Writing this post while typing on my iPad. It is strange to type on the glass screen. I am watching this horror movie called "Drag me to hell", and it is genuinely scary. Memo to self - do not rent horror movies to watch on Netflix because I get scared too easily. Parts of the movie are actually quite campy and funny, but the scary bits are freaking me out.

What else? I went to see the J W Turner exhibit at the de Young museum on Sunday. I knew Turner was considered a master in art, but I never quite got why until I saw the art in person. There is something about his work that is absolutely breathtaking. His depiction of light is amazing. His light has texture and depth. Who knew light had such substance to it. And it is different from Monet.

Monet depicted light as well, but his light was dappled and transparent. Turner's light is different. His light is so substantial. There are no words to describe his art. And seeing Turner's art in a printed book does not do the art justice. You have to see the work in person.

Art can be such a relevation. I am thinking of the time I saw Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the Tate Museum in London. The sunflowers leapt out of the canvas, and all Van Gogh did was layer the paints in the piece so it had depth. All previous art until then was flat. And then when you see the art of Jay DeFeo, you see paint layering in its extreme with her piece "The Rose".

So if you are in San Francisco, go and see the Turner exhibit at the de Young. I am now dying to see the movie about Turner's life that came out last year, and then going back to see the exhibit. That will be fun.

I thought morning pages might be easy to get into, but the process has not been easy. I used to be so eager to write that getting up early in the morning to do it was no big deal.  Now it is a huge effing deal. I am not sure if my reluctance to get up in the morning is because I am getting old, or it's because I don't have the enthusiasm for writing that I used to have. Most likely it is a combination of both things and then some others.

But I want to get back into it, the problem is I cannot guage that want. Writing used to be like an addiction, like if I didn't write, I thought I would explode with all these voices in my head. Have the voices gone silent? Or have I jus stopped listening for them? Where have all my story characters gone? 

I can hear them, but they seemed so far away. They are saying there is too much clutter in my head and the clutter blocks their voices, their sounds. 

I have a theory about story characters which goes something like this.  If you are writer, and I believe anyone can write, so that's everyone, the story characters find you  They inhabit your mind, hoping you can hear them, because all they want to do is to get their story out. And when you write their story down, they are ecstatic because they want their stories to be told. I don't think much care about the story being published, they just want the story out. But if you can't hear them, they will move on the next person and the next person until they get story out.

And even when their story gets out, some of them will go to another writer and have that writer get their story out, because the new writer will tell their story differently.

I wonder if my story charcters have moved on. I hope not. They say they are still around, but I need to get that that clutter out of my head. They say they are attached to me and they want me to tell their story. I'm glad that they are sticking around.   

Morning pages today have become very late evening pages. I am trying to get to work half an hour earlier now, so I get home at a decent time. But I am not used to it so my whole morning routine is still off a bit. I think if I keep at in in 30 days, I wiill get used to it, at least that is the thought.

I've been listening to reviews on the youtube channel "What the Flick" of Netflix's new series called "Sense8", and the reviewers make me laugh so much. They are having such a hard time with the concept that people could be linked telempathically, and are having such a hard time following the story. I did not have this problem. I am not sure if I agree with how the Wachowskis are portraying what it is like to be telempathic, but I applaud them for trying to do it on tv.  

The conspiracy side of me says that the ideas in Sennse8 are exposing people to what it is like to be hive-mind, where you are an individual but still part of the collective. They are outlining the advantages for human beings to come together and link telepathically.

I am reminded of the sci-fi stories of Olivia Butler, who is one of my favorite science fiction writers.  In her books, one person was able to link all the minds in the story telepathically but I believe they were all linked by DNA, by genetics.

In Sense8, the 8 people are all linked by the fact that they all born on same day.  The show was not explicit on whether it was the same time but definitely the same day.

Watching the reviewers of What the Flick trying to dissect Sense8 made me wonder if I am living in the same world as the reviewers since these ideas of linking minds are normal and easy to understand.

On another topic but still somehwat related, I was listening to an interview on the radio and I got the feeling that the woman I was listening to was coming from a deeply negative space. The interview was like an infomercial for a conference where the person being interviewed was going to the featured keynote speaker. I was half a mind to go to this conference, but hearing this woman being interviewed totally turned me off. I feel like this conference is for beginnners on this topic, and I am more advanced. They were talking about all of these break-out sessions that would be held, but none of those senssions appealed to me on any level because they were all for beginners. 

