I was going to write about how I can be a christian and post modernist at the same time, and how post modernism brings God back into the equation of our lives. At least I think it does. But I don't feel like being philosophical and who the hell cares what I think anyway.

I'm just glad I figured it all for myself, and maybe that's all that matters.

Post modernism theory, at least my understanding of it, has every viewpoint be valid. If this is true, then people who think they talk to angels, people who think they have visitations from God, people who speak in tongues or have those biblical ecstatic experiences all have valid experiences.

I'm sure it's all much more complicated than that, and most of the time when people tell me I'm a post modernist, I have absolutely no idea what they're talkinga about. But if being a post modernist allows for miracles, angels, healers and other mystical phenomena to be true, then yes I'm a post modernist.

I have no scientific fact, no numbers as they say in finance, to back up the theory that things like angels and miracles can't be true. But I don't care. I think it's totally cool that things like angels and miracles might be true. I don't know. It's not like I talk to angels or have had like a biblical type miracle happen to me, but if someone tells me that they talk to angels or have had biblical type miracles happen to them, I'm like "GREAT". Wow, wish I could have stuff like that happen to me.

To me the problem with rationalism and enlightenment is it took God out of life. It said we can't prove God exists because scientifically it can't be done. Rationalism and the enlightenment relied on science to make everything true in our lives. It painted the world in black and white, in absolutes, and life just isn't like that. Life is full of contradictions, and stuff that just doesn't make any sense.

I mean, sure you can scientifically prove things, but then things happen, shit happens, people do things that make absolutely no sense at all for absolutely no reason. Life just not that rational sometimes, life can't be put in a box and added up.

I think post modernism frees us from the strait jacket of rationalism and enlightenment, and says that faith is valid. Faith in god, which can't be scientifically proven, which can't be explained, which in some ways is the most irrational thing in the whole wide world, faith is valid and if faith is valid, then so is God, from my point of view.

It's six degrees of Star Wars. You know, when Obiwon Kanobi tells Luke that Darth Vader is his father, and Luke accuses Obiwon of lying. Obiwon says he was telling the truth, from a certain point of view. And then Obiwon ways something like "you will find that truth depends on your perspective." How post modernist is that?

But like everything else, post modernist has it weaknesses and bad points too. I mean, everything does. It's so ying yang. What's so great about post modernism is also what's really bad, because then truth is not absolute and if truth is not absolute, then some people will say that God is not absolute. But I disagree.

Post modernist thinking opens the door for God, for people believing in angels, for people who fervently believe that prayer works and works absolutely. Post modernist thinking puts God back into the equation of life.

At least that's how l look at , But I am a christian, and God is the filter through which I view life, so of course, like duh!!! Like I'm going to say that post modern thinking negates God. I don't think so.

I bought tickets to go see the play "Wicked" with a friend. Another friend went to see it on opening night and loved it, but the SF Chron gave it a bad review. My friend who saw it on opening night, flies to NYC every year to see 5 or 6 broadway shows. She's very, very critical of theatre productions, and I almost hate going to theatre with her because if the show is bad she'll walk out or just complain and moan all night long. If my friend liked it, then I'll trust her opinion more than I would a newspaper review.

Now if I could just convince someone else to see "The Damnation of Faust" with me. Nobody I know likes french opera. Damnation got a great review, and the friends whom I've called said they will think about it.

I'll probably just end up going myself just because I don't want to miss it. I'm still bummed I missed the opera on St. Francis of Assisi, which was I heard spectacular.

So I couldn't help myself. I was in Walgreen's buying some stuff, and I saw the Iraq Most Wanted deck of playing cards for $5.99. I had to buy them. They are such a riot. I hope it's an official deck. It says it is, but you can never tell. Sadam Huseein is the Ace of Spades. How funny is that? I should display my Iraq bad boys deck with the soldier girl doll I bought in a junk store in West Virginia.

I also saw the cds for Clay and Ruben from American Idol. I was tempted to buy the Clay Aiken cd too, but I stopped myself. I couldn't just buy the Clay cd and not buy Ruben's cd as well.

