Had coffee and an English Muffin with peanut butter.
Taught one of the strangest acting classes I’ve ever taught, eight kids of varying ages all in the same room. Quite an experiment.
Got home and did minor shopping with Rene.
Celebrated Rene’s Dad’s birthday.
Sat down and have been in a bit of a daze ever since.
Here’s today’s picture:
It’s Frankie’s wound after a week of healing. Looks a lot better than it used to. He’s still our little Frankie-stein. I missed the perfect picture this morning when I woke up of Rene and Frankie sleeping in the bed like mother and son and have been regretting it all day. I’m hoping for another opportunity tomorrow.
As you’ve probably noticed these blogs are REALLY late. I’m going to pretend that I’m writing on Monday.
Today was an uneventful Monday.
I did some organizing, but there wasn’t much going on.
There was so little going on that this is my picture today:
My tiki head, carved sailor and Mighty Mugg Iron Man. They are like the three little tiki Gods that watch over me. One is crazy and magical, one is drunk and peg-legged and the other is Iron Man. A person could do worse.
As you’ve probably noticed these blogs are REALLY late. I’m going to pretend that I’m writing on Sunday.
Tonight was the series finale of LOST and Rene and I watched it with our friend and LOST enthusiast Dean. To help celebrate the night Dean made a dinner of salmon and roasted potatoes and Rene and I brought salad. The food was really good! I really enjoy the making of and enjoying good, homemade food. The conversation in the kitchen, the combination of flavors and then the actual eating of everything is one of life’s simple pleasures and we don’t do it nearly often enough.
We watched the show and, in order to keep the arguments to a minimum, I’ll simply say that I enjoyed it and I’m thinking that we’ll see a LOST TV movie or mini-series sometime in the next three years, but don’t quote me on that.
After the show we left, it was a school night, and as we were pulling out I caught this picture:
I now know for a fact that I am hard core no more.
And it isn’t even about the amount of drinking (for whatever reason I’m still very good at that) it’s the number of hours awake! The days where I could get four hours of sleep and be bright and chipper the next day appear to be gone. Not a huge loss, really, but it is a constant reminder that I’m definitely well out of my twenties.
I was so tired I even watched Sex and the City: The Movie:
Watching LOST with Dean tonight and I picked up food before I got there. When we spoke on the phone and decided on what food to eat the only stipulation that I gave was that I did not want Wing Stop again since it made me gassy so, naturally, we narrowed it down to pastrami sandwiches from The Hat and an order of onion rings.
Yeah, probably should have gotten Wing Stop again.
For those of you who may not be familiar with The Hat they make really good pastrami and if you are a fan of french fries covered in gravy, like yours truly, then this is the place to go. It is also the destination for anyone who can devour a metric ton of onion rings because that’s how big a single order is. I mentioned on the phone that I was getting onion rings and Dean said, “Really? Are you sure?” Then later when we actually poured them onto a plate we started to wonder if we shouldn’t invite over the neighbors and maybe a starving family of four to help finish them off.
It was an amazing amount of rings. The grease alone could power an alternate fuel car for at least a year. I can still feel it coating my throat and it took about twenty minutes to scrub it off my teeth. The bag was see through, yet still held together by the power of grease. Just describing it all makes me wonder why I ate them in the first place, but then I remember – they taste AWESOME!!!
The only problem I had with The Hat tonight was that I ordered a Dr. Pepper and got a Diet Coke! DIET COKE!!!!! I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coronary inducing onion rings, a Diet Coke isn’t going to make up for all that.
Although they probably didn’t do it on purpose, it felt deliberate.
Today’s picture is the mountain of onion rings that were left after we ate our fill:
Today nothing extraordinary happened. Things happened, I know they did. Like how I just deleted several lines of this blog on accident by hitting shift/up arrow at the same time and then the space bar.
I hate that! I truly, truly hate that! I love my netbook, almost more than my regular computer, but it has a slightly smaller keyboard so it’s easy to do the shift/up arrow trick. I have lost whole pages of text to it.
Anyway, today was so mundane that today’s picture is of a pot of flowers:
With Iron Man 2 on the way I’m starting to get Iron Fever! I’m planning a midnight movie trip and am trying to see if there’s a way to do the Iron Man/Iron Man 2 double feature offered by AMC. My fanaticism knows few bounds. It knows some, but not a lot of them. Ever since 1983, issue 173, I have loved Iron Man. I know that part of what drew me to the character is the design, with the color combo of red and gold, but it is odd that the story in issue 173 managed to capture my attention. Written by Denny O’Neil, famous for his run on Green Lantern Green Arrow which was heavy with social commentary, he took Tony Stark from arrogant hero to hopeless drunk… for a second time.
