Look what the Easter Bunny brought!

Slog,

I'd like you to meet Cerie. My new laptop. This is now where I am blogging from. As you can see, it is a new, very pretty laptop--young and gamine. Thin. Thus, Cerie, after the character on 30 Rock. We're still getting to know each other, but so far so good. I've promised not to break her, and she's promised not to break me. It seems fair.

But, we don't get anywhere by forgetting where we came from. Here, then, is a photo of the Toshiba Satellite, which I never bothered to name (that may have been where our problems began). It was a good, hard-working computer. I should've taken better care of it. When its internal temperature rose to, I don't know, eight million degrees, I should've looked into fixing the computer, instead of forcing us both to slog ahead, sweating. Honestly, I'm surprised I never got second degree burns from the heat of the keys. My bad, Toshiba. My bad.

This is the laptop on which I wrote my applications for MFA programs, and my master's thesis. (Hence all the food crumbs down in the keys--it's like I physically couldn't compose that thesis without some crumby snack in hand.) It's where I started my Facebook page, and my slog, and lost countless hours researching celebrities and other material for my fiction: favorite such searches include "ice mummies," "dirt-eating," and "marionette horror movies." Doesn't that make you want to read my stories? I know.

I don't know if you can see it, but the oil and dirt from my wrists actually imprinted themselves into the Toshiba, making two heart-shaped stains. Isn't that nice? And also a strong hint that I ought to wash my wrists more? Point taken.

Now I'm in this weird no-man's-land, where most of the work I need is still on the Toshiba, and it will let me turn it on for ten minutes, so I have to prioritize the items I most need to rescue, and then save them to a thumb drive and do it fast. It's daunting.

Also on the fritz: my iPod, my TV remote, and my shower. So, just another day in the endless, endless, battle between me and All The Technology in The World.

Yours,

Kendall

"Whatever you feel, just DANCE it."

For reasons I cannot remember now, I once saw the movie "Center Stage." Okay, twice. Twice! And, as a total non-dancer, it's an entirely forgettable movie. Except for two things: Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, and the Most Meaningful Movie Quote Ever:

"Whatever you feel, just dance it."

See, that's what I've been trying to do in my life. Not dancing, necessarily (though I have been making it a point to dance a little bit every day, when no one is watching), but more just embracing and expressing whatever mood I'm in. And this week I've had a particular mood: a non-blogging mood. A mood that makes it impossible to do dishes, or take out the garbage, or eat fruits and vegetables. A mood that makes it impossible to return phone calls or emails. A mood that allows for one thing, and one thing only: DVDs of Friday Night Lights.

I've been in the mood to carry on an unhealthy relationship with my DVD player, and by extension, the entire Dillon Panthers football team. I've been in a mood to wear pajamas all day, and say, "Bleh," a lot. And I've enjoyed it. I've totally danced it.

And now, I'm passed it. I'm back in real clothes, and eating vegetables, and the garbage has been taken out. I'm blogging! And yesterday, some friends and I took the blog on a road trip to Spokane, and WE SAW AVATAR. Which leads me to my question for the day.

Question: is 3D cinema just a trick where all the leaders of the world were like, "Do you think we can get millions of people to wear really uncomfortable, ridiculous looking plastic glasses? You know, just to sort of test how gullible and foolish they are?"

Because, as a society we've put people in outer space, we've learned how to transplant hearts and faces from one body to another, and we've made robots to vacuum our houses for us. Hell, people figured out how to make a movie like Avatar, but these are what we have to wear to watch it? These are the best we can do?

I find that very hard to believe.


Disbelieving (and dancing that disbelief),

Kendall

Kendall Writes a Script.

(This is how I'm going to dress to write my TV episodes, too.)

INT. Night. Kendall's apartment (where, yes, ANOTHER hobo spider has recently been discovered in the shower, and murdered). Kendall sits on her futon, her laptop atop her lap, typing, and occasionally looking ponderously at the ceiling. She speaks quietly to herself.

KENDALL:

What on earth do I blog about today? My Valentine's Day hangover? The fact that I've still only read 120 pages of Moby Dick? What President's Day means to me? I know, I'll blog about software.

I'm a whole lot closer to recognizing my dream of being a TV writer, because now I have FINAL DRAFT 8. What is Final Draft? It is a program that makes a script out of a word document. It has all the necessary formatting! Apparently. I don't actually know how it works yet. (Also, I don't know how to make a TV episode. I know there's an A story, a B story, and sometimes a C story, and tags and buttons, etc. but, I don't know how you make those things. Yet.)

The point is, I've set a goal for myself that seems hard to attain (writing for TV), especially from my spider house on the Palouse, and it's super easy to get bogged down in the size of a dream that seems far, far away. But I think I'm learning something important, which is that I just need to focus on the step that is right in front of me. It becomes sort of manageable and measurable--two helpful qualities with goal-reaching. Today, I got the necessary software. Victory!

Tomorrow: I'll figure out how it works. I can handle it.

Measured and managed,

Kendall