Julie Modeling

Photos: 12

Mercer Island, WA | 1995.06.01 | Photos | Julie, Modeling

Untitled Poem

Pulling back from the edges of daybreak

avoiding talk of the next release

I am haunted by the causation of hope

For Julie has taught me how to couple

I pass the weight and fear its loss

Learning only of beauty after beauty retreats

Am I doomed to mistake and dwell alone?

Feeling are far and walls thick to hide

Cut, blood and missing pain I've now felt

Tears-sorrow-loss-ache of receipt.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2003.06.08 | Julie, Poetry

work decisions

Of course, I had another thought today. What if I give up on this whole corporate job and instead take a law firm job prosecuting patents from 9 to 5. I’d take a cut in prestige, but I would make more money and I could live where I wanted. The question is: which is more important for you and more importantly, why. I’d like to move to CA, but I’d also like to return to NYC. I’m not even sure how to weigh the pros and cons here. It’s only my future I’m thinking about. I’m also pushing thirty. I’m not sure how that plays into the equation. I don’t know which is more important to me at this stage in my life. It’s confusing to say the least. And there’s also this pretend writing that you’ve been trying to accomplish. How do you think that’s going to go? Are you even spending enough time with it. As Nicole would say, these are all good questions.

The way I see it, you’re going to have to come up with some answers soon. You’re going to have to weigh everything and make up your mind and go with it. I’m leaning toward Oslo, as I stated before. The power is what is driving me on. My job would be more interesting with that power. It would keep me busy and perhaps happy. New experiences, such as those found by living in a foreign country, can only help me grow as a person. My real concerns: darkness and depression—this is a serious concern for me. Tied closely in with that is the friends and families (and I’m not talking about the long distance plans). As I’ve showed adequately by my brief stay in Houston, I’ve not made much in the way of friends here. I don’t know if that’s going to change when (and if!) I move to Oslo, but if it does, it’s going to be very lonely. Before Julie, Houston was approaching unbearable. What would Norway be? Of course, I also don’t want to be scared of trying new things. I want to grow as a person and experience different things. I don’t want to look back and as a lot of what-ifs. Those are questions I would not be able to handle.

Damn, airplanes are scaring me again. I hate when I go through these types of periods. I think the rough turbulence on my way here put that idea into my head. Now it sits there, fermenting, and waiting for a strange movement or sound to raise the bile in my throat. Joy.

Money is also playing a role. I stress about it, but I like having money. Erik’s house is nice. That’s the type of purchase I think I would enjoy at some point in my life. I was thinking my first house would be an apartment in NYC. I’m not so sure anymore. I wish I had someone to talk about with these things. I guess Shannon would be the best person to talk to. He has no ulterior motives, unlike my mother or sisters.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2003.09.01 | Diary, Julie, Work

Of Time Spent Away From You

Tree limbs dipped to find you,

Plucked from racing streams;

I doubted an elfin woman would capture me,

I long questioned the sway of all women.

And yet, evidence of perseverance thrives

Encasing and lifting me from my bemused shape.

Moons pass overhead as heavens rise,

Illuminating my solid mask, it fractures.

Green daffodils surround us presently,

Sands and suns boil a salmon's call.

Field's littered, corrupted by space, await us,

Stumbling and raising hair for summer.

Sliding across an icy rhythm we wait;

Descending across tears dried crusty brown;

What becomes of our travails?

The same can be said of our distance.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2003.12.19 | Julie, Poetry

birthday

It's my birthday, and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You would cry to if it happened to you. Okay, so there's nor eason to be crying today (besides that I'm turning 30--igh). That annoying song was just going through my head all day. It's now Sunday morning, the morning of my 30th birthday. Julie came to NYC with me, and we're staying in my mother's house for the holidays (and my birthday). Did I also mention that today was my birthday? And I have a pile of presents waiting for me?

So far, Julie's meeting my family has gone well. She's a little sick, which I'm sure is making her a lot more self-conscious than she would normally (or like to) be. But she's doing great with my mother. This should be a good day, barring any unexpected happenings.

⊕ New York, NY | 2003.12.21 | Birthday, Diary, Julie

what to post in musings

I've been thinking about what I should post in my musings section. Obviously, I'll post extraneous thoughts that I come up with. But I was thinking more particularly if I should be writing my daily happenings, for example, should I discuss my week with Julie in NYC, my visits with my family, my hotel stay? Or should I leave those for asides, like found in my e-mails and letters, and instead concentrate on my thoughts and sharing my latest (or old and repetitive) theories on the world. (Julie has pointed out that I start many of these musings with either thoughts on writing or with complaints that I have nothing to write. This sounds awfully familiar in this case.)

I've come to realize that my life is not too exciting. A famous person (who I've since rediscovered as Benjamin Franklin), once said that you can either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about. Since I admit that I don't do very much that's worth writing about, for now, I will (try to) write something worth reading.

I finished my Grelko Story in the airport. I'm not terribly proud of it, but I'm going to leave it alone. I don't think it's going to benefit much from continued prodding. I'll instead move onto a new story, perhaps continuing my monsters story, or starting something completely different. I've spent too much time on what started as a writing exercise (when I first started writing short stories, my intention was to write--I forget exactly how many--a bunch, and try a different technique in each story). This will all be done while continuing to work on this site. I've got the basics down, but after long discussions with Chuck about his site, I have new ideas about improving this, and a new desire to fix the photographs section (even though it's going to take a ton of work and a ton of editing with Photoshop, something, I will admit, I am not looking forward to.

Breaking with my decision not to report on the uninteresting moments in my life (i.e., most of my life), I'm currently on my way to Dallas (through Houston) to spend the remainder of the week with Julie's family. I've enjoyed this past week more than I've ever enjoyed a birthday week (even though it is my thirtieth, a horrible birthday to contemplate), probably--or, more accurately, definitely--because of Julie. I won't get into what she means to me now (since it's something I'm not too comfortable discussing). On my way to NYC, I started drafting a poem I wanted to give her with her holiday gifts (gifts which are embarrassing cheap compared to what she presented me). I've decided to post the poem, even though I never gave it to her (in a way, posting it here is a cowards way of giving it to her). I don't think it's very good, and it doesn't even get close to expressing what I feel, or what I've been thinking, but I'll post it nonetheless with the usual warnings about me being a bad poet, etcetera.

Other than that, I have no new theories to share. I guess I'm not very good at following through with my plans, but that, I think, will take time. I'll post my vacation pictures when I get home. I'll also post my family pictures then, although I will slowly (but surely) be redoing how the photos work and how they're organized (always remembering that while presentation is important, it's the content that most people care about).

⊕ Houston, TX | 2003.12.25 | Diary, Julie

New Years without consternation!

I bet you thought you’d escape without seeing something from me before the end of the year. You were wrong. Here it is. It’s now 10:34pm, and unless I get another phone call (I just got off the phone with my mother, who’s in Buffalo babysitting Orli), I’m going to tie some words together and see where it drags me.

I’m not much of a year-in-review type of guy. This has been an overall interesting year (I’ll let you define interesting). I’ve learned many things, fallen in love with a great girl, and changed a bit of what I am, making me a little happier in the process. But since it’s New Years time, and I don’t think I can continue with my resolution to stop eating beef (what was I thinking? I had a Quiznos sub for lunch, the meateater to be exact, and as I was eating I was thinking, ‘what the fuck was tunneling through my brain that made me think it was time to give up my favorite meats?’), I have to come up with some sort of resolution. I usually don’t do resolutions, at least not at New Years. I usually make life changes after my stew of worries and theories coalesce into an overwhelming brew that forces me to take some action (these are internal actions--regrettably, I’m not much of a political or take action to better society-type of person. That’s how I stopped eating veal, stopped playing video games, stopped eating at fast food restaurants, and stopped watching television (do you see a trend here?).

But I figured this New Years would be different. Now Julie (the aforementioned girl) has commented that my musings have tended to sound consternated (I too think of constipated when I hear that word). She’s right. I have been complaining and clearing my throat a tremendous amount in my writings, especially on the subject of writing. You have to remember, I’m excellent at complaining (and modest too). I practice often, and just like a comedian, I hone my act until the complaints flow nicely with the right twist of quirkiness.

Although I won’t give up complaining (I don’t think I could exist without it), I think the consternation about writing is getting old. How many times can I truly write about how much trouble I’m having writing? How painful it is? How much of a loser I am for not being able to do it? How if only I could sit down and write a story, my life would be different, and better, and there would be peace in the worlds, dogs would fuck cats, kangaroos would live without fear of those nasty koala bears, and all wars would cease to exist, because madmen would all be struck dead with a miraculous (and godsend) disease that only affects those that are insane and have an inkling for world domination.

From now on, if I have nothing to say, then I’ll say nothing, or I’ll revamp my pitiful existence or my unexciting day. I won’t endlessly discuss how difficult writing is. (It is, but the only way you’ll actually believe me is to sit down and try it. No use wasting my breath here.) I’m going to talk about all the terribly uninteresting things that happen to me. I’m sure you’re all excited to hear that I went to Burger King for dinner tonight. It was the first time I went to a fast-food restaurant in a very long time.

You see, in my mind (yes, yes, I know that everything I’m writing here comes from my mind; that’s obvious. And, yes, it would be better if I just cut out those three words instead of writing a ten line aside about how that is just stylistically awful. But I won’t), take-out should be divided into a three different groups: first, you have your fast food restaurants, e.g., McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bells, all the horrible places that I’ve foresworn. I must admit that I sometimes have wet dreams (okay, they’re not exactly wet dreams, because (a), I’m not sleeping at the time, and (b) I don’t wet myself, in either the piss-way, or the other more gross-don’t-talk-about-but-boy-does-it-feel-good-way. For me and many of my friends (stop laughing, they do exist, sort of, and not in my mind--well, not all in my mind), Wendy’s has the best hamburgers--there’s just something about all the grease they put on their food that is just downright, how does one say it, decadently delicious. Especially with a hangover, there’s nothing like a Wendy’s triple cheeseburger for coating a tender stomach the morning after a wee-bit too much to drink. Let me move on before my will power completely breaks and I head out the door. Wendy’s is open late, 2 a.m., I believe. Probably even on New Year’s eve.

Getting back to the quick foods, the second type is your sandwich shop. These are your Quiznos, Subways, and lesser known ones like Schlosky’s. I still frequent these places often, mostly because they’re healthier than fast food, just as quick, and I don’t leave feeling bloated and sick (usually--there have been way too many post-Taco Bell pukings for me to ever feel comfortable in that place again).

After those two categories of quick foods, there’s only a third, smaller category left: family style take-out. The most famous is my post-gym hangout (known as PG to those in the know), Boston Market, which for $7.04 gets me a half chicken with two sides. It’s conveniently located right outside my 24-hour fitness, so, no mess, no fuss. There’s also, conveniently located, an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet next to the gym, and when I say next, I mean it’s in the same driveway as the gym. The main driveway that leads to the gym (which, since this is Houston, is obviously in a strip-mall, in this case, the back of one, or at least the side, since it’s all the way down the driveway off the main road) passes right by the Chinese buffet. Usually, there are cars parked along the driveway, since they run out of spots in the Chinese buffet parking lot. Just so you know, there are plenty of spots in the gym parking lot. Besides Boston Market, there aren’t many stores that fall into this category. I don’t actually know of any others, but I like to think there are others that meet this criteria.

As I sit here, I’m trying to figure out where pizza falls in my three categories (that’s what you get for locking yourself into a number of categories, instead of leaving it open-ended, or at least editable--but just to show that I am fallible (yes, I know it’s hard to believe), I won’t change it. Instead, I’ll just put pizza into, let’s say, the first category. I haven’t foresworn it, though. Being from Brooklyn, it’s a criminal offense to not eat pizza (I can’t make these things up! Okay, I can and do, but that’s not the point).

That’s pretty much it. You have to search hard to find something that doesn’t fall into one of those three categories (the pizza example notwithstanding).

What does any of this drivel have to do with anything? Again, it has nothing to do with anything. It’s just the empty air swooshing around in my hollow head. These things I think about and these things you’re going to have to read about, since I’ve given up consternating about writing (at least 69 minutes from now—actually, it’s more like 36 minutes with all this editing I’m doing--shhh).

I just finished watching Chasing Amy, another excellent film by Kevin Smith. His stories are very real feeling, even if the acting always seems amateurish (it might be because of his direction). The movie was about three characters: the main character, a comic book artist, a woman he falls in love with, who happens to be a lesbian comic book artist with a dirty, dirty past, and the main character’s roommate, another comic book artist who’s trying to protect the main character from getting hurt. There’s a lot more to this story, but I don’t want to ruin it. The story is simple, but the dialog and the asides (stupid but simple asides) make it fun to watch. Kevin Smith also doesn’t torture the audience. There was a scene where it would have been very easy (and cheap) for the main character to think the lesbian was gesturing for him to join her on stage. She was instead motioning her former lesbian lover. A lesser director (and writer) would have stretched that misunderstanding and tortured the audience. I hate that. Kevin Smith played it short; he made it obvious and then moved on. That’s how it’s supposed to be done. There’s no need for a Three’s Company moment (boy do I hate those!).

I’m really looking forward to starting this next story. It’s going to focus on characters, more specifically an outrageous character, with an identifiable, defining characteristic. Something that’ll make him stick out. (I think I’ve said this already.)

Speaking of stories, I’m going to watch another movie now. They inspire me to write drivel, and inspiration is always good. As soon as I get over this damn cough and cold, I’ll be a much happier camper. My web site has come a long way in three weeks. I’m rather proud of it now. Just a few more pictures to post, and I think I’m going to put away the tweaks for a bit. Maybe I’ll actually concentrate on doing work at work (as if—where did that go? I loved hearing bitchy girls say that).

Happy New Years!

⊕ Houston, TX | 2003.12.31 | Diary, Julie, New Years, Writing

toys and selfishness

Here I sit. I’ll give you a couple of guesses where. Up to a few minutes ago, I was sitting inside, but a family came in, looked over the pretty much empty establishment, and decided to push together four little tables. The tables, of course, were right next to me, and I’ve since become convinced that they did this with the sole intention of annoying me. As proof of this, after they sat next to me, they began talking baby talk to their three year old. It was very endearing. They were asking her to use big girl worlds when she wanted to be picked up and placed on the chair. Her grandparents were very surprised at how big she now was and that she could sit in a big girl’s chair instead of a monster chair (they didn’t exactly call it a monster chair, but you know what I’m talking about).

Suffice to say, I’m now outside, mocha-less, listening to strange languages, smelling delicious cigarette smoke, and watching skateboarders ply their trade on ramps and stairs in front of a former restaurant across the strip mall (remember, this is Houston—everything is in a strip mall, even Starbuckses). I’m going through a bit of withdrawal right now, which explains a bit of my bitterness. After scarfing down a tall mocha, I’m feeling the need for more caffeine. I’m currently conducting a study: The last time I was here (Friday, I think), I ordered a decaf white mocha. I wrote three lines in my circus story. Today, after I ordered a caffeinated mocha, I wrote thirty lines. I’m thinking if I go back and order a second yummy, yummy mocha, I’ll be able to write even more.

I’m still a bit upset about losing my comfortable chair to the family. In a world run by me, such things wouldn’t happen. The entire Starbucks area would be mine, mine, all mine. I’d occasionally let strange and beautiful people in for voyeur-purposes, but they would be there by invitation only and would in no way violate my space. Doesn’t my world sound much better? (And, yes, I did go out and buy South Park season three on DVD today. I associate more and more with Cartman these days. One of the particularly good episodes is when he inherits one million dollars. He fulfills his dream and buys an amusement park. He doesn’t buy it because he wants to own and run an amusement park. Instead, he buys it because he wants it all for himself. “No more lines,” he cries. I sometimes—okay, often—feel the same way. Do you see how well I relate to cartoons? I wonder what that says about me.)

Now (continuing with my free association), I hate buffets for similar reasons. I’ve always thought the primary reason for my hatred was that I never got my moneys worth. You see I’m not that good of an eater. Whenever I eat at buffets, I feel that I don’t eat enough compared to my fatter (and better eating) neighbors. They’re getting their moneys worth (since the restaurant needs to make money and must charge enough so that they turn a profit when an average person eats there), and I’m not. While at Puerto Vallarta, I discovered another reason for my hatred of buffets. The hotel Julie and I were staying at had a breakfast buffet place that also served buffet dinners. We were rather tired one night (we went to downtown most of the other nights to eat dinner), and decided to try the buffet dinner, since our adventures with the hotel Japanese place were very unsatisfying (okay, we went downtown most of the nights except for the Japanese night and the buffet night).

The buffet was surprisingly good. What, I think, made it especially good was that there was no lines. There were three people waiting to serve us: the meat carver (which was the only downside, since the meat was rather dry), the waiter, and the buffet re-supplier (a truly awe-inspiring job). For almost our entire meal, all the foods in the buffet were all ours, ours, ours. Not until the end of our meal, did two couples (one of them with a monster) come in to spoil our wonderful dinner by forcing us to share the buffet. Thankfully, Julie was facing the buffet and ensured that we didn’t patron it until all the interlopers were seated and the buffet was all ours, ours, ours.

I’m sure you’re beginning to ask yourself, what does any of this have to do with anything? I’m glad you asked. Today I went to buy myself even more toys with some (almost all, actually) of my birthday booty. Knowing my enjoyment of all things electronic, a number of family members and friends gave me Best Buy and Circuit City gift cards of varying denominations (you’re all the greatest, by the way—not as great as Julie who bought me not one, but two digital cameras, but at least you now have something to live up to next year).

I’m happy to report that I spent almost all the gift money today. I’m beginning to wonder if I might be a wee-bit addicted to toys. As you surely realize (if you have, as I’m sure you have since how can you resist? read through all of my musings), I have an addictive personality, especially when it comes to collecting things. I started buying music for my iPod using iTunes not so much because I liked listening to music (which I usually do not), but because it felt great (in that, let’s not examine this too closely, kind of way) to own all music that I could possibly enjoy. I was the same way with Magic the Gathering playing cards (something I’ll one day explain in more detail). I think the absolute worse example of my addiction was comic books. I bought the first thirty comic books for Alien something-or-another. The comic books were awful and I don’t think I read one of them, but I wanted them all. I remember digging through my couches trying to find extra change so I could complete my collection. Sad, huh?

