So much has happened to me since my last post. I've been trying to write for half an hour a day at cafes and it's been working. I wrote 3,000 words and finished a short story I've been working on since February 1999. It started out as a free write in February 1999. I left it alone and didn' think about it till April 2001, when I decided to submit it for a writing class assignment on bad free writes. At the same time, my writing group was talking about writing from a weird character's point of view. For whatever reason, I let my writing group read the freewrite, thinking we'd all get a laugh about what I bad piece I'd written. I was so shocked when my writing group members said they loved it and thought it was the best piece of writing I'd ever done. I was so intrigued by their comments that I decided to try and flesh out the free write into a story.

That free write, called Crazy Eddie, is now finished. YEAH!!! I haven't finished a story since April 2001, when I was in that writing class that I ended up totally hating. That's 11 months without finishing a story, which is way too long to go without finishing a story.

The hardest part is still to come for me, the editing and the rewriting. Right now, Crazy Eddie is about 20 plus pages. I think the story can be told in 15 pages, maybe 16 or 17 pages, so I've got alot of cutting to do.

I also finished writing the opening scene and first scene for my screenplay. I still have to rewrite the beat pages, do the outline and then do a character study for all of my major characters. That's going to take some time and much hard work.

What I've found out from all this cafe writing, is I'm not blocked with my writing. I just can't, for whatever reason, write at home. I can only write in librarie or cafes or in malls. I thought my writing block and laziness was due to another serious reason, but I just needed a change of writing location. I'm sure I'll get sick of writing outside of my home and then be able to write at home again, but until then, I have to do what works.

I don't even write with headphones and music. I can concentrate with all the noise through all the noise that goes on. I used to do all my homwork in the college grill, so I'm no surprised I can concentrate in a crowded cafe. Writing is such a solitary pursuit. You sit at home all alone, at your computer or writing table and you're by yourself. Even with the TV on or the stereo blasting, you're still by yourself.

When I take personality tests, they always say I'm a social person who needs to be around people. When I read this conclusion, I usuall get a chuckle because I consider myself a shy and reticent person, who needs alot of alone time. Maybe those personality tests were right after all. Who knows. All I know is that since I can write outside the home, that's where I'll have to write for now. At least until the need subsides.

In between all this writing, I saw Training Day and Iris. I loved Training Day. I hope Denzel Washington gets the Oscar for Best Actor. He should have gotten one for The Hurricane so the academy is obliged to give it to him this year. They're not going to give to Russell Crowe. He's been acting like such a jerk lately and Hollywood is very provincial about stuff like that he probably alienated many voters. He's also an Aussie and the only actors who've gotten two Oscars have all been Americans, Spencer Tracy and Tom Hanks. And both of these guys were "nice" guys who never made any trouble for themselves or Hollywood. They'll never give it to Tom Wilkinson either. He's a Brit and although his performance was great, it was so understated, too understated maybe. Best actors winner performances have always been larger than life. Sean Penn is too much a Hollywood renegade, so they won't give it to him either. Now Denzel, he plays by the Hollywood rules and is a nice guy.

Denzel's performance was so against the good two shoes type he usually plays. He was a mean, bad ass black, ghetto talking cop. And he was so damned believable too. You'd think the guy was playing bad guys all his life. Ethan Hawke was no match for him, but I could see why Ethan got nominated for best supporting actor. He was also playing against his normal type and academy voters, most of whom are actors or failed/wannabe actors love that kind of casting.

The movie itself was very violent and there was a major gratuitious sex scene shot with some naked hispanic chick Denzel was bonking in the movie. The woman was butt nekkid in the movie for absolutely no reason, other than the fact that she had a great body. Since the movie was obviously geared towards boys, I guess you have to have a naked chick scene in there somwhere no matter how far fetched it is.

I loved Iris. They really got the Alzheimer's deterioration right. I was reminded of my friend Amy who died recently and how the nurse told me that she was like an Alzheimer's patient. Judy Dench was great and so was was Jim Broadbent. Kate Winslett was good too, although I got tired of looking at her nekkid body. I loved the actor who played John Bayley as a young man. He looked so much like this guy I had crush on in college named Drew. I met Drew when I was a freshman and I had a crush on him for two years. We became friends but he made it clear to me that he wasn't interested. I was so bummed but we still managed to emain friends.

Drew took a year off from college but visited school off and on, since he was living in the area. Then came the last semester I was in school. Out of the blue, Drew told me he was now in love with me and wanted to go out. And I was like huh? I was so over him by the time he declared his undying love. Talk about bad timing. He freaked me out so much, I hid out from him at a girlfriend's house one weekend to avoid him. My girlfriend told me he was asking everyone where I was. I thought he'd given up and went back to my apartment Sunday night, but as luck would have it I ran into him.

We talked and it was so hard. I really still liked him but as a friend now and not as a love interest and I had to explain it all to him. Somehow he ended up spending the night at my place and we tried to have sex, but it was so so useless for me. I was so not into him. Then I got so mad at him for stressing me out that I treated him really badly the next morning. I regret that now, but at the time, the situation completely frustrated me to no end. Thank god, we managed to remain friends even though it was so awkward for the longest time.

I lost touch with Drew when I got married but always looked back at our relationship fondly. I really did still like him. We got along so well and we could talk for hours. We were even into the same kind of music and liked so many of the same things. Drew was also a bit of anglophile like me. He was also the most charming and the most polite man I've ever met in my life. He was always in a good mood and so cheery. I loved this quality about him because I couldn't be in a bad mood around him. Part of me wished that I didn't rebuff him when he offered his love, but then there's the other part that says, he deserved it. He rebuffed me when I was in crush with him and I was in crush with him for two whole years. When you're 18, that's a damned long time.

I got back in touch with him a few years ago, when I saw his number in the college alumni directory. I just called him out of the blue and I was surprised that he still remembered me. He was living in Iowa at the time. He even told me he had spent a couple of years trying to find me. I felt bad that he did that but so flattered at the same time. I had no idea how into me he was and his slavish devotion to finding me was proof. Too bad I changed my name, although if he did find me, he would have found me married.

We traded letters for the next year and he was just like I remembered and I found myself falling in love with him, and wishing he would move out to California. I couldn't see myself moving to Iowa. In one of his last letters, he said that we blew something really special that we had in college. I cried when I read that because he was right in a way, although I still had hopes for us. But I guess he gave up on us because he stopped sending letters. I kept writing letters to his address but I never heard anything back. To this day, I don't know if he's dead or if he just decided to move on because he couldn't rekindle the feelings he had for me in college or if he met someone and got married. I don't know.

I'm resigned to it all. We were obviouly never meant to be, me and Drew. We tried three times and each time, the timing was so totally off. I wished we could have stayed friends though, but maybe when you're older that's harder to do, especially when you live so far away from each other. But in my heart, Drew holds such a special place in my heart. He's not the guy who got away, but the guy where the timing was off the worst for both of us.

To this day, I think he would have been a most compatible marriage partner. I think part of me is still looking for a very charming and incredibly polite man, who is always cheery and in a jolly mood, like Drew. And one day, I hope to find him.

I saw I am Sam tonight. It wasn't as schlocky as I thought it would be. The previews made me think the movie was going to be tearjerker and who wants to sit through that. But, since Sean Penn was nominated for Best Actor for this movie, I made myself watch it. Penn's performance was very studied and controlled. You can see his brain thinking away, trying to figure out his next move. But other than that, his performance was stunning. His physical gestures, Sam's way of walking, the way he held open his mouth all the time was rivetting. I liked the fact that he played the character of Sam without judgment and the movie filmed Sam that way. The director could have easily made the audience feel sympathetic to the Sam character, but it's not that easy. Sam is retarded and you get to feel the embarrassment and shame that his mental handicap causes the pepole around him. But Sam is not to be pitied or glorified. He's just retarded and like most people, just trying to get by in ths world with a kid.

The filmmakers really made the social services people come off like the cruel heartless liberals that the right wing media says there are. Those social services people were drawn so one-dimensional and just plain mean and nasty.

I'm not sure if Sean will win. I still have yet to see Ali and Training Day. Ali is no longer in theatres even though Will Smith was nominated for an oscar. I'm thinking it might be Denzel Washington as the winner only because he did get overlooked for his performance on The Hurricane. But Sean Penn, I don't know. His character work was flawless, controlled and very complete.

I thought I was doing so well on my candida killing diet, but I made the mistake of eating bacon today and the yeasties totally love it and started multiplying again. I totally forgot I cannot eat smoked or processed meats. This is the first time I had a yeastie reaction so this is good. I also had regular coffee instead of decaf and I don't know if the caffiene was a contributing factor to my yeastie breakout.

I just have to be more vigilant. I read the website again for the woman who's on the same program I am and her yeasties came out after 20 days. I'm only on day 15 but I don't know how far back eating bacon set me. The woman with the website said it took her 40 days to clear out her yeasties. When I went I went to the doctor he said I had dropped from severe to moderate, a good 10 point drop. I just have to keep dong this.

The woman with candida website also stayed on the eating program for 3.5 months. I might just do that too, which means I'll be eating this way till the middle of June. Going off sugar has really changed my tastebuds. Things just don't taste the same anymore. Sometime I crave sweet things but I drink herb tea with artificial sweetener and that seems to help.

I just want my yeasties to go away permanently, so I guess I'll have to be as strict as I can with this plan.

