12 of 12: May

Happy 12 of 12, everybody; all credit/blame goes to Chad Darnell. Enjoy!

8:00 - Waking up; no, I have not painted/gotten new sheets/gotten new apartment. I have, however, gotten a house-sitting gig, so there you go.

 8:20 - Watching Lost first thing, before the Internet spoils me. Clyde helps.

11:15 - Hibiscus tea cooler, script notes, and sunshine at the Peet's on Fourth St. My life is so hard.

12:30 - I'm unclear on the necessity of giant soccer balls hanging from the ceiling of Bette's Oceanview Diner, but then again, does anybody ever really need giant soccer balls hanging overhead, especially when there's already retro adorableness and breakfast food involved? BONUS.

12:50 - Brunch-for-lunch with Caroline, and before you ask: yes, we each had savory egg-based dishes plus a shared stack of pancakes, and no, I do not regret this decision.

3:05 - Oh, work-hunting, you are un-fun.

4:38 - Scandalous traffic getting from Highway 13 onto Highway 24.

5:34 - I'm going! Officially!

5:52 - This is the part of the day where we have sausage, onion, and olive pizza for dinner...and I pick off all the sausage, onions, and olives. Starving children in Africa, I apologize.

6:20 - Awana, before the establishing of order.

7

7:17 - Did your Wednesday involve a cardboard diorama of Paul and Silas's miraculous escape from prison (Acts 16:25-36), complete with yarn river and tiny prison bars? I thought not.

7:34 - Fifth- and sixth-grade Awana girls, who make life just that much more delightful. Noisy, but delightful. (Posted with their permission, promise!)

12 of 12: April

Sometimes, it's 12 of 12 and I'm out of town, or hanging with friends, or doing something really interesting. Today is not one of those days. It's not Chad Darnell's fault, but ultimately one could say that 12 of 12 is. ("Fault", "inspiration", whatever.)

Enjoy!

8:03 - Awake and wearing my giraffe jammies. You know, as you do.

8:49 - I wasn't going to say anything, but: yes. I spent this incredibly rainy Monday morning in bed with my computer and my cat. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

10:05 - Austenacious got a new header over the weekend, and if you think finding a tiny disco ball, photographing it, and Photoshopping it into a website header shouldn't take six months, well...we'd probably like to work with you. Heh.

1:30 - Leftover chili, pineapple, and SunChips: lunch of champions.

1:33 - Finishing up Season 3 of The Wire, about which I can't say anything for fear of Sarah stringing me up by my fingernails. Or, more appropriately, whistling "The Farmer in the Dell" and shooting me in the head with a .45-caliber shotgun. (However: !!!!!)

1:45 - The end of the Citron wrap is nigh, but those 540-stitch rows in the last section are not to be trifled with. I'd better find me some strapless dresses and some chilly summer evenings to show this baby off.

3:13 - Scripting away: Acts II and III, draft two.

4:24 -We have this bizarre talking Caller ID feature that announces aloud who's calling (as well as showing it in a pop-up bar at the bottom of the TV; when the robots overtake us, at least I can go down blaming Comcast), and today the phone told me with great specificity that "Nra" was on the phone.

4:48 - The great thing about California is that, even if it rains, things will look like this eventually. And by "eventually" I pretty much mean "within twenty-four hours." We wouldn't have it any other way.

7:26 - Rehearsing the Ukrainian Alleluia with forty of my closest friends.

8:40 - Post-rehearsal debrief, because nothing says "Praise the Lord" like cold beverages and cheese fries.

9:07 - Mysterious glowing cider, Triple Rock.

If I had a blog, this would be a really big day for me.