Again, I felt like I am living in such a different space than most people. Or maybe this means progress for me, because I know I am a fairly negative person myself. But that lady who is the featured speaker for this conference was in an even more negative space. It's like there is no room in her reality for people to have a positive experience on this topic, and if people have had a positive experience they need therapy. Which is such a laugh, since the keynote speaker is a therapist herself.

There are other some speakers at this conference that I would love to hear, but I think it is going to look strange if I don't hear the main speaker. I mean what am I going to do with myself during her session? Stay in my room? The conference is a few months away, so I have time to decide if I want to go. I just think it is so awkward if I go to the conference and ditch the mian speaker.  I guess I could always say I wasn't feeilng well, and needed to rest or lie down. Being sick is such a great classic excuse for getting ouf of events that you do want to attend. Normally it would just freak me out to pay for a conference and miss sessions because I paid to attend the whole conference. But now I am like, maybe I need to do it just so I can hear the other speakers. The conference schedule has not been finalized so I am hoping that when the schedule comes out, I will get a better idea of how many sessions I will have to miss.  

Julia Cameron recommended morning pages to be written in the morning before the mind wakes up, to get whatever thoughts are in your head on paper which presumably leaves the mind empty for the creative ideas to come through. Her suggestion was to write the "morning pages" by hand and to choose a limit of the number of pages.  I really must go back and read the book to find out exactly what she said.

As I am typing this, I feel like it is cheating a bit since Julie said to write by hand to connect the mind to the hand. And if I am blogging my morning pages, what will be my limit.  There are no page limits like in writing. Is it going to word count? Is this even going to be a good idea.

The only thing I am liking about doing this right now, is that I am typing on my iPad in bed with my apple keyboard. And I am thinking to myself, I am finally getting use out of that darn apple keyboard that I bought because I haven't been using it for writing like I thought I would.

Truth be told, it's sort of strange to have the keyboard separate from the screen.  Don't get me wrong, because I love  my iPad. I love lying in bed with my iPad and surfing the net before I go to sleep. I love that it is light enough to be carried in my giant handbag that I use for travel. I have even gotten used to watching movies on this smaller screen. But carrying keyboard that I bought for this iPad sometime is not practical.

I keep on thinking it is the fact that the apple keyboard is much longer than the iPad itself, and that it's too long to fit in my giant travel purse. When I went on vacation last May, the keyboard traveled in my backpack. I had the backpack with me the whole time, but it seemed a pain to take it out and use it on the plane. 

The apple keyboard itself works like a dream. Connection to the iPad was easy, and the clunky cover that guy at the apple store recommended actually works quite well. So the two items together fit very well together, and it something I am going to have to get used to unless I want to buy another keyboard  The apple keyboard feels like a real keyboard, and I seem to be able to type my normal speed.

I mean it's not that bad. I listened to a seminar online yesterday, and I was taking notes with the iPad and keyboard and that seemed to work well. I was even thinking of sending the notes to a friend of mine, which will be easy now because the notes are already typed. I just have to go in and delete my comments about the lecture.  When I've done this in the past, I had to type up my handwritten notes which I sometimes couldn't read because i was writing too fast.

So perhaps this is another reason to do morning pages on my iPad; so I can get used to typing on apple keyboard.

Wow, I forgot how mundane morning pages writing is. Julia Cameron said you need to keep writing in morning page, and make sure your hand never stops moving. And never put the pen down. But when you follow her instructions like I am trying to do now, it seems like the most boring crap is filling my brain.

That is sort of sad isn't it? That your all important brain's space is filled with the boring comments and issues of your daily life. But at least now, some of my brain space has been emptied of this morning's inane thoughts and concerns.  

I may write more later, but this feels like a good stopping point.

Blogging used to be such a passion of mine and now it's been forgotten like an old lover. And somehow the thought saddens me greatly.

But for a reason I have yet to discover, I have not been writing anything down anywhere. Not even in my journals. I do keep notes of when odd things happen to me, but I would not call that writing, not really.

But I do really want to get back into writing, so I am thinking of blogging again. Maybe make it like morning pages recommended by Julia Cameron.

Maybe the months of NOT-writing have to come out so the creative stuff can come out.  This technique has worked for me before, so I am going to give it a try again.

So expect more posts ....