I just love popular american culture artifacts!

This is the art exhibit I want to see in LA.

I think this is the catalogue for the exhibit above.

Having fun hijacking images from websites. Check out my book collection on the side bar.

I saw the movie "The Road to Perdition" over the weekend. In the screenwriting seminar I took last fall, the visiting UCLA professor told the class that the screenplay was written by someone who he knew and who had taken classes at the screenwriting school where he was lecturing and had worked on the screenplay there.

The local San Francisco screenwriter received $125K from the studio for the rights to the screenplay, which is the standard Writer's Guild fee, and then when the script was made into a movie, the screenwriter received $350K, which is again the standard fee. The local screenwriter had since supposedly moved down to LA, and was hired a movie studio and was working on another screenplay.

It was quite a good movie, and I'm surprised it didn't get nominated for an oscar. It did however, lack a certain amount of emotional punch that I think you need to have be a really great movie and get nominated. The whole tone of the movie was very understated, but still quite dramatic.

I love that some schlub in a screenwriting seminar somehwere in downtown San Francisco was working on this script, and it became a movie that was well received. That's pretty cool.

I went to the local library tonight to write. It's amazing how time just zips buy when I'm writing. I arrived at the library at around 7 pm, and the next thing I knew it was close to 9 pm and the workers were dimming the lights.

I brought my crazy eddie story with me and edited what I had already written. Then I decided I needed to outline the story again, since I'm doing another second draft totally new rewrite. I thought by doing the second rewrite, the structure of the story would change, but it's essentially stayed intact. The second rewrite basically just cuts away all the backstory and dead wood from the story.

Since doing character interviews really helped with my screenplay, I decided to do them for my crazy eddie story. I interviewed my main character, her mother and crazy eddie's friend Charlie, who tries to strangle her near the end.

My Crazy Eddie story is just so strange that at this point, I just want to finish it, and then have my writing group read it, and then be done with it. It's a story that came from a freewrite, which just needed to be written down as a complete story.

My character Jessie, during the interview, told me she hoped I would finish her story. She said she'd been waiting a very long time for me to finish it. Jessie said she just wants her story told and on paper, and then she could rest and be happy.

It's very odd when your characters address you directly and say, "please finish my story". It's like they have more of a vested interest in seeing it finished than I do.

I'm not sure I'll be able to bring my laptop to the library and write. I may have to go to a coffeeshop to do that. I'm almost tempted to take my work laptop with me, but I probably shouldn't do that. I could take my baby laptop, but I really like staring at a big screen when I write.

The library is open late from Monday through Wednesday. The library is a great place to edit, write outlines, write out character interviews, and do freewrites by hand. I'm not sure it's the best place to actually write a story, unless I'm writing it by hand.

I don't mind writing by hand, except then I have to read my own horrid handwriting and type it all up. It's much more efficient for me to write directly to a computer, but it's been so hard for to just sit down and write, that I'm almost tempted to write out everything by hand until I get in the mood to sit at my computer and write.

The thing about writing by hand is you can do another rewrite and edit as you type, which is kind of nice sometimes. I know I tend to edit more if I write by computer, than when I write by hand, but not by much.

At this point I'm willing to do anything to get to write again, even doing writing by hand and making very, very structured outlines, so I can just concentrate on writing sections of the outline instead of trying to write the whole story in one session. Many writers write this way, other try to spit it all out.

The Crazy Eddie story is all written, so maybe all I have to do is a combination of both techniques to get to a complete second and hopefully final draft. I have fantasies of submitting it somewhere, but I don't know. I don't think I'm ready for that yet. I might just submit it just to see what's involved in submitting something for publication, but I would be submitting just to go through the process and would have absolutely no expectations about crazy eddie ever seeing the publishing light of day.

I think to write well takes practice, tons and tons of it, and who knows how many stories I'd have to write just to get one good one. Writing a story is probably like take the right photo for a fashion magazine. A photographer takes hundreds and hundreds of shots before choosing one photo for the cover. Writing a damned good story is probably akin to getting the absolutely perfect photo for Vogue or the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.

