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Thursday, June 09, 2005

I'm starting to become interested in what jury will say about Michael Jackson. The legal pundits have said that if the jury deliberates for this long, then it's not good news for Jackson. I'm starting to think they're right.
I stayed at this amazing hotel in Vancouver years ago, and for the life of me I couldn't remember the name of it. I was searching for another hotel today that I'm attending a seminar at tonight, and when I googled the hotel website I noticed they had a hotel in Vancouver. When I clicked on the Vancouver hotel, I saw the hotel I stayed at all those years ago.

Check it out - Pan Pacific Hotel - Vancouver. We had a great view of the bay, and I loved that the hotel looked like a yaht. Vancouver is such a great city to visit ... it's so clean and very, very beautiful.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

I woke up this morning feeling good for the first time in a very long time. I was having a small health issue but it resolved itself this morning, and I’m starting to wonder if I was more than a little worried about what was happening.

I’m going to see the great Robert McKee on Thursday night, screenwriting guru made famous in the movie “Adaptation”. McKee is hosting his famous seminar in San Francisco this weekend and I would have signed up, but I have plans for both days. The seminar in pricey anyway, and it’s just not in my budget to spend that much money right now.

What else? I saw a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” called “The Kyogen of Errors” on Thursday June 2. Kyogen is a type of Japanese theater. Below is an explanation I found on the Net on what Kyogen is:

Kyogen evolved from a form of indigenous theater called Sarugaku and reached the level of popular entertainment among the common people during the tumultuous Muromachi Period (1380-1466). During the Tokugawa Period, kyogen subsequently gained the acceptance and support of the ruling classes. At this time, for aesthetic reasons, it was paired with noh. While noh and kyogen are performed on the same stage, and there is a part for a kyogen actor in almost every noh play, they are two separate theater arts. Kyogen dialogue is a somewhat stylized form of the common spoken language of the Muromachi Period while the language employed in the noh theater is highly literary in style. While noh is historical and tragic, kyogen plays reflect the habits, customs and lives of ordinary people in short comic sketches. Short ballads (kouta) were popular among the common people in the Muromachi period, and a number of these songs appear in kyogen plays. Kyogen relied heavily on improvisation and it was not until the seventeenth century during the Edo Period that the oldest still extant plays were put into written form. Once many manuscripts of these plays had come into existence, there was a tendency not to expand the repertoire and there were also no substantial changes in the way the plays were performed. Kyogen plays are divided into several categories, depending on the type of character designated as protagonist (shite) or the overall theme of the play. Today some 300 kyogen plays are known and about 200 of them are still performed, but unlike noh, not even a single name is left to us of those who composed kyogen.

The performers wore these masks and they looked like cute little goblins on stage. They kept uttering this phrase throughout the whole play “ya ya ko shi ya”, which in Japanese means “It’s all very complicated”. The performers were all men, and two of men who were supposed to be imitating women wore the most beautiful kimonos. I saw this play at Shakespeare in Golden Gate Park a few years ago, and they used boy/girl twins in the role.

It was amazing how the performers were able to translate a Shakespeare play into a very old form of Japanese theater, and that as an audience member I could still recognize the play as what I remembered.

Here’s the Chronicle’s review - "Errors" does Shakespeare right.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

I decided that I hate my job. I probably would have tried to leave last year if it wasn’t for that whole business with the red-haired guy. The people are nice, but the organization itself sucks since it’s so disorganized. I can see them heading into some rocky, rocky times this year now that the CEO is sending out emails about how we need to cut expenses.

I didn’t like my other job either, but I was so lucky to have a job when everyone else I knew was unemployed, that I managed to file away from discontent for four years. I have to figure out a way to file away my dissatisfaction with this new job like I did with my previous job. I know this is a good job for me financially, and my boss is great although sometimes just plain irritating. But the company is very dysfunctional and their disorganization is just too much for me to handle sometimes. I know my boss feels the same way because she told me last week that she didn’t know what we were doing.

My intuition is telling me to at least hold one through the summer because the company will going through some rough times, and that the rough times will initiate several changes culturally within the company. Until then, I’m going to have to figure out a way to feel content with my job. My discontent is at a zenith today, and I know this is a bad sign for me. I know it’s affecting my attitude at work and that’s not good.

I'm hoping this is just post too long holiday job satisfaction stuff, but I have a feeling it's not. I think this stuff has been building for a long time, and fortunately or unfortuntately, my roller coaster personal life has distracted me from facing how much I'm really not happy at work. Part of me wants to initiate another personal crisis just so I can stay at my job, but that would only delay things and not really solve them.