2/4/03 -- Drifting along

Yes, welcome to my new movie script, "Ass Brandon: Diary of a Deluded Secret Agent."

No, really, though. I always thought I was the kind of person that went for it, you know? Adventurous. Aries. Driven. The kind of person that would raise their hand in a room full of people not raising their hand to ask the question everybody wants to know the answer to.

But lately, I've found myself floating along with life instead of swimming against its current. I've found myself just enjoying what's around me, drifting, coasting a bit, catching my breath because I just have a gut feeling that in a few months, everything will change again and this period will seem like the eye in between storms of activity.

Mostly it's that I'm happy. I just feel in some ways that I'm not so worried about things, not as hard on myself for stuff I feel I ought to be doing, and that there are some things that are just out of my hands right now.

I know that the next three weeks are going to be really busy with some LCP travel to South Texas and to Vancouver and that the week after that I'm going to Houston for a short convention.

Part of breezing along is knowing that my next three weekends are booked, so there's no use worrying about upcoming concerts (Erykah Badu will be here and I'm going to be sad when I miss her), worrying that I need to shop for living room curtains or that I need to do laundry. Everything's going to be frantic and crazed and fast and exhausting, and there's a kind of resigned calm that comes with knowing and expecting these things in advance.

Of course, that doesn't mean life is stress-free. I just realized Sunday night that I have a defensive driving certificate due at the municipal court for a speeding ticket due, oh, today. Have I taken defensive driving? No. And yeah, I know about the one online, and I was all set to take it and then... well, I don't know what then. Three months passed before I knew it and suddenly, it was too late to even take the online course and get the certificate UPS'd to me. So today, I'm going to throw myself on the mercy of the court and hope they don't kick me while I'm down there.

I watched the shuttle coverage on Saturday morning until I couldn't watch anymore. And I felt a hurt, a pang, but most disturbingly, I found that shock and sadness compartmentalizing itself, storing itself away inside me, in the file that contains Oklahoma City and 9/11 and the day my class was ushered back from lunch in Biloxi, Miss., and we were told that the Space Shuttle Challenger, the one with the teacher on it, had blown up.

The universal sadness now files itself away more quickly because it realizes what it is and what it relates to, what other incidents it resembles. And it's both useful and sad that the numbness helps, that this is not an isolated incident. It makes me feel less human to know how quickly I could distance myself from it this time, even as debris and ash scattered itself across my home state.

And it's not really numbness with which I'm living the rest of my life right now. I think it's a kind watchful wariness. There are moments where I get really tired of certain routines that I wish I could break from, but I don't. And there's some writer's block going on with the novel that's kept me from working on it, and that part of it keeps me from feeling creative or productive, even as I still go to work, still write recaps, still go to rehearsals and work on scripts for our next shows, and still update here.

But there's being productive and being creative, reacting or creating and lately it's been a lot of the former, and very little of the latter.

So I'm coasting. And it's dangerous because it goes against a lot of my instincts.

But I think I can ride this thing out a little bit, maybe enjoy it for what it is. Being incredibly, productively lazy for a while.

Big pimpin'

New recap of Smallville is up for "Suspect," the "Who Shot Lionel Luthor?" episode that should have been awful, but somehow wasn't. .

The Sims Online. If the rest of the world were as addicted to this as me, I'd seem pretty normal right now. But, checkitout: 10.98 body skill, 10.70 logic skill and 9.60 cooking skill. That's right. I can make Sim-Preserves with MUCH skill. Take that, biz-natches.

I'd like to take this moment to say that because of my profession, there's an awful lot of things I'm not really free to talk about publicly. Which is why it's nice to be friends with someone as like-minded as Pineapple Girl, because a lot of times she says the things I wish I could say, but can't. (And that if I could say, I probably wouldn't as well because I don't have the background in politics and sociology that she does.) So go read her with the understanding that about 95 percent of what she says is stuff I absolutely agree with. (The other 5 percent is girlie stuff I'd probably agree with if I understood it at all.)

Plus, she can outdrink me. A lot.

So, I went to see How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Saturday. (Shut up, Pamie. I'm NOT gay.) And they showed this trailer before the movie. It shows a space shuttle falling to earth and then crash landing in some Grease-looking cement ravine. I groaned really loudly and said, "Oh, HELLS no!" So glad they pulled it. Not glad they made that movie, but glad they pulled the ad, at least.

Oh, and my little brother (the one that writes in blue text) is having finger surgery on Tuesday. Send some nice wishes his way. In fact, if you know where he can score a bionic finger, let him know. I was telling somebody about how one of his surgical options had the potential to get infected and cause them (the doctors, not my brother and co-journaler) to cut the tip of his finger right the fuck off! If you play videogames or type a lot like we do, you can imagine the horror inherent in that little prognosis.

I told that to someone and they suggested he lose the tip of the finger and get a metal tip like Holly Hunter in The Piano. I tried to stop laughing long enough to tell them that wasn't funny.

2/4/03 The floater...

2/4/03
The floater...