I saw In the Bedroom today. I did not expect the ending it had, which is good. I like to be surprised in a movie. Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson were very good, although their performances weren't Oscar winner quality. I think the Oscar should go to Halle Berry, although I have yet to see Iris. Halle Berry played against type, cried and did the hysterical woman thing alot and Oscar voters like those kinds of performances. Sissy Spacek's performance was almost the same type of she played in Affliction with Nick Nolte. I still remember Tom Wilkinson from that bizarre movie The Governess with Minnie Driver. I liked him much better in this role, although that performance was very good. He was so creepy in that movie.

I also Black Hawk Down and totally loved it. I will definitely have to buy the DVD for this movie. It was so realistic in it portrayal of war. One of my favorite scenes was when one of the soldiers looks down and see's a man's hand on the ground and just picks it up and puts it his pocket. That was so cool because to me that scene is the reality of war. I also liked all that blood just gushing out like that, again very realistic.

Black Hawk Down was another feast for the eyes with all those beautiful young male Hollywood actors. I liked that it was an international cast with lots of Americans, Brits and Aussies playing the soldiers. Ewan McGregor did a great American accent. Jason Isaacs' American accent wasn't that great but everybody else's was terrific. The beautiful elf price, Legolas, Orlando Bloom, was in this movie and he played an american quite well.

As everyone else has said in reviews, you cannot help but be reminded of the US soldiers in Afghanistan, while watching this movie. Our boys out there fighting for our country and they're also so young too. I get mixed feelings when watching a war movie. I hate war and I don't endorse war, although for 9/11 I made an exception. I couldn't help but get caught up in this movie about US soldiers but half way through, one part of me said it was disgusting to even be watching and cheering these soldier on in their failed mission in Somalia. I got the same reaction watching Top Gun, another movie I loved. The peace loving part of me freaks out that I'm cheering on soldiers.

But it's hard to be hate soldiers, especially after 9/11, because they're people out there protecting my country's interests and dying in conflict. I don't hate soldiers, I just hate war. I hate that we have wars and I just wish the world could find peaceful solutions to its problems.

I found a website that talks about why the Somalia mission failed. I was watching the movie and I even thought the tacticals were all wrong. The people planning the mission did not even take into consideration that there might be hostile forces trying to shoot them down. And god, they went out in the middle of the day in attack formation like that wasn't the big tip off that they were coming. There was no backup plan in case something went wrong. They just went it, arrogant as all hell, thinking the Somalis were just going to roll over the play dead.

These guys were supposed to be rangers and delta forces, elite troops, but their tacticals were so bad. Maybe I've been watching too many episodes of La Femme Nikita, where every mission was meticulously planned with backup and contigency plans in case something went wrong, but even I didn't watch that show I still would have had a backup plan. The guy planning the mission had none of that. Then they didn't even tell the Pakistani General they were going in, so they could have even more backup in case something did go wrong.

There's an adobe acrobat file I found on what went wrong on that mission in Somalia that inspired Black Hawk Down. I'll have to read it to see what a military expert thought. Still, Black Hawk down was a fantastic movie and it made me realize that my country's soldiers deserve alot of my respect for the role that they play in the country's defense forces. I don't like war, but it's a necessary evil and I'm honored that there are young men willing to die for my country.

Mercedes must be really not be doing well since they have so many commercials on the radio. I hate those Mercedes commercials. You know these companies pay alot of money to advertisers to come up with advertising campaigns and all those ad companies can come up with are those stupid ads. It makes me think that anyone who would buy a mercedes is a total idiot or a gold digging materialistic freak.

Then next worse ads are those Pacific Bell DSL commercials. God, they're just really dumb. It's always some guy who can't control the guy next door from using their DSL line. Like one kind of idiot lets the guy next door take over their DSL line? In the commercial on TV, the guy is always in their house. It's very weird! I think the message of those commercials came from the fact that people can build wireless networks and it's an attack against people who have wireless networks. Businesses like SBC Pacific Bell obviously hate the whole wireless network idea.

I wonder if people actually buy these products based on these commercials. It's having the opposite affect on me, but that's just me and I don't have normal reactions to anything. I wonder.

I just finished reading a book of essays on Venice by Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1987. Venice is a city that I've always wanted to visit, if I ever get married again I'm determined to honeymoon there, and I was keen to find out what he had to say about it.

One of his essays is about the autonomy of the eye. Brodsky suggests that the eye is "the most autonomous of our organs ... the eye keeps registering reality even when there is no apparent reason for doing this ... Why? ... because the environment is hostile and eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment which remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it."

It's an interesting way to look at the function of your eye, but I wonder if it's true. Brodsky then goes onto say that "the eye has an appetite for beauty and art because it's looking for safety ... beauty is solace, since beauty is safe ... when the eye fails to find beauty -- alias solace -- it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to percieve virtue in ugliness".

Brodsky's essay on beauty made me think about this book I read by Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, a book from the point of view of one of Cinderella's ugly stepsisters. I wonder what it's like to be ugly. I mean, not that I think I'm that beautiful, but too many men's and women's appreciative glances over the years have told me that I'm not ugly either. God, what is it like to not have people look at you with appreciation in their eyes. That must be such a trip.

If people have thought me ugly, it's only been a few. I'm not a knock out anything, I'm cute, maybe even pretty sometimes, but definitely not ugly. And if Brodsky is right that the eyes seek out beauty, does this mean that ugly people aren't sought out by people's eyes?

I had a roommate in college, who was a total math genius, but not very pretty. She wasn't ugly really, just kind of big and homel. She told me once, while I was complainng about my life, that I should feel lucky because I never had to work at having men notice me. Not that having men notice me has added anything significant to my life, but I'm sure I would have a differen opinion if men didn't notice me.

And beauty is such a fleeting thing to me anyway. Something or someone can appear beautiful depending on my mood, my emotional state, what side of the bed I got up on, how much or how little sleep I had that night and in a bar, how much I've had to drink. And my own standards for male beauty are so different than most women. All the men that the media and Hollywood tell me I'm supposed to panting over, just aren't that attractive to me.

I've had saved for years a Far Side comic where this monster guy is coming through a door on one side. On the other side, are a bunch of women. All of the women have the thought of 'Ugly' in their head except for one, she has heart in her head. The caption of the comic says 'Someone for Everyone'. I wrote my name on the woman with the heart because that's me.

Sometimes when I see a really great looking guy, say in like a seminar, I don't even talk to him, especially when I noticed that every woman in the room has made some excuse to talk to him. God, with that kind of competition who needs the stress, so I just avoid those popular types altogether and don't even bother to talk to them. Most of the time, these hoties guys are so arrogant and jerkish anyway, because they know they can just walk into a room and have the choice of any woman in it.

Of course, there's always an exception. I saw a guy like that in a seminar I was taking and I was dying to talk to him, because the man was just drop dead gorgeous. But I wasn't the only one who noticed the guy's beauty, because I saw him get hit on by every woman in the room except me. I was bummed to because this guy was exceptionally fine, but it was way to stressful, so I drove thoughts of him out of my mind.

Much to my surprise, while I was attending a one day seminar given by the same company who ran the other seminar we were both in, Mr Drop Dead Gorgeous ends up sitting next to me. It freaked me out so much because I'd been dying to talk to him for week and there he was, a breath away.

He turned out be such a nice guy and we actually became quite good friends after that. He turned out to not really my type but he was so cute. If we were back in the south and that holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, came up where you could ask a guy to marry you, I'd ask this guy. Nice, sweet, smart and cute, what a dynamite combo! Plus, he was always tanned and I'm very partial to a man with a tan. Never mind, that he's not my type, I'm very flexible when it comes to pretty men.

I wonder what that guy is doing now. He spent some part of the year as a ski instructor/bum and I got the distinct impression that financially, he was well taken care of. We lost touch a few years ago, but I often think of him since he seemed so damned perfect to me. Talk about beauty. I know I would never grow tired looking at that guy's mug through the years.

Just finished watching the movie Pearl Harbour. I liked it! It's a slow moving love story but I loved the special effects of the bombing of the harbour. This movie reminded me again that the USA wouldn't be the great power that it is, without our military might. I saw that in the church service they had in the DC after 9/11 when the military colour guard was there.

It is easy to forget that a military even exists, living here in the bastion of liberal thought. But the military is there and we wouldn't be the country we are without them.

It was weird to watch that Pearl Harbour movie because I grew up in Hawaii and you couldn't ignore the military presence. They weren't many on the island I lived on, but everytime I took a trip to the state's capitol, Honolulu, there they were. Bands of short haired young men, very young, mostly white and clean shaven from hometowns in the middle of the country, would roam around Honolulu especially on the weekends. They were all so strange and I was alway afraid to talk to any of them. Some of them were friendly, some weren't.

The other thing I got from watching the movie was how many people died. And most of them are buried in Hawaii at Punchbowl cemetery. Punchbowl cemetery is situated on one of the best plots of land on the island with the most incredible view of downtown Waikiki. And there are so many people buried there and a lot of them are from the Pearl Harbour disaster. You can't be buried at Punchbowl unless you served in the military or are the spouse of someone who served. My uncle served as a medic in Vietnam and he and my aunt already have their plots picked out.

I've been to the Arizona Memorial several times. If you go to school in Hawaii, every time you make a trip to the state capitol, a visit to the memorial is always on the agenda. The school board of education in Hawaii wanted every school kid in Hawaii to never forget what happened. The images of the bombing of Pearl Harbour are as familiar to me as they might be to someone who was alive during that time. When you visit the memorial you can't help but freak out at the thought of all the soldiers entormbed in the ship below. It's a trippy feeling and the Pearl Harbour movie brought it all back.

