like the media; 3) if possible read primary source documents in the original language, and if you can't be very sure you understand the motivation and philosophy behind the translation; 4) never believe anything you read or hear until you can research the facts for yourself; 5) everyone has an agenda in any form of communication - find out what the agenda is; 6) when studying any issue, you need to read all the literature on the issue, so you know what other people have said and where you fit in; 7) if you don't understand history, you're bound to repeat it, everything happens in context; 8) it is your civic responsibility to study the issues that affect your life and your community; 9) life is a participatory act, you have to participate, you have to vote, you have to contribute to the conversation, otherwise you're not living a life and you might as well be dead; 10) ideology without humanity and practicality is a bad idea.

I'm sure there were more, but that's all I can't think of right now. I've never really thought about all the things I learned in college like this before. I'm like wow! Very, very interesting!

Below are the lyrics for that dance song that keeps going through my head. This song feels like my life right now. I think I'm still suffering from post 9/11 anniversary traumatic stress disorder. It's either that or this crazy mercury retrograde!

"Gotta Get Thru This"
by Daniel Bedingfield - UK

If only I could get through this
I get through this

I gotta get through this
I gotta get through this
I gotta make it, make it, make it through
I'm gotta get through this
I gotta get through this
I gotta take my, take my mind off you

Give me just a second and I'll be all right
Surely one more moment couldn't break my heart
Give me 'til tomorrow then I'll be okay
Just another day and then I'll hold you tight

When your love is falling like the rain
I close my eyes and it falls again
When will I get the chance to say I love you
I pretend that you're already mine
Then my heart ain't breaking every time
I look into your eyes

If only I could get through this
If only I could get through this
If only I could get through this
God, gotta help me get through this

I gotta get through this
I gotta get through this
I gotta make it, make it, make it through
Said I'm gotta get through this
I gotta get through this
I gotta take my, take my mind off you

Give me just a second and I'll be all right
Surely one more moment couldn't break my heart
Give me 'til tomorrow then I'll be okay
Just another day and then I'll hold you tight

When your love is falling like the rain
I close my eyes and it falls again
When will I get the chance to say I love you
I pretend that you're already mine
Then my heart ain't breaking every time
I look into your eyes

If only I could get through this
If only I could get through this
If only I could get through this
God, gotta help me get through this
If only I could get through this
God, gotta help me get through this
If only I could get through this
God, gotta help me get through this
If only I could get through this...

I've been discussing, on my writing group's yahoo board, about the feedback I received from my screenwriting teacher. My writing group is saying that I should just stick to my story. Below is my response to a member of my writing group.

"You're right, I just need to stay with what I want my screenplay to be about, and I do want it to be about an adult child dealing with a dying father, a father the child has hated since childhood. That's the essence of my story. The brother sideline story is extra and so is baseball actually. I only made it about baseball players, because I got the idea for the story while wathcing the Oakland A's whack the Yankees in NYC for Game 4 of the 2000 ACLS. Plus baseball seemed the perfect background for exploring the father/child relationship from the male perspective, since I've always wondered if boys are closer to their fathers than daughters just because of the sports thing."

Songs that are going through my head right now: Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At, and some other song I heard on the dance station I sometimes listen to which goes something like, "I'm going to get through this".

I finally received some feedback from my screenwriting teacher on my screenplay. Here's what Julie O said.

"When I was away this summer I found that my conversation with any 'random' American often 'reversed' into talk/monologue about Baseball. This oldest sport(?) in the country obviously is deep seated in the psyche. And I'm thinking this will be explored in your piece. My lingering thoughts are Biblical though -- The Prodigal Son, Cain and Abel, etc. For me your first draft is a story about two brothers."

Biblical references in my screenplay, hmmm... I never saw this angle before. I knew when I was writing the screenplay, that it was a story about two brothers, and it was a story about a son returning home, but he's not the prodical son. The prodigal son left and returned home broke. My character is relatively wealthy. If I follow the biblical references to their logical extreme, is baseball then the garden of eden?

