So I’ve had a rough week.

At work, I’ve been filling in for a co-worker, taking on all of her responsibilities in addition to my own all week. I spent most of my days responding to near-constant requests for builds, reports, etc. There were a few periods of ”down time,” but it was a lot of pressure.

And I discovered that pressure kills my creativity. I arrived home every night and crashed, watching MST3K or just reading. I couldn’t even read much; I’d get a headache after a while. Which is like Richard Simmons getting a headache after five minutes of exercise.

I left work a little early on Friday, after finishing almost everything that was asked of me. I swung by the grocery store, picked up food for the week, arrived home, put the food away, started to make dinner…and realized that I was looking forward to dinner. I wanted to be creative with it. The week was over, and I felt normal again. And I hadn’t felt that way for at least ten days.

Friday evening was spent enjoying myself. I made some ice cream and munched on caramel popcorn while reading more of The Suit (an excellent book on men’s clothing), both cats laying next to me, their eyelids drooping.

I felt happy. Haven’t felt that in a while, either.

Saturday (today) was a blast. I made some pizza, did a few satisfying errands, finished The Suit, and had my parents over for a hugely enjoyable dinner (I made hamburgers and oven fries, a meal I’m still just learning to make).

So I feel like I’m back in business. Ready for action. And next weekend is Otakon. Whew.

Comments:

Staying offline for a whole week at a time proved inefficient. I would want to research an actor or a story, and by the time Saturday rolled around the originating need was overtaken by events. So, okay, I’ll come online twice a week.

And what a week it’s been. I’m in a team of three, all of whom do roughly the same thing but on different programs. One of my teammates is on vacation this week, so I’m servicing all of her programs, as well as my own. I’ve been responding to build requests almost non-stop from nine to five every day.

But it’s been fine. Tuesday was worst; I felt most harried that day. But I’m used to it now, and the week’s more than half over, so I’m calm. In fact, today I was downright cheerful as folks stopped by my desk.

I’ve realized that I don’t handle pressure very well. I’m okay at it, but high-pressure situations make me excitable, irritated, and generally unhappy. This is important to know (so says Peter Drucker, who writes about the value of knowing your strengths).

Yeah, I’ve been reading Drucker. If you don’t know, Peter Drucker’s a management guru who’s been writing since World War II. I’ve never read him before, but have frequently heard the advice, “If you only read two people about business, read Tom Peters and Peter Drucker.” Well, I’ve read Tom Peters (his Brand You 50! never leaves my side at work), and I recently bought The Essential Drucker from ALibris.

Drucker has a refreshingly straightforward writing style. He writes about fundamentals (at least, he does in this book, which I suppose is not surprising). What’s essential to at least lowering the odds of failure in business? Concrete plans for addressing specific customer desires. No vague “We provide top-tier value to our clients” business models. What are you going to do today? This week? How will that help your customers? What impact will that have on the world at large?

It reminds me of a sign my manager had on top of his computer monitor, so he had to stare at it multiple times per day. It was a silver plaque that read:

T H I N K!

Comments:

Amazing, really, how things that seem so meaningless can actually be so true.

I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching. Its sayings have dovetailed with what I’ve been learning in my daily meditations, that external knowledge is less important than internal knowledge. That the path to true peace begins (and ends?) inside one’s own being.

Take away your thoughts and your feelings, and what would be left? A person who is truly at peace no longer needs conscious thought or feelings to function. Not that thought or feeling are bad; just that they aren’t necessary to live. Do you need to think about a sunset? Do you need to feel it? Or can you just watch it?

Comments:

I’ve had a tough week at work. I’ve been working on several major problems, all of them big technical headaches with no clear path forward. I managed to fix them—I think—on Friday afternoon, so at least I don’t have to worry about them this weekend.

As a result, I’ve been arriving home and crashing at night. Haven’t felt like making or doing much of anything. I’m tired of stir-fry, which has been a staple of my diet for months. At least I can still eat my other dishes.

So I spent several evenings watching anime. In particular:

1. Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid. As mentioned earlier, I watched the first half two weeks ago, and thought it was excellent. The last half was fantastic. Absolutely perfect in a lot of ways, though I felt frustrated that the main relationship wasn’t pushed forward as much as it felt the show was leading up to. Still, it was dramatic and funny and exciting and generally everything I love in a mecha show. ‘Twas also gratifying to see a few Gundam references.
2. Eureka 7, another mecha show, this one more inspired by Cowboy Bebop than, say, Gundam (though it has a few fun Gundam references). I’m only a few episodes in, but what I’ve seen so far has been enjoyable and very well-made.
3. Strawberry Marshmallow, a perfectly-named show: absolute sugary fluff. It’s a modern slice-of-life comedy about a group of of eleven- and twelve-year old girls. Nothing of significance occurs. Best described as ”cute little girls doing cute things.” Some folks hate saccharine shows like this; I love ‘em. Wonder what that says about me.
4. KamiChu!, another slice-of-life comedy about young girls, though this one is a little more serious. It focuses on four junior high school girls in a slightly alternate world full of small gods; the protagonist has been granted goddess powers and now finds herself in great demand. Lots of good, clean fun.

Meanwhile, I’m closing in on finalizing draft 2 of Giant Armors, my young adult novel. Several reviewers pointed out that the ending lacks dramatic power, so I’ve been rewriting several other scenes to make the final fight much more desperate.

It’s been a fascinating experience. The story has diverged so drastically from its initial concept, and I’m having a great time traveling this path. Can’t wait to start draft 3, and really flesh out all the descriptions and word choices and such.

In completely different news, congratulations to Robert Eggleton on net-publication of his fantasy novel Rarity. He sent an advance copy to me to critique, and while I was unable to do that, I provided a blurb for him. The writing is just amazing; fleshed out, detailed, the kind that draws you inexorably in.