So I debuted my story at screenwriting class and I'm back to my original short story idea. The screenplay will be about baseball playing son who has to contront his estranged father and deal with his resentment and hatred of his father. My screen writing teacher called it heart felt family drama. GADS!!! I was the only one in class writing a heart felt family drama. Everybody in class was writing action films, films with lots of action or travel or comedies, dark humor, and I'm writing a family drama.

I don't know. It's my curse, it's my karma and it sucks! I don't know. The stories that I like nobody likes, the stories that I don't think are interesting everybody wants to hear about. I hate this. I swear to god, I can't tell what's good and what's not good. I can't divorce myself from my own work and step back to see whether it's good or not. I have to have other people tell me. I hate that.

I'm like thinking who the hell would pay $9.50 to watch a heart felt family drama. How boring!!! Do people really want to see dysfunctional families getting it together on the big screen. Haven't they had enough of that in our life? Or are people out there leading such broken and messed up lives that they have to fantasize about getting healthy?

I don't know. I'm a very whole person. I'm pro active as hell about therapy, personal growth and development and staying and being happy. I don't have a lot of relationships in my life that haven't been healed and the ones that aren't healed, I'm okay with them the way they are.

I feel like I'm 21 years old and my therapist is telling me I've got more awareness that 99.9% of the people in the world. I can hear my therapist's voice so clearly saying "most people don't look at their action and themselves the way you do and you have to remember that." I found it shocking then and years later I still don't understand that. How can people not be aware of how their actions affect others? I'm aware. Aren't there other people in the world like me? My therapist said no.

The last time I was in a seminar and dealt with my father issue, half the people in the seminar called their father on the break. I had people coming up to me after that for a couple of years to thank me for inspiring them to heal their relationship with their father. People who said they'd been in that seminar with me, most of whom I didn't recognize. People who thanked me for saving their life.

Is this heart felt father/son family drama that I'm supposed to write supposed to do the same thing? Inspire people to heal their relationship with their father? I don't know. I'm at the point now where I just have to write this story because it needs to be written. I have no idea how I'm gong to write this story. It seems so boring to me. But my writing teacher said to write it ike it's in real time. What does it all mean? Honestly I don't want to inspire people, I want to entertain people, make them laugh, make them think abou stuff. Is healing people entertaining? It's free therapy that's for sure.

I swear to god, it's my curse and my karma. Everytime I try to write about what I want I end up heading towards some drama with some spiritual message. It's not bad to do that, but I'm really not interested in writing about that. It's all so boring to me and old hat, like haven't most people made peace with their parents. According to my screen writing teacher, no. I don't understand any of my impetus to write anymore and I'm starting not to care either because I can't tell what people will like or not like. I only know what I like, what interests me, what compels me to write. Everytime I try to second guess what a reader or audience will like, the story falls flat on its face and people go how boring.

Does this mean I should follow my own intuition and just keep writing all the weird stuff that I like and to stop caring about what other people like? It's obvious to me now that I am totally clueless about the general public's taste. God, I just hate this. I'm tired of being weird, different and freaky. I honestly just want to be like everybody else, but everytime I try to think like other people I fail. It's such a lonely existence for me sometimes. It's so my karma though, and how can I fight my own karma?

I know, I'm complaining about this gift that I have. What I'm really interesting in writing about, other people really like, even though I always have the feeling that nobody would ever read or carfe about this except for me. When I try to write for an audience or a reader, I fail. So the lesson is I guess to just write to please myself, because everytime I think I'm writing to please other people I fail. It's all so confusing to me but if it works and places less stress on me, I'm all for it. It feels so weird to just write for myself without any thought to others, but I'm willing to give it a try. Writing to please myself and no one else, what a concept. I've gone done every road with my writing except that one and it's the last road, so I have to take it and see what happens.

Since there's been a discussion on my church Yahoo Group about the origins of liberalism and capitalism, I started researching books to read on the subject. I came across The Prince by Machiavelli and I was reminded of how my first love in college used to tell me I was "The Machiavellian Princess". I never knew what he meant by that since I had never read the book and when I asked him, he said that he saw me in the future as a chain smoking, three time divorced, corporate VP on my fourth husband and with three bratty kids.

As I was 18 when he predicted my future, I was naturally flattered. Me, corporate VP, how strange. As I grew older, I came to realized it was one of those backhanded compliments. But then I think he sort of thought of himself as the Machiavellian Prince, so of course, I had to be the Princess.

Funny isn't it, that being politically aware as I am, that I never bothered to take a political science course. If I had taken one, as all my friends in college did, I would have had to read Machiavelli. My first love said I would have aced Political Science, but at the time, I didn't know I was interested politics and politics was a boring subject to me since I had grown up in a politically aware household.

Well, I never did grow up to be the chain smoking corporate VP, although at some corps I worked at, I was on the periphery of that elite circle of employees. As soon as I started working, I knew i didn't want to be under the pressure of a management job. Oh sure, I was curious, but not curious enought to really want it and they're right when they say, to get to the top, you've got to want it bad, real bad.

At my job prior to the one I'm at now, I worked for a female CIO. She liked me and I was hired to be her financial analyst of sorts. It was my job to see that she didn't spend too many millions of dollars and to keep track of the millions she was spending. We liked each other and became very good friends, like sisters sort of. She was older and I saw her as my hardworking successful sister.

I got to see first hand what it was like to be a female in a top position and what I saw was frightening. People at the job knew we were close, so they loved telling me all the rumors they'd heard about her. Everyone thought she was incompetent and had slept with the CEO at a previous job to get this one, at least that was the rumor. Everyone below her wanted to be her or be close to her. I was close to her because of my job, it's not something I coveted, it was a function of my job. And I will admit, I wanted to be her when I first started, but after seeing how many people hated her and all the shit they said about her, I decided that being in a position of that much power in a corporation is so not worth the trouble.

Everything she did was looked at through a microscope. If she was too friendly to a male manager, everyone thought she was sleeping with him. Her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her choice of laptop and even her jewerly were all up for discussion. She was lucky she was a perfect size 4 or the discussion would have very nasty. My boss worked her bunnies off and she was still criticized. But she was a cool customer. She never lost her temper, she was always professional and I knew people in the office often remarked how professional she was at all times. She never let anyone hear her real opinions except for me and the director that hired me. She was always cheerful and optimistic and always coming up with new projects. And I knew the stress of the job got to her, because she told me she could only sleep 4 or 5 hours a night.

If I needed it confirmed again, why I didn't want to be a corporate VP, she confirmed it. My last love, Brian, like my first love, Michael, told me he could see me as a VP of some company. He kept encouraging me to get that kind of position. It's all so strange that he would say that, because he knew I hated the whole VP thing. He just kept saying I would be very good at it because I understood office politics and could drive a project to completion. Needless to say, I still have yet to become a corporate VP and have no intention of doing so, if I can help it.

So, I guess it's about time to read some Machiavelli after all these years. Maybe I will finally be able to see what two of the most important loves of my life have said I have a instinctive knack for. Besides, I want to be very well versed in the origins of capitalism and liberalism, so I can add some decent feedback to my church 9/11 discussion one of these days.

I still have such a long way to to go on my studies. I want to read Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, reread Plato and Aristotle, Mills, Hobbes and Burke. And that's just the origins part. But Machiavelli is a good place to start since he and his theories seem to be an odd letmotif running through my life.

Monster's Ball is a good movie. I only watched it because Halle Berry was nominated for an academy award and I wanted to see her performance. She is playing against type, like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, and I think you get nominated just because other actors voting know how hard it is to play against your type. She did a good job although I'm not quite sure this performance is Oscar worthy. Halle did a much better performance in Warren Beatty's Bulworth and she wasn't nominated in that year, so if she gets an Oscar, I think it will be because she was neglected for Bulworth.

Bulworth was such a brilliant movie. Too bad the critics ignored it, although Warry Beatty was nominaed for the screenplay.

And Mr. Billy Bob Thornton. I couldn't imagine why women like Laura Dern and Angelina Jolie were so into this guy, but this movie showed me why. God, the man is hot! He was oozing southern gentlemanly charm; that little boyishness, the manners and the cruelty just below the surface but tempered by gentleness and those manners and that cute accent. Damn, that combination of traits is attractive in a man. He's like your father, your first crush in grade school, your first boyfriend and your fantasy caveman all rolled into one. It's a powerful combination. Nice body too.

Just for fun, I read all the movie reviews just to see what the critics were saying. I'm really starting the hate Salon.com. Their review of this movie was horrid. They rant and rage for no apparent reason over really stupid details of a movie and then give you three sentences about the movie. Maybe they don't undestand movies and that's why the rant and rage for most of it and then give you a 5th grade book report. Whoever is reviewing their movies should read some Pauline Kael and Andrew Saris movie review to see the real movie critics at work. Maybe I'm too old for their reading audience, but I like movie reviews to be philosophical and written from the perspective of someone who loves movies and knows them. I don't think movie reviews written by someone who wouldn't know a great movie if it sat down next to them and slapped them upside the head.

When a company doesn't make any money, you have to wonder why. People like to make excuses about slow business periods, not enough exposure, etc. They never tell you that the company isn't making any money maybe because they have a really bad product. Well, Salon.com isn't doing well financially because they have sucky product.

But I don't know. Maybe I'm not hip enough, not GenX enough like their typical reader but I know a bad movie review when I read one.

My flu or maybe it was bad allergic reactions from all the pollen are gone now. Thank god! This was Day 11. I slept through the night last night for the first time without having to wake up and cough for 10 minutes straight.