Getting back to toys, what was I saying? Something about addictions, I think. Yeah, after a little more thought, I’ve concluded that I’m not addicted to toys. I do have some problems (video games, television, comic books, playing cards, etc.), but I don’t think toys are a problem. I deserve them, and they bring me enjoyment and my mommy says it’s okay for me to buy things, especially thing that are mine, mine, mine. I’ve decided it’s time to start saving for an amusement park. All for me, none for you!

I hope you’ve learned something today. But now it’s time for me to get back to my story (it’s way too easy to procrastinate by writing these harebrained musings).

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.01.04 | Diary, Julie

constipated feelings and blind dates

I’ve never gotten along well with my feelings. They dance at the edge of my vision and tease me. At times, they disappear for months only to reappear at unexpected moments. My wintry logic is useless in understanding them. My trouble extends doubly to the expression of feelings. I am incapable of telling others how I feel. I can talk for hours about the minutiae of my day, but when it comes to a simple statement about a feeling, my tongue expands and constricts my throat. This constipation is lessened on paper, where I have time to shape the words and submit them in a brief moment of courage.

As an example, I’ve never told my mother that I love her, let alone how much I love her (if you don’t know her, she is the best mother, ever), and yet here I write it, with much less difficulty if no less conviction. These troubles I understand at a superficial level. I usually give a nod to my father’s death when I was a boy and leave it at that. I don’t try to analyze these difficulties, and I certainly don’t attempt to remedy them.

I’m writing this while deliciously depressed. I get like this sporadically, but when I do, it inspires me like nothing artificial can. I hate to admit it, but I like this feeling. Mainly I enjoy feeling something, anything. There was a long period in my life (from around thirteen to twenty-something) when I suppressed all feelings. Now, when I am able to conjure feelings, it feels good. This includes depression and sadness. Does reveling in these bad feelings make me a horrible creature? It probably does. But that doesn’t lessen my enjoyment when I sit down with a clarity that’s lacking during ordinary moments. Perhaps clarity is the wrong word here. It’s more a feeling of openness than clarity.

I claim to be a sensitive person. However much this seemed to surprise past (and current) girlfriends, I believe that this claim is accurate. When I do feel, it is at such intensity that it debilitates me. (This sounds a lot more profound than it actually is.) My failures with my feelings are as good a reason as any for why most of my relationships were failures. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a girl for more than a week. As Julie has told me many times since reading through my musings, I’ve lived a rather pathetic life when it comes to relationships. (It’s hard to argue with her on that point.)

While writing this, my emotional state changed (more like dissipated). I had problems organizing and writing these thoughts, deleting and restarting many times. I came here with the best of intentions, awfully tired, but ready for a large caffeine intake. I accomplished this with a grande mocha, which was my first mistake. I drank it too quickly and now I’m feeling nauseous and tired, not the best way to attempt such a musing.

What makes it even worse is a distracting guy. He is on a first date, probably a blind first date. He talks too loudly and is too expressive. He’s discussed his past three dysfunctional girlfriends (a huge misstep on a first date) and hasn’t stopped talking for more than 30 seconds at a time. I can’t think with him there. It’s too cold to go outside and continue writing there. At first, I thought he would turn her off and she would leave. She made some motions toward the door, claiming some sort of Spanish class. But she’s stuck around now for more than half an hour. How can she stand it? From my eavesdropping (although, it’s not really eavesdropping since he talks loud enough for people driving in the street to hear him), I believe he’s unemployed, having recently been fired from his last job. He’s also interested in Spanish, but his seventh grade Spanish skills make him incapable of stringing Spanish words together to form coherent sentences. I’m sure you’re as fascinated as I am by this important information.

At times, I feel my voyeur skills are detrimental. When I’m near an annoying person, I am unable to ignore them. I imagine telepaths have the same problem. I don’t think I’d want to have the power to listen to what other people think. Besides the obvious fear of hearing the foolish thoughts of other people (just look at how demented and malformed my thoughts are), the inability to sit quietly and think my own thoughts would be unbearable. (As I’m sure you know by now, I like my own thoughts very much.)

With all of that said, what I really wanted to talk about today (before my cleverness and confessions drew me in a strange and rather unexpected direction) was Julie. She has been depressed lately and I’m sure part of the reason is because of me. I’m beginning to understand that she wants more from me than I’m currently giving her. I care very much for her and it hurts me to see her that way.

I had other things that I wanted to say about (or more exactly, to) her, but thanks to caffeine mismanagement and a general wimpiness, I’m not going to say more. While most of my musings take a while to write, this one took a very long while. As I said before, when I’m talking about minutiae, I can’t type fast enough to keep up with all my clever asides. When it’s time to talk about something more serious, my joints tighten and drafting each sentence takes an eternity.

(As a happy conclusion, the blind date victim finally escaped and it is mostly quiet…with the exception of the two guys who just sat next to me. One is a high school student and the other is a University of Chicago alumnus who is interviewing him, probably as part of the admission process. Why won’t the voices stop?)

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.01.06 | Diary, Julie, Philosophy

restaurants

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write something. Well, that’s not completely accurate: I did draft a couple of rather pathetic musings but I never posted them. They’re up now, but don’t waste your time. Inspiration has been an enemy of late.

I went to see Julie this past weekend. We had a good if short weekend. I took the buck ninety-eight Continental special, which left Saturday morning and returned Monday morning. The timing worked out well since Julie had to (like usual) work all day Friday and part of Saturday.

She reminded me (more than once) that I had not taken her to a fancy restaurant in a while. For some reason, she did not think our last trip to the Outback steakhouse counted. As you all should know, the Outback (as us regulars call it) is impressive. It represents the epitome of 90’s theme restaurants. Its decorum (if not food) is based on an American’s view of Australia. You’re greeted by kangaroos, cheap Australian beer advertisements (the beer is cheap, the advertisements are just tacky), maps of Australia (since restaurants in Australia, like the US, always have large maps just in case residents forget what their country looks like), boomerangs, and various other stereotypical Australian accoutrements. It’s a family-style restaurant with a fully stocked bar and is only open for dinner, clearly making enough money in the evening hours to remain closed during breakfast and lunch. It’s always crowded and there’s usually a wait, unless you arrive (as is Julie and my custom) after nine. And it does have food, steak to be exact, as its name indicates. It’s not exactly of the greatest quality, but it pretends to make up in quantity what it lacks in quality. It serves blooming-onions (an excuse to eat fried drippings and salt) and complimentary steakhouse salads (tasty greens with large and crunchy crotons and cheese; making me rethink Bart’s “you don’t make friends with salad” paradigm) and brown bread. Overall, a rather fancy place, at least in my mind. But does Julie consider it so? No. She’s under the impression that a cloth napkin a fancy restaurant does not make.

So, while in the OC, I took Julie out to Roy’s, which is a Hawaiian fusion restaurant (meaning fish cooked with Asian spices and a Hawaiian flair) we had originally visited during our Oahu vacation. When we went to Roy’s in Hawaii, we thought we were rather special. It is a bit off the beaten tourist path and the food was good (not the best Hawaiian fusion we had, but definitely top two). Then there appeared a Roy’s in the OC (the Roy’s had been there since Julie moved: when I say appeared I really mean we noticed it but I was too lazy to change the wording and instead decided to add this completely useless aside). I started asking questions when I saw one in Dallas. When I looked at the matchbook this weekend, I realized it had expanded way beyond Dallas into most of the major restaurant markets. It had become, like Morton's Steakhouse before it, a chain restaurant.

When I called to make a reservation on Friday (since Julie was too busy, or so she claimed, with “call” and “working,” whatever that means), the best time I could get was nine o’clock. As I said, we’re used to eating late, mostly because we make our reservations rather last minute. We arrived there and had to wait thirty minutes before we were seated. The food was sub-par, even the melted chocolate soufflé was unimpressive. No more Roy’s for us. We deserve better.

I’ve also somehow gotten sick again. On Friday before I went to see Julie, I felt another cold coming on (this is after my original cold that I acquired at the tail-end of my birthday trip when we were in Dallas—damn Dallas and all its evil, evil germs). I’ve been living off cough medicine and Nyquil for the last three days. I’ve also been sleeping a lot. For the past few months, as I’ve been working on this website (damn you Chuck!), I’ve gotten less and less sleep. I think that lack of sleep is finally catching up with me. The sickness (and meetings) has also slowed my gym goings. I hope to get back into it this weekend, health permitting. My first PTG (that’s post-trainer gym session for the uninformed) went well. We’ll see if I can keep it up.

At work, there has been an off-site meeting with my boss and his reports over the last two days (and tomorrow). It’s gone rather well, enabling me to escape the office and meet with colleagues that I rarely get to see. There has also been free food. For reasons that I don’t like to explore too closely, I love free food. I don’t care how low quality it is: free food just tastes better than food I have to pay for (I know this goes against my buffet theory—I have not found a unifying theory that reconciles the two).

The meeting today was rather informative, even if there was a facilitator present. For those uninformed in the practices of large corporations, facilitators are outside consultants who are brought in to guide a meeting. A few of the slides that taught corporate-speak and touch-feely management struck a chord with me. While it contained the usual sections on managing, handling change, and too many corporate buzzwords to count, I came to some striking realizations about myself.

I have a few notes of pages I wanted to get down today. I don’t think I’m going to get through it today. My headache, which I had attacked with three Tylenol before I came here, has reasserted it’s ugly head. I will continue this next time and go through some possible personal changes. I’m sure you’ll be waiting with bated breath for me to continue. Sorry for the tease.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.01.14 | Diary, Julie

mall story outline

Yet another early morning flight: I had a wonderful weekend with Julie. I stayed an extra day, which was worth the $100 change fee and the missed meetings. We went walking along the beach—remember, it’s the first day of February and only in California is the weather this perfect. The beach was beautiful, of course, as was Julie. We shopped at an overpriced crystal shop, climbed beach rocks to peer into the ocean, and ate oysters and shoestring fries that could have deliciously laced my shoes. It was a wonderful four-day weekend and I relish Julie’s visit to Houston next week for her vacation.

You might have noticed that I now use a single space after an end-of-sentence period. (Okay, you probably did not notice this, as only someone as anal about writing form as me would care about something so unimportant. More particularly, after doing more research, HTML removes double-spaces, so there is no way, anal or not, that you could have noticed this.) I have been told this is the new style by the Chicago manual of style, which moves away from the typewriter rule of two spaces of a period. I’m still not a convert, but I will try it for a bit. It only took two musings before the spacing became natural.

At this rate, I might decide to switch over to the Dvorak keyboard layout. For those who have not studied the history of the keyboard, the Qwerty keyboard is not the only layout available, it is only the most popular. The legend goes that the Qwerty typewriter triumphed over other keyboard layouts for two reasons: the first was that salesmen were able to show the speed of the keyboard by typing the word “typewriter,” which has all of its letters on the top row. The second reason was the very inadequacy of the layout. The keys of early typewriters would stick if struck too quickly. By designing a difficult layout to learn and type on, the designers of the Qwerty keyboard were able to slow the typing speed and avoid keyboard jams. For whatever reason the Qwerty keyboard succeeded, the computer keyboard followed in its cousin’s footsteps and the generation of computer users have accepted the Qwerty layout, as the powers of the dreaded status quo are difficult to overcome.

Dvorak, on the other hand, is a statistical approach, where the most frequently used keys are placed at the home keys, and the less frequently used keys are placed on the far pinky keys. Supposedly, once a typist switches, their speed may increase by thirty percent and their typing fatigue decrease. There is, however, a rather steep learning curve. I didn’t say I was going to do it, just that I’ve thought of doing it, and easily switching from two spaces after a period to one space after a period might be just the first step.

Now, back to the real reason for this musing (and most musings now that I’ve decided to go from aspiring writer to aspiring bestselling writer): I need to settle on a short story to draft. I’ve been writing snippets lately and I’ve gotten away from my goal of writing seven (I think it was seven) short stories trying the different styles. I no longer need to do that (try the different styles), since the right style for each story should be dependent upon the story itself, not an arbitrary decision on the style. The style is just an artifact of the story, a way of presenting it to the readers, not a clever intonation. I now have many tools at my disposal for writing the story. The only thing left is the actual writing (and storytelling).

I’m racking my brain trying to decide what story I will tell next. My choices are infinite: I was thinking that it’s time to go back to the boy lost in the mall story. While I’m again focusing on a child character, I think it’s the logical next story to write. What follow is the storytelling, the planning, thinking, and interrogation necessary before the writing can begin. It’s not a terribly interesting read, but it is important for me get these ideas down on paper to develop the story.

Let’s interrogate the characters and see where it takes us. There are two main characters so far. (As the story develops, there might be more. Once the boy is lost, we might want someone to find him or help him find his mother.)

What do we know about the boy? He’s around seven or eight years old. He lives in Brooklyn with his mother (very original, by the way). What does he want to be when he grows up? That’s an interesting question to ask a child. Their answers are always interesting and skewed by what they know or what they see on television. Sometimes they want to do what their parents do. Other times, they want to be athletes or movie stars. For this boy, we need something special, something different. He wants to be…. Something I’ll come back to. My initial thoughts are fireman, policeman, etc. This might have more relevance later.

This story takes place back in the 1980s. There will be hints throughout, but it shouldn’t make much of a difference for most of the scenes. This is the pre-9/11 era, the pre-media domination. Life is good, but not as good as the 90s because of the Russian threats, which are only slowly dissipating. Shopping malls have not reached the sizes they will twenty-years from then. The narrator knows what will happen in the future, and he’s looking back with almost a nostalgic view.

He sounds like a first-person narrator. Why would he be telling this story? What makes it special? Why should the reader care about it? It’s something that happened in his past. Perhaps it’s something that changed him. How can he be changed by his experience getting lost in a department story? Are you going to focus on courage again? No. I’ve gone down that path and failed. Does that mean you don’t want to go in that direction again? I want to try something new. I’ll return to the questions of courage on another story (this will probably be a theme throughout your stories).

Okay, so the narrator is somehow changed by his experience. Is the narrator the young boy? It has to be. The mother would not make a very good narrator, since she’s absent for a large part of the story. What about a narration from the perspective of the man or woman who rescues the boy? How would he be changed? Ah. The rescuer moves from a man who is married, but does not want children, to someone who (thinks he) understands what children can bring to his life after he meets the lost boy. There we go. Now the story is getting interesting. His wife wants children, but he thinks the monsters would slow him down, ruin his style and his independence. Helping the boy find his mother changes him. Or perhaps it doesn’t, but it does make him think. It is a pivotal time in his life.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere more interesting than a boy lost in a mall. Should we still be in a mall? It might be limiting. The boy has to be with the man for a bit for him to be influenced by him. Or does he? It could be a short experience. But why would he help him? Why wouldn’t he walk by him, like all the people walked by the screaming girl who couldn’t find her mother at the mall this weekend? There has to be something about the boy that makes the man stop and help (after those around him ignore the wailing boy). There also has to be a reason that the boy is lost. Maybe his mother is not caring or young or just a bad mother. I’ll pursue that separately when I interrogate her.

So, the boy does not have fears about shopping malls, the narrator does. Or at least he did when he was younger. And seeing the boy screaming, lost, confused, brought back memories of his youth. (This story should not have flashbacks, it should become apparent without them.) That’s his motive for helping.

What happens when he helps? How does the boy change the narrator? We’ll get back to that once we know a little more about the narrator. We know about his marital state and his fear of monsters. Let’s try not to define him by his job. I’m trying to get away from that. What else is he going to talk to his wife about? Obviously, he’s going to talk about the monster question, but we need more. I don’t want the discussions to become too clichéd. We’ll make the wife an interesting character as well. She won’t be the nagging type; she really wants what’s best for both of them. She believes that he would be a great parent and would be happier with them.

Does she have to be his wife? She could be a girlfriend, someone who’s wondering when marriage is going to happen. This could be about more than just monsters; it could also be about commitment.

What’s the point of view? It can be first person, past. He’s using the narration as a way of explaining, perhaps to his children, why and when he decided to have children. You could use a frame story to convey this. But if you do this, you’ll lose the intimacy that he would have in disclosing his discussions with his wife. Is she going to leave him if he doesn’t come around? No. She went into the marriage knowing his believes, but hoping that he would change his mind.

So, what narration? I’m leaning toward first person, present. It’s an accepted narration style for short stories, and although it loses a bit of time immediacy (however contradictory that appears), it will allow me to use my clever (so clever), second person asides to the reader.

With that settled, what type of person is the narrator?

I still have work to do. I have to figure out motives, develop the character’s history, habits, and what makes them unique using twists and exaggerations. The name is also something that needs to be thought of. I’ll let all of that steep in my head for now. This is a good start (I hate saying that because I never know if I’ll return to make it more than a start).

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.02.02 | Julie, Story Drafts

more story planning: lost monster

This entry contains more drivel and plans for the lost monster story. I like that name: Lost Monsters, or A Lost Monster, or Finding my Monster, or just Lost Monster. It has two connotations: the lost boy (or girl) in the mall (since the narrator will refer to children as monsters, as I’ve enjoyed doing), and the narrator’s (or his girlfriend’s) decision not to have children.

This storytelling is a rather time-consuming process, as it probably should be. I’ve barely planned the first scene or understood any of the characters and I’ve already spent many hours thinking and writing about it (which is much different than writing it). You really do have to spend as much time putting the story together as actually writing it. It’s fun in a different way than writing. I like it when a twist or exaggeration changes the story for the better, or the character develops in an unexpected way. The only bad part is that the writing is crap and terribly boring to read (if it’s boring for me, I can’t imagine how torturous it is for those that actually plow through it on here—which, when I think about it, is probably only Julie and, to make myself feel better, one or two other people who look beyond the pretty pictures). When I go back and reread prose, I usually enjoy it (if I can ignore the impulse to edit it) and am strangely impressed by it. Yes, I’m an egotist, so you can stop reminding me.

