I'm wondering if I need to start writing with pen and paper again. I redid my interview with the main character in my baseball story screenplay and I came out with a totally different interview. I was thinking of changing my story, thinking I needed to make my baseball player a minor league player instead of a major league player. My baseball guy wasn't coming across as a very likable character. He was too brash, too arrogant and I wasn't sure if a regular person would relate to my spoiled baseball millionaire character.

But if made my baseball guy play in the minor leagues, I would have had to take Pac Bell park out of the story and I don't want to do that. Pac Bell park was such an inspiration for my screenplay that I can't bear to take it out. I need Pac Bell park to be in the story to be a symbol for renewal, old fashioned values and that simply all baseball players started out with a parent playing catch with them in the backyard.

So, I decided to make my baseball player less brash, more of a utility player, a journeyman type of player, who has good numbers but was never a star. He's still 38 years old and he's still on the last leg of of his career, but he's batting .250 maybe .200 and he's seriously thinking about retirement. I made him more resigned, tired and older. He wants to give up the game, but baseball is the only thing he knows and if he quits at 38, what the hell else is he going to do with his life. I made him more ordinary, but I think this new characterization makes him more sympathetic to an audience.

I want him to be an everyman in a sport like baseball, which is becoming full of players who are increasingly removed from ordinary people with their arrogant attitudes and their multimillion dollar salaries. I see my baseball player as a hold out from a different era. He's never been on a team that's won a world series. He's played the sport because he was good at it, he loved it and it was better than becoming a construction worker or painter like his dad and brother.

He still has a troubled relationship with his father, which became exacerbated when he left home at 18 with his college baseball scholarship. His father supported him, pushed him into baseball early on and then when he became successful, the father started to resent his success because of his own failure in the sport. My baseball guy feels that he would have been a better player if his father had behaved differently. Doesn't every child think this? And now that his father is dying, my baseball guy has tried to make up with him, but can't cross the chasm of time and bitterness that's developed between him and his dad.

I think this story is better, closer to my original short story idea. I think in the first draft of my screenplay I got caught up in the fact that my main character played baseball. But really, the story is about a father and son struggling to resolve their differences before time runs out for them. The fact that my main character plays baseball is incidental to the story, I think. I liked the idea of my main character being a baseball player only because I see sports as one of the few ways that men and their sons bond together from a very young age. Sometimes, I think sports is the only way men bond.

I think I have to interview all the other characters in my screenplay and then I'll be ready to write. I'm still debating about writing by hand versus computer. For the interviews, writing by hand is definitely the way to go beacause I can't sensor my thoughts when I write by hand. By the time I write the screenplay, I will be following my new outline so I'm hoping writing by computer doesn't make that much of a difference. I hate writing by hand because I have really unreadable handwriting and transcribing my own work is such a pain in the wazoo. But, I'll guess I'll to wait and see what comes out when I finally sit down and start writing.

Here's the blog page for a friend of mine, who wrote this totally funny and snarky take about Lady Fest:

Lady Fest Rant.

Being snarkily funny is such an art and this guy has it down and then some.

I consider myself a feminist, but I'm not into the movement at all, ever since I had that experience in college, where I was told I couldn't be a feminist because I waxed hair off my body and wore nice expensive clothes. Like what kind of bullshit is that?

And what's so ironic is I lived the feminist's dream of power and equality with men. I was the only female in an all male finance department for a company that was trading at $80 per share on the New York Stock Exchange before the market went bad. I sat in countless meetings where I was the only female at the table surrounded by men, men who were either vice presidents or the directors, men who ran the stupid company I worked for. And I was the only chick there and I was respected, well respected. And I wasn't a mannish female. I wore totally rocking suits with thigh high skirts, silk scarves, pearls, pantyhose, heels, and I wore make up and had nice looking long hair! I was in a position of power that most men, and I think women, dream of who work in corporate America.

So all those feminists can say whatever they like about me. I lived the damned feminist power dream and I wasn't even trying to do it. I fell into it by accident, I think, because I'm kind of cute and I was damned smarter than alot of guys I worked with. Most feminists types talking about wanting to enter the sacred world of male power, but 99.9% of them couldn't hack it. Hell, I lived it for 8 years of my life. And my corporate life was never about wanting gender equality or wanting power. I was just trying to do my job and this attitude took me far, very far. I didn't rant and rave about wanting power or equality. I shut my mouth, did my job, worked hard and you know what, the power and the equality came. And if I wasn't so bored with it all, I probably could have gotten alot more of it too.

