My jaw’s been sore for the past few days, still healing from my dental appointment last week. At least it seems to be hurting less. But a painful jaw should get you out of anything. You should be able to say only, “My jaw hurts,” and boom! Time off from work, discounts at Starbuck’s, and an empty lane in front of you on the road.

In any event, I feel like I’m slipping away from my goals. I’ve spent time doing things that are good, but that don’t support my goals. Things like cleaning, checking physical mail, talking to friends, etc. And a lot of it has been tiring me out. On the other hand, I have been doing good things instead of pointless things (surfing the web, etc.).

And it’s not that I don’t want to relax or spend time “off;” I’ve just been…I don’t know. Feeling the need to get this stuff done, I guess.

Maybe I’m just backsliding into busy-work without relaxation. Or maybe my jaw’s just making me grumpy.

Had a bit of a scare today: I received a phone call mid-morning from my tenant, informing me that her car was towed this morning. Ugh; I felt terrible for her, and I felt really bad myself about having to deal with this. I zipped home as quickly as I could to get the name of the towing place, but meanwhile her boyfriend was able to get the car. And I’ve wanted to talk to her about it, but she works nights, so she probably won’t get in until the wee hours.

…My jaw hurts.

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Had a fun Memorial Day with my parents. All we did was go to the grocery store then stayed home and chatted, but that was great. It’s a real blessing to have parents with which that’s fun.

Came home and tried a bit of meditation. I recently read an excellent article about meditation, which re-encouraged me to try it. So I spent five minutes sitting on the floor, consciously quieting my mind.

It was a very powerful experience. Afterwards, I felt much more alive and focused on the moment.

Then, after practicing a bit of Tai Chi, I watched some more Gundam Wing. It’s a much better show than I’d remembered, to be honest. It has a surprising amount of real, tense drama. The characters…well, they’re not especially complex, but then this is fiction. The characters are very well-balanced; they play off each other in fascinating ways.

I’m trying to think of an example, but nothing really comes to mind. And I need sleep anyway, and I’m not going to sacrifice any more sleep than I have already. I respect my body too much for that.

And so, I go to bed.

Well, that was an exciting way to end the day.

First, yesterday: My new tenant moved in. Finally! I found a tenant, and a normal person at that. She had a couple of trips on Saturday, hauling the amazing amount of stuff that’s always needed during a move. That went fine.

I then had a wonderful evening with Mandy, as usual, watching Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro. Yes, anime. But really good anime. And she enjoyed them. So there.

And I just got home from a fun day: Spent most of the day role-playing at Nick’s house, then just chatted with him and his parents for most of the evening. As I left, I saw I had a voicemail from my new tenant, who informed me she’d kinda sorta accidentally locked the main door handle in addition to the dead bolt, and locked herself out of the house. I always use the deadbolt, never the handle.

So I returned her call and said smoothly that I’d be home in about an hour. Fortunately, she was at a friend’s house, so I didn’t have to worry about her sitting on my doorstep for an hour. I then looked down at my keyring:

Since I never use the handle lock, I don’t keep the key for it on my keyring. It was sitting in my desk at home. Locked inside.

That worried me for a few minutes, but as I started driving, I thought, No, I’m not going to spend the next hour fretting over this when there’s nothing I can do about it until I get home anyway. I let myself explore occasional possible courses of action, but beyond that I just drove and listened to Gundam SEED music.

I got home, and sure enough, I couldn’t get in. OK. I tried slamming my body against the door; no luck. So I sighed, shifted my weight into one leg, summoned all my Tai Chi practice, and lashed out with the other leg at the door.

Bang! The door slammed open. Fortunately, there’s a large gap between the door and the doorjamb at that point (it’s the deadbolt that fits snugly), and when I hit it with that much force, it just snapped open. Didn’t even do any damage to the door.

So, whew! I’m home, and safe, and boy am I glad I’m learning Tai Chi.

Well, that’s that. I just sold my PowerMac G5. I had put an ad on CraigsList last week, and somebody came by today to buy it. A very nice young woman, a local web designer in fact, who was thrilled to get such a nice machine at this price (honestly, I couldn’t have sold it for more anywhere, as far as I can see).