The new eating plan is going well. I had the worse caffeine withdrawal headache on Tuesday and I had to down tons of aspirin to get through the rest of the day. I still like drinking a hot beverage in the morning so I make decaf coffee instead. I'm a little more tired in the afternoon at work, bu I can't tell if my exhaustion is from lack of sleep or lack of caffeine.

I have my appointment in Berkeley tomorrow with my holistic healer. He's supposed to let me know if the parasite killer pills are working. I think they are. My jeans are looser this week but I don't know if the cause is from going off sugar, caffeine and carbos or from my parasites dying off. Maybe it's a combination of both.

I filed my taxes last night. What a drag! It makes me think about becoming a republican. I pay so much in taxes. I never wanted to own property, but it seems like the mortgage interest deduction is the only tax break left. I think I might have made a mistake in calculating my taxes because I didn't include my charitable deductions for the year. I'll check tonight. I don't think it will make a difference but I'll review anyway. If I can't get the deduction this year, I know I'll be able to take the deduction next year and add last year's charity giving to get a bigger deduction.

My church is starting to discuss the war on terrorism. Finally. I thought most of the church people would be left over peacenik hippies but I should have known better. They support the war on terrorism like me. Even this one woman who is the resident earth mommy in the church said she was called a "hawk" by her liberal friends. I was thinkig about finding another church, but where am I going to find a more educated and faithful group of people like the church members?

The majority of the members are very well educated, either through private school education and/or through Ivy League or Ivy League type colleges and universities. Many of them have two or three degrees under their belt. Most of them are fairly well to do. And they're pragmatic and centrists like me. This 9/11 discussion has quelled my desire to leave the church for now. I like these people and I'm afraid if I leave to go to another church, I won't find the level of intellect I have at my church.

The church members are just so smart. There's a discussion going on about the origins of liberalism and the free market and is the christian church compatible. Members are bringing in history, quoting Adam Smith and John Locke, recommending books to read and are seriously looking at the effect of 9/11 on faith. It's all so interesting. There are those few members who argue current events without any thought to history like we live in some kind of vacuum or who spout the liberal party line without any philosophical understanding of the origins of capitalism, liberalism and the free market. Their comments blaringly announcing their naivete, their ignorance and their immature way of trying to categorize everything down to black and white issues.

It's like HELLO! What kind of world do you live in? It hasn't been black and white world for a long time, if ever. They don't want to talk details because they say it's esoteric. Liars! They don't want to talk details because then we get to see that these same 60's type don't know shit about history or economic theory or the history of their own beloved liberalism. Whatever. Thank god, the rest of the church members aren't like this. They use their intellect and their faith to discuss serious issues. They don't buy the soundbites they hear on TV or the media hype. They know the world is complicated and in a zillion shades of gray. And finally, they know that you need faith to understand it all.

So the California primaries are over and it looks like it's going to be an interesting election cycle. I voted and you can thank my parents for that. My parents took politics and voting seriously. When they emigrated to this country, they never took for granted the right to vote, a right they didn't have in their home country. I spent much of my childhood listening to political debates on TV and in my own house. My father was a hard core democrat, working his way up the union ranks to a leadership position. He was often involved in local, state and national election events.

Although I think I remain true to my democrat roots, my own pragmatism has moved me more towards the center and sometimes even to the right on some social issues. I'm not sure my father would approve of my politics, but I know he would be proud that I am politically aware and that I eagerly vote.

When I vote, I feel like I participate in my small way in the running of this country. Voting gives me right to complain and to argue the political issues of the day. I think people who don't participate in this most simple act of democacy, voting, have absolutely no right to complain about the government. They don't participate, so they can't complain.

After the Florida voting debacle and the events of 9/11, how can you not vote?

Wow! After my descent into I'm not a writer at all hell, I was able to pull myself out of it somehow. Thank god for I spent thousands of dollarsand countless hours on growth and development seminars because I have tools to pull myself out of any funk. They never give you tools, at least I don't remember if they did or not, to never get yourself into a blue mood, but they gave you countless tools to get yourself out of one. Perhaps descents into writing hell is part of being an artist. I don't know.

All I know is I'm glad I'm out of the hell for awhile and, of course due to those G&D seminars, I have a plan to turn my life around. Or let's just say, I decided I have more tools at my disposal than I know what to do with and can at least draw a roadmap back to normal happiness. And lo and behold, I've got two pyramids. You gotta have a pyramid, three things you need to for success. Besides you use the pyramid images because it's the most stable because of the base, and the most uplifting because of the third peak point.

One pyramid is for my writing self esteem, which as you have read is practically non existent. The second pyramid is for writing stories, just three tools I know I can use to finish a story.

Now, if I can just invent a pyramid to tackle my procastination, I'll be set for life. Or least, till my next writing crisis comes.

Okay, so now I'm on version 4 of idea # 3 story. I don't want baseball player man to be that aware. I had his goal was to make peace with his dying father. But it doesn't make sense somehow that he's this aware and conscious. I want him to still be in a slump and be forced to go home by his manager and deal with his personal life. Baseball playing man doesn't think his father's illness is affecting him, everybody else including the team's owners, the manager, the media, his team buddy and his team think differently. How can the death of your father not affect you? Baseball playing man has an attitude though and he's in denial and besides he hasn't been close to his father since he was 18.

Baseball player's new goal is just get out of his slump. And I want him to be an anti-hero in a hero's profession. I don't want baseball player man to be that likable. I want him to be kind of nasty but a damned good masher. I want to him to have a dicey relationship with the media, with his team, with the league in general. He's on his 5th baseball team. He's a pain in the ass, but the boy hits 30 to 40 homeruns a year so teams are willing to deal with him. But he's on the twilight of his career and he knows it.

The new spin on the story doesn't change the plot points of my screenplay but it does change some of my scenes. I think it's a bettery story. But does it make sense, an anti-hero in a hero's profession? I don't know. By making baseball player guy unlikable, I force him to go on a hero's journey. He goes from being anti-hero to hero, from unlikable jerk to likable hero.

I read a story from M in my writing group. God, it's very good. Much tighter than her previous version. As I finished reading it, I wonder again whether I should pursue from writing. M's story is so good. Part of me thinks, well she's an english major so she knows how to write and how to edit and I'm completely and totally handicapped because I'm a sociology major, who couldn't make up her mind on what to major in so I also have a concentration on Russian language and Theatre Lit. I'm handicapped because the state where I went to school didn't have core curriculum rules and I went to a college where you were encouraged to pursue whatever the hell you wanted and you couldn't fail because there was no 'D' or 'F' grade, meaning if you got lower than a 'C' grade it didn't show up your transcript.

College was like my very indulgent parents. I did whatever I wanted and took whatever courses I wanted. And I know it sounds like heaven, but I think it's handicapped me. I was never forced to read classic literature and sometimes if I think I did, I'd be a better writer.

I'm in such a 'poor me' mode this morning, it's bad. I am in my "why do I need to torture myself and write" mood. Do all writers feel this way? Do all writers wake up practically every day and think "is this what I really want to be doing for the rest of my life?" I'm perfectly happy to be a corporate slave. I'm perfectly happy to be a mom, homemaker with kids with no other interests other than the kids and the hubbie boy. I could even be happy being a working mom worry about the quality of day care and feeling guilty because I'm not spending enough time with my kid.

But no, I want to be a writer. I want to be in a profession that everybody and their mother thinks they can do. God, it's worse than acting, where I had classes that were so crowded with pretty boys and women with rack jobs and all other assorted types who just wanted to see their mugs on film or on the stage.

It's ill, totally ill. I am at the point where I think I should just write for myself and no one else and that should be it. Then writing can be my secret hobby and I can mentally masturbate myself for the rest of my life. And then I could be happy being in a job and writing on the side. And then I wouldn't wake up and think of myself as a total failure every other morning.

I'm nervous. I have to go over my screenplay in class next week. I was ready to do it tonight but my throat, but I decided it against it because my throat was still very scratchy.

My teacher and everyone in class will probably hate it. I just know they will. It's a simple story, father and son estranged with the only twist being it takes place in the world of major league baseball. But I love this story. I'v already laid out each scene of my screenplay from beginning to end. I think it's a good story, but you never know until you let tell other people about it. Other people can spot the holes, the obvious places you thought worked, where it should start as opposed to where you started it.

I'll probably end up telling my story and I'll get a hundred suggestions about how to do it differently. It's nerve wracking. Then I have this niggling doubt that nobody will get the story, nobody will understand why I want to tell it. I can even hear somebody say that I've written the summary for a third rate bad country music song. Self doubt floods my mind regularly the monsoon rains in Southeast Asia.

Is it possible to be so in love with your own story that you can't even tell if it's not good? The stories I've liked people haven't really liked. The stories I didn't like, people really liked. How can you win? How can you tell? Then I think maybe I'm not supposed to be a writer and this is just another stupid idea of mine, like acting. But I've been told since youtj that I had a talent, that I could write great stories, great dialogue, that I had a certain level of writing gift that most people would kill for. But what if everyone was wrong?

My acting director told me to write. He said I had a gift for telling stories and that I should pursue it. But he had a crush on me, so how can I trust him? He kept saying he wouldn't be saying it unless it was true and that I should know that he rarely praised anything anybody did. But sometimes I don't believe him. The guy really liked me. What if he was saying I was a good writer to seduce me, not that I could be seduced, but what if that was his intention?

Sometimes I wish my acting director didn't like the way he did, because then I could believe him. I wish his praise was given grudgingly because maybe it would mean more for me. Silly isn't it?