After further thought, the narrator is now a teacher, a fifth grade (or somewhere around there) teacher. His girlfriend (I thought about making her his wife, but decided against it) is a successful businesswoman. She’s reluctant to marry him because he doesn’t want children. She stays with him because she thinks it’s crazy for a teacher, who likes his job, not to want children.

A possible first scene finds the narrator (and possibly his girlfriend) in a restaurant or lounge or coffee house meeting a group of Friends-esque friends in their weekday hangout. Two of the usual gang is missing: they just had their first child—or, better yet, they’ve had their child for a few months, but only now have come to the realization that they cannot or do not want to hang out with their old friends. They don’t feel they have as much in common. Should this be a confrontation? Maybe they should be there and slowly become disillusioned with their friends. They begin to realize that they have more in common with their other couple plus child friends, and not as much in common with their school chums.

Who are the school chums? My initial reaction is that they are college friends, like Steven and his Michigan friends (but without the weed). Who else could they be? Childhood friends. Work friends. Maybe a more complicated relationship would make it more interesting. Not necessarily.

Before we create the friends, we still need to understand the girlfriend. She’s a businesswoman, but that shouldn’t define her. She wants children, but what makes her interesting? Where’s the twist or exaggeration? She might be a little crazy. She comes from a broken home and her goal has been to avoid the fate of her parents. Why wouldn’t she just do that by not having children? Because if she doesn’t want children, then the story won’t go anywhere, stupid. Unless, it’s not the narrator but his girlfriend who doesn’t want children. There’s an interesting twist (actually, it’s only interesting if you knew the original idea, but I’ll let that pass). Why would he be with her? Perhaps he thinks he can change her mind. She’s focused on her work and doesn’t want to take time out to have children. In that case, there’s no reason for the narrator to be a teacher. The irony is lost, since it should be self-evident that a teacher would want children. He can be a generic businessman. Let’s come back to that.

Where did they meet? (This stretching of my brain hurts, by the way. It’s being exercised in a way I’m not used to. I’m just hoping it grows and this becomes easier or less painful.) Possibly a bar, or the internet, or from the school chums, or at work. You said she was a bit crazy, that might be another reason she doesn’t want children. She might have had an abortion earlier in her life and that affected her view toward children (not all of this information needs to come out during the storytelling. I’m just trying to get a deeper understanding of the characters and what they would do—i.e., their motives).

You have more questions than answers, it seems. I’ll be back.

Talking to Julie reminded me of two important marriage aspects in the story: my three-year marriage contract idea, which will be espoused probably by one of the school chums, and the circle of life for marriage: birth, childhood, school, work, marriage, (when they run out of things to say with to each other) kids, old age, death. So many theories to talk about.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.02.04 | Julie, Story Drafts

90th birthdays and Stephen King's writings

I’m back. I’ve received messages from my Frequent Readers: both were terribly worried. Okay, they weren’t so much worried as disappointed. They asked, Why would you pretend to post often, even going as far as calling others out for not posting, and then turn around and not post at all. It’s a good question and I will describe the answer in sufficient detail to bore the lot of you (I was going to say “to tears,” but I’ll spare you the cliché—oops, too late).

Sit back, make sure your seatbacks are in their reclined and comfortable position, and prepare yourself. If the measure of a musing is the number of letters typed on the screen, then this one’s a doozy. If the measure of a musing is the amount of caffeine that I intake before sitting down to write, then this one’s a grande (that’s with caffeine).

To start with, as you noticed if you’ve read my last few musings, I’ve been in a bit of a rut. These musings have become less about what’s going on in my life and more about my writing, and lately my writing has been rather bad. I don’t write about my work life here, partly because this is a public website, but mostly because I deal with it enough during the day and I don’t want to relive each moment through this. Instead, I share my current thoughts and environments. I’ve written a number of musings on my Starbucks pals—pals might be too strong of a word. Except for the coffee girl who believed I was a student (I haven’t seen her in awhile), I avoid talking to the masses at the coffeehouses. (My entire conversation with the coffee girl consisted of her asking, “Aren’t you a student?” And me responding, “Why…umm…yes.” And her saying, “I thought so. Will that be decaf?”) The masses are not exactly beating down the doors to talk to me either, but I’m fine with that. I come here to write, not talk. If I wanted to talk, I have plenty of imaginary friends at home to entertain me.

At times, I’ve used this forum to share the broad strokes of my life in asides, usually as the first or last few paragraphs. And occasionally, like today, I sit down with the purpose of describing in detail what’s been going on in my life. But most of the time, I focus on my writing.

Before I designed sewcrates.com, I started sharing my writing on a few websites, including Enter the Muse, but I didn’t like the comments I received. Not that I was looking for the aforementioned praise, but I was looking for insightful critiques and I wasn’t getting any. The thrill of posting a story got me back into writing again, and I thank those websites at least for that. But I decided the ego-gratification was actually hurting my writing. I ended up posting the story too soon just to fish for a comment or validation. This is something that still hurts my writing and something I will hopefully rectify by withholding the first draft (see below, way below).

Second, I wanted someplace to store my notes. Before I started this site, I explored a number of programs that promised to keep track of notes. You need to understand that my memory is not good. I have trouble remembering things that happened to me a month ago. Stuff that happened a year ago I remember when prompted with hints. Anything beyond that is fuzzy. When I visited Shannon this weekend, I forgot that he visited me in Houston two and a half years ago (I think he was on an interview). When he first mentioned that he had visited Houston, I thought, “What is he smoking? He’s never been there. I’m the good friend here, flying all the way to DC to see him.” It was only after I remembered a particular incident that I remembered that he had.

Shannon visited shortly after I moved to Houston and purchased my car. At the time, I was still learning to drive stick (I bought it because real men drive stick—don’t let wusses tell you differently—and, for the record, stick doesn’t give you more control over your car than automatic, it just makes you feel more manly as you manipulate the shaft). Shannon was showing off and parked my car inches away from the wall of my garage. (I still park the car three feet away from the wall, mostly because I can’t judge the front or rear distances. I really shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel of an automobile.) When I started the car the next day, I let go of the clutch. Shannon had left it in gear (I didn’t even know you can leave it in gear when you parked) and the car jerked forward, denting the license place but doing no other harm.

Until I remembered this, I didn’t remember that Shannon had visited. After I remembered this story, I started remembering other aspects of his visit, including his disdain of Ruth’s Chris’s Steakhouse (high quality food does not impress his holiness—at the time I brought him there I had also forgotten that I had introduced him to the buttery goodness of this particular steakhouse in NYC). As you can see, my memory is bad. I’m not proud of it, but I have learned to accept it.

These gaps in my memory extend to academic- and work-related information. When I have information, my work product is rather good, which is one of the reasons I did so well in graduate school. My notes were specific and complete. To remedy my lack of an adequate way to store my home and work notes, I started trying out various pieces of software. I settled on The Brain. I used it for a few months, but grew frustrated with the lack of synchronization between my home and work computers, and my PocketPC. The Brain offered a web-based solution, but wanted to charge additional money. After forking over $70 for the original product, I was not willing to pay for a more complete solution. It was then that I decided to create a website to hold my notes. It wouldn’t be as fancy as The Brain, but it would hold the same information.

Third, I wanted a place to store my pictures and writing, someway to share them with the world. Like everyone who owns a website, I pictured that after I installed my website, millions of people would visit it. That hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it to happen. I’m not disappointed. The people I really wanted to share my thoughts with do occasionally frequent here, and that’s the important thing.

Finally, I wanted a presence on the internet. As a nerd, I felt it was my obligation (and right) to mark my digital territory (visualize: dog urinating on wall). I reserved the URL david.figatner.name and sewcrates.com for this purpose. (I had problems linking david.figatner.name to this site. One day I’ll fix that.) I now have a presence and everything seems right in the world.

The creation of my original website is an interesting story, but I’ll leave it for another time. In short, after the Chuck Inspiration (we’ll call that post-CI), the current incarnation of sewcrates.com came into being.

I’m sure Julie is asking where is the Julie section in the musing (she does word searches for her name and skips right to that section—and you think I’m vain). I’m getting there right now. I spent the last week with Julie. She had another one of her mythical one-week vacations. I describe the vacations as mythical because as an intern (she incorrectly refers to herself as a first-year resident, or an R1, but in reality she’s just an I), you’re supposed to work your butt off. Last year, the medical powers-that-be implemented, among other slavery-saving procedures, an 80-hour workweek. Since then, residents’ life, most especially Julie’s life, has become much easier. Julie has four, one-week vacations. While I think it’s despicable that tomorrow’s doctors are not going to have nearly the skills of today’s doctors, I’m personally grateful for this change. I wouldn’t see Julie half as much if her schedule were what it would have been in 2000. We also couldn’t go on all our exotic vacations (see the photographs section for more details).

Julie flew to Houston on Saturday night. She could have flown Friday, since she had Friday afternoon off, but she’s not a good planner. She also could have flown from SNA (which is ten minutes away from her home) instead of LAX (which is forty minutes away), but, again, bad planning. In the end, I had to wait an extra day to see Julie, a long extra day. My plan for the week was to work four hours days on Monday and Tuesday. Work had a different opinion. It dumped oodles of paper on my desk and I had to work full days while Julie stayed in my apartment. The good part is that Julie, who is incapable of staying in a messy place, cleaned my apartment (before you ask, my apartment was David-clean before she arrived, but that’s a completely different standard from Julie-clean).

We went to DC to visit Shannon and Max (and her 13 children and grandchildren—fish and birds, which you would have known if you remembered Shannon’s distaste of monsters) on Wednesday and Thursday. He is getting along as usual. We then went to NY for my Grandma’s ninetieth birthday and Orli's second birthday. I won’t get much into these visits. I've posted pictures of these events. Julie also created her second album with my assistance as sound engineer (and Sugar Daddy for buying all the expensive sound equipment). Ain't she great? My intention today (as if I have an intention in this poorly organized and much too long musing), was to discuss my new writing rules and Julie (always Julie). I’ll breeze over my trips to accomplish this in a reasonable five pages.

While waiting for Shannon to finish his treatments (his laser zapping of mostly female clients in search of the smoothest skin—I asked but he wouldn’t let me play with the lasers after-hours, in case you were wondering) on Wednesday night, Julie and I bided our time in a monster-infested mall. There weren’t many monsters in the mall, but every other store sold monster accessories. Everything a monster could possibly need (or, more exactly, everything that a monster’s parent would think a monster could possibly need). Shannon later told us that in DC, having children has become a sort of status symbol. The more monsters you leashed, the more important (rich, good-looking, powerful, etc.) you were to the rest of society. This is wrong on so many levels. As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, while in the mall, we stopped in a bookstore and for $5.98 I bought Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s an autobiographical look at his career as a writer, including his advice to young and impressionable writers. Since I’m such a writer (or at least pretend to be one), I read it. It was a bit slow at parts, but overall it was a good read and I picked up some hints and validations of my current writing plans.

In brief, Stephen (since reading his book, I feel like I’m on a first name basis with him) validated my decision to stop watching television. I have now changed the rules for DVDs: I will only watch them on the weekends, leaving my weekdays free to focus on my writing. Before the vacation, I had been playing the Jedi video game rather often, even without friends (yes, this does get around my no-video game-without-friends-rule, but I made lots of excuses for this, such as, I needed the practice so Jason would stop kicking my ass when I played against him). Before the vacation and especially after Stephen’s book, I decided to curtail this and stop playing video games unless there’s a real, live friend in there with me.

Another suggestion he made was that to write well, you must read and write a lot. He recommended six hours a day, which seems fair to me. I calculated that I read and write an average of three to four hours a day, not counting work or internet sites. I’m going to try to increase that to six hours (I’m on my way with this musing, which I’ve been fiddling with for the past three hours, sad, huh). I’m also going to increase my reading intake. That’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to change my DVD watching rules. I’ve been spending too much time watching movies instead of reading. I’ve also gone out and bought an audio book on CD for my car. Now my five-minute trip to work will count toward my reading total.

Stephen discussed not overdoing the synopsis. When I thought about this, it made sense. I’ve been consternating and fighting the plot for my latest story about the lost mall child. Stephen’s suggestion is to pick a situation, a few one-dimensional characters, and let the characters and the situation tell the story. A plot will develop from their experiences, and the author will be pleasantly surprised by this development, which should flow better than if it had been meticulously planned. This is a good thing. I look back to my failed Grelko story for an example of too much planning. I became so obsessed with planning the details of the story that I lost track of what the story was about. In the end, I wrote the story more to just be done with it than to tell the story. The writing was halting and the characters undeveloped, pushed along more to get words on a page than tell the story. By having the characters tell the story, more possibilities will open up. In the end, the results are similar. Instead of planning the plot in an outline form and then writing from that outline, I’ll plan the plot in the form of the story. It might force me to rewrite parts of it after I discover a better plot twist, but that’s not bad. The more I write, the better I’ll become. It’s like the circle of life, only different.

The last important suggestion Stephen made relates to drafts and sharing drafts with others. This will have the greatest effect on my adoring fans (cough, cough). First, Stephen recommends that after you finish the first draft, you put the draft aside for six weeks before reading it again. This allows you to review the story with a different mindset, and lets the story percolate (my word, not Stephen’s) in your brain for a while. By the time you revisit the first draft, you’ll have more distance from the story. This should make it easier for you to cut your “darling children,” since the second draft should ideally be 10% shorter than the first. Besides not reading the first draft, Stephen also recommended that you not share the first draft with anyone else. This draft is a “closed door” draft. The only person you’re trying to please with this draft is yourself. Once the second draft is finished, then it’s time to share it with trusted friends (i.e., all three people who read this website), to get their honest opinions on the story and characters, the “open door” draft. I’m going to try this for my current story. Except for some thoughts on the direction of the story, you will probably not read anything for a while about my current story. I’ll keep you updated on where I am, but I’m not going to post any snippets until the second draft is finished.

I’ve also adjusted my writing schedule a bit to make more room for writing. I’m going to attempt to wake up early to write my story. You’ll be happy to hear that I plan to visit coffeehouses to draft musings in the evenings. We’ll see how long this lasts. Waking up at six this morning was difficult. What made it worse was that I only wrote three lines in my story. I’m hoping it’ll get better with time.

I did want to get back to Julie. I had a wonderful week with her. I forgot how much I love sleeping with her (get your minds out of the gutter, we’re talking about the actual act of sleeping now). She’s warm and quite squishy and fits rather well in most of my sleeping positions. She flew back with me to Houston yesterday before heading back to LA. Seeing her off at her gate was difficult, extremely difficult. I felt a ripping pain in my stomach when I watched her board the plane. I’ve never really felt that before. As I was driving back to my apartment, I missed her terribly. My feelings for her have grown over the past year that I’ve known her. I love her. I now can say that I know what love is. I’ve always known what familial love is, but not this other type. Where that will take us, I don’t know. But I felt it was important to say.

Starbucks is closing in five minutes. I think I’ve dragged this out long enough. If you’ve made it this far, I’m impressed. If you’ve just skipped down to the end then you should know that the Butler did it in the Pantry. I’ll try to be more regular with these musings.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.02.16 | Diary, Julie, sewcrates.com

More Complaining

I don’t know how people talk to me. I complain so fucking much. That Julie can put up with me is a miracle. I complain about just about everything: the weather, having to eat, sleeping—anything that at first I think would be cute, but then I take to exrremes until the cuteness devolves into annoyance.

You will not complain in the story. You’ll appear innocent and a victim. In the end you will not be so innocent. I even annoy myself after a while. Go figure.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.04.29 | Julie, Writing

Good Sister

Julie is a good sister for one year. You can be a good sister too if you do one good deed. It lasts only one year, like jury duty.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.05.22 | Julie, Voyeur

wah i nee

electrons zap greetings, exchanges;

new zaps follow silence, until:

meet in steak’s house, jack-o’-lanterns near.

opera’s next, but i know it can’t last;

not a relationship man;

never been one—didn’t know how.

‘moving away,’ they tell me, ‘far away’

‘where am i going to poke,’ she asks;

‘somewhere beautiful, sunny and sandy.’

she goes, leaving me humid and dreadful;

no go for me, thunder rolls;

classes on ardor, i learn slowly.

year plus-plus passes, ears pop often;

eating headsets like candy;

soreness of distance and pretzel rest.

heart quickens when i say ‘wah i nee’ ;

‘wah she-ong nee’ we cry, ‘wah she-ong nee’ ;

story’s unfinished, beginnings await.

⊕ Houston, TX | 2004.07.08 | Julie, Poetry

Caffeinated Fish

Coffee really is the elixir of gods. Or was that beer? I forget. Either way, I’m sitting here with a tall Mocha and life is good again. This is usually the part of my writing where distraction sets in, and right on schedule, it’s ugly mug shows up. I’ve focused my life so much around my new job that the only thoughts that fly through my ears relate to work. Since I don’t talk about that here, I find myself with little to talk about. That’s where the yummy caffeine comes in.

The castle is doing well, if you were wondering. Besides unpacking and having the boxes carted off, I’ve not done much in the way of decorating. I’ve hung only one picture, and it’s in my reading room, which is rather funny because that’s the only room in my house with no furniture. I’m still not sure what a reading room is, but I know it’s something of a cross between a study and a hallway. I’m going to love writing on the furniture that will eventually inhabit the room: I’m thinking about plushy, old-school (think pipe smoking but without the sweet smoke, or pipe, or fire, or tobacco, or, you get the idea) leather chairs with matching ottomans and some small tables to hold the, yes, you’re getting good at this guessing, yummy caffeinated drinks. But for now, the picture hanging on the wall mocks me.