The photo or story has to be the one that makes the buyer or editor want to purchase the magazine or in a story's case, buy the story for publication. And Crazy Eddie is definitely not cover material. I like the story well enough, and I know I'm only finishing it because I've had comments from people that it's my best work.

It's a story where the character is so unlike me and goes through something I've never gone through before. It's a totally fictional, yet on a certain level, a very personal story. I've taken experiences that have happened to me, and molded them to fit this story. I suppose it's the personal stuff from my own life, although vastly diferent in the fictional story, that makes the story so close to me, yet not. It's hard to explain.

Anyway, it feel good to be writing again. When I don't write, I totally and truly forget how interesting the whole experience is, how lost I get in it, and how I get so caught up so totally in what I'm doing. Writing is like watching a really good movie or tv show. I am spellbound for however long I do it. I am so transported into this other world, and I guess that makes sense because I'm in the mind of the character speaking or in the mind of the storyteller recounting the story.

Writing is really like an escape for me, and it feels like a good and necessary escape as well.

I was feeling a little down this morning, because when it's that time of the month as it now, I sometimes get a little depressed. I don't know. I was feeling really, really lonely, even though I spent a lovely day at my church picnic on Sunday afternoon.

Then an hour ago, my froggie french friend Francois sent me a message inviting me to chat with him on MSN messenger, and now we're chatting ahd having lunch on Friday. Thank god for friends, especially when they're french and read, speak and write fluent hebrew, greek, japanese as well as their native froggie tongue.

This is fun. I took an art history 103 class, the origins and developments of Modern Art in Europe and America from the French Revolution through World War II. from a painter/professor a few years ago, and in that class he always talked about wanting to teach a class on contemporary art from 1945 to the present. When I check the fall schedule for the community college where he teaches, I saw his new class. I'm so happy he was able to fulfill his wish.

I like modern art, even though I don't always understand it. Sometimes I think I just love the expressiveness of the the colours that are used. It will be interesting to see what he says about the really, really modern stuff.

I was going to take Art History 101, which is early art, but I decided I should take the Contemporary art class because it might not be offered again. The local community college always offers the standard Art History 101 and 102. You don't even have to take them in order, since I took 103 first because it was the only art history class that fit into my schedule at the time.

I know I should to take art history 101 and 102 sometime, just so I have the historical perspective on art, but I guess they'll have to wait.

It's really cool to take an art history class from an artist. The guy who teaches the class is a painter, who teaches painting classes as well as art history. He even takes a group to France every summer to paint outdoors, like the french impressionists did. One night he brought into some of his painting, and they were really really interesting. Maybe he'll do the same thing in this class.

I love studying art. I keep thinking that if I'd taken an art history class as a freshman in college, I probably would have majored in art history. I think I like studying art because I get to use my analytical skills in a way I don't normally use them. Analyzing art isn't as cut and dried as analyzing numbers; you have to be so much more creative. Plus the whole time you're analyzing a piece of art, you're studying an incredibly beautiful creation, which is so much more satisfying than staring at an excel worksheet full of numbers.

Not sure how serious this analyst is, but if he's right, I don't want to even think of the consequences to the US economy, The Big Three automakers could be headed for Chapter 11, a UBS Warburg analyst argued in a research note Thursday.

So like I know this is going to sound very silly, but I was searching the Net for how to use an electric oven. I've always had gas ovens, and now I have an electric oven and I have no idea how to use it.

There are like all these knobs. There's one know that says off, preheat, bake and timed bake, and another know that has the temperature. I tried to just put the oven on bake and then set it to the temperature I wanted, but the oven didn't heat up. Then I just put it on broil just like a gas oven, and waited till the oven got very hot and then turned the guage back to temperature I wanted.

Is it supposed to work this way? What about the preheat setting? What's that for? I miss my gas stove and oven very much.

I feel really out of sorts today, so I thought I'd cheer myself up and plan my next vacation.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, there's going to be what looks like to be this fantastic art exhibit.