Iron Man fans will know the Demon in a Bottle storyline, a seminal tale that is “must” reading for the character, by Bob Layton and David Michelinie with art by a personal favorite of mine, John Romita, Jr. It tells the story of Tony Stark’s fall into alcoholism. After a few issues, and the help of Bethany Cabe with a few well plotted montages, he was better and back to being a hero. The Stane Saga was Tony’s major relapse and I found this explanation of the story on ToonZone.com:
Underneath the strong armor of Iron Man inhabits an all-too fragile man. For all his wealth, handsome looks, and genius, Tony Stark is an alcoholic. At one point, the power of drink threw him into self-destruction. Fortunately Tony stopped drinking. But there is no cure for Alcoholics. Sobriety is a life-long struggle. Obadiah Stane knows that. A chess master, he attacks Tony emotionally and physically. He kidnaps his friends, attacks his business, and nearly pummels his armored ‘bodyguard’ with his powerful Chessmen. Pushed to the edge, Tony finds solace in a beautiful woman. But then Stane reveals his Queen, sending Tony to despair and liquor. Plunging deeper into booze, he fails to care as he loses his business, his fortune, his dignity. Even the mantle of Iron Man is taken from him, by his best friend!
The second ‘alcoholism’ saga, I thought this was a better story than the Micheline-Layton ‘Demon in the Bottle.’ There, Tony just goes drunk for one issue and than everything’s fine next issue. This storyline is one slow development. A prototype for the Post-Crisis Luthor, Obadiah Stane ruthlessly takes down Stark, hits him hard, flaunts his abilities and takes almost everything away from him. And poor Tony goes from one embarrassment to another (fighting Machine Man under the influence, attacking a baddie sloshed and in his underwear, etc.). It is also Tony’s last adventure in his classic armor, setting up Jim Rhodes as the second Iron Man (and eventually War Machine). A rather underrated story.
This issue is the middle of the story and the Iron Man armor is barely in it. Tony Stark is a royal mess and gives up half way through. None of the characters are freshly introduced, you’re expected to know who they are, and to top it all off when Stane’s men come to find Tony, drunk in an alley and being assaulted by gang members, one of Stane’s men shoots a gang member through the hand. It was the most provocative thing I had ever seen and the image from that panel fascinated me for days. But in the end Luke McDonnell’s version of the Iron Man armor stuck with me and, to this day, is one of my favorite versions of the classic armor.
A few years later Iron Man 173 became the first issue in my nearly complete Iron Man comic book collection (I gave up when “young Tony” showed up and again right around 2000). You might think that the picture today would be of that issue from my collection, and you’d be right that it would be a good idea, but I didn’t have access to my long boxes and Target has a really cool Iron Man 2 toy display with a mirror that has the new armor minus the helmet so you can take a picture like this:
Now if you’ll excuse me I have some fanboy-ing to do.
I run the risk of having a few too many of my blogs this year being about my dog, but the joy that we get from Frankie has been described by parents as the same that they feel for their children. Until you meet him I think it is hard to understand the level of personality and expression that he shows in his face. There are times when you can tell that he is communicating with you pretty clearly and I know that other equally nutty dog parents can relate to the fact that once you really know your dog you really can communicate in a very rudimentary kind of way.
Frankie knows how to let us know he’s hungry, would like a walk, that he’s ready for bed and when he doesn’t like what’s on T.V. Yes, he does watch T.V., but not a lot. He prefers shows that include animals, especially pet food commercials. He also likes shows that include whistling. While I haven’t tested this theory I’m pretty sure that the end credits of “The Andy Griffith Show” might be his favorite thing in the world. He doesn’t have sophisticated taste, but most television audiences don’t either.
His favorite show, really, is “Looking Out the Front Window.” It’s not on T.V., that’s what he does. He sits on his daybed and looks out the front window at all the things going on. He likes to watch the gardeners mow the lawn and trim things and he really pays attention when school lets out and the high school kids walk by with their purple highlights and skinny jeans. I was with him this morning as he was watching cars pass. Every once in a while I join him on that daybed and try to see the world the way he does. So far I don’t find it nearly as interesting, but my senses work differently what with my color vision and significantly diminished sense of smell and hearing. But today, as he was intently looking at things I couldn’t see, I got a chance to really look at his face in the sun. I started looking at the detail of how the fur grew on his face and how his skin reacted to the turns of his head and the twitch of his ears. There was a lot of action going on beneath the surface during his simple action of looking at the world. This theme carried through to class today as I worked with some of my older students about the subtleties of multiple emotions in acting, how it isn’t just “I’m happy” or “I’m sad” but “I’m happy, but conflicted and frustrated,” or something like that.
The devil may be in the details, but so is inspiration and, if you’re willing to see it, a bit of wonder. Being that close to Frankie and seeing all that work under the skin made me look at my face closely, see the reaction of my eyes to light, involuntary reactions of my eyebrows and the tracks of the forming wrinkles around my eyes. It’s all like clock pieces moving together. These aren’t new discoveries, I have memories of my teachers in school telling me to do this kind of observation but I didn’t care then or have the capacity to really appreciate it. Today I did.
