I was listening to that Vertical Horizon song on the way from work today. God, I love that song! There's something about "Everything You Want" that is so haunting to me. That was my Ellis song in 1999. Everytime I hear that song I think of him and I wonder why I didn't find him perfect, because he was pretty darn perfect, even more perfect than Brian. Brian had a hell of a temper and would have really hard to live with, him and his nasty tongue lashings, that Virgo shit coming out. But Ellis, he was easygoing and a Gemini, which meant like me he's an air sign.

I told a friend of mine on a plane coming back from Vegas that Ellis was just too perfect and I never had perfect before and it was so scary to think I could have it with him. Not that I don't think we wouldn't have had problems, he was kind of boring but boring in a good way, but with Ellis life would have been nice and easygoing and stress free. I'm sure he's married now. He was so cute and so nice and pretty well off too; any girl's dream come true. Guess not mine.

Anyway, I was listening to this song on the way home from work and I was thinking about my baseball story and it occured to me that my baseball dude guy has to fall in love with his father again. I mean, falling in love and falling out of love, is the same for men and women and I think a child and his or her parents.

Just think about it. You start out totally loving let's say your dad when you're young and then something happens along the way and all of a sudden, your dad becomes this total asshole. And you kind of go on from there thinking he's this total jerk until you get older and then something else happens and you find you want to make up with the guy. I think in order to do that, you're going to have to learn to love him again, not as his son or his daughter, or as a child loving their parent, but as an adult liking another adult. You're going to have to see him for all his faults and assholeness and you're going to have to like him despite all of it. But it's hard because you've still got years of hate and resentment. How do you get over that? How do you cross the huge gigundous gap that's not crept up between you and your dad? And then there's that little child inside of you that's still angry at dad.

How do you resolve all of that? Maybe that's what this screenplay is about for me. Resolving that gap. How do I get my baseball guy to rediscover and refall in love with his dad? I think the way he's going to have to do this is to grow up, to stop being a kid that was hurt all those years ago and become a man, trying to befriend another man.

I think about the words to this song by Vertical Horizon. "He is everything you want, he is everything you need, he is everything inside of you that you wish you could be. He says all the right things, at exactly the right time, but he means nothing to you and you don't know why." My baseball guy has to fall in love with his own dad. What a concept! It's weird, I think my baseball dude has to grow up in order to recover his love for his dad, but in doing so, he becomes a child again, maybe not an innocent child, but an older more wiser child. I'm not sure if this all makes sense, but I think this is what my baseball dude guy wants to do in my story and this was his way of telling me.

It's weird how you when you get older you can become friends with people who you know have qualities you don't necessarily like, but your friends with them anyway and you kind of just learn to live with their bad qualities. You take the bad with the good because you know the person is really nice underneath. But somehow, it's really hard to do the same thing with your mom and dad. It's really hard to take their bad qualities and their good qualities and then decide that they're good people anyway, never mind that they made your childhood and probably are continuing to make your life hell. Maybe it's hard to do with your parents because you have years and years of bad memories. Or maybe because they're your parents and you're like shocked that they were so mean to you because you think parents aren't suppose to behave that way.

If my baseball dude guy wants to fall in love with his dad, he's going to have to grow up pretty fast. I've only got 80 more pages till the end of the story.

Screenwriting class wasn' t that bad today. We read 10 pages of my story out loud and there some good compliments form people, who said my story was starting to gel, that the father/son conflict was still strong, that I was building tension into the scenes. Even the criticisms were what I already thought, my scenes are way to talky and way too long. Julie gave me a good hint on how to add more action to the scene. She also said my dialogue was too speechy, but I remember getting this criticism before with my half finished play, so I know I start out writing speechy and can hone later in a second draft.

Someone in class finished their screeplay in the second week and we had to take it home and read it. I gave the guy 3.5 pages of notes. I hope he doesn't freak out. I guess shouldn't have taken that class on how to be a film critic at UC San Diego, but I did want to be a film critic at that time. I'm like reading this guy's script and I'm already itching to write the preview monologue and I've got the montage of scenes all laid out. But then I told him, and other people agreed, that his script would be rated R for all the nudity scenes.

I'm so exhausted and desperately need to go to bed. I thinik I need to do more character work for the people in my script. I think I also want to read more scripts just to see how other writers have done it. I'm also dying to start rewriting, but I've decided that the best thing for me is write that top notch shittty first draft first. I've edited my pieces before and although the grammar thing is hard for me, I've done really well on edits. I wonder if I'm like one of those people who has to do a gazillion edits. With my luck probably. But I'm not afraid of the rewriting process as I used to be. I know I can tell a good story and I also know that my writiing needs major reworking and editing. I guess I should just feel glad that the words and the stories always come. It doesn't take me long to dip into that well that all writers keep talking about. In fact, most of the time, my stupid well is gushing an overflowing and haunting my thoughts and my dreams.