I realized recently that I've completely fallen off the blog-reading wagon.  It turns out that, as far as my own reading habits go, enthusiasm for the blogs of total strangers corresponds directly to having a job I'm trying to avoid; in a sense, I guess it's a good thing that I'm out of touch with these corners of the internet. Theoretically, I am so busy doing work I like and/or trying to get work I like that I have completely forgotten to snoop through the lives of people I've never met. (I speak the truth! Productivity is my middle name! These are not the droids you're looking for!)*

With this in mind, I've trimmed my blogroll—I got rid of the site about the hipster stay-at-home dad with the super-cute kids, the celebrity fashion site that exemplifies all that is great and good about the internet but that I somehow never actually read, and Mindy Kaling's sadly defunct shopping site (I guess this is what happens when you are hilarious: you sign a seven-figure development deal with NBC and stop needing to write for free about ridiculous Things You've Bought That You Love). I kept a couple of knitting blogs—as one does—but mostly I refined my collection of food blogs. Because that is something I never get tired of: the urge to make ridiculous, complicated, and/or expensive dishes because somebody has a really nice camera.

First, I added Smitten Kitchen, because leaving SK off the blogroll any longer would be like telling my (theoretical) really awesome boyfriend of five years that I'd really prefer to keep our relationship "just between us." Consider this my very own food-blog Jumbotron proposal: I cook from Deb's blog all the time. To wit: for dinner tonight, my family ate mushroom marsala pasta with artichokes; before dinner I'll have a bit of the Guinness chocolate cake I whipped up this afternoon—for the second time in two weeks. SK is my first line of defense against lack of recipe and/or inspiration, and also now includes frequent but not content-diminishing pictures of the cutest baby of all time, and I'm so pleased to have made an honest blog of it. Our love is pure and true!

I also added Thursday Night Smackdown, with which I have been acquainted approximately an hour and a half, and which I can already tell is good people. We're talking the Invisible But Obvious Membership in the International Siblinghood of Poached Egg Obsessives kind of good people, which is, I think, akin to finding a whole spate of long-lost cousins on the internet—cousins who like their eggs runny and plopped on top of all manner of non-breakfast foods, even, which is even better.

So I guess this is a step in a positive direction: finally, somebody's found something useful to do with that new Information Superhighway, if by "useful" you mean "including leafy greens, lots of champagne vinaigrettes, and recipes that requires ice cream makers I don't own."

Not that, you know, non-food blogs aren't worth reading. Despite my own lull in making the rounds, there's lots of good writing to be found that has nothing to do with what to make for dinner. And everybody likes a good sporadically-updated, non-subject-oriented yet cat-heavy life chronicle, right?

....Right?





* Note that this does not include the many and varied (yet also somehow redundant) social networks out there: Facebook and Twitter and Blip.fm and Goodreads and that horrendous hipster time-suck Tumblr, which I don't even USE but cannot stay off of, regardless. What if something awesome happens on the internet and I miss it?

12 of 12: March

What has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and didn't forget 12 of 12?

All credit/blame for the twelve-photo obsession goes to Chad Darnell. He started it.

8:15 - Up; not quite at 'em.

8:41 - Nothing like starting the day off with a ten-minute Lady Gaga/Beyonce lesbian prison-movie music video, right? Yet Sherlock appears unimpressed.

9:22 - Packing for a weekend in LA. Jewelry bag: check. Makeup bag: check. Knitting bag: check. Round brush: check. Laptop cord: check. Well-intentioned but unnecessary running shoes: check check.

10:38 - Heading over the Altamont Pass and into the valley.

11:05 - Green hills, orange wildflowers. Say what you will about I-5; it's a total showoff in the spring.
















11:30 - Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere (or rather, Santa Nella and Harris Ranch), central California.

1:28 - Bringing fries along after lunch at In-N-Out (#2, protein-style, with grilled onions); oddly, they weren't good, and I didn't finish them.

2:17 - Post-Kettleman City, pre-Grapevine. More wildflowers.



3:00 - At last, the Grapevine. It's like a reward.



4:15 - Waiting on a light in Van Nuys on the way to visit recent California transplant Sharon.




8:08 - Mango and blackberry sorbets at Sharon's; I like how sorbet offers the dual illusions of ice cream and virtue.


11:42 - My final destination: hanging with Kendra and roomies for the weekend. Worth the drive!

