I read that column about Marina girls. God, that woman was so condescending. I looked at the list and I could answer yes to bunch of those statements. So what. Does that make me a Marina girl? I don't think so because I never lived in the Marina. But what I think it means is that all young affluent attractive women in their youth have similar qualities.

I can't believe that columnist didn't say if she could have answered yes to any of those statements. Either she's lying to us and herself or she must be one super ugly anal hyper organized person. Whatever.

I read two of my favorite screenplays tonight; American Beauty and Wag the Dog. Afterwards, I'm like thinking what the hell was I thinking when I decided I could write a screenplay. I don't think visually, at least not very well. And to write screenplays, you have to think visually.

A little voice inside of me says that all first screenplays are hard and stupid and bad, really bad. Some people write a screenplay every six weeks and they've been doing it for years and they have yet to sell any of them. And here I am complaining about writing my first one. How spoiled! What a baby I am.

What comes easy to me is the the story ideas and the actual plot and storytelling. I never seem to run out of ideas or stories or plots. I also dont' have a problem findind the voice for my characters, which I attribute to all my actor training. What's hard is actually translating the storytelling, the plot and my characters onto paper. The language trips me up. It's like I can see the movie, I can hear the play and I can hear the story being told, but I just can't get it down on paper.

My poor characters. I want to make them real and believable like dolls, like stuff animals, like a hologram that you can see and touch and hear but you know deep down is not real.

It's true what they say, writng is all about rewriting, then more rewriting and then more rewriting. Nothing by rewriting and even then I don't think you ever get it right. I hate this fact.

I'd stop writing in a heart beat, but I can't get those characters and voices out of my head. They demand to be heard, to be made real, to find life in words on pages. I just wish I could do a faster and better job of creating their world.

It's funny how life imitates art. There was someone in my screenwriting class who told me that it's not a big deal to get sent down to the minors when you're playing pro baseball. I get alot of questions like this since I'm a chick who's who's got the nerve to write a screenplay about a jock boy playing America's favorite pastime, baseball. Interesting how these questions mostly come from women and not from men.

Anyway, what's today's headline. John Rocker, that racist pig pitcher who now plays for the Texas Rangers, gets sent down to Triple A ball or the minor leagues after playing only two weeks of baseball.

Actually, the one nice guy in the class was telling me that I must know alot about baseball and I told him I don't but I know alot of people who are totally into it. Well, that and the fact that I'm a chick who dwells in Jim Rome's jungle alot.

Rome had an interview with baseball commissioner Bud Selig the other day. The guy is one smooth talker. He should try politics one day. Selig talked about the upcoming labor negotiations between the players' union and the owners. Rome kept asking him if there was going to be a strike and he kept dodging the question. Then Selig totally condemned that Forbes article about how much baseball owners really make.

His standard line, which he fed to congress, was the owners were losing money. Oh yeah. Then how come baseball teams can pay such exhorbitant salaries to their players? Case in point, look at the Texas Rangers. Their payroll is phenomenal, not that it does them any good since they've assembled a rag tag team of high priced problem players who aren't even giving the Rangers the number of wins you'd think they should have, given the amount of talent and money they have.

Then Selig went on to say that major league baseball wants to start testing the players for steroid usage. I think baseball is the only sport that doesn't test. Guess that incident between Mike Piazza and Roger Clemens in 2000 didn't fly with alot people. Whatever Clemens was on that night, be it his own intense personality or artificial substances, made him an out of control raging animal.

There was also that talk about how easy it was for the homerun record to fall after so many years and how they're too many players who are bigger than they used to be and hitting more bombs than before and older than before and still playing well. Part of it I think is better medical attention to the players themselves. The advances in sports medicine in the last 10 years have really allowed athletes to stay in condition all year long and if they do get injured, to come back quicker and pretty much in the same shape. Look at Garrison Hearts of the 49ers. The guy is amazing to have come back like that after what would have been a career ending injury.

Then there's the competitiveness and the salaries. I think the athletes are taking care of themselves better because there' s more competition and they're staying in shape all year round and not messing around with their million dollar product, their bodies. There are always exceptions though, like Jeff Kent, but the majority of athletes take care of themselves. They've got to. They've got those big salaries and I don't think teams are stupid enough to not put clauses in their players' contracts about keeping the body in shape.

There's also I think the Tiger Woods phenomenon. He's a golf guy who's totally in weight training and conditioning and look how great he is. I'm sure other athletes are noticing the differences that training and conditioning can make to an athlete and his game.

Then again, there's the players themselves. And alot of them will come out in an interview and hit about steroid usage. Now whether it's just sour grapes or really the truth, no one knows. But as long as they are players willing to hint, there's always going to the suspicion of doped up players. Major league baseball has to test to quell the rumors, but don't look for that to get approval for a long time. The owners are happy because homeruns bring the crowds to the parks and the players are happy because it gives them a bargaining chip in their salary negotiations.

Selig also talked about adding more parity to the league. I'm sure that' s going to go over well with the players and the owners. Can you imagine salary caps in major league baseball? What would teams like the Yankees, the Braves, the Dodgers and the Texas Rangers do. No way is this going to fly. Steinbrenner will fight it tooth and nail and from all the reports, the guy's got alot of clout.

I think major league baseball should have salary caps. It seems to work for the NFL. It took awhile but it seems to be working. What a salary cap will also is make baseball teams rely on their farm systems more for their players. And that can't be too bad. A team like the A's has a great farm system and they're always in the playoffs. In the NFL, they have to recruit well from the college ranks and other sources. The NFL has to get young players because they're cheap and then spend a few years developing them. It only took the 49ers a couple of years to get a young team in shape.

I saw a football game on ESPN the other night and it was football in Europe. What a kick! They had a stat up saying that just last year I think, the NFL contributed over 200 players to the European league. The announcer said that the NFL is looking that European league as a way to test and train their new players, kind of like a farm system since the NFL really doesn't have one in the US.

So I guess until I finish writing and then rewriting my screenplay, it's going to be all baseball all the time. I guess that's not a bad thing. It will be like writing to mood music only this time it's baseball news and baseball games.

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.