Old Masters, Impressionists and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The exhibit was in Houston, and is now in Atlanta. Featured artists include Cezanne, Picasso, van Gogh, and Matisse.

So I check out the Los Angeles County Museum website, and I don't know, I guess was expecting a more visitor friendly site. The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, where I saw the Andy Warhol exhibit last year, had a whole section for visitors to the museum. They had a section for places to stay near the museum, and even nearby restaurants.

I was expecting the same sort of thing from LACMA, but there was nothing! I did some research on Google, and I think I found a couple of hotels, Le Meridien on La Cienega and The Beverly Plaza on West 3rd St. Some website I found says that these hotels are only a mile away from LACMA. But a mile in LA is like a long way.

Just in case, I emailed LACMA and asked them for hotel recommendations. I wonder if I'll even get a response.

Art museums totally whine about they don't make any money and stuff, and that's all fine and good, but if they're not going to create websites which make is easy for visitors, in town and out of town alike, to visit them, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for their budgetary shortfalls.

Sometimes like tonight, I feel like I should just shut up and write. Sometimes when I speak stupid things come out of my mouth and it bugs me. It's like my mouth and my brain don't work and either I say the wrong thing or I have absolutely nothing to say.

But when I write stories, it's not like that. The words just come, they pour out if I let them, and I can't move my hand or type fast enought to get it all down.

I am so looking forward to my writing class next week. I really need a big kick in the pants to get me started writing stories again. Maybe God is making my mouth and brain not work so I would realize that I can only say what I need and have to say through my writing. It's cruel, very cruel of God to do this, although I know he is probably just trying to do something, anything to get me to write.

I was at the library today looking for a book, and the woman next me at the library computer catalog was looking for books on celtic literature. She made me think of my half elf human novel that I started last November and never finished.

I realized another thing today as well. You know how doubting Thomas is one of the characters in the bible that I most relate to. Well, doubting Thomas' problem was lack of faith and I know that my biggest spiritual problem is lack of faith.

So ... if I have constant lack of faith in God, wouldn't it make sense that I have constant lack of faith in everything I do or attempt to do? I realized I don't write because I have such a depth of lack of faith in my ability to write and tell a story. Like it doesn't matter that from grade school on, teachers have been telling me that I write good stories and good plots and would make a good writer one day.

Writing is an act of faith, faith that someone wants to read what you have to say, what stories you have to tell. It takes faith to think that someone will pay some of their totally hard won money to buy something that you wrote. It takes faith to think that you will find a connection into a publisher, who will push your work so it gets published. It takes faith to think that what stories you have to tell will be relevant, entertaining, amusing and fun to read.

And I'm thinking in the car as I have these thoughts, I don't know if I that kind of faith. I mean, I'm the living female reincarnation of doubting Thomas after all, she of little faith, who had to see the holes in Jesus' hands and sides to know that Christ had risen.

I don't know. This is a hard realization to face, this lack of faith thing. I struggle with with the faith question constantly just on the spiritual/religious side. Now I have to deal with it so I can write as well. OY!!!

I am in such a mood to buy a summer bag. I don't know what put me into this mood, but I was surfing on ebay this morning looking for dirt cheap Coach or Bottega Venetta bags.

Why I even need a summer bag is a mystery to me, since we don't get proper summers in San Francisco. Our summertime comes in the fall when we get an indian summer, and it's a beautiful 80 degrees from September through October and sometimes even into early November.

I need to start saving to buy myself a place someday, not buying an expensive summer bag for a climate that doesn't have a summer. Most summer bags are way too small anyway for me, and I only buy bags with long straps so that I can wear the bag around my body.

Summer bags have always been way too fragile for me, since I am very hard on my purses. The only purses that I don't wear out in three months are strong leather purses.

I think I got in the mood to buy a summer bag because I saw this woman I know at church with one of those "The Sak" bags. I bought a knock-off The Sak bag at Target for my cruise vacation. I could start using that I bag I guess, but it is so small. Or I guess I could just go and buy a real "The Sak" bag from Macy's or better yet, buy one off of Ebay.