What I'm Doing; or, 0 of 12

February 12 was pretty much a normal day. I did stuff. I didn't think too much about it. That is, until I went over to Heather's to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, and she said, "Let me take a picture of you for 12 of 12!" and I said, "Wait, today's the 12th?" and she said, "Smile!" and I said, "Aaaaargh."

So. I have no pictures, today, of myself 1) waking up, or 2) writing, or 3) walking to Trader Joe's (via the yarn store), or 4) eating sweet potato bisque, Dubliner cheese on crackers, and a mineola for lunch, or 5) making the maiden tweet on Austenacious's brand-new, steeped-in-emotional-ambiguity Twitter feed, or 6) driving to Heather and Erik's for the Olympics, or 7) getting verklempt over stand-up comics falling in love on NPR, or 8) eating heavenly gingered eggplant and chickpeas over basmati rice for dinner, or 9) realizing that I now get two weeks of hunky Brian Williams on my TV without having to watch the news, or 10) eating heavenly rose water-buttermilk sherbet and cornmeal-orange shortbread, still warm from the oven, for dessert, or 11) coveting that flying-harness dude's job in much the way that I have previously coveted Tinkerbelle's job in the Disneyland fireworks show, or 12) coming home, feeding cats, and crawling into bed.


Nevertheless, it occurs to me that, in quitting my job and moving cross-country and then completely failing to post here, I may not be doing an excellent job of explaining what exactly I'm doing right now.


Well.


Fair enough.


I'm writing. I'm keeping up with Austenacious and trying to post to P.S. BTW like a normal person. I'm eyeing this blog guiltily and promising to post more. I've just turned the Act IV corner on an original TV pilot script, which I hope to use as a calling card so that I can get somebody to pay me to write more scripts.


I'm doing a bit of freelance work—writing short celebrity bio blurbs for a website about celebrity net worth, should anybody out there be wondering about the financial situation of, say, Zac Efron and/or Donald Trump—and looking for more. This involves much stalking of Craigslist, much writing of cover letters, and much pondering of the distinction between a writing gig and a writing job.


I'm taking a screenwriting class at the local community college, as my eighteen-year-old self says, "I thought I worked hard in high school so I wouldn't have to go to DVC?"


I'm singing with my old choir, because I simply haven't had enough Latin in my life lately.


I'm house-sitting an apartment and two cats in Albany.


I'm running.


I'm flossing my teeth regularly, because seriously, people who don't have jobs are not too busy to floss.


And that's the gist of it: working, trying to make writing my work, alternately hoping for and obsessing over the future, and trying to make the present workable. I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing, because it's a chance at something awesome, and because not doing what I'm doing is a terrifying prospect, long-term. In any case, it's not a bad gig. Job. Whatever.

12 of 12: January

Happy January, cats and kittens! As always, credit/props/blame to Chad Darnell, 12 of 12 originator and guru.

PHOTO TIME.

8:15 - Up. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

8:40 - Off to the park for a run to celebrate seeing the sky. (Seriously: IT IS SO FOGGY HERE.)

8:47 - Path, sun, Rian Johnson on the Creative Screenwriting podcast.

9:57 - Apparently, I have become the kind of person who eats Great Grains and reads The New York Times.

10:10 - Deep thoughts in my Inbox.

(Personally, am torn on this issue. I do miss tasty Season 2 hipster hair, but the new look has grown on me. Could maybe do with--dare I say it?--a tad more product.)

10: 35 - Research for Austenacious. No, really.

12:30 - Taking a break for some thank-you knitting.

12:50 - Lunch: grilled cheese with apple and spinach (too much; next time, apple OR spinach!) and Jon Stewart totally failing to intimidate John Yoo (the scary constitutional lawyer, not the First Pres music director, though that would be fun, too).

3:15 - Seeing a man about a website. At Starbucks. Ooh la la!

7:50 - Sherlock enjoys watching my mom play with her people toys.

 

8:20 - Trying for an after-dinner burst of productivity, with mixed results.

 

8: 40 - How all good days should end. Obviously.

See you in February.

And to all a good night

SoHo, New York City; November 29, 2009

Right back where we started from

News alert:

I

AM

SO

HAPPY.