Why would I sell a computer? Well, honestly, I don’t need it. I bought it to help with video editing and general image manipulation at Otherspace, but now that I’ve pulled back from Otherspace, I don’t do that any more. Heck, even before that, others were doing all the video editing and image manipulation. My G5 was just a place to download anime.

And I’ve been seeking to simplify my life more and more lately. Fewer projects, fewer possessions. I’m even thinking about selling my camcorder, since I haven’t used it in years.

Why? I want more focus. I want fewer things distracting me. I encounter enough roadblocks to achieving my dreams; why live with stuff that will pull me away from them? Stuff that takes up time to sort through, manage, and generally live with.

So, no. I’ll have no more of it. I’ll own what I need, and that will be that.

…Anyone willing to take any bets on how long this’ll last?

Decided to stay home from work today, and I’m glad I did; I didn’t even feel like doing anything at home, much less work. So I lazed around the house, watching MST3K and Radar Men From The Moon.

I’m increasingly attracted to the old serial format, of a larger story told in small, exciting pieces. It required a certain focus on movement; you couldn’t have long pointer scenes or drawn-out exchanges of existentialist dialogue. Thugs with guns would burst through the door before too long.

Interesting that the serial format has revived in modern SF. What was Babylon 5 but a revival of the serial format, just in a much longer form? Now all recent SF shows are expected to have a big overarching plot.

But even the original release format strikes me as a brilliant concept. I mean, okay, the movie theaters today are complaining that they’re having trouble making money. Okay:

Let’s say you go to the movies, and when you get into the theater ten minutes early, instead of watching previews for summer movies that you know you’re not going to see, you’re dropped into a roller coaster plot of aliens taking over the world. The heroes are tossed into a really tough spot, things are looking hopeless—we cut to black! And a title card comes up: “To see what happens next, come back to this theater next week.” And the trailers begin.

Imagine: A little story that you find at least entertaining, and that you can only find out more about by watching another movie. How can this not bring in people? Sure, you wouldn’t draw a lot of people to the movies alone…but there are few people who don’t want to go to the movies. Give them that incentive. “You know, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see this flick, but…I could catch the next bit of that show….”

And it’d be sure to create less anger than the current twenty minutes of ads before every movie.

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Got three teeth drilled today, so I’m having a tough time concentrating enough to write anything coherent.

Been watching the most recent MST3K collection. The movies are…bad. Which goes without saying, you’d thionk, except that MST3K always had two kinds of movies: cheesy movies and bad movies. The cheesy ones are entertaining in their own weird way; they plot may never go anywhere, but there’d be a plot. The bad ones are just difficult to watch, because nothing happens, and it’s a whole lot of nothing.

Cheesy films include, say, Manos: The Hands of Fate (though that’s really bad, at least the plot keeps leaping around from the confused couple to Torgo to the Master to the silk-clad “wives” to the kissin’ couple to the clueless cops…). One bad film in this lot is Wild Rebels, a 60′s biker film in which, let’s see, a guy auctions off his racing gear, is approached by two bikers, and agrees to help them hold up a bank. By that point we’re a full thirty minutes into the film. The bikers just take forever to get to their point, and the protagonist just stands there waiting.

Or take The Sinister Urge. This was my first Ed Wood movie, and boy is it an eye-opener (though I’m sure it’d be more of an eye-opener if I’d seen it uncut). He films everything. If a guy is told to leave the room, we watch him walk over to the door, open it, leave, and shut the door behind him. Augh.

It was fascinating to watch a principle of mine demonstrated very clearly: It’s the director that makes the actor’s performance (mostly). There’s a brief scene involving an actor who was in an other MST3K film. In the other film, he did fine. In this, he was histrionic and painful to watch. The same is true of so many actors and films; see what George Lucas was able to do with Mark Hamill in Star Wars. (Not that Mark’s a bad actor.)

…Am I making any sense? I need more Advil.

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And I did it. I managed to finish everything I wanted to last night, without feeling exhausted. It was tiring, though; I can’t do that every single night. Need at least a bit of total relaxation.

In a fit of brain activity while mourning the death of my Syllable laptop, I did manage to hook up another computer and install the latest version of Syllable on that. So, huzzah! I finally have a system with which I can support the open-source project that I’ve been affiliated with for, oh, half a decade or so, it seems. ‘Twas a good feeling as I crawled into bed.