The last time I sat down with a cup of coffee to write I was sitting in the bucks of stars in Houston, Texas, lamenting my fate. Lamenting is not the right word. I wasn’t mournful about the change, it’s just that the change was all encompassing. I had trouble focusing on the writing, even with sweet caffeine scouring my veins. I’m still in the aftershocks of that change. While life is becoming more settled, my mind still races through empty corridors most nights. I’ve not had the free time, the free weekends, to sit down and evaluate everything that is happening. I’m not sure I even want to evaluate it. When you’re happy, it’s not always good to see what’s waiting under the covers. That made little sense. What I meant to say is that when you’re excited about a gift, it’s sometimes disappointing to unwrap it. That is, receiving a gift is sometimes nicer than the gift itself. Damn, now I’m babbling. I’ll move on now before I scare myself with my incoherence.

I’ve spent the last few days rethinking the inner workings of this site. I’ve started work on migrating my Linux/Apache/PHP server to an XP Pro/IIS/ASP.NET+C# server. I’m sure you’re asking yourself why. (I’ve tried to guess your thoughts a little too often in this musing. It’s a habit of mine. I tend to speak better when I have someone to bounce ideas off. The fact that you’re not actually there, well, at least not there when I’m writing this, is probably a sign of insanity. Hell, this whole aside is a sign of insanity and will be used in my commitment hearings. Your honor, I am sane. There are little people reading this while I write it. They’re even telling me what they’re thinking as I type. They’re my green, invisible, intangible, space-alien friends. Really. Yes, your honor, they are green. No, your honor, I don’t know how I know they’re green since they’re invisible, but trust me on this, they are. So you say I should follow these nice men in the white suits? Will they bring me more yummy caffeine? Oh, something better, you say? Egg-cellent.)

Anyway, as I was saying, I wanted to learn a new language (C#) and cut off my own head by trying to administer yet another un-administrable platform. I remember the weeks and months it took to set up my Linux box and get Apache and PHP to run on it. That fun is just starting with IIS. At least IIS supports C# out of the box. I’ve not made much progress. Two days ago, I thought I was actually getting somewhere. I went to sleep (too late, of course) having figured a few things out and with a number of possible avenues for development. When I plopped down in front of my computer yesterday, all that progress disappeared. I won’t bore you with the difficulties, but I went to sleep last night discouraged and lamenting (there’s the proper use of that word) my new website design.

Not that you will notice much of a change. Most of the external workings will remain the same (except for some minor, cosmetic changes). I’m focusing (for now) on migrating the internal workings to the new server, and redoing the generation of the pages and pictures. The impetus for the change, for those technically minded, was my frustration with PHP’s object-oriented design (actually, the lack of a good OOD). Of course, the opportunity to play with a new language and program again was another benefit.

Now that I’ve cleared that techno-babble from my mind, I can get back to the more important issues. Julie is coming up this weekend! She’s been traveling to Seattle often, which is a nice break from all my travels to Newport Beach. She’s in a tough rotation now, working nights in the OB (that’s the baby-delivery-thingy place) for the past few weeks, and that together with lack of sleep and her favorite fish dying yesterday, have left her in a rather strange place. But I’m sure my wonderfully planned weekend of sleeping and…umm…sleeping will get her back on track. Sleeping in the castle is exceptionally peaceful. You should try it one day (hint, hint: visit me!).

Getting back to her poor fish, her golden Japanese algae sucker jumped out of her fish tank the day before yesterday. When we first bought him (I’m assuming it’s a he, although with algae fish, you never can know—or, at least, I can never know), he was rather timid. He hid in the door of the taller Pagoda that made the fish tank look more like a city then a, you know, glass box. He grew from less than half an inch to more than three inches, and moved to the smaller Pagoda with the larger door. As he grew bigger and we added more fish to the tank, he became aggressive, swimming around quickly to protect his underwater domain. After Julie found him, she performed an investigation that would have made CSI proud. Julie now figures it was during one of his aggressive swims that he jumped up through the back of the fish tank. (She didn’t find a suicide note, but the neon fish stuck with their story that they were swimming on the bottom of the tank when he jumped.) Julie found the proud algae sucker the next day behind the fish tank. I imagine he was stiff and rather white. My only regret was that it was too late to fry him up. But don’t tell Julie that. She sees each fish that dies (and there have been many dead fish in her tank) as a personal failing. R.I.P., algae sucker.

I’ve babbled enough for one day. From the length of this post, one thing is clear: caffeine is a good thing, a very good thing.

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2004.10.07 | Diary, Julie, sewcrates.com

8 Days Left

I’m starting this late with a headache. But I’m here and I’m typing. I’m in that wonderful place I mentioned briefly yesterday, where I have nothing to say about life. It’s wonderful because my hope is that it will prod my muse into talking about my story. That’s not completely true. I do have one thing to talk about: Julie is at the airport waiting to go home now. I’m becoming repetitive by saying this, but we had a wonderful weekend and I miss her already. It’s getting more difficult for me to watch her leave when she visits. In another year and a half we won’t have to worry about this anymore, but between now and then is a long time and, if you’ll excuse my pathetic word choice, it sucks. I miss holding her, wrapping my arms around her warm body and finding the crevices for my head and hands, like the grasping arms of the stuffed monkey that holds on tight. As I said, there will come a day where I won’t need such thoughts, but that day seems so far away, especially when I’m sitting alone in the bucks.

It has been nice writing every day. I don’t have to worry about trying to guess what day it is when I save the file (I name all my files by date). I just add one to the last day. I am beginning to understand what Stephen King in his book On Writing was talking about when he wrote about writing everyday. He once told reporters that the only days he took off were New Years and Columbus day (or something silly like that), but he was lying. He never took a day off from writing (well, at least until he a car hit him. Then he took days off, but that wasn’t by choice). Writing for me is becoming cathartic and easier. It’s not easy in that I can say something of value. What is easier is just writing my thoughts, putting words on the paper and not having to worry about simple things, like how do I want to say that, or should I even say that? Writing without editing (or editing following my newfound rules) silences my inner critic and more directly links my brain to my fingers, in the way that my brain is linked to my throat when talking.

My head has been delicate today. I hate waking up with the beginnings of a headache. I know there’s not much I can do with it. The best I can hope for is to turn over and go back to sleep and try waking up again. Sometime it works, but more usual, I wake up with the same or worse headache. Thankfully, by the time I arrived at the bucks, my headache had receded to a mere murmur in the back of my brain. As long as I didn’t move my head too fast or stare at the screen for too long, the headache has agreed to keep its distance. The problem with headaches, besides hurting terribly and ruining perfectly good days, is that they’re also unreliable. We’ll see how long this one keeps its promise.

I’ve been reading more of the Nanowrimo forums as of late. While my initial reaction was that they were filled by talent-free hacks, I’ve been reading through some decent writing that has forced me to reevaluate my quick judgments. That’s something I’m not good at: quick judgments. I’m awful when I first meet people. My first reaction, whether negative or positive, can almost never be trusted. It’s not the always wrong reaction, which would be easy to fix by just reversing my initial thought—you know, dumb person becomes smart, ala the great episode where George Castanza of “Seinfeld” decided to spend the day doing the opposite of what he thought he should do. That was the episode where he received a job with the Yankees and bedded a girl, or at least that’s what I hazily remember. It was a great episode, either way. Getting back to me, I’m wrong about half the time with my initial reactions and I find myself missing out on potentially good acquaintances or opportunities by judging so quickly.

There are some good writers participating in the Nanowrimo. There are also many, many students—you can tell them by their livejournal websites—who aspire to write and have many years to find out that there are many better aspirations. But I enjoy reading forums; I like understanding a community and seeing how people interact. I’ll keep reading the forums and trying to find inspiration there. What harm can there be in that?

I’ve cleared my throat enough for one day. It’s time I continued the planning of the story. Over the last few days, I’ve been making large, drastic changes, and I have a feeling that by next week (remember, the start of November is only eight days away—I’m having trouble counting days. Am I supposed to include today? Should I include November 1? Math, the number-math not the theory math, was never a strong subject for me), I won’t recognize the story I started to plan a few days ago. The little girl has disappeared, and the pink sweater is threatening to follow. I’m rethinking the themes and trying to find some hooks and new characters to introduce.

There, I found my goal for today. I’m not moving terribly fast toward my goal, and the caffeine, while lessening my headache (just while drinking it, regrettably), isn’t doing much to accelerate my thinking or writing. Therefore, I’ll choose a ridiculous goal and see how far I can push it. I want to create characters today. I’ve read that it’s the characters that actually push a story forward. I don’t know very much about that, since my characters, with the exception of Kem from Termite, weren’t memorable for me (I won’t even bother to ask what you thought of any of them, if you even remember any characters). But from what other writers, both successful and hack, say, when they let their characters go, they’re always surprised where they—i.e., the characters—take them. Before I can let them go do their thing, however, I need to sketch them and understand who they are, or at least, what they are.

The caffeine is fighting my headache and losing. My word count is hovering around 550 (before editing, of course), but I’m going to keep going. I don’t think anything interesting will come out of this typing but I made myself a promise to keep pushing through, even when nothing is coming. I’m good at the pushing—particularly if I’m pushing with no concerns for what pops out on the other end. I finished my coffee. We’ll see if there’s enough caffeine entering my bloodstream to keep me going toward finishing this musing.

I’m leaning toward naming the narrator Lenny, after my illustrious demon friend. I want there to be one exaggeration for each character, something I can point to and say, that’s so-and-so, you know, the guy with the limp. I’m hoping to come up with something better than a limp, of course. But I want to start working with something. Before I get to that, let me introduce more of the lineup. Lenny is involved with a woman, Karen, a tall, curly haired brunette. She is outgoing and. Yeah, that’s not working well. Nothing is working well, but I’m going to keep pushing. Bathwater and baby, that’s how it goes—I’m just swimming through the bathwater looking for the baby. My god, even my poorly wrought analogies are poorly wrought. Wow. Keep pushing, we’re at 790 words (again, before editing—I’m much better at going back through these musings and adding junk than thinking up the junk in the first place. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Original ideas, like the ones I was trying to describe yesterday, are hard to come up with. Filling crap in-between ideas, regardless of how original they are, are not difficult. It’s just not terribly productive either).

What makes Karen special? Why is she dating Lenny? Who cares? Talk some about Lenny’s job. Does he like it? What defines him? His love of something can define him. It’s not going to be his love of his job or his love of Karen. He’ll discover Karen later in the book, when she threatens or does leave him. I don’t predict a sane outcome for Lenny. He’s not going to do well with the sweater or the magic. Lenny will need friends. We’ll start at work. A Tamer character would be interesting. What exactly is a Tamer character? Do I even know how to create characters? I’m becoming pretty scared about my story now. Looking back at my poorly designed previous stories, none of them had more than two characters. Originally, the Termite was supposed to have four characters, but I couldn’t do it. I tried and tried, but ended up killing (okay, more like deleting than killing) the second two characters and leaving myself with two. My other stories were similar. Even in Grelko, my only multi-character story, none of the characters were fully developed.

Argh. My headache and doubts are filling up these pages with babble. What I need is more dreaming, more ceiling staring and sleepy mutters into my voice-recording phone. For reasons that I wish I could understand and fix, I am not good at developing ideas by writing. I want my characters to show themselves on the page. I want them to make choices and surprise me. I want, as I’ve read many times before, a character to change the plot and flow of the story in such a drastic way that I can’t believe it’s the same character that I had originally written. These are all wants and desires. I’m thinking their going to find themselves unfulfilled at the end of November, but I’m hoping to be surprised.

This has not turned out like I hoped, and I had high hopes on this headachy Sunday evening. I sit down with limited expectations but unlimited expectations. When I end up, like I usually do, at the end of these entries having said little and moved my story nowhere, I become discouraged. Don’t worry: this won’t stop me from continuing writing. It’ll just leave me disappointed, looking back on another wasted day where I could have written something of value but instead consternated for 2,000 words. One of the reasons I’m looking forward to starting Nanowrimo is because my consternations will not count toward my daily writing goal. I’ll instead have to write prose, create characters, and grant them breathe. Either that, or give up, and we know that I’m not going to give up. Particularly since Chuck would enjoy nothing more than basking in my failure. He has already proposed writing a script to compare our daily word counts. I’ll, of course, accede to his wishes, mostly because I know I’m a faster typist and at the least I’ll write more words in a day than he will. Well, hopefully. While I do type fast, seeing as I have a real job, I actually have less time to write than him. This is a great way to waste words: trash talk Chuck. I should have thought about doing this many hours ago.

I won’t bother writing another paragraph about not coming up with any original ideas or direction for my story. I’m close to fulfilling my 2,000 word count and I’ll leave it at that. Any words that I’m missing I’m going to capture by editing in a few words here and there. I’m not proud of my content, but I am proud of my quantity. That’s what it’s about for the next month and nine days: quantity. I’ll worry about actually saying something of value when I get done with this. I thank you if you’ve made it this far. I don’t expect it, and in all likelihood, the only people who will make it this far are those who scroll to the end to see if I am planning to say anything of value. For those that do (after searching for “Julie,” of course), I’m sorry to say that yet again I failed to say anything of value. But, boy oh boy, did I type a lot of words.

Word count: 1,957; time: 50 minutes; Caffeination: Tall mocha + Tea at Dim Sum; word count after editing: 2,092; editing time: 12 minutes (cut short because this bucks closes at 7pm on Sundays).

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2004.10.24 | Diary, Julie, Nanowrimo

Broken Clocks

“How come all my clocks are broken?” That’s a good question if I ever heard one, and I’ve heard my share of questions. I almost went through the day without writing. It’s evening now and I sat down with Julie on the couch to write. She’s reading her fantasy novel. Besides video games, I addicted her to fantasy novels. She goes through stages where she doesn’t read, but with the vacations coming up in a week, she’ll get a lot of reading done. We’re heading to Taiwan next Friday. I’m excited to visit, if not the flight. When I went to the airport to pick up Julie, I remembered how much I hated to fly. There’s something depressing about sitting in a closed box for hours and hours with nothing to do but read and watch TV and write. I guess when I put it that way, it doesn’t sound too bad, especially with Julie sitting next to me to keep me calm and stop me from going crazy.

I liked the story I wrote yesterday. It’s raw and needs an ending and a middle, and probably a point, but the writing style was fun. I forced the short sentences more than the Brooklyn accent in the flying toe stomp. I liked that story as well, but I don’t think I did as good of a job editing it as I would have liked. The sheer size of it made it difficult for me to get my hands around it. While I liked the individual bits, I felt I missed on the story. I built up nothing, there was little conflict (outside the obvious one) and it didn’t end. The ending was more because I grew lazy than I couldn’t think of a way of ending it. I’m usually good at endings. When I get to it, the words come easier and I draw everything together. I failed on that one. I ended it in the middle of a thought and didn’t resolve anything. More for the next draft, I guess.

I didn’t mean to sit down and complain today. I’m having a good day. I posted new pictures of Julie and my stroll around the park, which names my community. It was a beautiful sunny, if slightly cold, day. I nice relief from the rainy weather we’ve been having over the last week. I’m still adapting Julie to the cold. I told her today that I’m conditioning her, as you do with new fish you bring home before adding them to the aquarium. If you dropped the fish in the tank, the shock of the different temperatures may kill them. Instead, you put the bag in the water, and let the water temperature in the bag equalize with the tank over a half hour. I’m doing the same thing with Julie. I’m giving her small tastes of Seattle’s weather to condition her for the big plop, which is now a little more than a year away. Sucker.

I have a nice fire going and the candles burning. It’s a nice relaxing Saturday night. We ate bad sushi tonight. We’ve only been to one decent restaurant in Seattle. The other ones are good—better than Houston at least—but nothing to write home, brag, dance in the streets, etc. Man, my analogies or is that a syllogism or some other part of English that I know nothing about, are bad tonight.

I’m afraid I’m going to call it quits early tonight. It was nice to see Chuck post something again. He’s been a bit of a funk since Nanowrimo (while he pretends to be busy, we all know the truth). That’s what you get for writing something brilliant. Me, I didn’t write anything brilliant, so I don't have to worry about the after effects. Now I have to find inspiration. I’ll search tomorrow.

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2004.12.11 | Diary, Julie

Loops in the Park

Today was another cold and clear day. Mr. Rainer (that’s Mt. Rainer to you) was hazy but visible from the lake. I took a long, cold walk around Seward Park, and on my way back, after getting lost and wandering the neighborhood for an addition thirty minutes, I realized that if my house were a bit higher or further into the street, I would have a view of Mr. Rainer. As it is now, I have to settle for the peaks of other not-so-big mountains in the distance. The visibility of the surrounding mountains has greatly improved with the colder weather, as have the stars. I didn’t even know Seattle had stars until this past week.

To survive the freezing temperatures (I’m not sure the exact temperature, but many of the puddles had a thin coatings of ice—very unusual for these parts), I dressed in layers. I wore a long-sleeve black shirt, a sweater over the shirt, my blue zipper-up work sweatshirt, hat, gloves, and scarf. While most of my body was quite snug—almost too much so, I attempted to regulate my temperature by taking off and putting back on my gloves many times during the loop around the park—my corduroy pants, which I assumed from my previous experience with corduroy in the 1980s would be warm, were the weak point. Halfway around the park, the backs of my legs started to itch, which is never a good sign. Except for the incessant itching, the walk was nice. I like to say that I spent much of it planning new stories or NEQID, but my mind was full of the rewrite for the website. When I’m stuck on a project, it’s hard to get my mind onto other things.

I set what I thought was a good pace for the walk, but I was behind a couple that would have none of it. They must have been a newer couple since when they entered the park, he, the guy that is, said, “And over here we have the northwestern ducks, better known in these part as the Seattlian-doe ducks, which are well known in this lake-front habitats,” and on, and on, in his most look at me, over here, hey, down here, damn it, I’m funny, very funny, now look at me, voice to impress his girl. She laughed and I somehow managed to swallow my bile. But no matter how much I increased my walking speed, I never caught up to them or got close enough to eavesdrop for additional not-clever clever remarks. They must have been super walkers or something. Halfway through the loop, when it became apparent that I wouldn’t catch them, I stopped for a bit to rub the backs of my legs. Looking back, I feel it’s now safe to admit that I stopped more to put the couple out of view than to relieve the coldness from my legs. I thought about running to pass them, until I realized that (a) I wasn’t wearing the right type of shoes, and (b) running makes me tired and I don’t like being tired. You’ll be happy to hear that with all the getting lost and freezing my legs off, I did manage to return to the warm Castle, and as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, I sustained no permanent damage.