And that’s it for me today.

I’m in day three of an experiment: Except for checking e-mails and blogs, I’m only accessing the internet during one block of time on the weekend.

The experiment started when my laptop died on Thursday. I came home and, while I knew I could jump onto the internet using my secondary laptop (the one I plan to sell once I’ve convinced myself that I haven’t forgotten anything else on it), I decided to just ignore the internet for the night. I did, and enjoyed myself as I watched some Russian animations, and I thought to myself, “Why not do this every night?”

Luckily, I had no meetings at work on Friday, so I took the laptop to the Apple store that morning. The ”Genius Bar” (a.k.a. tech support) was understaffed, so I ended up waiting for an hour and a half to get serviced. But that was okay; I chatted a bit with one of the women who was being helped, and just observed my environment. Was nice being in the Apple store when it’s not massively crowded, too; it seems to be stuffed with people on evenings and weekends. And fortunately, the laptop was fine; I hadn’t installed some new RAM correctly.

So I came home and, after spending about fifteen minutes processing e-mail and blogs, I had the rest of the evening free. I made two batches of ice cream, started on some cinnamon buns for tomorrow, and wrote a few hundred more words of Giant Armors. I feel all creative ‘n’ stuff now.

That’s partly due to these Russian animations I’ve been watching. I ordered volume 2 on Amazon.com about a year ago, and was blown away by some of them. I bought volumes 1 and 3 recently, and while there are more duds in these volumes, there were a few amazing works in there. In particular, the stop-motion shorts were fantastic.

So, here are my top thirteen favorite short films from the ”Masters of Russian Animation” collection:

• “My Green Crocodile,” stop-motion fable by Vadim Kurchevsky (1966)
• “Ball of Wool,” stop-motion fable by Nikolai Serebryakov (1968)
• “Film Film Film,” comedy about the filmmaking process by Fyodor Khitruk (1968)
• “Battle at Kerzehenets,” an animation of religious iconographic paintings by Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Yuri Norstein (1971)
• “Heron and Crane,” a fable by Yuri Norstein (1974)
• “Hedgehog in the Fog,” a fairy tale by Yuri Norstein (1975)
• “Crane Feathers,” stop-motion adaptation of a Japanese fairy tale by Ideya Garanina (1977)
• “Firing Range,” modern SF story by Anatoly Petrov (1977)
• “Hunt,” modern fable by Eduard Nazarov (1979)
• “Travels of an Ant,” in which an ant is flung from its nest and entreats others to help it get home, by Eduard Nazarov (1983)
• “Lion and Ox,” African fable by Fyodor Khitruk (1983)
• “Wolf and Calf,” humorous stop-motion fairy tale by Mikhail Kamenetsky
• “Cabaret,” an amazing stop-motion operetta by Ideya Garanina (1984)

You may note quite a few animations in there by Yuri Norstein. Oddly, he also made an animation, “Tale of Tales,” which was voted the greatest animation of all time by a San Francisco festival, and I can’t stand to watch it. Nothing at all happens. Nicely done, certainly, but it consists entirely of characters walking around. At least, I assume it does; I couldn’t sit through it all.

Which is such a contrast to an anime series called Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid, an under-appreciated work of raw genius which I’m halfway through. They’ve taken a solid concept with previously lackluster adaptations and made a fantastic action series and character drama out of it. It’s brilliant on numerous levels. I hope someday I will make something this good; this is a masterpiece (a word I rarely use, and that I only use in its full meaning of a once-in-a-lifetime, defining work).

I also finished The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which started strong and ended strong. It’s another series that works well on numerous levels, though it’s primarily a comedy.

Anyvay. After all that, with several days’ diet of no internet, I woke up this morning and made this:

Maybe taking leave of the internet is a good idea….

Comments:

Well, this has been a practically perfect day.

I’m sitting on the forest green cushions of my window seat, looking out at the fireworks being set off by my neighbors down the street (they’re Hispanic; they’ve hung an American flag in front of their house). A car just beeped merrily at the fireworks as it passed. To my left, I can see my downstairs bathroom, which has been almost completely renovated today; we put down baseboards, put the sink back after tiling the floor yesterday, and moved the light switch from the middle of one wall (?!) to the other side of the room, next to the door. I can also see my kitchen, in which we hung four extra lights.

This isn’t merely cosmetic; most of the changes are either to replace thirty-year-old fixtures with new ones, or to improve a poor room (until today, my kitchen was lit by two naked bulbs).

Once we were done today—and boy, were we done—I followed my parents back to their place, where we chatted and had dinner. I made my way back here about an hour ago, and I realized this on the way back:

I’ve made it.

I own my own home and my own car. I’m respected and admired by my parents. I’m keeping in contact with my friends and family, whom I love. I have money left over after paying my bills. I’m in a secure job where I’m doing everything that needs to be done. I feel like I’ve dealt with most of my psychological issues.

Obviously, I’m not perfect, and my life’s not perfect. But in a lot of the important ways, I feel like I’m where I need to be.

Now to work on getting to where I should be, I suppose.

My, it’s been a busy couple of days.

My parents have been stopping by the house every day since Saturday, helping me renovate the downstairs of the townhouse. We ripped up the ugly, faded linoleum floor in the bathroom and laid down new tile, re-painted the kitchen (needed a second coat), and worked on a bunch of other miscellaneous things. Today, we should be able to get new lights set up in the kitchen.

It feels good to be doing this. To be improving my environment. Finally.

Today, I drank deeply from the cup of life.

It tasted like clear, crystalline water. It tasted like the purest honey. It tasted like a snowflake fallen fresh on the tongue.

It was a full, rich, satisfying day.

Brennen and the Future

Brennen wrote:

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