It's interesting what people read into my stories, especially when I never think about stuff like this when I write. I can't. It's too hard. I struggle to have my story come alive on paper, and the last thing I'm thinking about is what it all means. If I think about what I'm writing, I lose my story and my plot, and story and plot is everything to me.

Musical selection tonight: Itzhak Perlman's Greatest Hits - music to soothe an elf girl's soul. It's amazing what a lack of sleep can due to my mostly happy mood.

There was an accident on 19th Avenue near Judah on the way home tonight. An ambulance and police were at the scene. I try not to look at accidents when I drive past them. They freak me out, especially since I once saw a car on fire with I think people in it on the way to a Dead concert in Sacramento a very long time ago. We were going so fast, we weren't sure what we saw, but a car was definitely on fire. It's way too depressing to look at car accidents. I know many people who've been in car accidents, and it doesn't matter how long ago the accident was, the injuries still affect them and will probably continue to do for the rest of their lives. A car accident injury totally messes with your body for as long as you live. I think of my injured friends every time I pass an accident on the road.

I'm in such a melancholy mood because of my bad boy dreams and lack of sleep. All I want to do is work on my new needlepoint project, listen to my classical music cds, wait for it to get dark and then go to bed. There is something very relaxing about doing needlepoint. I like the repititiveness of it, and the fact that I really have to concentrate on what I'm doing since I'm not a good stitcher. It's almost meditative when I needlepoint because I can't think of anything else.

And afterwards when I look back at my work, I feel such a sense of accomplishment because I see how much progress I'm making on my pillow or on the purse that I'm now working on. Of course, the best needlepoint projects you can buy are found in London at Harrod's or Liberty of London. Needlepoint must be a big hobby there, because the selection of needlepoint projects is unbelievable. The kits you can buy here in the states are so mediocre compared to the kits in London.

My friend Mel is in Italy for a month. I am very jealous. I would love to go to Italy, if I could stop in London either on the way there or on the way home so I can buy new needlepoint projects at either Harrod's or Liberty, purchase new tartan shawls on Portobello Road, pick up a few silk scarves at Liberty of London which are divine but quite pricey, and then stop at Harrod's for tea and to check out their silver and raincoat departments.

If I had oodles of money, I would fly to London for the weekend, like I how used to fly from here to NYC for the weekend, for shopping, West End shows and a proper English tea.

Hard at work today working on client projects. I didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up from this recurring dream with me and the hottie guy from screenwriting class. I am so over him, and it bugs me that I dreamt about him. He was way too wild for me. I haven't spoken to him in a month. So why the hell am I dreaming about him? It's like some curse.

And what's worse, I never dreamt about him when I thought I was in serious crush with him. So why am I dreaming about him now? I hate men who disturb my sleep.

I listened to the BBC news on the radio on my way home from work. It comes on at 7 pm here, and the BBC person says it's 2 o'clock GMT. BBC interviewed Richard Peck, a former US ambassador to Iraq. The man sounded like a total idiot. I can't believe they interviewed him. He kept saying that all we wanted to do in the US was to kill Sadam Hussein, and that the government was looking for any excuse to do it. Who is this guy? I can't believe he said on the BBC news. No wonder the rest of the world has bad opinions of the US, when the BBC digs up freaks like this guy to interview. Then he said that he didn't think that Iraq was capable of making biological or chemical weapons. How does this guy know?

They interviewed Richard Butler earlier, the Aussie who used to head the UN inspections team, and he said even when they were doing the inspections earlier the Iraqi government made it difficult for them to do "unfettered" inspections. I remember watching videotape on the news a few years ago, showing Iraqi trucks leaving just as the inspectors were arriving. What a farce!!!

I think that despite this new move by Iraq to allow the UN inspectors back in, that we will go to war with Iraq. This new concession by the Iraqis just moves the time table back. I don't want to the country to go to war. I just don't see the Shrubmeister backing down on this one. I don't trust the Iraqis either. I think we are watching a "wait and see" game by both sides. And what I fear is the american public will be caught in the middle, and we will be an unwilling pawn in this very dangerous game.