When I first sat down to write this evening, I attempted to light a fire to ward the cold and fragrance the living room. The fireplace, like the couple before it, fought me. I stuffed wads of newspaper and junk mail under three well-placed logs, but there must have been something in the air because after the kindling burnt through, the wood didn’t catch. I let the embers sit for a while, hoping that something would catch, but it never did. With no fire, I gave up on writing, cooked a delicious dinner of lamb and steamed string beams, and washed all the dishes that had been piling up in the sink. I know that none of this is in the least bit interesting, but I needed to provide background for how I got through my funk. That’s right. I’m now funk-free. The funk gave me lots of time to work on the redesign of the website. In another week, I should be able to hit the switch and share with you all the fancy new whistles and bells. Besides the stylistic changes, I did go back to my original idea of redesigning the website from the ground up. The redesign reuses a lot of slightly rewritten code but I’m happy I did it. As I tried to explain before, it’s now more aesthetically pleasing to me, and isn’t that the important thing?

Continuing on my week of firsts—if you remember, yesterday I managed to break the first item in the Castle—last night (early this morning is more accurate, since Julie hasn’t been getting home until after midnight), I fought with Julie for the first time. We’ve had minor squabbles in the past, but they never amounted to much. When my doctor last week asked about girlfriend-produced stress, I told him that I didn’t have any, thanks to my long-distance relationship. That has all since changed. We fought for a few hours on the phone, which is not the best of places to fight. It’s easier to argue when you’re face to face and your facial expressions can portray the evil thoughts that are going through your head. Suffice to say I was wrong, selfish, and pig headed. I’d like to blame the late hour, the funk, the moon moving through Jupiter, the cold weather, but the truth is, it was all me. I wanted something my way, and I was angry when I didn’t get it. I’m like a petulant child at times, and even when I’m like that, it’s hard to break it. I get into a bad mood after something doesn’t go my way, and that mood permeates everything I do. We’ve gotten over it after cooler heads prevailed, but there’s a lesson in all of this. I’m not sure what it is, but something along the lines of Trust in Julie (TIJ). Now, before you ask if I’m writing this so I don’t have to sleep on the proverbial (not sure why I’ve been using this word so often) couch—forgetting even that we don’t live together or that my couch is very comfortable and in easy access to my movie collection and Netflix—I’m not. That’s why I write fiction: so I can lie freely.

And, moving past my week of firsts, I broke my second item in the Castle. My beautifully self-installed, perfectly centered and caulked, garbage disposal, which was my second house project—come to think of it, there hasn’t been a real third project, I am a lazy man—stopped working. I could understand if I jammed it—by all rights, it should have been jammed with all the crap that I throw down there—but when I turned it on today, it just buzzed. It worked the last time I used it a few days ago. I turned off the electricity and spun the grinding thingy with a fork. It moved freely, which moved my diagnosis from jammed to engine trouble. I’m planning to recheck the electrical connection I made when I installed it, and then I’m going to call in the garbage disposal folks and invoke my right of warranty. Either that or I’m going to not use it anymore and pretend it’s not even there. That’s probably more likely.

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2005.01.03 | Castle, Diary, Julie

Ant-Free Day

Inspiration strikes at strange times. I’m busy and tired all day, and when I drive home, the writing bug hits me and I have all these ideas. I record a few onto my phone, but by the time I make it home (fighting the usual evening traffic), the inspiration has left me and I can do nothing but wonder what happened. With all my gadgets and moleskins, there are few times where I have nothing to record the flighty moments of inspiration. But recording random thoughts is not the same as writing. When I listened to my notes from the drive home, I realized that to turn any of those notes into actual sentences and paragraphs would be difficult. If I had been at a good writing place when the inspiration struck, it would not have been as difficult.

But I’m crying over dumped garbage. Speaking of garbage, I’m naming today an official ant-free day. While I have not sucked up or seen an ant in about five days (they disappeared right around the time I fell ill—coincidence: I think not), I dumped the remaining ants captured over the last week in my vacuum cleaner into the garbage today. In Seattle, the garbage people only collect once a week, Thursday morning for my block. As of twenty-minutes ago, the Castle is devoid of ants and ant carcasses (at least visibly—I’m sure some still linger in the walls). You know what that means: tomorrow I’ll probably find thousands of them crawling around, just in time to freak out Julies for her visit this weekend.

Speaking of Julies, my mother asked me a funny question the other day. She said, “I keep seeing you write ‘Julies’ on your website when you refer to Julie. Is that her real name?” Well, I guess it isn’t that funny, but it made me laugh. I don’t remember when I started calling Julie ‘Julies.’ If you haven’t figured it out, her real name is Julies and ‘Julies’ is a pet name, like ‘honey’ or ‘please don’t hurt me.’ When I missed Julie, I would tell her, “Why are there so many Julies in the world?” To which she’d ask how many, and I’d say, “There are millions of Julies.” Then she’d ask how many Davids, and I’d have to offer the upsetting truth: “Just one.” Yeah, we’re one of those types of couples, you know, the type that talk baby talk to each other and sicken small children and animals with their cuteness. Part of it comes from the long-distance aspect of the relationship. We don’t spend much time physically together (although we spend lots of virtual time together—whether on the phone or in the video-game world, or, as I prefer, both simultaneously), and when we get together, we’re like children. I don’t know what makes us transform, but we’re not the only people who suffer from this type of abomination.

I’m almost back to full health. My congestion, sneezing, and coughing were rather bad today, but I didn’t feel sick physically. Sure, I run around with tissues to catch errant coughs or outrageous sneezes (the type where I squirt large chunks of phlegm onto unsuspecting floors and people), and I sound like a deeper-voiced and sexier version of David. But overall, I don’t feel bad. I’m hoping that when I wake up tomorrow morning, my sickness will be past and I’ll have the energy to return to the gym.

Speaking of writing (okay, I wasn’t really talking about it, but you know it’s always on the tip of my fingers, even if not one of you wants to hear me consternate or complain about it), I did have some interesting ideas on another story as I drove home. As I mentioned before, I had hopes of writing it, but I don’t think it’s going to happen today. After dinner, movie, phone conversations, and soon-to-play video games, I think this is already a full day. I just wanted to say that, yes, I am thinking of writing something other than these everything-is-peachy words, and, no, it won’t happen today, and probably won’t happen for a few more days, as I prepare for Julies’ visit, which involves much cleaning (both Castle- and personal-wise), and mentally preparing to share my space with another.

We’ve reached the edges of my thoughts for the day; at least the thoughts I wanted to share. One of these days, I’m going to find the energy or desire to share my more philosophical musings, the type I talk about for hours on the phone with friends. If you must know (and I know you probably don’t, but I’m going to share anyway), it’s a matter of effort. The thought of organizing these terribly brilliant sounding discussions into writing gives me a headache. What else is new?

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2005.03.23 | Castle, Julie

Moping Castles

I’m having trouble writing the essay I spoke about yesterday. I know I should be spending this time writing instead of consternating about my troubles, but I can only stare so long at poorly formed paragraphs before feelings of dejection overtake my fragile psyche. That and today is caffeine-free, never a good omen.

After a rather prolific day writing yesterday, today was slower. Julie left a few hours ago, and she’s on her way back to California after two-bookend weekends in Seattle during her whirlwind (her term, not mine) tour of China and Taiwan. I parked and walked her to security because she had to check her two large suitcases. It’s always harder to watch her leave from there because the pain lasts longer. Better to rip the bandage off and be done with it. The Castle is now empty and I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to think about my cold bed or empty heart.

After spending the weekend in different neighborhoods in Seattle, Julie and I decided that as long as we’re in Seattle, there’s no reason to move away from the Castle. While there are some cute neighborhoods with better access to dining and coffee houses, any other house we bought would pale compared to the peacefulness, architecture, and views of the Castle. I doubt the cuteness of other neighborhoods would last long. Even the best contains only five or six blocks worth of interesting shops. I keep trying to force Seattle into my mold of New York. I have to accept that this is not New York, and I will have to drive places, find culture spread throughout the city, and accept that neighborhoods contain only a few blocks worth of interesting shops and restaurants.

I have nothing else to say. I didn’t have much to say to begin with, but after cutting my nails (long nails make typing very difficult), I felt I should say something. I decided not to bore you with more chronicles on my essay writing. It’ll come or not over this week. I can rehash it after the verdict is in. Instead, I’ll post what little I’ve written of this non-essay musing, and mope around the Castle. In spite (or perhaps because) of all its peacefulness, the Castle is a wonderful place to mope.

⊕ Seattle, WA | 2005.04.03 | Diary, Julie

Groping Distractions and Sleeping Through Barbeques

Unlike yesterday, today is not going to be easy. It’s 11pm and Julie is not letting me write. She keeps bothering me trying to stick her tongue down my throat. I’m keeping her off me with extreme effort. It’s difficult, but I have obligations. Today was a long day. I slept through most of it after a family barbeque.

After too many late morning risings and naps, I’ve found another cause for my morning headaches besides sleep apnea. Julie is again trying to distract me from my writing duties by smelling me. I’m trying to resist her evil allures. It is difficult but we all have crosses to bear, and mine is Julies. She slapped me after reading the last sentence. She’s also trying to press the backspace button to erase the evidence, but I’m not letting her. I’m sneaky that way.

New paragraph. I’m sure when people see us together they are as sickened by our disgusting baby talk and touching as I would have been seeing two people like us together years ago. Now it’s funny and cute and sexy. I guess this will last another six weeks before it all becomes old and craggily. Julie, for those still paying attention, is now sucking on my neck, again trying to distract me from my writing endeavors. It’s been difficult coming up with different words, such as endeavors, duties, and obligations, but I’ve persevered to bring up to the minute Julie sightings and doings.

Getting back to my discussions on sleep, since I’m sure you’re more interested in that than in Julie’s groping (and if you’re not, there are plenty of other sites on the internet that you should be visiting; please send e-mail to Julie for the exact URLs of those sites—she again slapped me after reading this comment, denying any knowledge of the aforementioned websites). Mom, if you read this, Julie thinks that you should disregard all of the above because these terrible, terrible truths embarrass her. Now she (that’s Julies again) is trying to poke me upside the chest and stomach areas and yelling, “Change that, change that,” in a most threatening and scary voice. For the enjoyment and education of my reading audience, I shall again persist in keeping these words as they were written in a moment by moment analysis of the events as they occurred.

Once again, returning to the topic of the day—sorry for the interruption, but Julie, complaining about the terrible heat that has met us in NYC, demanded that we close all the windows in the bedroom, where I am writing and Julie is poking most inconsiderately, and turn on the air conditioner. The weather today has been terribly hot. The outdoor barbeque that my mother planned became an indoor, air-conditioned barbeque because of the heat and its affects on the partygoers and my grandmother in particular, who is in her 80s (I would have put the exact number down, but I’m not a very good grandson). Any who, I was trying to talk about sleep and my self-diagnosed sleep apnea. As I write this and Julie reads in real time (which, by the way, is the most reading she’s done of my website since I started posting—she always claimed to read everything I wrote, but I watched her today read yesterday’s efforts, and after reading the first twenty or so words, she immediately began skimming my beautifully crafted words for the “Julie” part, and then partaking in the “Julie” part most excitedly), she groans at the continuous mentions of sleep apnea since she believes I have a tendency to dwell on certain aspects of my personality. Of course, this is ridiculous. I do not dwell on such parts of my personality, but instead use this time and these words to better myself and evaluate me and my life, trying to improve it so Julie can have a better David. (After writing that last sentence, I was rewarded with a sweet kiss, which only goes to show you that writing for your audience is important, and the truth is not so important.)

New paragraph. Getting back to the sleep apnea question, it has come to my attention that perhaps, in some way, I was mistaken in the sleep apnea self-diagnosis. After taking a not-so-needed nap in the middle of the barbeque this afternoon, I woke up with a mild headache and a case of PY (pathologic yawning) (don’t feel bad if you didn’t remember what PY stood for, since I didn’t either without Julie, who is now making nice to David in the hopes of getting more positive mentions in this musings, to which she is obviously succeeding, who, getting back to what Julie did, reminded me that the name of the excessive yawning was pathologic). The mild headache and PY after today’s nap (which brought my total sleep time to over 30 hours for the last day), convinced me that perhaps, in some way, I might have incorrectly diagnosed myself with sleep apnea or the African sleeping sickness, which is another favorite diagnoses of mine when it comes to my sleeping problems. My mother made this more than clear after laughing off any possibility that anyone in her family would have sleep apnea, believing that no Figatner has ever nor would ever snore, except—as Julie points out sitting next to me as the judges in the Muppet Show would do during particularly poignant (thanks to Julie for that spelling or that word would have never appeared) segments—when sick.

Another interruption as Julie comments after reading over my shoulder (something I usually don’t let her do, but since I had nothing to write today, I decided to incorporate Julie’s distractions to show you how I overcome her normal distractions), she said, “I can’t believe that Chuck wants to read this (she was going to say crap here, but she didn’t, but since I lie all the time anyway, I’ll include) crap?” To which I have no response, particularly since he claims to have read yesterday’s bowl of crap, which, I am very proud to say, was one of my most prolific and brilliant works to date, which, by and by, only goes to show that Chuck has impeccable taste when it comes to writing. It’s either that or he’s a terrible masochist, glutton for punishment (another favorite cliché).

I’m halfway through with lots of words and not much to write about today. Today, if you haven’t figured out yet, is a caffeine-free day. I’ll pretend that if had not been, I might have attempted a story, something I am irrationally avoiding. After writing the first half of today’s entry, my joy and excitement has waned. I’m now tired and trying to squeak out more words to meet the Goal. This would have been easier if I didn’t spend the last three hours watching the Tony awards show. I particularly liked how they cut off the thank-you speeches with the music. I wish I could do that in real life. I would be talking to someone who was boring me, and then I’d say, “Cue music,” and the music would come up, and the person would know that they’re talking was coming to a close. Then, and this is my favorite part, if they continued to speak, the music would swell until I could no longer hear them and all their talking was for naught. Oh, what a world, what a beautiful world that would be.

We woke from our nap with all of the guests having left the house. Seeing as we had breakfast at midday (thanks to our late rising), and my mother served the barbeque at around 3pm, I didn’t eat much at the barbeque thanks to my bagel, cream cheese, and lox at breakfast. When we woke up after the barbeque and nap, I was hungry, and Julie and I ventured through the streets of Brooklyn (or “the hood,” as Julie called it) to find sustenance. We walked down the Avenue, passing many yummy pizzerias, none of which Julie would eat at because she, being Asian, abhors cheese, a condition that I, being a Brooklyn Jew, cannot understand, especially when it comes to pizza. We eventually settled on a greasy roast beef joint—which, as it turns out, was David’s original plan before we walked thirty minutes down the Avenue only to return to two blocks from my mother’s house for the greasy roast beef. It was a bit hot in the roast beef joint, but we found a table near the air conditioner, and ordered the dripping roast beef sandwich that I described poorly in The Flying Toe Stomp (I think—not the poorly part, but the describing part). The food was delicious as always, except at the end, where Julie noticed a friendly cockroach wandering around the area near the napkin holder and sweet relish. That kind of killed any remaining appetite, and we called for the check and went home.

The best part of our Brennan and Carr adventure was a large man who was sitting at a round table, which the waiters use when not serving the customers to add up their checks and waste time. He was an older, muscular man, with a thick neck and large, tattooed arms. When we first walked in, he was sitting in the chair with his eyes closed, holding a plastic cup filled with Coke. After waking from his short nap—he waited a long time for the waiters to bring him his two cheeseburgers—he began chatting with a waiter. He said with a profound Brooklyn accent, “Don’t waste your life. I’m 50 years old, and when I look back at when I was your age, I can’t believe how much I wasted. When you get my age, you look back and see everything you should have done, all the gorgeous girls you should have done everything with, you look back and wonder what you didn’t and why you didn’t do things. Regrets. Think about regrets now when you have a chance to do something about them. When you get to be my age, you have nothing but regrets and no way of changing anything.”

The same guy, after one of the waiter’s girlfriends sat down at a nearby table, started a conversation with her. “You’re gorgeous, you know. If I was thirty years younger, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you. How old are you? Twenty-one, eh? You’re just a baby.” The boyfriend sat down. “You hitting on my woman? What, you go after the younger ones now? Thirty-years younger?” The waiter was about half the guy’s size, but the guy laughed him off.

Okay, the scene was much better in person than in description. I didn’t have my Moleskine, and I missed many of the more interesting turns of phrases in the conversation. It was good to eavesdrop again, even if I didn’t do as good a job this time. Camera and journal: I have to start carrying them both around more often. I didn’t take any pictures during the barbeque or our walk along Sheepshead Bay last night. If I don’t start snapping photographs, I’ll have nothing to revitalize my photos section, which I haven’t updated in a long time.

Julie’s birthday is on Wednesday of this week. She was disappointed that I hadn’t mentioned it here yet. I told her I was waiting for Wednesday, but seeing as I have nothing better to talk about (not that there could be anything better than talking about Julie’s birthday—how about that for brownie points), there’s the mention. With a bit of caffeine tomorrow, I might try my hand at starting my 10k story. I had some ideas, most of which passed from my brain before I thought to record them. Regrettably, many of my stories revolve around magical objects, which brings me too close to returning to the Pink Sweater, something I am trying desperately to avoid to save my and my three reader’s sanities.

I’m approaching the end of this crooked musing. It wasn’t as bad as yesterdays, but, again, it was forced, something I’m growing more comfortable with the more often I do it. I don’t know if it’s helping my writing, but I am enjoying writing more, even when it’s just this type of crap. I can’t understand why, but I guess it makes some semblance of sense for an egotist, and I’m nothing if not an egotist (or I am an egotist, for those who have trouble translating double negatives). That last parenthetical pushed me over my self-imposed Goal. Word count: 2,122; caffeine: none; distractions: many.

