I'm sitting here waiting listening to one of my favorite jazz tunes, My Favorites Things by John Coltrane and wondering what happened to that autiobio essay I started on the paper table cloth at that fancy restaurant in Carmel in 2000. Carmel used to be an artisit colony and the restaurants put paper table clothes on the tables so the artists could sketch or write as they ate. So I obliged and started writing a piece called "A Life Lived Through Jazz", which was about having the most important moments of my life magically explained while I was listening some jazz record.

There is something so wicked, so cityish, so sinful, so delightful about listening to jazz for me. I think of streets I walked at night in Manhattan, DC and San Francisco where I heard some guy on a street corner wailing away on his saxaphone, the sound eerily echoing through the scrscraper caverns. Or the time we cleared out a college party by playing John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Or sitting in countless bubble baths with glass of wine or champagne in hand and listening to jazz music on the radio. Or that senior I slept with occassionally in college, when I was a freshman, with the huge jazz record collection. He would ply me with ouzo, carefully select a jazz record to play, and then we would have sex. Afterwards, I would watch him meticulously clean the record in his birthday suit. He would then carefully choose another one and come back to bed, not to make love, but just to hold me. I would lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beat in tune to whatever record he was playing. An interesting way to get a jazz education, I suppose. I think I was attracted more to his record collection than to him. He lived right down the hall, drove a Mercedes, supplied free drink and demanded nothing of me until I showed up at his door in the wee hours of the morning; he was the perfectly convenient college lover. And when I did show up at his door in my sleep attire, which I seem remember was just a tshirt, all I had to do was smile and listen to him talk about jazz music and his beloved collection. But what man wouldn't want a willing 18 year old to show up at his door wearing nothing but a tshirt and panties? And always so agreeable and pleasant too!

There used to be a radio station devoted completely to jazz, called KJAZ (what else), when I first moved to San Francisco. That station has long since gone and now I listen to classical music while I bathe.

I've trying to slog my way through John Henry Days. It's a good book but the reading is slow. I wanted to finish it in West Virginia since we were actually going to go John Henry Days, but I got sidelined by Confederated in the Attic. I love that book. It was so much more easier to read than this John Henry book. I don't know if Confederates is so good because it was written by a former war correspondent who is used to writing for the media and well versed in the art of keeping the reader with a limited attention span interested or if it's good because it's a non fiction book and sometimes, true life is better reading than fiction.

I want to finish John Henry Days only because I hate starting a book and not finishing it. There's something very bad for me about starting a book and not finishing it. It's kind of rude, since the author spent time on his creation and it's a dishonour for the reader not to finish it. I'm the same way with movies, even bad ones. I have to watch it to the end, just in case the film gets it together and redeems itself.

So I'm playing my favorite jazz tunes to get me through, but even that's not working. I sat in a different chair to take a break and I fell asleep and woke up to Take the A Train. And now I'm getting de ja vu, like I've written a whole thing abuot jazz on my blog before. Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter. It just shows that jazz music does permeate my thoughts alot or just that I play jazz music from time to time. What's the difference?

On the way to screenwriting group on Tuesday, I twisted my right ankle. I was wearing my oh so comfy dankso clogs and mindlessly walking down the sidewalk to my car, fantasizing about something or other, when I felt my ankle buckle and then sharp pains shooting through my ankle. I do this all the time, so I didn't think anything of it. I even did a 45 minute workout later that night in guilt for eating like a pig vacation.

On Wednesday while getting out of the shower, I look down at my right ankle and I notice it's a little swollen but still I shrug it off, thinking the swelling will go down during the day. I even went on my usual two mile walk at work during my morning and afternoon breaks.

On Wednesday night I'm at my chiropractor and he starts freaking out because my ankle is really swollen and he tells me I need to ice it. He keeps asking me if it hurts and I say no, it only hurts when I bend it or stretch forward. Still, he freaks out some more and begs me to ice my ankle.

I spent the rest of the night watching my Ken Burns' Jazz series which I taped last year with my ankle elevated and an ice pack on it. Still no pain.

Not today. Today my right ankle is killing me so I have a brace on it that I remembered I had. My left leg and knee are now also hurting because I'm walking funny and not putting that much weight on my right leg, so my left leg is taking all my weight and it's protesting in a serious way.

I can't believe this! I've never had my ankle swell like this before. So weird. I feel old and like a total invalid. Is this what I'll have to look forward to when I grow old? If it is, I'm definitely going to find a way to die before my god gets totally messed up.

Then this morning, I had a dream about Nazis. I don't think I've had a dream about Nazis since high school and college, when I was into my Holocaust phase. In my previous dreams, I was always running from the Nazis and they were always chasing me. They never caught me though and in some of the dreams, I even joined the resistance.

