2025-W15 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Snyder ended up rescheduling to next Monday and I gave up on having something for him to review. That’s fine. Tworek also ended up rescheduling but only to the next day. In other news, I joined Rambo’s Patreon. I think as of today, Sunday, I’m going to treat Snyder’s call as an introduction and not make it too heavy, but DEFINITELY have something/anything for him to review next time. And with Rambo’s Patreon, that will force me on a monthly schedule of having something to review as well. Finally, the Tworek call on Friday… was feeling a little intimidated again. It’s one thing to listen, set intentions, and ask questions, which was the de rigueur of the last two sessions, but this Friday was finally “real” in the sense that the professor was asking me what I thought, and what I observed. So now I’m on the spot and I haven’t been on the spot academically in a long time, and actually thinking through and articulating my observations made me wonder for a bit if my insights were inadequate, or stupid, or trying to hard. In short, it was uncomfortable… but also, exactly what real learning is. Being uncomfortable in sussing out what you actually think about difficult, nuanced, and complex subject matter. It felt good afterwards to have gone through it. But in the moment, in the actual situation of it, I was definitely squirming in my seat. This is good. This is all good stuff.
• OK - so no work was done on prj: MERCI, but I started a new thing for the RAMBO ASSW on Friday night while at the office for the second time that day: prj: MUSIC, which is a story I’ve had sitting in my head for a while now. As per last week, it’s not something I needed to do a ton of research for as it’s set in the modern era (OK, it’s set 30 years ago so there are a few things to look up for fun), but I’m not learning a completely new dialect, a new technology, and building a concept from the ground up is what I’m saying. It is still a lot of work. It’s due tomorrow night and I need to keep the scope contained, which I think I can. Keep it at around 2500 words. I have the key scenes mapped out in my head (which is important). I have the ending, which is UBER-IMPORTANT. And I have the CDA… sorta. That one is throwing me for a loop a bit. I kinda know what I want to say, but it’s also not concrete yet.
• Did I just buy another Scrivener license I didn’t need? One license should go for multiple computers right? Pretty sure I did. Dammit. But also bought a copy of Story Genius (2016) by Lisa Cron because Sandra Tayler and two others in SLSC said it really helped them. Went to Chapters after dropping off donations at Crossroads and just picked it up. Started reading it there, and just kept going. Over 150 pages in. Yes, it reaffirms everything I’ve been working towards the last twelve months.

Four Thousand Weeks

• On Monday, eldest had a concert but forgot his dress shoes, pants, well, all of it, so we had to turn into that horribly designed mall on Westwood, looped around, went back and then back out, which ended up making both of us late, which led to a bad start of the week. Tuesday night, he goes out to see BeabaDooBee at the Pacific Coliseum and somehow manages to forget all common sense on how to get home. And then he’s crew for a school production of Something Rotten! (2015) on Thursday and Friday nights. I’m not complaining about the actual events in and of themselves. But the lack of common sense surrounding the logistics of how to get there, how to get back, what needs to be done. But can I really fault him when I made those exact same absurd mistakes and utterly stupid decisions. Hello, 19yo me who walked from Como Lake & Westwood all the way home to Hastings and Boundary after a party, after the busses stopped running. Got home at 830AM? Of course, by that point, my mother had stopped saying stuff to me. Didn’t give up worrying of course, mothers don’t do that, but how much more overbearing nagging can you do? I wore her down. But this is 2025 and he has Uber on his phone, we are middle-class and can afford it, and he has it in his head, all my children do that it would be “too much”. This is ultimately a net-positive thing. For them to be hyper aware of expenses.
• Friday night was weird. Eldest was crew for musical as above. Youngest and wife went to another school production of a musical. Middle one had a band reunion. So I was left alone, but not really, because I still had to pick up eldest after the wrap up, so it was like this window where work was done and everybody else was doing something. I think what made it weird was that I now have a full-time job and there is a clear delineation between done and not-done. There is actually breathing room. I think I’m still getting used to this. When I was freelancing, there was always this tremendous guilt and weight to find more clients, land another project, work on projects, fill up every single minute of every hour of doing something productive. I think two years ago, I would’ve probably went into the office and had every intention of working on a project, only to devolve into watching a TV show or movie and just feel guilty and horrible the entire time. So much of my sixteen years as a freelancer was simply avoidant activities and hating myself afterwards for wasting time. Resenting the lack of self-control.

Story Introspection

• Reread the enter X-Manhunt crossover from beginning to end in one sitting. It wasn’t as bad as my original initial impressions of it were. There were a lot more standouts than I remembered. I didn’t mention NYX last week, but I truly did enjoy that one. I’m perfectly fine with Professor X being a villain in this modern era. He is a villain, and I think it’s fine to admit that. Nobody who recruits small innocent children to fight their wars is good. So you can also add Dumbledore, Gandalf, and all the Narnian animals to the mix. Fight your own damn wars.
• Reread Bernard Cooper’s Old Birds (1999), and Amy Hempel’s short essay before it. The conflict between ambiguous loss vs. definitive loss and how PROT struggles with that hit a lot harder on this second read. I’m not sure I’ve completely nailed down what it meant in the end for PROT’s mind to wander off to the retirement home he’s designing with the aviary. I mean aside from the fact that his father mentions “old birds” and he makes that leap. I mean, is that it? Is that all Cooper wants to show us? There’s no deeper meaning? Or is there a very basic and obvious metaphor of caged birds? How he’s trapped, or how these retirees are trapped in the retirement home until their death, or how PROT is trapped with dealing with the two types of loss as per above? The dad is put up in an apartment, not a retirement home, not a cage. That’s why he wanders off and PROT has to fetch him and/or deal with his wandering caused by his mental decline. So maybe the PROT’s meandering to an aviary in a retirement home is exactly that wish that he could put his father away like a caged bird. But he didn’t, and there’s a finality in the last paragraph where Cooper clearly states this is the last time they will talk. So either he dies, or maybe, maybe, he did end up putting him in a retirement home and that’s why they don’t talk again.
• Burned through three episodes of White Lotus last Sunday, fully caught up on The Studio as of last night.

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