Category: Uncategorized

Another sign of my inevitable march of time is how cheered I’ve become lately by the earlier sunrises. With the clocks changing this weekend, this soon won’t be the case, of course, but right now the sun is rising before 7am again, which means it’s almost light when I wake up, making a dramatic change in my optimism about the day ahead. No longer does it feel like I’m getting started when the rest of the world is asleep — although, to be fair, that’s probably still the case, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is nice — and instead, it’s as if the day is waking up with me, if that makes sense.

Everything changes this Sunday, of course; the 6:45 sunrises will become 7:45 again, although the Internet promises me that we’ll be back to this point by the end of the month, which feels entirely do-able in a way that the seasons shifting didn’t this time last month. This wasn’t always the case for me; I didn’t used to be so happy about — or even conscious of — earlier mornings and when the sun rises. I’m putting it down to growing older, but why that should be the case, I have no idea.

It’s always strange when a dream goes from one thing — and a pleasant, lazily benign thing, for that matter — to something else without warning; something that has me wondering just what my subconsciousness is playing at, and working through. Last night/this morning’s dream is fading, already, but what I remember includes being at some comic convention of some kind in the U.K., where I ran into an old friend from school by accident — only for the two of us to suddenly be separated, with no idea of what happened. Turned out, both of us had lost our memories and the friend now had somebody’s head in his possession, much to his surprise and concern.

Despite what that sounds like, it didn’t turn into anything horrific, more oddly comedic and murder-mystery-ish: Who was behind our memories disappearing? Whose head was it, and how had my friend ended up with it? What do we do now? It was, in its own way, kind of wonderful, if utterly unexpected — an Edgar Wright movie of a dream, in many ways. But sadly, I woke up before I found out the truth behind my predicament. Perhaps that, in itself, is a lesson of sorts.

And then there are the posts I clearly closed the window on too quickly and so they didn’t actually post, like this:

As my body gets older, I find that the cliches come true all the more often; last night was a case in point, with a cup of tea at nine o’clock apparently wrecking my sleep for the rest of the night. Every couple of hours, pretty much on the dot, I’d wake up and just lie there thinking this is both impressive and ridiculous for a handful of minutes before it’d suddenly be two hours later and I’d be doing the same thing.

True, there are multiple reasons why this might have happened, most of which have nothing to do with tea — something that has never had this kind of effect on me before — but, for either comedy purposes or a lack of desire to search elsewhere for a reason, it’s something I landed on immediately. It makes me feel old and curmudgeonly to tell myself, and in this state of sleep-deprived disrepair, there’s something very fitting about that.

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.)