Today’s picture is of Frankie’s face when he wanted to be asleep:
I found that on Facebook today posted by my friend Kristin. I think it’s important to point out stuff like this because it’s easy to ignore things when you don’t see the final outcome or consequences. I used to watch Penn & Teller’s Bull Shit on Showtime, I even own the first three seasons on DVD, and even though they were definitely pushing an agenda I really liked seeing a different perspective on very hot topics. What I liked best is that they could back up a lot of their claims with straight up facts. Verifiable, cross-referenced, generally accepted facts. There was plenty of editorial tossed in, but the facts were there all the same. I stopped watching when I stopped paying for Showtime, is the show still on? Just checked, it is.
I have been very bad about my workouts this week, I’m definitely placing higher priority on movie biz things then on my fitness and I’m a bit conflicted about it. I try to ease my guilt of not working out by checking off stuff on the task list. Honestly that could be shrinking a little faster too, but whachagonnado? I’ve found that, in all the mire, I’m keeping my personal integrity but it isn’t making the choices any easier or making things move any faster… but I have made a commitment to not randomly vent on this page – if I did there’d be noting else – and I’m trying to push myself to write more story-like posts, in the vein of The Tobolowosky Files from /film. Since all of these posts for the rest of the year are focused on the actual day and its associated picture it’s been hard to do genuine reflection, I mean, at best I get a day to think about what happened and the effects of it all, but I’m enjoying looking for that one part of the day, a certain hour or five minutes, that ignites deeper insight then just a list of what went on through the course of the day.
I just thought about what that would look like on paper. Here’s the last couple days as a list:
Wake up.
Turn on computer.
Get water.
Load pages: Email, calendar, RSS reader, FB, blog pages, hootsuite.
Read/reply/archive email.
Read RSS feed.
Check FB messages.
Talk to Zeke (director for CMD!)
Feed dog.
Feed self, including making coffee if Rene didn’t yet.
Return phone messages.
Determine tasks for the day.
Pet dog.
Submit packages for film funds.
Eat again (Tuesday involved a lengthy trip to the post office, then eating again.).
Head to the school to teach.
Return home.
Last pass at email.
Sleep.
Most days I could literally copy/paste this string and it would be 90% accurate. Although tonight I added a trip at the end of teaching to watch Doctor Who with Dean and then get to the grocery store for some general supplies. Then home.
Today’s picture is from my trip to the store:
The cart just seemed so lonely. I think I might be thinking too hard when I start impressing emotions on inanimate objects.
I hurt pretty bad today. Tony, the personal trainer, is definitely making me work hard for my free sessions. When I woke up this morning it was hard to sit up.
I am so out of shape.
The only exercise I could manage today was walking the dog (a little over two miles). It hurt to bend down to pick up his poop. Getting in shape for the wedding might kill me.
Did I mention that it rained today? Cuz it did… but only when I had to be outside! Like when I was bringing up the trash cans, and it poured, and then literally stopped pouring when I was finished so I looked like this:
Yes, that’s right, the picture for today is my soaked ass. That sweater shouldn’t be that dark – it also shouldn’t weigh eight pounds. Rain is wonderful when you’re not in it.
Project 365 4-27-2010
Before we begin, a video presentation:
I found that on Facebook today posted by my friend Kristin. I think it’s important to point out stuff like this because it’s easy to ignore things when you don’t see the final outcome or consequences. I used to watch Penn & Teller’s Bull Shit on Showtime, I even own the first three seasons on DVD, and even though they were definitely pushing an agenda I really liked seeing a different perspective on very hot topics. What I liked best is that they could back up a lot of their claims with straight up facts. Verifiable, cross-referenced, generally accepted facts. There was plenty of editorial tossed in, but the facts were there all the same. I stopped watching when I stopped paying for Showtime, is the show still on? Just checked, it is.
I have been very bad about my workouts this week, I’m definitely placing higher priority on movie biz things then on my fitness and I’m a bit conflicted about it. I try to ease my guilt of not working out by checking off stuff on the task list. Honestly that could be shrinking a little faster too, but whachagonnado? I’ve found that, in all the mire, I’m keeping my personal integrity but it isn’t making the choices any easier or making things move any faster… but I have made a commitment to not randomly vent on this page – if I did there’d be noting else – and I’m trying to push myself to write more story-like posts, in the vein of The Tobolowosky Files from /film. Since all of these posts for the rest of the year are focused on the actual day and its associated picture it’s been hard to do genuine reflection, I mean, at best I get a day to think about what happened and the effects of it all, but I’m enjoying looking for that one part of the day, a certain hour or five minutes, that ignites deeper insight then just a list of what went on through the course of the day.
I just thought about what that would look like on paper. Here’s the last couple days as a list:
Most days I could literally copy/paste this string and it would be 90% accurate. Although tonight I added a trip at the end of teaching to watch Doctor Who with Dean and then get to the grocery store for some general supplies. Then home.
Today’s picture is from my trip to the store:
The cart just seemed so lonely. I think I might be thinking too hard when I start impressing emotions on inanimate objects.
See you tomorrow!
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Filed under getting fit, musings, politics, project 365 2010, social commentary