I'm taking this bible class starting Wednesday from a real bible scholar, the new minister at church, and already I have homework. I received an email, saying that the class should have memorized in order the 66 books of the bible by the second class September 25. I'm like, what did I sign up for? This is just like college. HELP!!! I vowed to myself in college, after I got repeatedly dinged on tests and papers for not knowing the biblical references in literature or in plays, that I would take a bible study class when the opportunity came up. Sometimes, you get what you ask you for, and it totally freaks you out when you get it.

I wonder if he'll test us. God, I hate tests and I've been a straight A student most of my learning life. I bet my class will be full of lawyers. Many of the people in my church are laywers. And half the people who attend my church, have the equivalent if not the equivalent of a divinity degree. I wonder if I'll feel like the village idiot in class, because I'll probably be the only one who isn't a laywer and doesn't have a divinity degree. I can just see arguments in class erupting over bible minutia.

If you really want to study the bible right, you'd probably have to read hebrew (my friend from Paris Francois reads and write hebrew even though he's not jewish) and greek, so you can read the bible in the original text. Maybe even Latin too. This is when I wish I went to an old fashioned private high school, and learned to read greek and latin like my ex-husband.

I'm watching the Redskins/Eagles game, and there was something sprayed on the Philadelphia side, something that felt like burning in your lungs someone said. How scary! In this post 9/11 world, the first thing I thought of was some kind of chemical or biological weapon was unleashed on Monday Night Football. This is so scary!

My friend at Hooray for Anything is right. Sometimes writing in my blog is such a distraction, that it takes time away from my fiction writing. I'm telling myself it's okay, because out of my blog writing came my writeup about my 9/11 experience. And even though I think of myself as a poor personal essay writer, my 9/11 experience writeup was published on The SF Chronicle's website, SFGATE. What seemed like a terrible month long vacation from writing stories, turned into a publishing experience. So I guess the blog writing can't be that bad for me.

It's weird keeping a public blog, which is online diary for people to read, and also keeping my own private diary. Sometimes the entries are the same. Sometimes they are radically different. I say things in my private diary, that I would never say on my blog. I write things in my blog, that I wouldn't necessarily write in my journal.

In acting, teachers talked about the audience as "the fourth wall". As an actor, you have to on the one hand, ignore that the audience is there, but on the other hand, you have to be aware that your audience is there because if you're generating laughs, you might want to pause and wait just a little for the audience to stop laughing so you don't lose your lines in the laughter. In a storytelling performance I participated in, during my story the audience was reacting and laughing and I was feeding off of their energy and laughter. I found myself doing things in the performance that I didn't rehearse, but which seemed right to do because the audience was reacting the way they did.

In the beginning, hearing the audience laugh disturbed me. I couldn't help but think that I was really doing something really awful, and they were laughing at me and making fun of me. Any experience I'd had of being laughed at in my life, flashed before my eyes in what seemed like an excruciating slow few seconds. I could feel myself freaking out, and had to really think about what was going on with not only what I was saying, but with how the audience was reacting.

When I surmised that they weren't laughing at me, but reacting to my character's story with laughter, I relaxed. When I felt relaxed, I felt the audience's energy hitting me, and it felt like a drug high. There were only about 30 people who saw my performance. I wondered what it must be like for rock stars, who have a stadium full of people reacting to them. Afterwards, I realized why performance for some people is so addictive. There is nothing quite like having people pay that much attention to you. For me, it was exciting but at the same time scary somehow. There's a certain power in commanding that kind of audience attention, a power I didn't want and certainly didn't crave.

Speaking of acting roles ... I performed a speech from the play "Steaming" by Nell Dunn, where I played a cockney East End stripper. What a funny role! She was a great character too. And since I studied how to speak in a proper Brit RP and Brit cockney dialect the summer before, I said my speech in cockney. Someone came up to me after the performance and asked me if I grew up in England, since my accent sounded so authentic. What a scream!!! I told my acting coach, and he laughed.