In this new dream, I'm in some kind of prison or concentration camp and we're putting on some kind of play or circus for the prisoners and the Nazis are watching, but it's really just a front for some big escape we're planning. How strange to have a Nazi dream after all these years and to be caught and in a prison camp? I wonder if this means something. At least I was trying to escape and I looked pretty healthy.

Maybe I had this dream because I finally watched that italian movie "A Beautiful Life" a few weeks ago. I had no idea it was about a Nazi concentration camp. Or maybe it's all those years of watching Hogan's Heroes as a child coming back to haunt me. I'm not sure.

So today I'm not walking and I'm bummed, so I'm eating my new comfort food, lentils and rice and tabouleh. I love this dish and it's part of new kosher levitical diet so I can eat as much of it as I want.

I'm bored at work today. I'm supposed to be working on some project that's due next week, but it's very hard to do and I don't feel like doing it. Instead, I'm surfing the net trying to find a video store that carries Ken Burns' Civil War and Baseball series.

A friend of mind recommended I read "Confederates in the Attic" while I was on vacation in West Virginia and I did and I loved it. The book made me want to watch Ken Burns' Civil War series. I think I am slowly getting into a civil war kick. I even bought a civial war book at a library book sale in West Viriginia. The name of the book is "A Stillness at Appomattox" by Bruce Catton. I definitely want to read all of Shelby Foote's books too. In fact, I want to read all the Civil War books, the good ones at least.

I've been thinking I will use the Confederacy as a model for my Elf Kingdom series . The Confederacy was basically a rural/aggrarian region making war with the industrialized north. Unlike the confederacy, the Elf Kingdom people were enslaved after they lost the war and I can use the black slave stories of the south as a model for the elf people enslavement. I'll use my knowledge of Holocaust history too, so I'll probably combine both the black slave south stories with the jewish concentration camp stories and come up with a totally new enslavement story for my elf people. I have a feeling that enslavement of human beings by other human beings is the same, no mattter what the time and culture.

In Confederates in the Attic, Shelby Foote said something like the worst thing, the tragedy of the civil war was the North freeing the black slaves. The idea of freeing the black slaves was a grand one and a right idea, but then the north didn't have a plan for what to do with black slaves and left them on their own. We're still suffering the effects of this failure. This point was reinforced in the first episode of Ken Burns' Jazz series. The narrator of episode 1 said that after reconstruction, the northern republicans and the southern democrats made a deal and out of that deal came Jim Crow laws and segregation. The narrator then went on to say that segragation would rule the south for the next 50 years and with segregation came regular lynchings of black people and the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan.

This fact made me sad, very sad. It made me think that the Civil War was all for nothing. So many people died in that war. In the north 1 out of 10 northern soldiers died in the Civil War. But for the south, the death toll was worse. 1 out of every 4 southern men died during the civil war. And all for nothing because about 20 years later, Jim Crow laws took slavery's place.

Interestingly enough the deal was brokered by Northern republicans since Lincoln was a republican too. Didn't that movie "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" make a point about the betrayal of the south by the southern democrats?

And when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled in the south and integration took place, the public school system went from okay to really, really bad. History is very complicated isn't it? When you do one good thing, along comes another bad thing that is sometimes even worse.

I'm probably the only woman in America who doesn't like "Sex in the City". I don't have cable premium channels so I don't watch it, and from what I've seen of it, I didn't like it. It's boring! Why would I want to watch skinny women dressed in what looks like very ugly clothes and shoes and their totally boring lives?

Honestly, I tried to watch it and I did try to relate to it, but I couldn't and I love clothes and fashion and have been a serious Vogue reader since I was 13 years old. I think their clothes are pretty trashy and those shoes! Do they have jobs? I wouldn't be taken seriously in any fortune 500 company meeting worth their salt if I walked in wearing shoes like that.

But maybe that's the difference. I actually work for a living and spent time climbing the corporate ladder where I competed with men and sometimes other women for position and power. If I behaved at all or dressed like any of the girls in Sex and the City, I wouldn't be sitting in my cushy office right now in my cushy office job.

I guess people like watching fantasy shows, but isn't that what soap operas are for? And didn't people get enough of wanting to watch fantasy shows with old shows like Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty?

The pink section on Sunday had all these articles on the Sex and the City girls. BORING! This is one cultural phenomenon I'm glad I'm missing and I don't think I'm alone.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from screenwriting group tonight and I heard this voice that sounded to me like Robert Smith from The Cure and so of course I fell in love with the guy's voice and song.

The name of the group is called Dashboard Confessional and the name of the song is called "Screaming Infidelities".

You gotta love a line like this one "Your hair, it's everywhere. Screaming infidelities And taking its wear." I was of course, singing along in my car.