Haven't written for awhile... where to start...
I have a job. A real job. Nothing against my fellow servers, who are amazing people and lovely to work with--I'm sad to leave the food industry because you cannot find a more interesting, diverse, and personable group of people--but I never considered it anything but a temporary measure to pay the bills, and this new job is more than that. I'll be working as a college outreach adviser, helping high school students to think about, apply to, and finance college. I know it's going to be hard work but if I do my job well, I'll be changing lives. It's difficult to find a job that you can say that about. I was shaking when I got the phone call. It's a temporary position, from August 1 2008 until May 31 2009, which may just work out perfectly if I get into grad school next year.
I broke my collarbone. It was one of those random, stupid, silly things, not even a good story, I was just riding my bike down a hill, hit a pot hole, and went butt-over-head, which is a much more accurate description than head-over-heels. I won't be whole until September; in the meantime I'm supposed to wear a sling but almost never do because I am a rebellious child. Also because the doctor told me I didn't have to. My collarbone is always going to stick up funny. This shouldn't be depressing but it is.
Just got back from California (San Diego and then LA). It was a wonderful trip, too short. I got to spend a morning with my Grandma, an afternoon babysitting my cousins (four of them... which is excellent birth control and confirmed my decision to only have two children when the time comes), hours and hours on beaches, an entire day with my Grandpa, who took us sailing to Coronado and then out for margaritas in Old Town, plus a tour of the Gaslamp district. Got to see my brave little cousin Ella who is just three months old and has survived two operations in conjunction with a brain tumor. Andy stepped it up and was a perfect gentleman to my Grandma, asked my Grandpa all kinds of questions that I had never thought to ask him, and didn't grumble too much when I wanted to just sit on the beach for hours. We went to the zoo, where he meowed at all the cats... silly boy. He took me to a couple of beer bars and breweries, where everything finally just clicked for me--he's been trying to train me to really appreciate beer for over a year and I've just humored him--and I got excited about some of the beers we tried, especially the Petrus Aged Pale. We went to Stone Brewery, which is just a beautiful place aside from having an amazing selection, and later in LA we went to a Biergarten where I decided that my favorite patio drink is a good Bavarian Weiss.
Also in LA: saw Wicked at Pantages. Very cool theater, elaborate and well-performed production. Lots of themes to think about. I don't remember the novel being nearly as good. Went to a Dodgers game, which was as fun as a game can be when the scoreboard looks like this:
300000000
000000001
(Andy tells me this is typical of Major League Baseball games. Almost as boring as watching golf.) Venice Beach wasn't quite what we expected--more trinkets and less performers. We wandered along the beach from the end (or start) of the boardwalk all the way to Santa Monica (?) pier.
Now we're back and busy finding a place to live (we're moving closer to downtown/U of U for Andy), working extra shifts where we can, trying to make everything work out.
Things are coming together as far as my manuscript. I feel good about the different projects I'm working on, have one just about completed and a great start on another. I need to get going on my screenplay, though. If I want to enter American Zoetrope I need to finish it by August 1. I'm only about a third of the way done. In the back of my head I guess I'm planning on doing it Kerouac-style, maybe three caffeine-fueled days of writing. Not a good plan. That's how the script started, though. I wrote the first thirty pages over the course of several feverish hours. If I finish it and love it, I'll have a tough decision to face: apply to Michener for fiction or screenwriting? Fiction is my passion but I might have better odds with a screenplay, especially a strong one. We'll see. I wish I could apply in both genres. (I can study both genres, sort of major/minor style, if I get in, but I'd love that extra chance of getting in.)
I miss the ocean.
