I went to a spiritualist church on Franklin at Van Ness today with my englishi friend Eileen. They do John Edwards style readings and I wanted to find out if I would get a message from Amy. When you walk in, you write a question down and if you're lucky one of the mediums will pick your question.

Lucky for me, my question was picked. My question was, how Amy was doing on the other side. The medium said that she was fine and the message from Amy was to be good and kind to my other friends. Not exactly what I thought I might hear, but I was happy to know that she was okay and happy in the spirit world.

I speeded up the timeline for my screenplay since I decided I wanted everyone in class to review it before the class ended. That meant I had to write 15 scenes this week, since if I was a on a five week schedule I would have finished scene 36. My previous schedule had me writing about 10 scenes a week and as of Monday, I was on scene 21. That's alot of scenes.

It was such hard work, especially since I was on a lazy fit on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and write. But I started on Friday and wrote three scenes. On Saturday night I wrote six scenes and tonight I just finished writing six scenes. I got so confused with my scenes because I changed my beat sheet and outline so many times that it took me half an hour to figure out at the end, exactly how many scenes I'd written. I've really got to do my outline and beat sheet over.

My scenes seem to be getting better. They're shorter, full or more action and my dialogue I think, is sharper and more concise. I'll find out tomorrow when I go to class. I've still got to rewrite the first father son scene tomorrow, but I can do that on my lunch break tomorrow. I'd like to start with that scene and what follow afterwards to be read in class.

I'm trying to force myself to get used to this critique thing. It's hard as hell since my write ego is so fragile, but maybe I can toughen myself up if I just do it all the time. Does the fear ever go away I wonder? I hope so.

I went to the Dada/Surrealism exhibit at the California Legion of Honor today. I sort of like all that stuff in way, even though some of it incredibly pretentious. The exhibit had the famous toilet bowl, which I've always liked and the rake. It must have been fun to be in the movement in those days, because it all very groundbreaking and new and happening in Paris during the first and second world wars.

That first world war must have been a doozy. There's that one film maker, I think it's Clive Barker, who seems to be obsessed with it. Images from life in the trenches always show up in his movie, even in Gods & Monsters, a movie he was involved in. I think that war, the brutality of it, really drove the european intellectuals insane, but it lead to some of the best artistic movements.

I loved the collages. They made me want to start collaging again. I used to collage every day as a technique to get whatever was in my head and into some physical form. I saw some of collage that even resembled some I did. I think I should get some of my collages framed, especially that one that a friend of mine offered to buy for $50. I think I should have sold it to him, but I didn't want to part with it. Imagine $50 for something I made and he wasn't even that good of a friend and he wasn't tryig to get into my pants either. If I had let him buy it, I could have said I was a paid artist.

At the exhibit I decided to listen to the audio tape and one of the recorded session, the speaker said that Dadaists were kicked out of the communist party for being political incorrect. The Communist party thought that the Dadaists were expressing the consciousness of one individual and not the collective consciousness. Artists must work for the good the collective consciousness and surrender their own individuality.

I had to listen to it twice. No wonder I've started to hate political correctness and can spot it a mile away. Political correctness and its advoacates want us to all think the same like robots, like automatons, like sheep. They want us to be of one consciousness, be absorbed into one big consciousness like The Borg and give up our own inviduality. Political correctness is the enemy of art because art is all about an artist expressing their individual consciousness.

When artists expressed the consciousness of one group, they called in soviet communist art, bad art. Artists in those countries bitterly complained about repression and fled out of the country. Does that mean political correctness has its roots in communism? It would seem so. As an artist, I must fight against political correctness because it is a denial of individual consciousness. I will be not be absorbed into The Borg of Political Correctness.

I like that I think differently, that my life experiences make me different, unique from anyone else on the planet. I refuse to have my own indvidual consciousness changed into some big collective consciousness. It's a total conspiracy by the left, and I live in the area where the conspiracy first started. The great social experiment; more like the great social brainwashing, the great movement to absorb individuals into one big consciousness of the The Borg left and liberal consciousness.