When I was taking singing lesson, one of my singing coaches was english. I told him I could do a pretty good cockney accent, and he dared me to sing my peformance song in cockney for him. After I finished, he fell down on the floor laughing and told me I sounded like his auntie. Scary!!!

I suppose I should explain how the poem below came about. I'm not jewish, and I did write from the "we" point of view.

At the time I wrote this poem, I was friends with a woman who was very religious and was celebrating the High Holy Days. We had a long discussion on what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur was about for her. After our discussion,I tried to imagine myself as someone of her faith, and out popped this poem.

Is it pretentious? Perhaps. My friend spoke so pasisonately about the High Holy Days, and what they meant to her and their significance in jewish history that I was moved, inspired to write this poem.

I showed it to her and she liked it very much. She liked that I understood and could relate to what she had been trying to tell me. I showed it to another friend of mine at the time, who was from Saudi Arabia, and he said I was being totally too zionist.

On NPR this morning, I heard an interview about Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone. He said he chose to write science fiction, because he could have martians say things and not get any flak about it. If he had real people saying these words, he would have been censored.

I wonder about pretentiousness as I write my fictional stories, since all of my stories are written about people opposite to me. My screenplay is written from the point of view of middle aged professional baseball player. Am I being pretentious then to write from male point of view, since I am not a man. My baseball player is irish too, and I'm not irish. What about male writers through history, who have written from female point of view? Are they any more pretentious? What about Liam Neeson and Raffe Fiennes, the actors who played the jew and the german in Schindler's List? Are they prententious since they're neither jewish nor german?

These are questions I ponder as I write my stories, since I have no intention of writing fictional stories that have anything to do with my real life. My real life is boring, and uninspiring to me as story subjects. What causes me to write stories is when I wonder what it would be like to be a middle aged baseball player whose father is dying, but who's spent half his life hating his father. What would it be like to be non-college educated woman from the south, now living in california, who comes home from work one day, to find her gambling, alcoholic boyfriend lying dead in a pool of blood in the hallway? What it would be like be an overly religious woman who finds herself in an S&M relationship and loving every moment of it and at the same time feeling a sense of incredible guilt about it? I'm weird. These kinds of characters and their stories interest me. They make me wonder what it would be like to be these people. They make me want to understand what they feel and why they do the things they do.

Maybe it's that actor training I've had kicking in, where I often acted in the roles of women who were nothing at all like me. Where I spent hours pretending what it would be like to Lucky from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or the disgruntled wife in Edward Albee's The American Dream, or the crazy professsor's wife in Albee's Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or the morphine addicted mother/wife in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Where I wrote pages and pages pretending to be my character and writing about what I felt about the other people in the play, what my life was like, what I loved, what I believed in, and what I was trying to saying in this play. Was it pretentious of me to pretend to be any of these characters and write from their point of view? I even played Lady Macbeth once, and did the "out out damned spot" speech, and had to write about what it would like to see blood that wasn't there out of guilt.

Fiction is a strange thing because the essence of fiction is to tell a lie.

fiction
\Fic"tion\, n. [F. fiction, L. fictio, fr. fingere, fictum to form, shape, invent, feign. See Feign.] 1. The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind. --Bp. Stillingfleet.
2. That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.
The fiction of those golden apples kept by a dragon. --Sir W. Raleigh.
When it could no longer be denied that her flight had been voluntary, numerous fictions were invented to account for it. --Macaulay.
3. Fictitious literature; comprehensively, all works of imagination; specifically, novels and romances.
The office of fiction as a vehicle of instruction and moral elevation has been recognized by most if not all great educators. --Dict. of Education.
4. (Law) An assumption of a possible thing as a fact, irrespective of the question of its truth. --Wharton.
5. Any like assumption made for convenience, as for passing more rapidly over what is not disputed, and arriving at points really at issue.
Syn: Fabrication; invention; fable; falsehood.
fic·tion Pronunciation Key (fkshn)
n.
1. a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
b. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
2. A lie.
3. a. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
b. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories.
4. Law. Something untrue that is intentionally represented as true by the narrator.