I don't care. I love my baseball man story. It's been kicking around my head since November 2000. I found a first draft of it on my PC. I even tried to write more of it in February 2001 but I couldn't. I didn't know where it was going to go and then I started thinking I had to do all this research about baseball to write the story. Then the story kind of left my mind for awhile, only cropping up at odd times in my head like it needed to let me know it was there.

This wasn't even my first screenplay idea. The baseball story is my third idea. But after screenwriting class last week, I saw the ending. In fact, I saw the mini movie version of it, flashing through my mind in lightning speed. I wrote the gist of the story down in notebook. Then the next day in the shower, the movie flashed through my mind again and I thought, BORING! Who would pay $9.50 to see this? Then by noon I had altered the story and upped all the stakes and made it larger than life, bold and daring and over the top.

I thought I was done with the story today, but on the way to screenwriting class I decided my baseball player man needed a buddy on the baseball team that he can talk to and who will represent what the members of the team think about him. Every guy needs a buddy, a best friend, to talk things over with. I wanted baseball player man to be a loner but now I think he needs a buddy on the team. Maybe not a best friend, but at least some guy on the team who likes him and takes his side.

So I'm on idea # 3, version 3, and hopefully this is the last version.

That crush on screenwriting cutie guy is totally gone. I think he's hooking up with some other girl in class and I'm glad. Watching them together, I know that we're definitely not meant to be together. Screenwriting hottie guy and this woman have easy rapport, always seem to sit next to each other and today I heard them figure out that they live near each other. Their getting together was so easy and the circumstances are all falling easily into place.

If screenwriting hottie guy and I had the same things going for us, then he would be the one. But we don't. I've never even spoken to him. Just as well. He's from the South. What would I do with a guy like that? I'm sure we're definitely not each other's type. But if I were to meet the one, I think our relationship would enfold like screenwriting hottie guy and this new chick. You know, easy going, everything going for us, talking together easily, living in the same neighborhood, etc.

But screenwriting hottie guy did get my creative spark lit again, so I'm glad I had my 15 minutes of crush on him. A guy who gives you back your creativity, your passion, what more could you from a guy? And this one was easy too because there's not awkward breakup, no embarrassing moments to have to contend with when it was over.

I think I am emotionally turning into a writing whore. I will do anything, including falling in love, to get my writing muse going. This is bad, very bad. And at the same time, I can't help bu think, no, this is good, very good.

Somehow I did it again. I wrote a long piece about my day, hit the wrong button and now it's gone. It was a damned fine piece of wriitng too. I think I'm going to have write my pieces in Word first and then transfer it back to blogger when I'm done.

This is the third time this happened and everytime, I'm sure I pressed the Post and Publish button. I guess no one is supposed to read my very good and intimate thoughts about my life, but just the boring and banal ones. It's like a curse, I swear.

And now I'm too tired to remember what I wrote, not that it matters anyway because I know I'll never be able to recreate it again in the same way. It's a curse, I swear it's a curse.

I may try again later, I supposed. Damn! I had a whole thing about reading through old newspapers and getting depressed and media hype, A&E Biography and hyped perfect lives and real unhappy lives underneath. And then wondering what my five plants would say if they could talk.

Well, that was most of it, the shortened version at least. I've got come up with a better process for writing my blogs than straight into blogger page because the way I'm doing it now is not working for me at all. God, I love the freedom of just typing into blogger though because then it's all like one giant, stream of consciousness thought, free write, mess. I have this vision that if I start in Word, I'll want to polish and rewrite and it's won't be this vomiting of feeling, stream of concsciousness ala Viriginia Woolf diatribe about my life.

But it's happened three times now. Is is a sign from god to not write out my most freakiest intimate thoughts on the Net or is a sign to just do it in Word as a fail safe in case clumsy stupid me hits the damned wrong button again. God, I don't know. It's a toss up either way. But three times. Three is such a biblical number! I'll try the Word first process and see how that works out. Damn! Sometimes I really do hate technology.

I watched 'On Golden Pond' tonight. It's an old movie from the 80's but I'd never seen it. Jane Fonda looked so 80's with her winged hair. Katherine Hepburn had that disease, Parkinson's I think, where your head shakes from side to side all the time. And Henry Fonda looked so old and was so doddering. Was he acting or was it real?

I can't imagine what it's like to be old. It's bad enough growing old now, I can't imagine what it would be like to be 70 or even 80 years old. I have no desire to live to a ripe old age. I know a friend who swore he was going to live till 105 and was looking forward to it. Not me.

To tell you the truth, I'm afraid of growing old. From what I've seen, it's not a fun experience. You're on so much medication, you can barely walk and your mind starts to deteriorate. But if you're one of the lucky ones, you're still strong, you're still fit and lucid. I once watched a 90 year old japanese woman chop a tree once when I was 13 years old. It was awesome. Somehow I don't think I shall be as healthy as that woman. She died in her sleep when she was 97. I've always wondered what she thought of life. She lived in an old dirty run down house on the edge of the town I grew up in and my mother, who was a social worker, was visiting her. That's when I watched her chop a tree from the car; a frail and thin looking, white haired, wrinkled japanese woman with a big axe. The axe looked too heavy for her to even pick up, but that old woman was strong. And her outfit. She was wearing a 60's style polyester white dress with small blue flowers, a navy blue sweater, that ugly brown support hose and thick soled black shoes. The outlines of old woman's body completely disappeared in the folds of dress like she was some stick doll.

I don't know why I still remember her so vividly after all these years, but I still love the thought that she could chop a tree at 90, that she was so strong and from a generation where women weren't tuaght to be strong. I liked that she lived all alone at the edge of town, in a small run down house. Did she have any children? Did she have a husband once? Or did she grow old all alone? Was she strong because she was that way inside or did she grow strong out of necessity and out of loneliness? I wish I knew. I wished I had asked my mom what her story was. Maybe I did, but I don't remember any of it now. I wonder if I will be as strong in my old age like that woman was. I wonder if I will end up as a memory in some other young girl's mind, a memory that will haunt her all her days as this woman's image has haunted mine.

First day of new eating program. I feel like I'm eating the way I used to in my younger days. Rice cakes, popcorn, lots and lots of popcorn, cereals that have no taste but lots of crunch and no candy. Too bad I gave up drinking diet pepsi because then I would have my complete way of eating from my 20's.

I saw the review of Blithe Spirit in the Chron today. The review was exactly my sentiments exactly. The little man was there just sitting in his chair. I've been agreeing with the Chron on theatre reviews these last few months and I'm surprised. I usually never agree with any theatre review of theirs. Maybe they've changed reviewers. Or maybe enough people complained and they finally are writing intelligent theatre reviews.

My flu symptoms showed up at work today. My throat was very scratchy and I kept coughing and sneezing all day. Maybe this is a real flu and not just cleansing symptoms. It doesn't feel like any flu I've ever had before though, where I'm usually as sick as a dog. This flu seems to come and go, which is strange.

I'm watching KTEH right now. Some show about the origins of Sherlock Holmes. What's so strange is they're producing a Tony Hillerman mystery and it's the one Hillerman book I've read. I'm beginning to believe there are no coincidences in my life anymore. Everything happens for a reason.

At Costco today while I was standing in the checkout line, a woman started telling me how the broccoli she bought there last week smelled really bad. I picked my bag and it did smell. The checker guy said he bought a bag of broccoli there and it went bad in a week. The woman convinced me not to buy it, so I didn't. Strange isn't it?

Then I saw a duckie couple twice. Once at work and then again while I leaving Costco. I love duckie couples, especially mallard green head ducks and their mates. They're my good luck symbol. Ducks mate for life and I'm hoping this is a sign that my soul partner is going to come soon. Earlier I saw a robin on the tree outside my window at work. I love robins. They are a sign of spring, hope and renewal. It's all good signs I hope.

Musings on the O Brother Where art Thou Soundtrack

I'm in a better mood today, thank God. I woke up with a scratchy throat, and when I spat out the mucous was yellowish. Still, I don't think I have the flu because when I get to work it disappears.

I'm listening to the 2001 Grammy Record of the Year, the 'O Brother, Where art Thou?" soundtrack, which I bought several months ago. I must have been a hillbilly chick in a former life because I totally love this kind of music. It's either that or it's all those episodes of that country music show Hee Haw that I watched as a child. I have vague memories of Minnie Pearl with her hat with the price tag hanging off the brim and Buck Owens and lots of hay bales and horses.

The movie itself was so fun. I made the mistake of watching it in Marin County instead of SF. I spent the whole time laughing during the movie and if I had been in SF, there would be other people laughing. In Marin, it was so silent you could hear a pin drop. I have to watch movies in SF, because here I have the same sense of humor as most of the people in the audience. It's the not same outside the city proper.

I noticed this phenomenon when I watched Shakespeare in Love in SF and then in Redwood City, which is on the Peninsula. In the SF viewing, you could hardly hear the movie because people were laughing at every other line. In Redwood City, the movie maybe got three laughs.

Whoever did the cinematography for O Brother is a genius. The colours were lush and it made the south look so beautiful. Woody Allen did the same thing with NYC with Bullets over Broadway and Broadway Danny Rose. NYC looked so unbelievable stunning in those two movies. If you didn't know anything about NYC, you might even feel inclined to move there because it was so clean and pretty. I haven't been to NYC since 1991 and friends tell me Guiliani cleaned it up and made it look like NYC Disneyland for the tourists. I find that hard to believe, but I'll reserve judgement till I see it for myself. NYC is such an old city, that unless they built new buildings, I don't see how they can make it look brand spanking new.