So all those feminst types can talk about wanting equality with men and power, but I dare any one of them to actually try to have it, to go for it and to see how far they actually get. My guess is not far, not even through the damned front door.

I'm like, girls, women, feminists, put your money, your life, where your mouth is and try to make it in a male dominated world and see how your philosophy, your ranting and your ravings get you!

I guess I'd feel better about Lady Fest if the actually had women there who were women with power. I mean, the Bay Area has tons of female executives, women running their own companies, women like Carly Fiorina who run or are executives at Fortune 500 or 1000 companies, women CFOs or CEO or CIOs. These are the women who are blazing the trails, are in the trenches, fighting the real war of gender equality. But Lady Fest did not. Instead most of the women there didn't have any real power and besides, what women who had any kind of power in America would be caught dead at something like Lady Fest. I mean, come on. Lady Fest is for the very naive young ones or the ones who don't have the guts to take the real male world on, so they can have a place to bitch and moan and complain. The real women who are fighting the real feminist war are out there too busy fighting to bitch and moan and rant and rave.

Lady Fest is for women who like to complain about gender equality but who do nothing to fight the war and who only make it hard for the rest of us who are actually in male dominated companies fighting for the things that these women who attended Lady Fest are complaining about. If you want to fight the war, fight it! Don't rant, rave and complain about it!

So I've been on a major sushi binge since coming back from West Virginia. I have to eat sushi at least every other day and it's such an expensive way to eat.

My favorite all you can eat japanese food restaurant, Todai, is opening a new place closer to San Francisco in August, but I don't know if I can wait that long. I could easily chow down $20-$30 worth of sushi every night easily!!! It's sick!!!

I just checked out the Todai website and they now have a place in Cupertino at Vallco Shopping Mall. I'm trying to resist the urge to go down there and stuff as much sushi into my body as is humanly possible. It's an illness, I swear.

I wonder if it's because I'm craving salt and with soy sauce, sushi is so salty and very, very tasty. On a day like this, I wish I was still living at home where raw fish is half as much as what it costs here and readily available and fresh.

With all the people bieng laid off in Sili Valley and San Francisco, the traffic on 280 is so light right now. In July, I drove to Stanford Shopping Center in Palo and it only took me half an hour. I really like shopping at Stanford, only because it's so not crowded and they have lots of stores. At Christmas, Stanford Shopping Center was a ghost town compared to Union Square or even Stonestown. You'd think with all those stores, people would totally flock there and shop. But every time I've been there, the place is totally empty.

Well, I had my sushi fill for today, but it might just be time for a trip to Todai on Saturday, just so I can stuff my face with sushi and get rid of these darn sushi cravings.

I guess I am really lucky because I have a job that pays well enough for me live pretty darn comfortably and yet doesn't suck up all my time. Sure I could be making more money but then I would mostly likely be in a job where I would have to work 60-80 hours a week, instead of my normal 40 hours. I worked for about 8 years straight like that and it was exciting but not very fun. I breathed and lived my job. I would come home at 10 pm, eat and go to sleep. I didn't have time for anything else. My only friends were the people I worked with and when I did relax, I totally overdid it. I was living from one extreme to the next.

But when I figured out there was more to life than getting a raise and promotion every year, I had to seriously think about finding a job that would still pay well but not eat up most of my time. I think I've found that, at least for now. Now that the transition wasn't difficult. During that first year, I freaked out and felt like a total corporate failure because I wasn't working 60-80 hours a week. What kind of corporate drone was I, if I wasn't living and breathing my job? But now that I'm used to it and finally appreciating the job of coming home at 6 pm, I can't imagine working those crazy work hours ever again.

I mean after all, nobody says on their death bed that they wished they had worked more hours at work. It's hard to get this concept, but it's totally true. If you don't set your life up to follow your dreams, your fantasies then on your deathbed you will be lying there and thinking about all the things you'd wish you'd done, all the fantasies and dreams you put aside because you were busy working too hard. And who wants that? How dang depressing! If I thought I'd be lying on my deathbed thinking horrible thought about what I didn't do in my life, I would kill myself today. I mean, what would be the point of living, why not get it over with now because at least I would have less regret.

This is my new mantra. Be proactive about avoiding misery now and in the future, especially on that dreaded deathbed!