I woke up this morning with the calm relaxed feeling one only gets from a full night’s sleep. I rolled over and fumbled for my phone to check the time (and there’s a phrase that only makes sense today…imagine someone from thirty years ago reading the sentence “I rolled over in bed and switched on my phone to check the time”), and saw that it was…9:15 a.m.

Apparently, in setting up the new Syllable computer last night, I kicked out the power cord for my laptop, so my alarm didn’t go off. I shot off a quick apologetic e-mail to my boss and threw on some clothes. As I shrugged into my shirt, my phone rang—it was a friend I’d called the night before, and hadn’t talked to in months. She wanted to fill me in on the latest going on in her life. This was a very bad time for that, though I really wanted to know. So I talked for a few minutes before begging off, then ran into work.

By the time I got there, I had about an hour before I had to leave for a dentist’s appointment. Oh, great fun, putting two permanent plasticine caps on two teeth he’d drilled a few weeks ago. I elected to wait on the remaining work (three more fillings on the other side of my mouth), and scheduled another appointment for tomorrow to do that.

Got back to work to discover that a) a local developer can’t do a build, b) the customer was confused because the build process is different (despite my explanations that the build process has changed), and c) I had a meeting tomorrow at the same time I’d scheduled the dentist appointment. So, back out to the car, where I grabbed the appointment card, phoned the dentist, and changed to a Thursday appointment. Deep breath, back to the office, where I e-mailed the customer to explain the changes in the build process.

At which point another CM person IMed me with some weird problems she was having in the lab. And I had a meeting in five minutes to present some training materials.

So. Put off the CM rep, print out the training materials, attend the meeting, then help the CM rep. Return to my office to find that the customer’s builds are blowing up spectacularly. Another deep breath, call the customer, figure out what’s going on, and resolve that problem.

Only thing remaining at this point was the local developer’s problem, which we worked on until 5:30 p.m. when we decided to give up and try again tomorrow morning.

Then off to my Mom’s to see her (my Dad is down in Mississippi, helping to rebuild the house of a Katrina victim), had a great time eating dinner and watching the MST3K version of Planet of the Prehistoric Women, and returned home about five minutes ago.

That was my day. How about yours?

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It’s a perfect day. Weather-wise, at least. About seventy degrees, sunny, with just enough clouds to provide gilding for the clear blue sky. You could walk or run and not feel the least bit like sweating, or you could stand in the shade in a t-shirt and feel comfortable. What’s better than that?

Well, obviously, a few things: Deep love. Honor. Respect. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Mmmm. (You know you can make your own?)

Where is this going, you may ask? Not sure. Let’s see where today takes me:

Woke up with the alarm and managed to crawl out of bed quickly enough that I got to work half an hour early. That was a nice bonus, since I had a two-hour meeting starting at 9:00. A meeting in which the chair recited a list of requirements for an hour and a half. Not exciting, but useful; we were able to clarify a number of things.

Then back to my desk for some last-minute work before lunch, during which I snuck out to my truck to watch an episode of Gundam Wing on my laptop. (Why? A friend wants to see it, but wants me to re-watch it before I loan it to him.) It’s been quite a few years since I watched Wing, which worried me a bit.

See, Gundam Wing was one of my early anime loves. Oh, I’d seen a fair bit of anime at that point, but that was a series I completely fell in love with, after watching enough episodes to no longer be confused (that is, about twenty). It it had some depth, but it was also able to be light-hearted and fun. It was exciting. It was classic kid’s Saturday morning adventure, but with suicidal pilots and ridiculously colored giant robots. It was also my first Gundam series, a franchise I’ve since gobbled up with the joy of a starving African given a free trip to Outback Steakhouse.

So, I worried, would I still enjoy this series after a much broader exposure to anime? Would my experience with the rest of Gundam hurt my love of this series, or would I still be able to love it?

Yes!

Oh man is it fun. I can see the cheesiness more clearly now, and the voice acting grates on my ears now that I’ve heard so much better. I’m not quite the die-hard fan I once was; my appreciate is more mature. But I still love it on a deep, fundamental level. It’s such great fun.