Speaking of haunting, I am being haunted by my fist love. I saw a Maryland license plate today and HE lives in Maryland. I keep thinking I need to get in touch with him, but honestly I can't deal with a stressful reunion in my life now and not ever. I want the past to stay where it is, in the past. This is such a change for me since I've fantasized over and over and then some about meeting him again. But now I'm like, get out of my life, get out of my thoughts, stay in the past where you belong and stop frickin' haunting me. I want to keep thinking of you as a beautiful 18 year old boy and I don't want the present to destroy that image. Maybe I'm just cranky because I'm so tired. Maybe I'm just getting older and growing up. Maybe I'm just afraid of what meeting my first love will mean to my current life. I don't want change right now. I want things to stay the same. I'm at a point in my life where I'm happy and I'm writing more and I just don't want that to change. It's selfish I know, but I don't care. I am being consumed by writing and I think it's a good thing.

My archives keeps disappearing. This seems to happen periodicaly, but when I republlish them they come back. Not sure why I'm so worried, since I wouldn't be too heart broken if I lost my blog. No, I take that back. I would be just a little pissed because I've invested alot of time writing in this thing, although I know no one is reading it. Ah, the joys of blogging on the Net.

I'm on page 42 of my screenplay and I just finished scene 21. I'm writing total drivel, but Julie says all first drafts are shitty first drafts, so I'm just following what she says and wriitng a top notch totally shitty first draft.

The worst thing about being in this part 2 of screenwriting class is having your screenplay read out loud by people you don't know and don't particularly like. I read a book today called Movies in the Mind, How to Build a Short Story. There's a chapter in the book on critics where the author says "pick your critics carefully and make sure they're trained ... find critics that can actually help you write better ... never say anything about someone else's story unless you yourself could fix it."

Some people in writng classes I've taken love to critique a story but then when you ask them how to make it better, they have no answers. Then there are those others, and they're in every class, every seminar you take, who just talk and having nothing to say. They love to raise their hand and talk, but what comes out of their mouth is nothing. It's like they were taught in school, they just need to talk, never mind that what they're saying is bad BS. Now I don't mind people who talk and who are good at BSing their way into making themselves sound intelligent. But from my own personal experience, they are of BSing well is a lost art. Don't these people hear what they are actually saying? I don't think they do, because if they did, they would be so embarrassed for themselves. But alas, the gift of awarenss is a rare gift indeed.

My problem is I don't talk enough. I don't usually like to say anything unless I have something good to say and I hate critiquing someone else's work unless I can offer them advice on how to make it better. Screenwriting is so new to me that half the time, I'm at a lost as to what to say to anyone.

Five more classes to go. If the screenwriting teacher wasn't so great and if I didn't have as my goal finishing the screenplay by the last class, I wouldn't have taken part 2. I swear to god, this is the last writing class I'll ever take. I said that earlier, but screenwriting was a new genre for me. I'm glad I took the class because there was alot to learn with the formatting, the character development, the beat sheet and stickie notes and then the final outline for screenplays.

Every published author who's ever written a book of writing eventually ends up saying, stop taking writing classes. They're useless and sometimes destructive. They all say just keep writing and keep reading.

Well, I think It's time to take these published authors advice. Just five more classes and then yeah, no more writing classes ever. I hate saying never or ever, because then what always ends up happening is, I do the thing I swore you would never do. So I'm not going to say never or ever. I'm just going to say, I prefer at this time to not take a writing class until such time where I feel I may benefit from being in that kind of environment. I think that sounds better, doesn't it?

Other mundane topics. I still can't decide which Palm to get, either a 505 or a 130. Or should I save the $100 and get a Vx like the on a friend of mine has. Do I really need color and an an place to stick an addon file?

Or now I'm thinking, maybe I should get one of the Palm knock offs like a Handspring Visor or something. I haven't even started researching those options yet.

The only this is certain is I want to spend as little money as possible, just in case I find out like so many of my friends have, that I don't even used the damned thing. I have so many friends who bought the latest and greatest most expensive palm pilots, only to find out later they hated it and missed pen and paper. Maybe they can afford to have a $300 and up little paperweight sitting on their desk, but I can't.

I called LG electronics on Thursday and found out I can upgrade my LG Phenom express to windows ce 2.2. Thank god. I was started to get so depressed about my little toppie. I love the size of it. I can just stick it in a bag and not a big bag either and take it with me to write anywhere. Hell, I've written at movie theaters and even on MUNI. The battery life is better than I thought it would be too. I was at a cafe a couple of weeks ago and I wrote in there for two hours, despite my batteries only being 30%. That's a long time.

I needed to upgrade the toppie so I could surf the net with it when I travel. My stupid ISP only works with windows ce 2.1 and up. I wish I'd thought of these things before I changed my ISPs, but who can plan for these issues. I thought I'd want to buy a real laptop too, and not a baby one. But these baby laptops are so much more convenient to carry around and cheaper too. It's so small, you don't have to worry about it being stolen. I keep in my travel cd holder, which normally hold 48 cds. That's how small it is. The keyboard is about 78% of normal size but I have small hands anyway and don't have a problem typing. Now if only I can upgrade my ISP to the right plan to use my windows CE machine, I'd be set for life. But upgrading my ISP, that's a whole other can of worms that I won't be able to deal with till May 19.