Word History: To most people “the latest fiction” means the latest novels or stories rather than the most recently invented pretense or latest lie. All three senses of the word fiction point back to its source, Latin ficti, “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Ficti in turn was derived from fingere, “to make by shaping, feign, make up or invent a story or excuse.” Our first instance of fiction, recorded in a work composed around 1412, was used in the sense “invention of the mind, that which is imaginatively invented.” It is not a far step from this meaning to the sense “imaginative literature,” first recorded in 1599.

Perhaps that was my mistake. I should have said my poem below is a "fictional" poem.

A poem for Yom Kippur I wrote in my early 20's, when I was one of those weird chicks who was always writing poetry about anything and everything.

On Yom Kippur - The Day of Atonement
-for all things lost, forgotten and forgiven

This is a time of great sadness, of great sorrow.
When the sins of the fathers are passed on to the children,
and we must atone for the sins of the world which
have been laid upon our shoulders.
We fast so we may purify our bodies, our selves, our souls on
this most holiest day of the year.

When we must remember th days of Moses, the flight from Egypt,
the great holocaust where many of our kindred died, a time
when God had forsaken his chosen people, and let them suffer and die
at the hands of the white barbarian aryans.

The sins of the world have always been upon our people.
From the day a little star rose above Bethlehem, when a man who
walked upon the water was nailed to a cross among thiees.
From that day forwad, the sins of the world were branded upon our minds
and our hearts, on we the forsaken, by those who blamed us.

But on this most holy day, we must remember that
for all things lost and forgotten,
all things are forgiven,
so that we may start anew again in the coming year.
That for another year, our hearts, our souls,
our bodies are cleansed, purified and innocent of the
world from which we came, and from which we will always return.

I stopped writing poetry in my 20's. THe inpsiration to write poetry left me, and then I decided that I wasn't very good at it anyway. But it's interesting once in a while, to look back at my feeble attempts to express my world thru verse.

Another lazy Sunday. I slept through my alarm and woke up too late for church. So I turned the TV on and watched the San Francisco Grand Prix bike race on TV. Supposedly Robin Williams was out there as an announcer. Some very young Canadian guy on the 7-up team won. Lance Armstrong tried to take the lead, but he burnt out at the last minute.

Then I watched 49ers lose. I hate it when they lose. I watched bits of the Giants/Padres and the Oakland/Seattle baseball game. I stepped out out do laundry, and went for a walk. And now I'm watching the Raiders/Steelers game. I think the Raiders will win this game, which is nice. I don't think I can't take two Bay Area football teams both losing on the same day. I think the A's lost to the Mariners, but I'm not sure.

I stayed up too late on Saturday night, and I've been tired all day. At least I finished my filing, a project I've been wanting to work on for a long time. This means my weekend hasn't been a total waste.

I received an email today which said that my sports take on boxing, was selected to be on Random Blog Quotes. I wonder how they find my blog. Actually, I'm curious as to how anyone finds my blog. The web is this gigundous (love this silly word) thing with as many sites I would imagine, as there are people who surf the net. How anybody finds anyone or anything is amazing to me. I think I even received a comment in portuguese, if I'm not mistaken. That's cool, very cool.

I'm rereading The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. I think I read it as a child, but I don't remember. It seems like one of those books that every child reads. I cried at the end of the first story, when Mowgli gets kicked out the wolf pack. There was something very sad about that, to be kicked out of the only family you have ever known. I mean, Mowgli had some memories of his human family, but they were very vague. The wolves, the panther and the bear were the only family he knew.

I have visions of Mowgli ending up like Christopher Lambert in that movie, Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, where he's crazy and missing the jungle. But then again, I can kind of imagine him turning out like George of the Jungle too, or maybe Brendan Frazer in the disney movie. I think I'll just stick to imagining that Mowgli has no future. Rudyard Kipling didn't give him a future outside of The Jungle book, and neither will I. Poor Mr. Kipling is probably rolling over in his grave over what his story has morphed into over the years. I'm not quite sure I blame him either.