I saw a bunch of those "The Sak" bags at both Marshalls and Ross, but I couldn't find one I liked. Those bags are for women who don't carry very much in their purses, and I'm definitely not one of those types.

I added a link on the left side to my new tibetan buddhism book called "Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Part 3: Wonderment by Longchenpa or Longchen Rabjam. Longchen was recommended in that seminar I took last year taught by Russell Targ, who is a physicist and parapsychology researcher.

This book is mind blowing. I get so many insights just by reading a few pages, it's like the equivalent of taking one of those $3,000 growth and development seminars, only I only paid $7.50 for the book and I'm not even done with it yet.

A new word I discovered from First Matter, under Lexicon. Their reading list is also very interesting.

Devox
We’ve created a word to capture the spirit of both the deviant and deviance -- devox -- which we’ll use to describe the voice of deviant ideas, products and even individuals as it moves down the path of acceptance. As the devox evolves it gains in marketability and therefore in commercial value. At each point of its journey from the outer Fringe of society to what we call the heart of Social Convention the devox becomes exponentially more commercially viable. Its market increases in both absolute numbers and breadth, building and building until it gains maximum attention and acceptance. And then, just as predictably as it arrived, the devox recedes from the collective consciousness beginning, an even more interesting journey to either functional cultural immortality or oblivion.

I put a link up to amazon.com for the two books I'm reading on the left, and a list of movies I've seen in 2003. I've seen 22 movies so far in 2003, not counting mindless movie watching on TV.

I've been trying to account for how I spend my time these last five months, and the stress of worrying about my job and then having to move really put a stop to me reading. This is not good.

I read 7 books in 5 months, which is I daresay not very promising for someone who wants to be a writer.

Books I've read so far in 2003:
God Talk: Travels in Spiritual America by Brad Gooch
Phantoms by Dean Koontz
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
LOTR - The Two Towers
The Courage to be Rich by Suze Orman
The Energy of Money by Mara Nemeth.

I definitely need to start reading more. I go through periods where I read mostly books, and then I go through periods where I read everything else but books.

I know I spent most of April going through my old papers and magazines, and reading through them to decide whether to trash or keep them, so maybe I was burnt out on reading. Who knows?

Plays I've Seen so far in 2003
American Buffalo by David Mamet
The Dazzle by Richard Greenberg
The Constant Wifev by W. Somerset Maugham
The Three Sister by Anton Chekhov
The Ramayana

Other Events I've attended so far in 2003
Art exhibit - American Flag: Two Centuries of Concord and Conflict
Art Exhibit - The opening of the Asian Art Museum
Art Exhibit - Leonardo Da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland
Exhibition - The Orchid Show
Fair - Whole Earth Expo
Exhibition - Arts of Pacific Asia
Concert - Opera in the Gardens
Concert - Free Blues Concert in Golden Gate Park

Seminars/classes I've taken so far in 2003
Sean David Morton - Trends for 2003
The Path of the Adept by Dr. Paul A Clark
Kerygma Bible class - every Wednesday from January through June 2003
The Moral Education of Children by Steve Johnson

I mean when I list all of things I remember doing and going to, I think I lead a fairly busy life, but my reading list truly sucks! I'll have to put myself on a serious reading schedule to make sure I get my reading in. It's the only way I can guarantee myself that I'll read and actually finish a book.

Not finishing a book is a problem too. I'll pick up a book and start reading it, and if it doesn't grab my attention right away, I'll just stop reading it. I have many partially read books in my apartment. I think it's a good idea to finish reading a book once you start it, even if it sucks, just to see as a writer why the book failed. Easier said than done however. Some books are just so darn boring.

I brought the book "London" by Edward Rutherford with me on my vacation, intending to finish reading the book and I just couldn't do it. It just so happens that the person I was on vacation with was the one who gave me the book to read, and when I asked her if she finished it, she said no, it was too boring. I'm determined to finish "London" sometime this year I swear, just to get it out of my apartment.