Brooklyn, NY | 2005.06.05 | Diary, Julie, Voyeur

Engagement

I’m very drunk now. You’ll have to excuse my condition. Today was the big day, the day I’ve been planning for over a month that I couldn’t talk about here because Julie might read it (not that she would read every word, but that she might read the Julie part and know what I had planned, which would ruin the surprise). I proposed to Julie tonight at dinner and she accepted. We are now engaged. That’s a strange word to write about myself: engaged. This has been a long time coming. We went out for the first time around Halloween in October 2002, and after a bit less than three years, I popped the question. I was very sneaky about the popping part, something I will explain in the rest of these words today. (Isn’t it great that I have all these words to get through today? You won’t miss a thing—not that most of you care, but this is exceptionally interesting to Julie and me, and probably my mother.)

As I type this, I’m attempting to drink at least half a bottle of a large Poland Spring water bottle. I drank way too much wine and champagne tonight as I worked up the courage to ask Julie to marry me. I now have to fully hydrate myself or run the risk of waking up miserable tomorrow. I’ll post this tonight, although it will cost me $10 for 24 hours of internet, which I will probably only use half of. But no worries. After dropping lots of money on Julie’s sparkly ring, and a little less money on my most expensive dinner for two persons ever. That’s no worry, of course. Tonight was a special night, a night I had planned for the last month and a half.

I’m about a quarter of the way through my water bottle. This will be the judge of the length of this musing. Why babble about word count, when I can babble about hydration? Julie has hinted at me for the last couple months about the ring. We had discussed it, and decided that I should buy one before she made her decision about applying for a fellowship for next year. That is, she hinted, and I listened carefully. She was becoming a bit frustrated speaking with her friends and family, most of which kept asking her, when is he going to ask you to marry you? Her answer to those queries was he’ll get to it eventually, but probably before December; at least that’s what we decided. As I said before (I’m likely to repeat myself in my inebriated state, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me—although, I’m not sure if Julie will forgive this crazy, drunken musing), this was all a surprise for Julie. We had agreed that I would propose before December because that was when she would have to make her decision about her next year’s fellowship.

Speaking of fellowships, Julie and I agreed that next year, when she moved in with me, she would (in a year from June, which is a year from now) apply for a fellowship in Seattle, so we can spend a year in Seattle before I have to make my decision about where I want to work, which, we’re leaning toward NYC—a place I feel more at home than anywhere in the world. The fellowship, which I was trying to talk about before becoming drunkenly (like most of today’s musing the drunken part should be a given) distracted, will be in Geriatrics, which lasts a year past her normal three-year family medicine residency. She has signed up for a one-month rotation in a Seattle hospital in September, the same place she would do her one-year fellowship.

Okay, enough preparation for the description of what happened, I’ll get to the description of how I did it, and the planning, etc. It’s difficult to concentrate on this musing as Julie calls her family to tell them what happened, but I am dedicated here, and I will get to it when I get to it. My mind is still wavy, and I’m trying to find the concentration necessary to get this across, as Julie keeps handing me the phone to talk to her parents and sister. I don’t think they really want to speak to me, but Julie is forcing it on them.

Okay, I’m really going to get to what happened now. I was going to get to what happened, but Julie interrupted me with a kissing moment—the moment lasted about thirty minutes, but you know how that goes. My water bottle is about one-third of the way through, and I still have to tell you what happened. I’m getting to it, calm down.

I started the planning a couple of months ago. Julie had returned from China, and she started hinting that we had gone out long enough, and perhaps it was time to buy her something diamondy. I, of course, resisted, being a guy and all. And, in case you forget, a rather fearful guy, afraid of heights, dark places, and, above all, commitments since commitments means I’m leaving myself out there to be hurt. But that is another story for another time. When Julie started to talk about the ring (she never actually brought up the ring, but she kept wanting to bring me places that coincidentally sold rings), I decided that it was time. I love Julie, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her, and it was silly to ask her to wait, especially after I asked her to move to Seattle with me.

So, a few months ago I made the plan. We would go to Vancouver for the first half of our vacation, I’d ask her in Vancouver, and then we’d go to the NYC for the second half, and I’d show off Julie with her new ring to my family and her family with her new sparkly ring. After making the plan, I spoke to my cousin Nancy who told me, after a weekend visit to Vancouver, that perhaps Vancouver wasn’t the best place. I had already decided that before I spoke to her, however, mostly because I didn’t know a good place to bring Julie. It was too risky to bring her to a place I’d never been before. What if the service or food wasn’t up to par? That would be unacceptable for such an important day. I decided that it had to be NYC—I had an ulterior motive as well. I still want to move back here in a few years, and I figured if I piled on enough good memories in NYC, it would be easier to manipulate . . . err, convince Julie to move here.

It was settled. We booked our NYC trip a couple of months ago, and then I started worrying about the ring. The first step in deciding what type of ring I wanted to buy was to figure out how much I should spend. This is a bigger question than most people know, especially after you start working for a living in a good job. There is the de Beers (or is it Bears? Who cares) methodology, which is something like two-months salary, which, I finally figured out was rather ridiculous when you get into the six-figure salary range. Only one of my colleagues even proposed a number close to that, and he had spent around $700 on his wife’s engagement ring, which got me thinking that perhaps he didn’t like me much and was trying to get me to spend ridiculous amounts on my ring.

That’s when I called Mr. Reliable. I always knew it would come down to his advice. He’s my metrosexual friend (although, don’t tell him I called him that): Tamer from Houston. He’s a great dresser, a very suave man, who buys presents that always melt the knees of his current conquests. After I called him, it turned out, he had just proposed to his girlfriend Tamara, but didn’t want to “steal my thunder” (as he recounted two days later when he called me to give his own thunder), with the news that he was engaged. I held this news back from Julies, not wanting to provide her with more fodder about my own lack of a ring (although it was already planned by this time), but I let it slip a few days ago, which began an entire new renunciation (I’m still drunk, and although that word looks long, I’m pretty sure it’s the wrong word), relating to why Tamer was getting engaged but she was not. This was a theme of a few conversations over the last couple of weeks, which was particularly poignant, especially after I bought the ring and was staring at it as I spoke to her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Tamer suggested the right amount (as I see it now) to spend on the ring, and I followed his guidance, ending up a bit above because of tax and the fancy band, which I felt Julie would like because of its sparkliness (another made up word—but I figure I’m allowed because of all the great things that happened today).

My sister Randy came up last week, and Randy and my cousin Nancy, and I went to Seattle to find a ring. We first visited the place I bought the ring (it’s called “Seattle’s Tiffany’s,” aka Turgeon Raine). We found two rings that we liked—actually, one ring I like, and one ring Randy liked. I had Rachel, the saleswoman, write down the one I liked (seeing as I was buying the ring and not Randy), and we visited a few other places. None of the rings in those places cried out to me—and the ambiance in the other few places didn’t cry out for rings to be bought there—and we returned to Turgeon Raine around 5:20pm, ten minutes before the store closed. We spent the next thirty minutes picking out the right diamond for the setting. Randy was particularly selective, sure that there was a smudge in the diamond of the ring I finally picked out. I think she was seeing things, but that’s just me. It took them around four days to put the diamond into the setting I chose, and I picked it up on the Thursday before I was to leave (my flight left on Saturday, in case you forgot).

I’m a little past the halfway mark of the water bottle, but I’m thinking I should drink at least three-quarters of the bottle to be absolutely safe. Julie and I are meeting up with Julie’s family tomorrow night (except for her mother, who we’ll visit with on Saturday), and I’d rather not be too miserable for that meeting.

About a month ago, after I decided, with Julie’s urgings (her father recommended that we skip the whole Vancouver-thing, and go directly to NYC) to go directly to NYC, I made a reservation at Jean-Georges Restaurant, one of the top French restaurants in the city, and a favorite from my misspent summer associate program at the law firm, where the associates got to treat out the summer associates to $50/person lunches to impress them that the firm was a good place to work full time (it wasn’t—but the summer program was good enough to get me to sign aboard for a couple of years; so, I guess, in the end it paid off for them in a small way).

I’m getting to point. I made the reservation about a month ago. Keeping all of this from Julie was very difficult, particularly since I am so used to telling Julie everything. I cashed out my mutual fund, which I had saved up during my law firm day (they paid me too much, and I live relatively cheaply, allowing me to save a bunch of money every year, that was somehow—not through any of my own skills—grew enough to leave me a little left over after buying the ring), leaving me enough to buy the ring and pay for painting the Castle, which was an added bonus. The check hasn’t cleared yet (another discussion I’ve been dying to have with Julie, as I wait patiently for the check to clear before my credit card bill is due), but it should before I’m due. (Yeah, I know I keep repeating myself, but you try to write after all I’ve been through tonight.)

So, I bought the ring, made the reservation, and somehow kept this all from Julie (something I ruefully described to Julie as “sneaky,” “tricksy,” and downright “diabolical” (I made up that last one)). It was then time to take Julie out. We spent the first part of the week in Brooklyn. (Julie just got out of her evening shower—her third one of the day!—and she’s examining the ring on her finger; she’s decided that her finger I slanted, but the ring is fancy enough to make up for any slants.) I would have cut the Brooklyn trick off by a day, but I didn’t want to leave the ring in the hotel room—something I shouldn’t have worried so much about because the hotel had a nice safe, which I used to hide/keep the ring safe while we wandered the streets before dinner.

The dinner was incredible as always. We each ordered a different seven-course meal, which was, as I tried to say in the last sentence, phenomenal. I had originally planned to ask Julie around the third course because of the fullness factor, but, after tasting the food and watching the service, I decided to wait until after dessert, which was many courses, and many aggravating minutes away.

They sat us at a wonderful table: the king and queen table, in that it was a side-by-side seat that overlooked the rest of the main dining room. I guess making the reservation early was a good move on my part. The dinner was wonderful (did I mention that already?), especially a fish dish they served me with a popcorn-like sauce, which I declared would be the best food I would ever taste (I still hold to that conviction).

After dessert, and after Julie went to the bathroom to freshen up, I ordered another half glass of champagne (Julie still had more than her half of champagne left), partly to toast our engagement (if it worked out), and partly because I was running out of wine, and I wanted to make sure my liquid courage was fully, well, liquid. When she returned, I started kissing her continuously.

I then said, “am I a good Davids?” And she said yes. I repeated this a few times, asking her if she was a good Julies, and the I said, “I have a question to ask you.” This is when she claims to have figured it all out. She wouldn’t put everything together until later, when I revealed all the details, all the hints that were inadvertently thrown across her path (such as my mother revealing that I had made a reservation at a fancy restaurant, after I had left that a secret, throwing more subterfuge in the path of Julies; and my mother’s neighbor, thinking the deed was done over the week asking Julie and I, “And, so, the big day is over; how did it go?” To which I had to respond, “what are you talking about,” in my meanness David expression). Then I said, “Julie, I love you, I love you very much. Will you marry me.” By this time, I was crying, and Julie was crying, and she said yes, and I presented her with the green box with the ring. She put it on, and we were kissing and crying and kissing. She didn’t even look at the ring until we finished kissing for fifteen minutes. The waiters, being terribly professional, left us alone during this entire interlude. When she looked at the ring, I told her the whole story, how everything came together; the secrets I had to keep; how I told everyone I knew: my family, my friends (except for my video game friends, because I wasn’t sure they could keep the secret while we played video games) what I had planned because I had to tell someone, seeing as I usually tell Julie everything. It all came flooding out in a drunken stupor.

Julie is done her shower and is now reading wearing her beautiful new ring. I’m going to post this, and then hold her and kiss her and we’ll go to sleep (or perhaps do other things). There are probably many details I left out that will occur to me after I post this, but I think I hit most of the salient points. In short: I love Julie, and, as it turns out, she loves me too, and we’re getting married. I have about a quarter of my water bottle left, but I’m too happy to care.

Word count (as if I was counting for today’s musing): 3,009 (yeah, I forgot this in the original posting--I had more important things on my mind then); caffeine: espresso at the end of dinner, to ensure that more than alcohol kept me writing today. Feeling: wonderful (I’ll leave off the terrible “priceless” joke that was going through my head, or partly so).

Link to Julie's version

NY, NY | 2005.06.08 | Diary, Julie

The Engagement Through Julie’s Eyes (written by Julie)

“Wear something nice for dinner tonight” said David.

“Where are we going?” I asked

“You’ll see.”

I wore my sky blue dress with flower borders and my matching yellow shoes, ready for my birthday eve dinner. We walked along the atypically warm NYC streets all decked out. About half way into the walk, I started to get really curious about our destination. David had mentioned to his mother the other day that he would make reservations from the hotel when we got into the city. But he never told me of the name of the restaurant.

“Are we almost there?”

“Yes, right where those trees are,” as David pointed toward Central Park.

As we got close to the park, I noticed that we were approaching Jekkyl and Hyde.

“We’re going to Jekkyl and Hyde?” I asked. We had seen the infamous Jekkyl & Hyde jeep with the scary looking monsters piled in the back of the jeep. David had explained that the jeep drives around the city in hopes of leading customers to the restaurant.

“Yes, that’s it.” David said with a slight hint of sarcasm.

“I should have worn black then to go with the ambience.”

But we walked briskly passed J&H and proceeded to go towards the park.

Perhaps we were going to ride in the horse carriage and then have a picnic in Central Park. The idea of it always seemed romantic to me but then the smell of the horses overcomes the thought. But we walked passed the horses.

We then came upon the Trump towers and the massive globe statue that David had pointed out earlier that day. We finally walked up the steps of a grand building to Jean-Georges. The hostess led us to the most perfect booth seating, strategically set into the wall so it felt like we were a royal couple looking out at the other guests. I liked the booth seating so that we could sit close to each other. David then confessed that he had made the reservation a month and a half in advance.

We then decided to order the chef’s 7 course tasting menu. Thus we commenced the night of delectable French food. David also ordered some sparkling champagne and a bottle of white wine. I had some sips as usual and David tried to convince me to drink more. The food was spectacular and the service was great.

By the end of the meal, I excused myself to go to the ladies room. When I got back, I noticed David had ordered yet another glass of champagne for himself. After I sat down again, he turned to face me as he put his right arm around me.

“You know that I love you very much.”

The way he said it with a slight quiver in his voice and the closeness of his face to mine made me a little tearful from the sudden surge of emotion.

“I have a question to ask you.” He said. At this moment, my heart leapt as I anticipated what he was going to say.

He then presented a small green box from his inner suit pocket. I took it in my shaky hands and opened it to reveal a beautiful, sparkling diamond ring.

“Will you marry me?” He asked, at this point, we both had tears in our eyes.

“Yes!” I said as we embraced and kissed each other, tasting our tears. It seemed as if we were the only ones in the restaurant and the moment lingered on deliciously.

After wiping my tears and then his with my dinner napkin, we turned our attention finally to the sparkling ring. It looked breathtaking under the lights at Jean-Georges as the diamond exhibited its rainbow of colors. The smaller diamonds surrounding the band also flirted with the lighting and presented a dazzling sight.

“It’s so pretty”

“Yes, I thought you’d like the sparkliness,” says David.

David then went on to tell me about his month and a half of planning and how hard it was to keep the secret from me. I was completely surprised about the engagement, thinking that it was down the road in the next 6 months as we had discussed. We talked about David’s “sneaky” or “tricksy” factor and he was very proud of surprising me. My family was very happy for me when I called to let them know later that night. We subsequently met up with my family in the next 1-2 days to celebrate our engagement. I’m looking forward to my life with Davids!

Link to David's version

NY, NY | 2005.06.12 | Julie

Millions of Soldiers

I finished watching “Band of Brothers.” The writers spent the last episode following the company in its last wartime posting. At the end, Richard Winters, one of two officers that make it through the entire series, explained what happened to the other soldiers that we had followed through the campaign. I remember when I first watched this episode on HBO (this was before my no-cable rule; I had a ReplayTV and while I recorded each week’s episode, I ended up watching them live more times than not), I was a bit disappointed by what happened to the soldiers. Except for a Wall Street Journal journalist, they didn’t amount to anything that I considered special. They lived their lives as simple men: mechanics, carpenters, human resource managers, and other mostly blue collar professions.

The reaction to this still embarrasses me. I tend to measure a person first by their intelligence and second by their jobs. It’s a silly measure, when I think about it. People are more than their jobs and they’re more than their intelligence. What the person does and how they think are important aspects, of course. But it is not the full measure of the person. Their accomplishments, be they family and friends, or effect on society or other people, is the true measure of a person. I think I tend to measure people by characteristics that I have in abundance. It’s easier to judge other people by these standards because I’ve excelled in them, and therefore they must be important from that perspective. What the soldiers in the series did—and I’m not speaking of what they did on the television, but what the real people accomplished as dramatized by the miniseries—made them great men.

When I first watched it, I assumed that Richard Winters, a Major by the end of the show, would be a CEO or important official in the civilian world. It doesn’t work that way. We shouldn’t define great people by these types of accomplishments. Let me try to put that another way: a person may be great based on their accomplishments, but a different person placed in the same situation may have been just as great. The alcohol is still fogging my brain a bit, and I’m not doing a good job of conveying this notion.

I’ll back it up a bit. To use the miniseries as an example, we could not predict a soldier’s courage before he entered the battlefield. There are character traits of people that do not show themselves until put to the test. This is why I keep going back to that “Fight Club” saying: how can I know my own valor or characteristics without a test? Ah, like most things I speak about, this one comes back to me. Not only was I embarrassed by my thoughts on the professions of the soldier, the fact that they were tested and I wasn’t also concerns me.

My thoughts are cloudy and my logic is not sound. I’m sitting on my porch on a beautiful Seattle summer day. The temperature reached into the seventies today, and now hovers in the upper sixties. It was clear and wonderful with only the remnants of clouds floating through the sky. It was the type of day where it helped to stand in the sun because the breeze felt cool and I welcomed the warmth of the sun.

