Author: Graeme McMillan

It’s interesting to me the extent to which, as I get older, I invest more meaning in weightless, worthless things. I realized this morning that it was the start of March and immediately thought, Well, now I can shake off that weird February torpor as if it had been something particular to the month, and not the person.

Intellectually, I know that March 1st means nothing — there’s no real break in continuity from earlier months, nor no real chance for renewal or revision. And yet, there it is, in my head: the idea that a new month means a new beginning. Superstition, of course, but I should try and work out if it’s a good one or not.

(If nothing else, a new month is a chance to bill clients and bring some new money in…)

Did I miss another day yesterday? Damn. The problems of being underslept and overwhelmed, I think. I had intended to write one at the end of the work day, boasting of word count (5,800 or so, I seem to remember?), but events overtook me and instead I ended up vacuuming the house instead. (Don’t ask.)

Yesterday was an odd one, though; Leonard Nimoy’s death knocked me for a loop. He’s one of those guys who I remember from being a kid, this recognizable figure way back before anyone else (It was the ears and that haircut); even though I never met him, the idea of a world without him feels that much lesser. Pushing through that personal reaction to write about his death for work was this odd moment of “I want to be confessional, but I can’t.”

As we race towards the end of the month, apparently I just lose days judging by my lack of update yesterday; the irony being, it’s not as if I was especially busy, with the exception of first thing in the morning when I had two stories scheduled for pre-9am — meaning that I postponed doing one of these in order to meet deadlines, and then simply got distracted for the rest of the day. There’s a lot to distract me — in addition to the workload of everyday (Today: Some Hollywood Reporter posts, recording another Wait, What?, writing the majority of a big piece for Wired and interviewing a secret someone about a secret something — hi, NDA!), my mother-in-law arrives tomorrow for a week, necessitating much preparation, and I’m also helping my sister and her family find somewhere to stay for their visit in April. Lots of moving parts and things to keep track of, and sometimes, things — like this very “daily” blog — fall through the cracks. More than anything, I’m embarrassed that I can forget so easily.

Occasionally, you have to accept that spam email subject lines will ask profound questions. Take, for example, this from today’s mailbox: Do you like showing off your pride? It’s certainly something we should all ask ourselves on a regular basis, because who amongst us hasn’t at some point felt as if it was time to show off our pride? It’s no easy task to raise a family of small lions, after all, and you could be forgiven for wanting the world to recognize your efforts when you successfully manage to do so.

I joke, of course; I know it’s not that kind of pride — if only because, hey, of course I’d love to show off that pride! — but instead the one that cometh before a fall. In that case, the spam question is more confusing: How do you show off that kind of pride? Do you have a parade? I’ve heard that pride parades are very popular these days, after all. Or maybe you hold a press conference and announce how proud you are to the world. But is even that showing it off, or just showing off that you have pride? It’s almost enough to make me wish that I hadn’t immediately deleted the email because it was clearly spam, just so that it could’ve explained this somewhat confusing topic a little more.

Perhaps that’ll be the question asked by tomorrow’s spam: Do you delete your spam emails without really looking at them?

Another stupidly busy day, writing-wise (“Only” 5,900 words today), and again my brain is exhausted. This might not be the best way to start off a work week, but on the plus side, at least I know that I’ll probably be in the same state of exhaustion by the time it finishes, so at least there’s a “start as you mean to go on” element to the whole thing, right?

(A short entry because I have a dinner to get to. I promise, I’ll write more tomorrow.)

I love the way that the light before the sun is fully up lies to us. The bathroom is currently two different colors, thanks to being midway through being painted; the walls are blue (the old color) and yellow (the new), but when I went in there after waking up, there was the lying light that made everything seem the same shade of blue. You might have thought that it was daylight already, but apparently not. Not all of the spectrum had woken up yet.

As with all the best dreams, the details are fading already, but I can remember that this one featured moments where I was literally seeing things from someone else’s perspective — namely, a would-be murderer whose attempt was thwarted by his potential victim’s wife having an apparent heart attack (She was okay, as it turned out) — as well as a primary narrative where I was part of a group investigating said would-be murderer along with Penn Jilette, of all people.

The end of the dream saw us all sit down to have a celebratory meal from a food truck as a job well done, and then suddenly we were surrounded by a bunch of kids getting out from a local school. That’s all I remember, frustratingly. I know there’s so much more.