The funniest part of O Brother was when the KKK was dancing. I don't know what it was about that scene that was funny, but I just burst out laughing. I thought the Coen brothers made an interesting political statement about the South and our two political parties. The Democrats sold the South out, selling their new deal politics, when they were just as bad and sometimes even worse than the republican southerners. Alot of longtime southern democrats, including democratic blacks became republicans because of what the democratic party did, and who can blame them?

I'm starting on a new eating program to go along with my fungal and parasite cleanse. This new way of eating is supposed to starve the yeasties and the parasites so they never come back. I have to go off sugar of any kind, including fruit and anything that has mold in it like peanut butter. I found this new eating prgram on the Net from a woman who was taking the same parasite killing formula I am. She dropped five sizes in about three months.

I don't even care if I lose that much weight, I just want these evil fungals and parasites out of my body. My stupid parasites are so ungrateful. They had such a good deal, you know, living in my body. They had all the junk food they could eat. I 'm a total chocaholic, so they got all the sugar they wanted. But they had to go and spoil it and ruin my health. Now, I'm determined to be rid of them.

I was reading more about candida die-off reactions on the Net today, and I found out that the candida yeasties make you crave food that they want to eat. I was totally craving peanut butter last night and the candida love peanut butter. Those stupid green fungal parasites are controlling my life and it makes me mad. No one controls me, especially my eating. I refuse to be controlled by a green mold living inside of my pancreas and stomach lining.

I refused to let myself be controlled by speed, and then by alcohol and I'm sure as hell not going to let fbombing green parasitic molds control my life. God, it's like so rude for those little critters to try to control me, the host. I was so damned mad today. I vowed to root their butts out of my system. I'm going to break my addiction to sugar and carbos. I should be able to do this. I've had far worse addictions than sugar and carbos.

Take for instance speed. In my wild youth, I never felt comfortable unless I had 30 hits of speed on my at all times. Why 30 hits? I never knew, but I had to have 30 hits of pharmaceutical grade speed on me at all times. But when I crashed and got sick for a month and couldn't hold a teacup without shaking, I gave up speed.

I did the same thing with my ciggiliciouses. Okay, when I'm with my friend who smokes, I have a ciggie, but only then. It's not like I'm buying a pack on my own. I only smoke ciggies when I'm with very close friends who smoke or when I get too wasted at a party. And it's conditioning and habit, not addiction.

I also gave up booze, another abused substance of mine. Greg used to talk about how it wasn't good that after a fun drinking weekend, we'd both get moody, nasty and had violent headaches by Wednesdays, not to mention major anxiety fits. And I was okay with that for a long time. I could avoid the three day anxieity attacks as long as I kept my blood alcohol levels up. If you've ever wondered why your friends are sometimes so moody and crank? Well, it's because they're off their schedules and not keeping their levels up. If you're going to drink heavily, you've got to do it intelligently and keep your blood alcohol level at an even keel. If you do that, you don't get moody, you don't get cranky and best of all you don't get those scary anxiety attacks. So what if I couldn't go more than three days without a drink? At least it was still three days and not one day. I have standards. I was never a binge drinker. I drank socially all the time, that's all. And besides, Greg and I used to joke about gettng our reservations ready for our stay at Betty Ford, so it wasn't like I didn't know I was a closet alcoholic.

I only I gave up booze was because I didn't want to be beholden to that brown liquid in a glass bottle. I didn't like thinking that a liquid in a brown bottle had that much control over my life. And my anxieity attacks were so happening so often, I had to give it up. I was at a point, where I was so afraid to leave my house. I mean, who wants to live like that, right? So I gave booze up slowly and now I can go forever without a drink and not care. Having to drive to work helped too I must admit. I just hated driving hungover in that bad south 280/101 traffic every morning.

So if I can give up speed (still my favorite stimulant after all these years), ciggiliciouses and booze, I can certainly give up sugar and carbos for 40 days or however long it takes to get rid of my evil ungrateful candida yeasties.

I got very excited last night thinking I was going to start my new writing schedule, but isn't it always the case that just when you make new plans to change your life something gets in the way.

I went to the gym to workout and it was so hard and I was so tired. Instead of my usual 45 minutes, I only could complete 30 minutes. Then I went to Rainbow Grocery to pick up a few things and then went home. As soon as I entered through the door, it was like a starving spirit entered into me and I was ravenous. I ate a handful of almonds and then some dried apricots, then handfuls of mixed nuts. After all those snacks, I was still starving. I remembered I had a cooked chicken in the fridge and so I ate a few pieces of that and I was still so very hungry. I made a dinner of spaghetti with mushrooms, and it wasn't only until I finished dinner that I realized I had stuffed myself to death.

My stomach felt so distended and my head had started to throb and I felt depressed. I lit a few candles, turned of the lights and put on Mozart's Requiem for the Dead. I lay down wondering what in hell was wrong with me. I fell asleep and woke up with the sniffles. I finally went to bed and when I woke up with morning with a scratchy throat and more sniffles.

I was contemplating whether to call in sick at work, but decided I would just tough it out. Remarkably, my sniffles died down as soon as I got to the office, so I was relieved that I probably didn't pick up the flu. I started a new cleansing program on Saturday to rid my body of a fungal and parasite infection, that my holistic healer had diagnosed. Of course, he forgot to tell me that when you try to kill your fungals and parasites, you get a die-off reaction.

The little critters's bodies get deposited into your blood stream and your immune system becomes so overwhelmed that you get flu like symptoms. The die-off reaction also leaves you feeling tired and out of sorts and some people have reported feelings of depression. Great! Well, this explains what happened to me in the last 24 hours.

God, I hate feeling sick and tired and depressed. I don't mind feeling sick or tired or depressed, but not all three at once. It's like someone telling you your mother died or something.

I love cleansing routines. I think it's better to have the stuff come out of your body than to live inside of you, but the cleanse always leaves me feeling worse before I get better. I asked my holistic healer what a fungal infection was and he said to think of a fruit turning green. Tthat's what my insides look like. Lovely image isn't it? Now I'm starting to have a makings of really bad headache. There's nothing like toxins flooding through your body and giving a killer headache.

I think I'll take a bath as soon as I get home and soak in those expensive crystal salts I bought from I spa I went to last year. I"m afraid to eat because eating seems makes the die-off reactions worse, but I know if I don't eat I get nauseous. I can't win on this one, can I? I really wanted to finish Crazy Eddie before February ends but at this rate, I don't think it's going to happen. I hate this, I totally hate this.

My holistic healer told me 70% of my health problems will be solved once I get rid of my fungals and parasites. I hope he's right. I hope this painful die-off reaction that I'm experiencing does something for my general health because it's not doing a thing for my mood or my writing.

Here's some material for my baseball story. Jim Rome is saying that there is a news report from this year's baseball spring training camps, where managers are saying that the athletes are showing up at camp overweight. Rome said there's no reason for baseball players showing up fat at spring training because baseball is so competitive now. Then he said, "What is spring baseball training camp? A fat farm for baseball players?" How funny!

I want Jim, my baseball player, to be kind of overweight like that short stop from the NY Yankees who played for them in the 2000 season and fell over his feet in game 5 between the NY Yanks and the Oakland A's. Wish I could remember the guy's name, but I'm really bad with names.

Then there was talk last year in the local papers here that the reason Livan Hernandez, the SF Giants pitcher, was having a bad year was because his father was dying. I should have a scene where Jim, baseball player, is having a bad media day because he's playing so badly and the media asking him if his bad playing is due to his father's illness.

I love The Jungle. Jim was playing all the recent sports meltdowns, the Mike Tyson meltdown, the Jim Mora meltdown, some other hockey guy meltdown, etc. It's fascinating when players and coaches melt down in front of the media. Don't they know it's going to get replayed over and over again on sport talk radio shows all over the country? I think I want my baseball player guy to have a melt down in front of the media. Oliver Stone had media scenes in his football player movie Any Given Sunday, which I totally loved by the way.

Well, I guess there's nothing like good old fashioned dramarama in life to get the creative juices flowing. I wrote up my pitch for my baseball story and I even have a working title "Playing Catch with Dad". It's an updated "Field of Dreams" story with the estranged son wanting redemption with the dying father, only this time the Kevin Costner character is a smack talking major league baseball player, irish catholic boy who grew up in the Sunset district of San Francisco, went to SI and went to Stanford insteadl of Cal Berkeley.

In the shower this morning, I decided that the middle of my movie plot wasn't dramatic enough, not enough high stakes in my game, so I upped the stakes and have him come to Pac Bell at mid season before the trade deadlines. He's been playing badly for his team and the team's manager tells him that he either gets his act together or they going to trade him, send him down to minors or worse release him out of his contract. The team has a three game series with the SF Giants and towards the end of the movie, we see him in the third game with his last time at bat at Pac Bell Park. Either he hits a homerun and helps the team or he gets traded or loses his job. I love it. It's so melodramatic.

In the meantime, you have the dying father in the story and the son who's goal is to make peace with the father. You have the younger brother, who was ignored in favor of the star baseball playing son. He didn't even go to SI, he went to Riordan because he wasn't as smart. The brother is a construction worker, who plays on the softball team for a local sunset bar. Baseball playing son pays for the upkeep of the father and mother but never sees them. It's the younger brother who actually takes care of the mother and father. Then there's the baseball player's son who he's starting to have an estranged relationship with. In the beginning of the movie, the son wants to play catch with baseball playing dad but he's too busy and stressed out.