The difficulty in my writing, as I said before, is a result of the buzzing in my heads. I drank a glass of wine with dinner at my local Italian restaurant. It was only a glass, but it sent me on a bit of a loop. I had hoped to write grand thoughts in my Moleskine at dinner or by the lake, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I worked my way through yet another New Yorker, attempting, always feebly, to catch up with the never-ending onslaught in my mailbox. I ate a heavy chicken cutlet Parmigian, which was better than I remembered. They still don’t use salt in the kid-friendly restaurant, but the cooked the chicken with the perfect amount of cheese, and I cleaned the plate, including the mound of spaghetti. I wasn’t paying attention much to what I ate I was a bit surprised when I looked down and realized it was all gone. I must have been hungry than I thought. This week my eating habits have ranged from healthy salads to greasy pizzas and everywhere in between. It was nice to end the week on a delicious meal (since I’m flying out tomorrow to visit Julie (yeah!), I consider this my last dinner in Seattle).

Before dinner, I took a wonderful walk to my favorite spot by the lake. The spot is about a ten minute walk from the Castle, down a steep hill and across the park. Seward Park, which is the namesake of my neighborhood, juts out like a thumb into Lake Washington. I prefer the right side of the lake (looking at it from my porch and while approaching it, that is; I’m not sure which way is north from here thanks to my directionally challenged brain), where there are cemented rocks along the water shaded by large trees. Families of duck float near the spot, and the woman I wrote about last time was throwing tennis balls into the lake for her white dog to fetch. She was with a different woman this week, but they both seemed happy. A SUV kept its doors open and played loud music in the parking area behind my favorite spot. It broke my concentration a bit, but I didn’t mind. I would have preferred silence, of course, or at least not changing the song every thirty seconds, but, as too many people say at work (I’m becoming one of them, no matter how hard I fight), “it is what it is,” or, in this case, “it was what it was.”

The water was cleaner than last time I sat there. Much of the muck and twigs had washed away. I didn’t write much or think about much. Instead, I enjoyed the quiet lapping of the water on the rocks, and watched the birds fly around me. Four small birds with blue backs received much of my attention. They flew acrobatic circles near the water, diving and hovering and circling above the water. They were fast little birds, and flapped their wings almost constantly. The tiny birds would have impressed fighter jet pilot with their feats, turning and twisting, seemingly at the final moment, to stay millimeters above the water.

I thought about a bicycle ride tonight, but I decided against it. While I enjoy parts of bike riding, walking agrees with me more for contemplating and writing. Not that I accomplished much of that—well, not until I returned home and started pounding out these words—but I did have hopes for the trip.

Julie had a particularly good attending at work today, and he corrected her on her use of “like,” telling her she sounded like (hehe) a teenager every time she used. I decided that Julie and I were now on “like” and “umm” watches, trying to improve our speaking patterns. Julie claimed that it was too hard, but my continuing ridicule of her should fix her of that notion. I called to check on the status of the engagement ring, and while it won’t be ready for this weekend, it is ahead of schedule, and the saleswoman said it should be ready around the fourth of July.

I spoke with my mother briefly today, and she referenced my writing. She agrees with my video-game-induced-headache theory. Now, it’s not hard for her to agree with this theory since she probably thinks I spend too much time in front of computers—something that, I would like to remind her, has paid off handsomely in my chosen career. But even with that said, as I said earlier, I am leaning toward cutting down on video game nights. Tonight might have been one of those nights, especially since I will leave Seattle tomorrow night and not have a chance to play video games until next week (if at all). Had I played tonight, I would not have written this. I would have been left with the two sentences I managed to write before getting home from work, and the twenty or so words I sketched into my Moleskine during my dinner and walk. Not that there’s much here of value, but I’m still of the opinion that this writing will somehow help me in my Quest.

I don’t think I’m going to attempt much in the way of stories today. Yesterdays were a half-hearted attempt, and I thought about them while walking. I’m still gnawing on the continuity and subject matter. I have decided on the story for Nanowrimo in November. It’s based loosely on one of the short-short stories I pounded out, which was, in turn, based on a story idea I had written down long before. I’m not sure how much development I’ll do on the idea before November—or even if I’ll wait for November to use the idea—but since Chuck has declared that he has an idea, I wanted to have one as well. It’s no Pink Sweater, but, then again, I never want to think about that wretched pile of words again.

I don’t have much else to add tonight. I find myself with a few hundred words left and in the terrible position of having to fill them with, well, filler. I’m not a fan of these ending paragraphs, but I’ve found that occasionally I’ll hit upon something that actually interests me. I’m hoping to focus more on storytelling in the coming weeks. I seemingly have forgotten how to write stories, finding myself, instead, writing fragments of about a page length. Even my list of what I should do while writing has not helped inspire me (not that I thought a list written while in the fathoms of not writing would help me produce much).

I’ve been thinking of trying to break up these long musings and post them in separate subjects. That way, it should be easier to identify the subjects and find the stuff that is worth reading. The problem with that strategy, however, is that then I have to name each of those fragments. The real reason I wanted to do that was to make my writing more accessible. But as I think about it more, I’m still not convinced that I want these long musings to be accessible. They’re written for me—as I’ve made clear in my much older writings—and the work involved in breaking them out seems not worth the reward. I still enjoy these writings (as all writers should) and that’s all that counts, at least in my small, black book.

My laundry should be ready soon, and I’ll get to folding them before piling the clothes I’ll bring to California tomorrow morning. Julie planned a nice weekend for us. We have two reservations at restaurants, a date to watch “Batman Begins,” and tickets to an Arthur Miller play. But that’s all second billing to seeing Julies again. I can’t wait to be with her more than just on these distant weekends. She’ll be staying in Seattle for the month of September, and I can’t wait for that to happen. It’s difficult not to be able to hold her whenever I want to. But I know good things are worth the wait, and Julies are definitely a good thing. The Julies name, as I think I’ve said before, comes from the “millions of Julies” that I always say when I hold her—the meaning for me is that I will be with Julie a million moments, and therefore there is a million of her. I never articulated that before, but that’s what’s creeping through my brain.

I draw to an end a few minutes before 10pm. It’s time to fold laundry and prepare for a hopefully crow-free night’s sleep. I haven’t done anything about the crow problem, by the way. I’ll get to it when I get to it (of course, had I done something about it, I would now be sleeping much better and would be in general happier—which is a small price to pay for the fifteen minutes it would take me to buy the ladder, but I digress. When have I ever made it easy on myself?).

Seattle, WA | 2005.06.23 | Diary, Julie

JulieMarriesDavid.com

Okay, after many sleepless nights, we "finished" our wedding website. I still consider it a work in progress, but with the Marathon coming up, I'm going to put it aside for at least the next month.

The website is a bit cheesy and over the top, but that's what the Julies wanted, and what the Julies wants, the Julies gets (sometimes!).

It should work on most browsers, but I haven't created the non-Javascript page yet. So, if you have problems, try reloading. The first time you load the site, it might take a few minutes to download all the pictures.

The Photographs and Our Story are running slideshows. Hover the mouse over the pictures for controls, or let it play itself. The music selection (all Julie's!) is on the bottom. I don't know what else to say. There'll be updates over the next couple of months.

So, with too much ado, here it is:

JulieMarriesDavid.com

Seattle, WA | 2005.10.29 | Julie, Links

Julie's Jewish Essay

Here is Julie's essay on her thoughts on her conversion to Judaism.

I was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to Dallas, Texas at the age of six in 1983. My parents are entrepreneurs and both have business backgrounds. I am the oldest of three daughters. My sisters are currently on the East coast. My middle sister is studying for her PhD in International Relations, while my younger sister is a third-year undergraduate student at Harvard, majoring in anthropology with an interest in education.

I didn't grow up with any religious affiliation but in the 1990's, my parents became involved with the local Dallas Buddhist Association. The sect of Buddhism focuses on Buddhism more as an education and daily way of life, than as a religion. Buddhist values of compassion, filial piety (respect for elders and teachers), and rationalism are embodied by different Buddhas and Boddhisatvas. The statues of Buddhas and Boddhisatvas serve as reminders to embody those virtues in daily life, rather than as idols of worship. My parents are now currently in Taiwan, and have established a TV satellite station devoted to teachings of Buddhist saints and sages.

After graduating from high school in Dallas, I attended Stanford University for my undergraduate education. I then studied medicine at The Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I met David during my last year of medical school. After a couple of months of dating, he told me about his impending job transfer to Oslo, Norway. So I then decided to leave Houston for my family medicine residency at the University of California, Irvine. David's transfer, however, fell through and we continued to see each other and accumulated miles flying between Houston and Irvine. About a year ago, David moved out to the west coast and is currently working as a licensing attorney in Seattle. On June 7, 2005, David and I got engaged. I have six more months of residency in California, and then plan to move to Seattle in July 2006. I will then start my fellowship in geriatrics.

I want to convert to Judaism to feel closer to the Jewish community and to share a religion with David. I also feel that it is important our future children be raised in the Jewish tradition, for family unity and harmony. I have participated in Jewish celebrations with David's family, including the lighting of the menorah on Hannukah and Passover Seder, and I enjoyed the family gatherings and hope to continue those traditions in my own home. Since our engagement, I've made contacts with the Jewish community in Irvine and have attended Shabbat at a conservative synagogue. I've also attended a monthly noon series with a Chabbad Rabbi at the hospital where I work, and have been invited to Shabbat dinner by an Orthodox couple I met through the Chabbad series. I've done reading on my own and with David, including Embracing Judaism by Rabbi Kling and Becoming a Jew by Rabbi Lamm.

One of the beliefs and values in Judaism that is most appealing is Chesed, the act of loving-kindness. In my work as a physician, I treat my patients with compassion. I also have a soft spot in my heart for the elderly which is why I decided to pursue specialized training in geriatrics. I did a month's elective in Seattle and enjoyed caring for the elderly in a variety of settings, including nursing homes and assisted living. I also find Judaism appealing in that it focuses on our current life, and not so much on afterlife as in Christianity, or in leaving the life cycle to achieve Nirvana as in Buddhism. Life is short and precious and I want to learn and experience as much as I can in this life. What I also find fascinating in Judaism is the emphasis on questioning. Through questioning and debate with one another, one can arrive at a deeper understanding of the Torah. This is in contrast to traditional Chinese way of thinking which is to accept what you are taught.

Aspects which may be challenging as I convert to Judaism include my relationship with my family. I've discussed with my parents and my sisters about my decision to convert to Judaism. My parents are open to other religions and are generally accepting of my decision. My mom was surprised though that there was a formal conversion process which would take about a year to complete. My sisters were mixed in their responses. My younger sister was more critical as she had grown up with Buddhism more than I or my other sister had, and asked if the conversion was really necessary. I explained to her that my future children will not only know about Judaism but will be exposed to their Chinese heritage by attending Chinese school to learn Chinese. They may also learn about Buddhist philosophy and education if they so choose when they are older. I think it will be a continual process of reassuring my younger sister that I'm not turning my back on my Chinese background. My middle sister, on the other hand, was more receptive and said she supports my decision to convert, as long as I feel that it is important to me.

Other aspects I find challenging is whether I will ever really feel Jewish. Because of my ethnicity, I will not easily blend into a Jewish congregation. I wonder if people will be accepting of me as a convert. I suppose with time and with observing mitzvot and shabbat more regularly, I will feel more Jewish. And with attending a synagogue more regularly, I will come to be accepted as a Jew.

Conservative Judaism is most appealing to me. I don't feel comfortable with the sexism apparent in Orthodox Judaism. Prior to meeting the Chabbad Rabbi, I was forewarned that he wouldn't shake my hand because I am female. I've also read that women do not count as part of the minyan in Orthodox Judaism, and only males can be ordained as Rabbis in the Orthodox tradition. There are appealing aspects to Orthodox Judaism such as the strong sense of community. Reform Judaism is almost too lax in their requirements for conversion and for their congregation. Also, a reform conversion would not be recognized by Conservative or Orthodox Jews. As David's family is Conservative, it makes more sense for me to undergo a Conservative conversion and to belong to a Conservative congregation later. Also, I find appealing that Conservative Judaism still holds the Torah as binding but evolves with time, such as egalitarianism in Conservative synagogues.

I've read and heard that the conversion process is a life-altering experience and I look forward to that experience. I look forward to the learning and the discussions and the new friendships I will forge along the way.

Newport Beach, CA | 2005.12.31 | Jewish, Julie

Dr. Julie Show Videos

Photos: 1, Videos: 8

Mercer Island, WA | 2006.02.27 | Photos | Dr. Julie Show, Julie, Music Videos

Dr. Julie Show Videos II

Photos: 1, Videos: 12

Taipei, Taiwan | 2006.07.13 | Photos | Dr. Julie Show, Julie, Music Videos

If only she were real

And there she was: Julie in the form of a Horribles. You shouldn't be surprised to learn that I was Julie-free when I drew this.

Seattle, WA | 2007.01.14 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

I hate to disappoint

Seattle, WA | 2007.01.17 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

I hate slowing her down

Seattle, WA | 2007.02.05 | Cast of Horribles | Autumn, Blood, Headache, Julie, Trees

It's like we were made for each other

Seattle, WA | 2007.02.10 | Cast of Horribles | City, Julie, Night, Shooting Star, Stars

It's in the name of progress

Seattle, WA | 2007.02.20 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Spaceship, Travel

Whatever you do, you cannot look in the closet

Seattle, WA | 2007.02.26 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Wedding, Wedding Dress

Covet, covet, covet

Seattle, WA | 2007.02.28 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, House, Julie

She's flying

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.05 | Cast of Horribles | Ballet, Julie

You can't see inside me

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.08 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Snowglobe

Look but don't touch

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.11 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Rain

You have to jump head first

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.13 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Love, Swimming Pool

It's as if I still see her

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.20 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Suffering

People think better in circles

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.21 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Fashion, Julie

I will always be there

Seattle, WA | 2007.03.29 | Cast of Horribles | D&D, Dragon, Julie

She's everywhere

Seattle, WA | 2007.04.05 | Cast of Horribles | Art, Julie

Progress is highly overvalued

Seattle, WA | 2007.04.26 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Spaceship, Travel

She's been like this since she returned home

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.01 | Cast of Horribles | Engagement Ring, Julie, Sleep, Wedding

It's coming

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.10 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

It's early still

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.10 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

I'm low pressure!

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.14 | Cast of Horribles | Car, Julie, Salesperson

Stand behind me

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.16 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, D&D, Julie, Warrior, Wizard

Will she notice?

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.23 | Cast of Horribles | Earth, Julie, Night, Stars, Trees

Soft whispers

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.24 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Ocean, Sunset

Life changes when people drop in to stay

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.27 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Julie, Parachute

Dr. Julie Show website part 2

After a lot of hard work, I’m happy to announce the completion of the new and improved Dr. Julie Show website. I’m still tweaking parts of it, but it’s a big enough improvement that I decided to post it as soon as possible. Enjoy!

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.27 | Julie, sewcrates.com

Everyone is famous somewhere, right?

Seattle, WA | 2007.05.28 | Cast of Horribles | Earth, Fashion, Julie, Night, Shirt, Stars, T-shirt

Everyone has their own look

This was my portrait shot. I threw the Cast together and made them smile. If they had mouths.

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.06 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Family Portrait, Julie, Snowman

Going up is all the fun

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.06 | Cast of Horribles | Hiking, Julie, Mom, Mountain Climbing

Too exhausted for words

I'm usually good at putting things together. Give me a large Ikea box, and I can build furniture in less than an hour. The barbecue we bought for the Castle wasn't as easy. A few of the screws they gave us didn't fit in the holes they drilled. I spent many hours trying to make them fit, and then decided to create my own holes. I used too large of a bit, of course, and ended up with bolts holding on the left arm-thingy.

That's my mom (who visited for the weekend) and Julie in the back, watching my frustrations. While I didn't come away with a bandage on my head, I did get a few nasty splinters in my fingers from the deck.

The instruction book was really fun to draw. I need to do more of those.

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.12 | Cast of Horribles | Barbecue, Diary, Julie, Mom

Long time until sleep

That's us flying to NYC for the wedding. I drew this before we left. I was not looking forward to another flight, especially since our NY flight was in coach. Except for the luggage aggravations, it turned out not to be a bad flight.

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.17 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Stars, Travel, Wedding

You told me this ring would give me magical powers

When we were looking for rings, I told Julie that after the wedding I didn't want to wear the ring. I decided to give the ring a chance only if it provided me with powers. I told her I would accept invisibility or invulnerability, but actually I was open to anything.

As I was sitting around with Chuck and Charles after the Taiwan wedding, we were discussing what powers my ring granted me. I forget which one said it, but they told me that my ring did not grant me powers, but granted Julie powers.

I do wear my ring more than not, but we'll see how long it lasts. I occasionally attempt my "Sleeeep" (think Dark City) technique, or try to move objects with my ring-clad hand, but so far no good. I'll keep you updated on the powers of the ring.

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.26 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Wedding, Wedding Ring

What I want to do, and what I really want to do

This is one of my least favorite doodles. I expected so much more from it. It was supposed to show how playing video games is not the same as living. Now, don't get me wrong. I play a lot of video games. It's just sometimes when I've played too much, I feel like I could be using that time for better things. You know, like doodling or writing useless paragraphs on nothing.

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.27 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Julie, TV, Video Games

If you fly fast enough you'll live forever

Ah, the day and a half between the Taiwan wedding flight and the NYC wedding flight. Surprisingly, I wasn't that tired. We somehow avoided jet lag on the way home, and relaxed during the break. I even caught up on some work mails.

The title was taken from the fact that people who fly in airplanes a lot gain microseconds on their life. This is a relativity thing: if you move fast, time for you slows compared to things moving slower. When you fly at 500mph, you are moving faster relative to the people on earth. It's not that you live longer since according to your watch, you live the same amount of time. It's more that your life appears longer to those who aren't moving as fast. It's confusing and funny and absolutely brilliant (not my doodle, but that it works that way).