So, back to work, where I finished up some training materials and took care of other business before quitting time. I took a shrewd shortcut that ended up adding five minutes to my driving time, and stopped by the grocery store to stock up on exotic things like onions and butter. Then home.

And here, at home, I began a serious night of more work. Because i need to clear the decks of a bunch of things that have been bothering me—mostly phone calls that I need to make—and I’m not going to put them off any more.

So I tossed ingredients into the bread machine and got that going, ate some dinner (microwaved homemade soup…not great, but certainly a good meal), hard-cooked some eggs, and just finished making a batch of chocolate chip cookies for the coming week.

So we’ll see if I can keep this up all evening, or if I crash and burn. I have two hours to make these phone calls and do some editing of Giant Armors before bedtime. Can I do it? Or will I burn out?

Bring it on.

Had a great date with Mandy on Friday, where we started out with dinner at a sushi restaurant. I’ve had sushi only twice before in my life, and both times myself and those with me were novices. Mandy knows what she’s talking about, so I was able to thoroughly enjoy every delicious bite. There’s something about the way it all comes together that just makes for an amazing morsel of scrumptious deliciousness in your mouth. Am I being too technical?

We then went back to her (lovely, homey) apartment to watch Master and Commander. What a film. It’s burned into my memory.

One of the interesting aspects to the film is how it treats nineteenth century sailing so plainly. It doesn’t particularly try to make the ship look majestic or weird or unusual. It’s just a ship. If films were being made back then, this is how they’d treat a ship.

On Saturday, I lazed around the place, baked a cake, then hauled my butt over to Reston Town Center for their annual Fine Arts Festival, in which several hundred local (and not-so-local) artists put up their wares for sale. Of course, it had its share of artists who felt they could cut out three geometric shapes, glue them to a canvas, and sell it for $500. But the great majority of artists there were really, really good.

So good, in fact, that I broke down and bought a painting by Michael Kopald. It looks a bit like this, which is another one of his works:

Yeah, I’m happy with it.

Then, today, I went out and saw Over The Hedge, the latest Dreamworks film. And if CGI continues to be this good, I’ll welcome it. Judging from the previews, it won’t be. But still, OTH was thoroughly entertaining and genuinely funny at times. A cute commentary on modern suburban living, too, without being nasty or overbearing about it. Its message wasn’t “Suburban Living Is EVIL,” it was that some people go overboard with their ideals of suburbia.

Then home to make a pot of pork-and-potato soup. Turned out well, though I added unnecessary water to the chicken stock, making the soup…well…watery, and the flavors don’t quite come together to make a real statement in your mouth. It’s just flavorful, tasty soup.

Which, on reflection, is a blessing in and of itself. I’ve felt like such a couch potato for doing nothing of real “consequence” this weekend, but really, how petty of me. I’m alive, I live in a lovely little townhouse, I get to do and make stuff that I enjoy doing and making, and heck, I’m alive on a beautiful, clear day. Isn’t that enough?

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Let’s see. What have I done lately?

It’s been a tough week at work. I finished up a major delivery, which was the first time I’ve had to do this particular process. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, but I amazed myself by actually doing it, and with no outside help whatsoever. So it ended up being a confidence-booster, but an exhausting one.

Spent Wednesday night with my parents, and I was tired enough that I stayed the evening there, re-watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It’s still my least favorite Harry Potter movie. Not that it’s bad; it just doesn’t hold together very well for me. It feels like a collection of scenes, not a flowing, driving story. I enjoyed it more the second time around, though. Impeccable timing.

Tonight, I had more energy. I got groceries, mowed my front lawn, did a load of laundry, burned a DVD of Densha Otoko, posted ads on CraigsList for a renter and someone to buy my desktop computer, watched Mortal Kombst: Annihilation (wonderfully awful), cleaned out old paperwork that had been collecting dust in my filing cabinets, watched an episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi (indescribably fantastic anime), and talked to Saalon for a good hour.

So, yeah, a fairly productive evening. Amazing what you can do if you just set your mind to it. I just hope I’m not pushing myself too hard, but I sure don’t feel overstressed. Heck, I feel energized.

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