I never have the same problems forcing myself to see movies though. Movies don't require the same level of commitment that a book does. You can go to a movie and in 2-3 hours and it's done. Most books, depending on the length can take me a week to read or even longer, and if it's a good book I'll end up reading parts over 2 or 3 times because the writing is so good and I want to savor every part.

I wish I could go back to the bookworm self of my youth when I lived for reading, and was one of those types with their nose always in a book. But maybe back when I was a teenager living in my parents' house, I had to read because there was nothing else to do.

As an adult, there are so many choices of how to spend my time, whatever time I have left that is when I'm not working, eating, exercising, sleeping or maintaining my relationships. Sometimes I think if I didn't go to so many exhibits, plays and seminars/classes I would have more time to read. But I love plays and I love looking at art and attending events. Then there's all the websites to read, the newspapers online to read (SF Chron, NY Times, LA Times and Merc News), the magazines to read that I subscribe to (Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Shape, and Martha Stewart Living) It's a total conundrum.

Maybe if I'd gotten into the habit of reading before I go to bed I think I would read more books, but most people read to relax themselves and then go to sleep. When I read, I either get stirred up or I totally fall asleep. If a book really interests me, I'll have to keep reading it till I finish it.

I prefer to block out a period of several hours so I can read a book from start to finish. It's very hard for me to read a book in sections at a time, although I'm trying to teach myself to read this way. It's really the only way in my fairly busy life, that I'll ever get a book read.

Maybe reading needs to be like losing weight or doing anything else in my life at this point. I'll have to set up a schedule, a routine and try to follow it.

Some "The Matrix Reloaded" tidbits. I was going through a pile of old newspapers when I ran across a SF Chron interview with Keanu Reeves for the movie. Here's what Keanu said about his reading list for both movies.

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When he prepared for the original "Matrix", the Wachowski brothers asked Reeves to read Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" and Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" so he'd gain an understanding of issues surround artificial intelligence. For the sequels, Reeve says, "the brothers told me if I wanted to look at what they were doing, I should read some Schopenhauer, some Hume and their old pal Nietzsche. I got a little bit into Schopenhauer, but you have to keep going backward -- you start at "Will and Representation", then you have to read "The Four Fold Path", and then, Schopenhauer hates Hegel, and he's opposed to Kant, so you start reading Kant, and then you go, OK -- I've go to do some stretching and some kicking".
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I'm starting back on counting my calories again to lose those last 10 stubborn pounds. Wow, I have been way more than I thought. I haven't been gaining any weight though, and I guess that's a good thing.

I decided to start off easy and try to eat only 1400 calories this week. I thought I could start with 1300 calories, but after 1200 calories I was still hungry. YIKES!!!

It's the snacks that are killing me. A cookie here, a piece of candy there, and pretty soon I've eaten the equivalent of two meals. I've been lax about religiously counting my calories since I went on the cruise, so that's two months of an eating free for all.

I would gain a 2-5 pounds, but then if I just cut back a little on my food intake my weight would come down to where it was before I stopped being vigilant. If this is maintenance eating, it's not that bad.

But now for these last 10 pounds. If I can do it on my own, I think I may join weight watchers. I've resisted it so far, and managed to lose weight without joining but I would so dearly love to get rid of these last incredibly donkey stubborn 10 pounds.

I know my body is fighting me. It likes this weight because I weighed this weight for a really long time. Maybe it's my set weight, so who knows. I know I used to weigh less so I know it can be done. I still have a few things in my closet that don't fit, and they bug me.

Maybe I need to give up juice. I don't even drink 100% juice anymore anyway. I always dilute my juice with mineral water. It tastes better and it's kind of like drinking soda, plus I drink a quarter of the juice I would normally drink. Maybe it's back to mineral water with a lemon twist.

Definitely no more trips to junk food palaces like Burger King and Taco Bell. I know I need to start exercising again regularly as well. I really slacked off on that big time in the last two months.

I took a four mile walk this evening, and I worked out on Saturdday and Sunday. If I exercise every day even if it's just walking 4-5 miles a day, I know this will help me in the battle of the last 10 immovable pounds that are fighting for dear life to hold on to my body.