21 April 2002

I have a tortilla spread with Nutella and dotted with sliced strawberries. There is a bouquet of daffodils blooming on my kitchen table. I love mornings.

We watched "Brazil" on Friday night, I forgot to say. Kind of movied me out for last night. I'd never seen "Brazil" before. Unfortunately, "Real Genius" has ruined me for dream sequences forever. Or at least for now. Every time I see a dream sequence, I hear Val Kilmer in my head, "Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on top of a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throw little pickles at you? Why am I the only one who has this dream?" It didn't spoil "Brazil" for me, and I did like the heat-suited volleyball players, but....

And speaking of disturbing, Layne Staley, the lead singer from Alice in Chains, died. I'm not all crushed and depressed over this, but it's kind of weird. They were never my favorite band, but when I was dating Scott, the song we considered "ours" was an Alice in Chains song. (Go ahead and tell me what that says about the relationship if you want to, but I think I already know, thanks.) So it's not so much the end of an era as...I don't know, marking an era that was already over. It seemed like it was at just the wrong time. If it had been several years ago, it would have been a statement of Grunge Being Over. If it had been fifty years from now, it would have been The Passing Of A Generation. Instead, it was...nothing much in the way of easy symbolic statements. More on which later.

I've heard some writers talking about how it kills a story for them if they talk it out too much beforehand, and I just don't understand that. I need to babble about most projects, and I find out more interesting things in babbling about them than I would otherwise. Also...I respect the people I talk to. I really do. Even if I don't use their suggestions, they spur me to think of other things, or to plug up plot holes, or whatever. To develop the story better. Which leads, through much angst and hard work, to telling the story better. Sometimes it's hard to recognize this when Timprov is bouncing things off of me, because when I ask, "Well, is it this? Is it that? Is it the other?" and he keeps saying, "No...no...no...." it's hard to see how the gears are turning in there, what he's coming up with as a result. But I know it works that way for me, so if other people say it works that way for them, I know I should believe them.

Mark and I attempted church this morning, only to find that the worship time had been falsely advertised in both the phone book and the webpage notice. Oops. Ah well. Yesterday we had a lovely Ikea run, returning with the wrong size picture frames (we'll exchange them), knäckebrod, Anna's orange thins, lingonberries, gooseberries, and two jars of cloudberries. And we had a good lunch and went up Mt. Diablo. For some reason, my reaction this time took the form of three more-or-less open letters to people I love. So you can read those starting here as soon as I get the pictures ready to go with them. Have a good day. Me, I'm going to do nothing...well...nothing much, anyway....