Is this a Lifetime Television for Men story or what? Hallmark? I love my baseball story. It's so interesting to me. It's the sins of the father passed down to the son story, because baseball player's dad was minor leaguer who never made it to the show. It's family dysfunctionalism handed down from father to son. It's the prodigal son theme, with the two sons, but turned on its head, because the prodigal son has all the money and supports the family. It's the generational friction theme with the father and son clashing about why they play baseball. And finally it's the parent and child theme, where the child must deal with with a parent who's dying.

I love my baseball story, it's so interesting to me. How do I make this work? How do I make it interesting and not boring? How do I, as a female, write a story about a middle aged professional major league baseball player and make it believable? My writing group suggested to me that I was interested in writing this story because I needed to resolve my own feelings about my dad, who died in the early 90's. I think they're right. In this story, I could say all the things I never said to my dad before he died. I'm very resolved about the dad thing, but I know I still have guilt for not being there to say my peace with him.

I don't know. I won't find out till I write this story and I'm very interesting in writing this story now. How do I make this work? I'm also dying to now write the ending for my Crazy Eddie story. I'm on a creative roll and I have to take advantage of the energy created by my traumarama crush on cute screenwriting guy from class.

God, I hope I'm not one of those writers who have to have dramarama to write. But I feel so creative right now! It's great! It's a miracle! I love when I can come up with an ending that I really like and that satisfies me. Endings that I really like are the hardest things for me to create in a story. But I love my baseball story ending. I want the dad to flatline while the son is talking. How great is that? It's just like life. Just when you think you've turned a corner, something happens, somebody flatlines. How realistic is that? I love it. I love when endings reflect real life. And it's not depressing, because the last shot will be baseball player guy and his son playing catch in the backyard after the funeral.

It's like my crush on cute screenwriting guy. Just when I thought I was turning a corner in my life and I finally found a cute guy I was attracted to, I blow it, freak out and lose my opportunity for love. But then what happens next, I get my creative spirit back, something that's been lost or dead since November. So my ending isn't depressing either.

I had this whole thing typed out and I accidently hit the sign out button and I lost it. Maybe no one was supposed to read what I wrote.

My crush on the cute screenwriting guy is over. Must have been hormonal thing or something. I don't know. I just know it's gone and when I looked at him today, he just wasn't as cute as I thought. Such a relief too, because I hate distractions like this when I'm in a writing class.

I think I'm going to write a screenplay on my idea for a baseball story. It's my third screenplay idea, but I think this is finally the one I want to work on for class. The baseball story has Pac Bell park in it a symbol and metaphor. Pac Bell Park was built in downtown SF to revitalize that part of SF. My baseball player will find his love of baseball again and remember how it was his father who taught him how to love the game, a father who is now dying and with whom he's had a difficult relationship with since he was 18 years old.

I got the ending tonight on the way home from screenwriting class. I've been struggling for a way to write the ending to my baseball story, struggling for a year on how to end this story without being sentimental, happy and sappy. I'm going to let my baseball player find his redemption and forgiveness with his father, but then the father is going to die right afterwards. I love this ending, it's so bittersweet and so realistic to me. I don't want a celebratory redemption. I want redemption, but I want my redemption to be empty and lonely, like too much too little too late. To me, that's how redemption happens in the real world. It's not a happy fairytale Oprah ending. It's painful and it hurts and the hurt is from deep inside you, so deep you don't even know where it comes from. It's primal hurt, caveman and brutish and painful, very painful.

Maybe I had to have this atraction to this guy so I could have all this traumarama, dramarama in my life, to get me in the mood to come up with this great bittersweet ending for my baseball story. And if that was the purpose of cute screenwriting guy in my life, then so be it. I can't knock the inspiration for a bittersweet ending that I really, really like.

I saw in preview ACT's new play, Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. It's a good play, some fun special effects but not their best. One of the main characters had a nightgown on with a beautiful silver and lavender floor length robe, which I totall loved. The english accents were okay, although the main male character spoke in some odd accent that definitely wasn't Britt. He was in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys at ACT last year, and his accent then and the one in this play sounded identical. Guess my friend is right. Some people can do accents and some just can't.

I read an article in the program about the Spiritualist church. Is this a coincidence or what? I watched the movie "The Verdict" with someone from my screenwriting class today, so we could do our homework together. We started talking and then she started talking about the spiritualist church that she attends in SF. What a trip! She said the service is just like John Edward's Crossing Over.

Crossing Over was Amy's favorite show. I wonder if my friend Amy who died in October is trying to contact me. God! Amy used to watch that show every day while she was at home recovering from chemo therapy. She made me watch it with ther one night, since she knew I'd never seen it. She became obsessed with John Edwards and wanted to go see him. He was supposed to be in the Bay Area last year and she asked me if I wanted to go. I said sure. Butwhen she called, the event was sold out.

I miss Amy. She was the only friend I had outside of my writing group, who supported me in my writing. With Amy, I could talk freely about my writing goals and dreams and she would always listen and be so encouraging. I could tell her about my story ideas and she would listen and she even agreed to comment on one of my stories. She was so loving in her critiques and her comments. I couldn't have asked for a better supporter for my writing life. Amy even understood my hopelesly romantic love for Brian and Ellis and my subsequent struggles with them afterwards. The loss of her friendship has left me feeling so alone.

I feel like one of the desperate people you read about who use mediums to contact their loved ones. But it's just too coincidental that I find the spiritualist church connection now and it's similarity to Crossing Over, Amy's favorite show. I feel like I need to go to one of their Sunday services to see if Amy will try to contact me. I never got a chance to properly say goodbye to her. By the time I was able to see her, the brain tumor had turned her brain to mush and she was in an Alzheimer's dementia haze. Amy, my work friend who usd to earn six figures from doing IT consulting work, couldn't even remember what she'd said from one minute to the next. I tried to say goodbye, but how much can you really say goodbye to someone, if you're not even sure they remember who the hell you really are?

And what could I say? I'm sorry I wasn't there for you that last time she you called in August, when I told you 'chin up, everything will work out." I'm sorry that I didn't heed my intuition and call you because I was selfish and didn't want hear about your depression because of your health and work one more time. I didn't know you were breaking down. I didn't know you were fighting for you life. I didn't know that your inoperable brain tumor had start to grow rapidly again and was turning your brain into spoiled swiss cheese. I didn't know that you had stopped eating because you were so depressed. I didn't know and yet somehow I did know, but I just couldn't, just plainly and honestly didn't want to deal with any of it.

That maybe a part of me knew that one of these days you'd give up, because that was your modus operandi, you give up, you walk out, every time, out of every job, out of friendships, out of everything and even your own life. I wanted you to fight, to live longer, but I knew you were tired. Tired of fighting, tired of stressing over your health and your finances. And I'm sorry but I just can't see how anyone can give up. But you did and it freaks me out, because I wonder that there will ever come a time when I'll want to give up again. My attempts at giving up my own life have never worked out and I've just let learnt to let it go because it's never worked out, but the urge never ever goes away.

Is it different on the other side? Are you happy? Are you free? Do you miss life? Do you miss me? Is this you're way of trying to contact me? To tell me you're okay. To tell me that you're happy. To tell me that it's all going to be okay and everything is going to work out. To tell me that forgive me not wanting to call you in August. To tell me that you forgive me. To tell me that I'm going to find another really close friend who totally supports in my writing life the way you did. To not worry because I'll find that wonderful man who's a cross between Brian and Ellis and that I'll have that bouncing baby boy you saw in my future when you read my tarot cards.

I still don't know if I'll go to the spiritualist church. What if nothing happens? What if something does? I've never liked the idea of people channeling spirits, how do they know they're not channeling evil spirits? I know I'll have to resolve my own feelings about this issue for me to attend a spiritualist service. But if it gives me the chance to hear from Amy again, then it will be worth it. I miss her, her friendship and her support for my writing life.

I've been feeling bad for the last two hours that I've had such evil thoughts about a guy I don't even know. He read a few poems and I have such judgments about him based on his poetry, his voice and the way he looked and dressed. I'm doing the thing that I hate so much, judging people on first impression. I hate when people do it to me so I try not to do to other people. It's such bad karma. And what a waste of my precious energy to talk about some guy that barely registered in my mind.

I guess it's only because it's issue of the day because two members of my writing group find him attractive and I just don't get why. My intution, which is usually right, tells me he's a bitter person, full of ego and full of himself. He also strikes me as the kind of guy who has issues with women, lots of them. But I guess because he wrote a poem about his relationship, which he prefaced by saying it was a relationship poem, not a good relationship, not a happy relationship, not a relationship that I fondly look back at with love, but just a "relationship poem". Everyone in the room laughed knowingly, because what was unsaid was this relationship was a bad one and everyone knows about those kinds of "relationships". I think what impressed most of the women there, everyone except me that is, was the poem was about his girlfriend. You could practically here the silent "ooohhhh's and aaahhhs" in the room thought of by all the women in the room. Poetry boy is writing about his girlfirend, how sensitive, and how sweet, how anti frat boy. Never mind that the poem is a sarcastic tome to how many women he though his girlfriend had slept with before him and how this fact was slowly eating away at his heart and soul.

But then again, I don't know. I think I was the only woman in the room who felt how insincere and bitter the poem was and what do I know about poetry anyway? I can just read people's vibes pretty darn well since I'm supposed to be clairsentient, able to feel things in my body, and claircognizant, what most people call gut instinct. And my gut instinct is screaming 'freak, freak, danger, danger' in a screechingly loud voice. I think poetry boy writes poems like that to get laid. But give the guy credit right? It snared two of my friends into his tired act. God, one of them seems a little miffed because he acted like he didn't want to have sex with her. I love my friends, but are they that blind and dumb?