And what's upsetting is I'm a liberal, but even I think what some of the liberals think and have done are incredibly destructive and stupid that I'm ashamed to call myself a liberal sometimes. God, it makes me wonder if all those rightwingers are right in equating the liberal left with communists, especially when they're using a communist mode of the repression of free thinking, like political correctness.

I'm getting to the point if I just detect any form of political correctness in a play, in a move, in something on TV, in something I read, in someone's else thoughts when they speak, I immediately turn off and label the thing spouting the political correctness a zombie, a sheep, somebody too stupid or too lazy or both to think for themselves. I'm bad and I know it. What's ironic is the liberal left complain about how the rest of the country are like sheep following the other side. Well, their own followers are sheep as well because they buy the party line hook line and sinker.

Now whenever I hear PC being uttered anywhere, I'm going to think that the person or the thing has been absorbed into Borg consciousness and you know that the people in the Star Trek world hated the Borg. I think the USA will become like that someday. Everyone will fear the Borg of the Liberal Left. And if we do, it's the liberal left's fault for pushing political correctness the way they do.

Critics complain that TV and movies coming out of Hollywood are boring. Well, I can see why now. Hollywood has been absorbed into Borg consciousness. Hollywood is disgustingly PC. There is no room in Borg consciousness for individuality. The really great movies and TV are coming out of places and people who haven't been absorbed into the Borg like Canada, the UK, Australia and other regions of the US that haven't been absorbed into The Borg. I forgot. Add New York to the list of places that have been absorbed into the Borg or as some there would say, was where Borg consciousness actually started.

I'm in a bad mood now, so I have to change topic. I got a call this morning from this woman who led this seminar that I took last year. I was telling her that I was writng and she told me that she used to teach english and journalism. Marilyn was so nice. She offered to read my stories and help me edit them. I told her I'd be willing to pay her, but she just laughed.

Wow, this is just like they used say in my meditation group. When the student is ready, the master will come. I am at the point now where I could use a good editor and a friend calls me out of the blue and offers to help me edit for free. This is so cool. It makes me think that I won't have to worry about finding resources to publish my work. Perhaps when I'm ready to publish, publishing resources will show up. One can only hope.

I had a session with my spiritual healer/medical intuitive on Friday. She said that she's worked with six other writers and they've all published, so she has total confidence that I will publish soon. She makes a tape of her sesson and I can't wait for the tape. I just got the highlights in a phone call at work and although I wrote it down, it was hard to pay attention and really hear what she had to say. I'm too stressed out at work to really calm down and listen to anybody.

Sessons with her are always so interesting. Since I've been working with her, alot of my physical problems have gone away, but then she is a medical intuitive. Some of the other stuff she says is so far out but then she's told me that working with me is far out, since she's seen things in her session with me, that she's never seen before. I don't think it's a good sign when you freak the spiritual healer/medical intuitve out.

Susan said I'm supposed to work with a certain someone from the past. That man and I have been creeping around the earth since 2.3 million years ago. And I'm like no way. The past is dead, the past is dust and I've finally put that portion of my life to rest once and for all. It freaks me out because I had only recently just come to a point where I was at peace in myself that this man and I will never see other again. I had no desire for the first time in years to contact him and reconnect. I was very happy with leaving the past in the past and moving forward with my life. And now it seems like all that's changed. Susan said that it would be okay to reconnect with him since we were soul mates in a previous life and that I was a part of his past history. I don't think he feels the same way.

I don't care. I'm not gonig to contact him anyway until I'm a successful, money earning writer, which means I may never contact him. Susan said to even wait till I was more successful since this man is totally successful himself. I hate all this and I'm not going to fight it, but I'm not going to encourage it either. He was the one who walked out on me. He should be the one contacting me. It was him that couldn't be friends, that couldn't deal with the fact that someday I might date other men. God, why are men like that? B was the same way. I can't be friends with you without wanting a more serious and physical relationship. What bullshit! It's my scourge - overly romantic men! They are the plague of my existence.

Okay, now I'm in a more rotten mood than before. It's to work on the 24 pages of my screenplay that are due for class on Monday.

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.