Whatever. But then on the way home from grocery shopping tonight, I got so depressed. I hate being different from other women. But it's always been this way for me and I don't know why. My spiritual healer says it has something to do with the fact that I'm this elf-human thing and that I will never feel like ever fit it anywhere. And she's right. I just don't fit ib, especially in an artsy fartsy crowd. But damn! I took that crazy enneagram test and I tested at 4, I'm an artist. Of all people, I'm supposed to be artsy farsty as hell. In fact, I'm supposed to be able to out artsy fartsy anybody. What gives? Maybe it's that damned 5 wing, which is the intellectual. My stupid damn intellectual side won't let me fool myself that way and put on airs and that too cool for TV and too trendy for the average person attitude.

It's an elf girl's life to always feel left out of any crowd. But like any good elf girl, I know the best thing to do to get me out of my depression. Shopping. I stopped by a mall on the way hom. I went to the GNC first, and bought this new mineral which is supposed to help me not feel cold. I freeze at temperatures less than 80 degrees, which is not a good thing is you live in a city where the average year round temperature is 60 degrees. I didn't even blink an eye at paying $22 for a bottle of 30 pills. Hey, if helps me to stop from being cold all the time, it's worth it.

Then I went Macy's to look for my favorite pair of jeans. I found the pair I usually buy and there was another pair in a lighter colour for $13, my lucky number, so of course, I had to buy them. When do you ever see jeans for $13. It had to be a good sign. Then I went to Borders and bought a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a german christian philosopher whom I really like. Bonhoeffer was one of the few christians who fought against the Nazis and was later imprisoned and killed by them for his beliefs. He's an interesting philosopher to me because of his willingness to speak up against what was so obviously wrong.

But I was happy for only a little while before the depression came rolling in like the fog. I wonder if I just need to start writing my stories again. I've been too busy, too tired and too lazy this month to write and not writing seems to have put me off kilter, made me feel out of balance, moody and unable to sleep. I hate this feeling. And I feel crabby as hell too, so crabby that I'm having evil, nasty and bitter thoughts about a poetry man that I don't even know.

It's late now but I'm going to stay up and crank 1,000 words out. I know once I get back into my creative space, I'll feel happier and not think such bad thoughts. Or at least if I do, the bad thoughts won't linger like a bad hangover but flit across my mind gently and quickly like a young doe in flight.

I wonder if listening to Jim Rome's sports talk radio show, The Jungle, has changed my taste in men.

I went to a poetry reading yesterday to hear this woman from my writing group read her poems. The room was full of stereotypical artsy looking SF types with women in trendy dark skirts, velvet burnt out scarves and boots, men with leather jackets and beards or politically correct rumpled hair. Everyone had that affected and bored, I'm a struggling artist attitude, with pinched faces like they needed to go to the bathroom but weren't going because it was politically incorrect or something. The smell of patchouli was killing the scent of the giant cala lillies that seemed as out of place as I was, in this dark, "trendy and cool" scene.

And there I was, still wearing work khaki pants, white tshirt, black cardigan and red antique bead japanese necklace, an outfit I put some conscious thought into on a pit stop home. I was trying to look casual, relaxed and somewhat artsy, but when I surveyed the party, my outfit looked positively conservative and almost virginal.

It's not like I hadn't been to events like this before, but this was the first time I felt like such a fish out of water. And the men. They all looked so pasty like they were molding right there in their leather jackets and black jeans.

I think I really am different from most women when it comes to what is an attractive man. I can’t believe a friend thought that one thin, older, white haired and bearded poet was attractive. But he’s that stereotypical poet/artist type and I've never found that look was particularly attractive. First of all, I really don’t like very thin men. It's so annoying! My crazy mother instincts come blazing out and I just want to stuff food down their pie-hole till they gain some weight.

Secondly his poetry about that woman in the shower was just bad. How neurotic and such a show of low self-steam. Here’s a guy who’s paranoid about how many men his woman has slept with. Like who the hell really cares. And why would a guy even be concerned about stuff like that. It's none of his business how many men his chick has slept with and the fact that's he's written a poem about it, makes me think he has a problem with women with a past. Does thing guy want a virgin? Is he so lacking in self-esteem that he would prefer a woman with no sexual experience so he wouldn't feel so inadequate. His kind of poetry is not a good sign.

A friend thought Jim Rome sounded like a frat boy and I didn’t even know she really hates that type. But I know this friend would probably find skinny white haired poet guy attractive, because he’s so anti-frat boy. Maybe that’s his attraction for women. He’s the total opposite of the typical dumb male. Because he's not a frat type, as a woman you start to think that he's like this better kind of guy. But I don’t know. I think artsy type guys are wolves in sheeps' clothing. White haired bearded poetry guy was so sexist in his poetry, so selfish, so self absorbed. He seemed like the kind of guy who would write you a beautiful poem then break up with you in the next breath. This guy would probably never be caught dead at a football or baseball game.

A few years ago, I wouldn't have cared if a guy was into sports, but now I care. A few years ago, I might have been just little bit interested in white haired beared poetry guy, but not now. A caller on Rome's show called guys from SF, "those sissy wine sippers from the West Bay" and I think he made a good point.

But then I've never had a problem with frat boys. First of all, my college was so small, we didn't have frats and sororites so I never associated with them on a regular basis enought to have bad opinions. Secondly, I've always been athletic and worked out at a gym, so I'm used to guys who are healthy looking and who work out. Third, my few experiences with frat boys have all been good ones, so good in fact, that I've only ever dated frat boy types and even married one once.

Okay, I take that back. I've dated a few non frat boy types, but my experiences with these guys were horrible. I couldn' t watch football on Sunday. They weren't into March Madness. And we never went to baseball games to sit in the sun to drink beer. And I'm really not that that into sports.

So is Jim Rome changing my taste in men or did he just reinforce it? I don't know. All I know is poetry writing pasty thin artsy boys are just so not attractive to me right now, where before they at least showed up on my hottie radar screen if only for just a little while.

I just made my third sale at Half.com. Somebody is buying this CD that I bought and then found out I hated. I also sold a couple of books that I bought but never read. I'm so excited. Usually I just dump all my CDs and books at the Goodwill truck, so it's nice to get paid for this stuff. My stuff is listed for prices lower than anyone else and I'm sure this helps my sales.

I just listed my Velvet Underground box set Peel Slowly and See minus disk 4 on Half.com. Disk 4 is the only one I listened to. I left it on the floor accidentally one day, and then stepped on it. I didn't know CDs could crack, but then I never stepped on one before either. I saw the boxset listed in this CD club I belong last month, and broke down and bought it.

Disk 4 is my favorite Velvet Underground album. It's the self titled Velvet Underground album. The cd included in this boxset is the original version that Lou Reed and company submitted to the record company. The record company hated it and brought a producer in to remix the album and then subsequently released it.

I was so tempted to not even buy another boxset since I only liked that one disk. I found the two versions of the CD on the Net and was going to just buy those, but I didn't like having an incomplete box set.

Someone else on Half.com was selling just disk 1, so I decided to list my incomplete set. Maybe there are other people like me who have lost a disk. There was a guy selling disk 4 on Half.com and I tried to buy it, but then the seller pulled out of the deal. I was so bummed. I was going to list each disk desperately but if someone just wants to buy that one of the disks, I'll sell it to them.

I love this selling thing. I bought a pair of red cowboy boots from someone who was selling them outside her apartment building and that was years ago. I loved those boots and wore them to death. I still have them but the soles have cracked and I'm can't decide whether to get them repaired or just buy another pair of red cowboy boots but in suede instead of leather. I don't even know where I would be able to find red cowboy boots in the SF Bay Area. The best selection of boots are in Texas or in Dener, at least from what I've seen from the trips I've taken there. Maybe a place like Fresno would have a good selection of boots. The best country music stations in California are in Fresno area. You can find stations that even play old country music, with songs like "Whiskey I love you". But when would I ever need to go to Fresno?

I was reading an article in the NY Times yesterday on a Ralph Ellison biopic on TV, and I was surprised to find my college alma mater, Grinnell College mentioned. Like nobody knows where the hell is Grinnell is, or Grinn City as it's sometimes called by people who went to college there, and nobody cares. And there it is, showing up in the February 19 NY Times.

Grinnell is a great small school, student population 1,200, stuck in the middle of the Iowa cornfields. Hardly anyone from Iowa went there. In fact, my friends and I figured out that 30% of the school's population came from NYC and maybe at least 50% came from suburbs on Chicago's North Shore.

I've been thinking about my first love Michael lately and it's a strange coincidence that Grinnell College, where we both met, is mentioned in this article about Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man is, at leaset it was when we were 18, Michael's favorite book. He begged me to read and I never did. I bought it to please him and told him I read it, but then we never talked about it again. I guess I should read this book after all these years, because it is a great book. The NY Times articles said he never finished another book, and spent the rest of his life trying to create his next masterpiece. Sounds depressing doesn't it?

I was trying to remember what my favorite book was when I was 18 and I so don't remember those days. I kept my journals from my college years and I guess I could read them to see if I recorded it. I doubt that I did though. I know I became obsessed for whatever reason with James Joyce's book of short stories, "The Dubliners" when I was 18, so maybe this book was my favorite. I was also really into Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter and wanted to have some kind of blazing letter like S for stupid or I for Idiot or U for ugly embroidered on my clothes, but that was a high school obsession and I don't think it counts.