Seattle, WA | 2007.06.29 | Cast of Horribles | Diary, Earth, Julie, Travel, Wedding

Seward Park Outing

Photos: 28

Seattle, WA | 2007.07.08 | Photos | Julie

Complaints reaching dangerous levels

My mother called me after this was posted. It went up after our wedding, and my mother was very concerned about the newlyweds. I assured her that I drew this much earlier in the year, and it had nothing to do with our relationship. (This was posted before my fancy new website, with Create and Post dates, and squiggly lines on the bottom.)

Julie and I used to jog in Seward Park. This was in our starry-eyed living-in-sin stage. We would jog around the park, and I would listen to Julie complain: pain in her side, trouble breathing, heart rate too fast, unbearably itchy legs (I can't make this up!). After a while, I began keeping a complaint meter. The more she complained, the higher the levels. From the looks of the smoke coming from our sneakers, you can imagine the level of complaints.

Seattle, WA | 2007.07.08 | Cast of Horribles | Diary, Jogging, Julie, Suffering

We approach

My second D&D doodle. Drawing these characters keeps me sane when my hands start to shake and I think of World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot or Everquest or any of the MMORPG or RPG or D&D nights that kept me up long hours. Conjuring these costumed Horribles is as good as rolling up a new character, leveling him up, and then casting large fireballs. Well, almost.

Notice Julie is in front, and we're cowering behind her. That's exactly how we play video games: Julie runs ahead, and I cast from behind. Allegory for life, or just my love of magic coming out. I'll let you decide.

Seattle, WA | 2007.07.17 | Cast of Horribles | Blood, Blue Guy, D&D, Julie, Ranger, Warrior, Wizard

I can't find her

I played with shadows, smoke, and light on this one. It didn't end up very interesting but there you have it.

I just bicycled through the rain in Seattle. There was about fifteen minutes of my bike commute home, where I was sure the rain somehow turned to hail. As I coasted down a hill, the drops stung my face like tiny dull needles. Luckily, for the second half of my ride, it cleared up and the sun came out and washed away all the rain. I didn't see any spiders, though.

Sometimes you aim for the sweet spot between the rain showers, and end up riding right through a nasty one.

Seattle, WA | 2007.07.19 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Shadows, Suffering

To clear up the confusion

Today's work was the result of my posting this doodle about a month before our wedding. My mother immediately called:

"David."

"Yes, mom?"

"Is there something you're not telling me."

"There's lots I'm not telling you."

"I'm talking about your drawing yesterday, the one with the parachute. Is Julie, you know?"

"Pink?"

"No, pregnant?"

"Huh?"

"Well, you drew someone dropping in a parachute, and I was thinking you might be trying to tell us something--you know, subconsciously."

I failed, clearly. After all this time, nobody has a clue who's who. For the record, I'm the beige one, Julie is the pink one, and the blue guy is the philosopher, a combination of my friends. Julie was dropping in on my life. I decided to draw this picture as way of explanation.

So, thanks to that conversation, I bring you the ultimate guide to the Cast of Horribles, pre-marriage and pre-Ziggy.

Seattle, WA | 2007.07.31 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Julie

Burning away the covers

It's almost Seafair weekend in Seattle. The one time of year it's cool to live in Seward Park.

The weather has finally cleared, and the latter part of the week has been beautiful. A bit too beautiful today, as the sun pushed the temperature into the mid-80s. I managed to bicycle home. It was a very long and tiring ride. Some days I have it, other days I feel like a nut. When an old man with a large pot belly pedaled passed me on a hill, I knew what type of day it was. (For the record, he cheated a bit, as he had a little extra oomph from a motor contraption hidden near the chain. Or at least that's what I kept telling myself.)

Seattle, WA | 2007.08.02 | Cast of Horribles | Boat, Julie

That next step is a doozy

I drew this after we returned from Julie's sister's graduation. At Harvard, they wear funny robes with little swirly things on the collars. Since I'm reading the Harry Potter series, it makes me think of Hogswart as everything reminds me of Potter's world. (I hate being a Muggle, by the way.) The trip to Boston was fun. The graduation was a graduation. It feels important, and yet, for all its importance and pomp, it is excrutiatingly tiresome. We did have yummy Japanese food to celebrate.

Jennifer was a bit concerned that I made her look witchy, what with the green skin and red hair. She did dye her hair red, so I had no choice but to draw it that way. The green skin was an afterthought. It's always difficult to figure out what color I should make people. Many times green is my default. I already have the beige, pink, and blue people. Green is the big missing one.

Ziggy was amazing yesterday. He learned to sit (sometimes--mostly when he wanted a treat, regardless if we asked), and even walked to the park without us having to drag him. He's still not properly housetrained, but he is getting better. While running up the hill after our park walk, I accidentally stepped on his foot when he crossed in front of me. Ziggy is a small dog, and there were lots of warnings about how delicate Italian Greyhound's legs are. He yelped for a good three minutes, and it left a nasty cut on his toe. I spoke with Dr. Julie, and she assured me he would survive. Barely.

We finally hit another nice week of sunshine in Seattle. I was concerned that summer had passed us already. I may even bike sometime this week. I'm a bit nervous: I feel my muscles attrophying even as my appetitie dissappears. I'm destined to be overly skinny, and to hear about how bad I eat everytime I see my mother or Julie's parents. We all have our issues, I guess.

Seattle, WA | 2007.08.14 | Cast of Horribles | Diary, Graduation, Jennifer, Julie

It's never what you expect

Okay, so the box is a bit crooked. I never said I drew straight lines. Did you notice the packing peanuts? I hate packing peanuts. They get everywhere and they're difficult to recycle. We usually end up dumping them in someone else's garbage. I think I may have said too much.

The rain returned this weekend and continues today. The past three years everyone has been telling me how atypical the strange weather is for Seattle. We have seen crazy wind storms, rain showers in the summer, blizzards, and power outages. At some point, atypical becomes the norm. We seem to be quickly reaching that some point.

Seattle, WA | 2007.08.20 | Cast of Horribles | Gifts, Julie, Packing Peanuts

"I feel like we're stuck together and I can't pull free"

This was something Julie said after we were married. I thought it was pretty funny, especially since it reminded me of taffy. I soon after drew this doodle.

Seattle, WA | 2007.09.03 | Cast of Horribles | Blood, Julie, Taffy

"Keep your head down, you're supposed to be empty"

This won't make much sense to most of you. This is a badly drawn doodle of the characters from our latest Anime addiction: Full Metal Alchemist.

It's a wonderful and long series that starts with two brothers who use the magic of Alchemy to bring back their mother after she dies. It doesn't work out as they hoped: Ed, the undersized, blonde haired older brother, which Julie dresses up as, ends up losing his arm and a leg, and replaces them with Automail, a type of robotic limbs; and his younger brother, Al, who finds his soul attached to an empty suit of armor after he wakes from the spell.

The story is plot heavy, and each episode moves one of the many intertwining plots forward. There is very little filler, which is delightfully surprising for such a long series. We're very close to the last DVD, and were very thrilled by how good the series was. (We thought it would be another unfulfilling robot story.)

The actual doodle and tagline came to me while I was biking home after work. I had to pull over and write it down before I forgot it (I kept repeating it to myself, and since I'm a terrible multitasker, I was afraid I was going to crash).

To explain the joke for those who still don't get it: the armor is supposed to be empty because Ed is the armor. They dressed up as the characters and Julie was reprimanding the Little Guy (that's me, for those who still haven't realized). Yes, I know, funny doesn't need explanations. It's a good thing I never claimed to be funny.

As I said yesterday, this will be my last doodle for this week. I'll be back on Sunday night.

Seattle, WA | 2007.09.11 | Cast of Horribles | Anime, Full Metal Alchemist, Julie

Hold her steady

With Sukkot fast approaching, Julie and I scavenged wood from last year's attempt to reform our Sukkah. As always, my plan was better than my execution. After buying new roofing materials, and additional wood, I managed to get the walls and ceiling sort of done. Once again, I question the sturdiness of the roof, and worry that the 2x2x4s that hold up the roofing will come falling on our head one evening.

Today was Halo 3 launch day. Julie and I met up with Steven for many hours of playing the co-op campaign. Julie is a bit of a novice when it comes to FPS games, but she held her own. The game played wonderfully, with only a bit of lag caused by my sub-optimal DSL connection.

I decided to post a bit out of order because of my back log of Horribles, I keep missing date-relevant doodles. We'll return to my massive collection of Ziggy-related posts soon.

Seattle, WA | 2007.09.25 | Cast of Horribles | Diary, Jewish, Julie, Sukkah

Not everything is about Ziggy

Yes, I know that photographs have a rectangular border, not a circular one. I would have fixed this doodle, but my computer is dead, and the Illustrator file is sitting on the dead computer's harddrive. I do upload the Illustrator file to this site, but for reasons best explained by bad programming (and weakness in MySQL's storage of large blobs), it doesn't work, and I have not had time (or energy) to make it work.

The weekend is almost here, and with it, relaxation. These past two weeks I've been a bit off. I'm not sure if it's a light case of depression, or seasonal moodiness (which, come to think of it, probably amounts to the same thing). It is growing darker, colder, and more rainy. AS a result my energy levels have been particularly low, even at work. Hopefully I'll fight through it, and get back to working and planning for the Marathon.

I have a couple of ideas, none of which will probably amount to much. I hope to start writing again to warm up. Does this count? A little bit?

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.04 | Cast of Horribles | Camara, Dogs, Julie, Ziggy

She has an entire life outside of me

This is an ode to Jennifer, Julie's sister, who visited us in Seattle during her summer vacation. Since graduating college, Julie spends more time talking with Jennifer on the phone, which is good for both of them.

The weekend is almost here. I plan to fix my computer and maybe build a second computer to install Microsoft Home Server. Lots of fun (and probably frustrating) computer building this weekend.

Update: I spent the weekend failing to get my computer working. I'm typing this on a semi-working computer. After three trips to Fry's, I had the computer running for almost 15 minutes before it overheated. At least I think that's the problem. Have I mentioned how much I hate the hardware end of computers? I've given up. I'll salvage the parts and buy a new, fully built system.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.07 | Cast of Horribles | Jennifer, Julie

There's something she's not telling me

When I drew this, Julie was decorating her Doctor's office. Her office is now complete: she has wonderful wall art, comfy furniture, exam tables, measuring devices hanging on the wall, cotton balls and needles, and everything a doctor would need to exam patients. What she's still missing is patients. But that's okay. They're probably hiding under her reception desk.

Julie wanted to hang a Horribles on her wall, but felt they weren't medical enough, which is where this one came in. It didn't turn out as well as I hoped, as it's rather depressing and not well drawn. But it is my first Doctor Julie Horrible (which is different from Dr. Julie of the Dr. Julie Show).

As I mentioned yesterday, my computer rebuilding efforts did not work. I received free computer advice in the van this morning, encouraging me to try again. I'm not sure I'm ready to fail again. We'll see how I feel tonight, and more importantly, how much patience Julie has left with my time-consuming computer rebuilding project.

I'm happy to report that after another night spent poking around the computer, my computer still does not work. I did manage to turn the fans on, but getting to the BIOS seems to be beyond me. I hit another dead end tonight, and unless the vanpeople come up with something tomorrow, I might to have to throw in the towel, and return the new parts to Fry's. It gives me no pleasure to follow this course.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.08 | Cast of Horribles | Doctor Julie, Julie, X-Ray

"It's just that you always keep moving forward"

I spent many hours on this doodle. I was inspired by the wonderful anime, Kino's Journey: The Beautiful World. It's about the journey of a girl and her motorad, a talking motorcycle.

The anime has a cinematic style, and spends much of its time lingering over landscapes or pondering philosophical questions. The story takes a backseat to these meanderings. Kino is detached from the world, an atypical young woman with no goals or aims or relationships besides her motorad. I know it's a cliche, but for Kino the journey really is about the journey.

Each country she visits (which are never larger than a city) is different, and used as a parable for a societal issue or fault. You never know what to expect at the beginning of an episode. They don't always focus on the obvious truths, and not every story has a lesson or a purpose.

I haven't doodled since Sunday. Rebuilding my computer (or my failed attempts thereat) has taken my free time. While I still have a sizeable stockpile of Horribles, once the Marathon strikes next month, I might have to go on hiatus for a bit. I would hate to arrive at the end of November with an empty bank of Horribles. The bank is what keeps doodling fun: it doesn't feel like an obligation, since I'm not doodling for tomorrow, I'm doodling for next month. It's amazing how much pressure that removes.

I decided to not play with the computer today. I'll try again this weekend. Instead I managed to eek out a doodle. Oh, and I also wrote about a page of notes for the Marathon. You should fasten your seatbelts, you're in for a terribly uninteresting ride.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.09 | Cast of Horribles | Anime, Julie, Kino's Journey, Motorcycle

He's growing so fast

It's late, and I don't have much to say. Ziggy is five months old now, and his growing has slowed down. He'll probably grow a bit more, but he'll never be as big as the other dogs. I've learned to accept it. I hope he will too.

The weekend approaches, which means my second shot at computer rebuilding. I'll need to go to Fry's at least once more to exchange the motherboard, and hope the next one works better than the last one. This is my last chance. I figure if I can't do it this weekend, it won't be done by me. Julie is comfortable with my failing, and will probably be relieved once I finish this project and clean the computer room.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.11 | Cast of Horribles | Dogs, Julie, Stars, Sunset, Ziggy

You smell like truffle oil

We love truffles, and especially truffle oil. Not too much, or it takes over a dish. But a sprinkling on mushrooms or a piece of fish. We'd never use it at home, of course. That would require a level of skill I'm not comfortable with. But in a restaurant, as soon as we see truffle oil, we know it's going to be a good dish.

I made a break through in my Marathon planning. I might have found a genre and a style. I still don't have much of a plot, but I do have some ideas, probably small minded and worth ten or so thousand words. It's a start. I'll see if I can continue my progress through the end of the month.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.16 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Night, Stars, Truffle Oil

Do you think he's getting better?

The answer seems know this week. As Ziggy becomes an inside dog, and begins to roam more freely, he's beginning to leave small presents for us scattered throughout the house. They say it's always worst before it improves. If that's the case, it'll be wonderful in no time.

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.17 | Cast of Horribles | Dogs, Julie, Ziggy

A last-minute summer

Seattle, WA | 2007.10.24 | Cast of Horribles | City, Julie, Spider

Random Julie and Ziggy Photos

Photos: 11

Seattle, WA | 2007.11.18 | Photos | Julie, Ziggy

We've missed you

I decided to post out of order again. The next Horrible in the queue is not one of my favorites, and it's taking me a while to move past it. It's not that it's terrible, but there's a (relatively boring) back story I want to write, and I haven't yet found the will.

So I decided to lead with this welcome back message that I drew a couple of days ago. I did miss posting new Horribles. I only managed to draw three or so doodles during the Marathon. I'm glad I waited, however. I couldn't stand not having a least a month's worth of backup doodles in the queue.

This fits in well with one of my goals in life: reduction of stress. Whether it's arriving at the airport three hours early or taking the vanpool to and from work to avoid driving in traffic, I do everything in my power to not put myself in situations that are stressful while in control. That last part is important: if I have some say over the situation, but my say is not sufficient to make a change, it creates much more stress than sitting by and watching something that I have no control over. For example, I'd rather sit in traffic in the passenger seat than drive in traffi, even thought by driving I still maintain a semblance of control. I'm not sure why I'm wired that way, but I am.

Seattle, WA | 2007.11.29 | Cast of Horribles | Dogs, Family Portrait, Julie, Ziggy

So supportive!

Julie went with me to NYC to be with my mother. She was very helpful explaining medical things to us. It was also great to have her around. She's wonderful. Just having her there kept me grounded and helped me through this difficult time.

Notice how in this Horrible, David is leaning on the Julie. While I can't say I planned it that way, it is very appropriate.

Seattle, WA | 2007.12.11 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Love

Just a few hours, really

We were discussing the new Warhammer Online with Steven. Julie and I haven't played a MMORPG since I destroyed my second set of World of Warcraft discs. We decided it was time for us to try again when Warhammer releases.

We talked to Steven, who is an even worse addict than me. He hasn't played since Everquest because of his addiction. We told him that as long as we stick together and only play when we all play, he should join us. This strategy has failed me in the past, but there's always this time.

So come mid to late 2008, we'll be knee deep in orcs and swords.

Seattle, WA | 2007.12.16 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, D&D, Julie, Ranger, Warhammer, Warrior, Wizard

We bought him for sheer entertainment value

We brought Ziggy to a new dog park yesterday. We've been experimenting with different places to bring him on weekends. We were discussing it yesterday, and without Ziggy, we would spend much more time at home.

It snowed today. We had a few brief moments of grass sticking, but most of the snow melted on contact. Our four day weekend is just about over. Work this week should be slow, as most people take off the time between Christmas and New Years. While I don't usually like downtime at work, this will give me more time to work on NAIS.

I'm getting very close to sharing it with Chuck, which is the first step toward public release. There are a few more advanced administrator functions for the photos that are not yet done. I finished the basic layout, design, and back-end database and code. I'll have a few odds and ends to finish up once I post. The most important one is to combine the castofhorribles.com and NAIS databases, so I can avoid either double posting or migrating every time I post. (The current sewcrates.com just sucks the data off of castofhorribles.)

Seattle, WA | 2007.12.25 | Cast of Horribles | Dogs, Julie, Ziggy

I become lost in my projects

This is a fitting doodle. I have been working hard trying to finish NAIS, my New-And-Improved-Sewcrates.com project. I'm in the final stages, and I'm hopefully I'll post a nearly final version on Tuesday, the first of January.

To accomplish this, I locked myself in my little computer room for longer than I care to admit. This is not uncommon. These website projects tend to overwhelm me. I lose all sense of time until I finish.

Here's where I knew I approached bottom: as part of the new design, I'm resizing all of the thumbnails and photographs to enlarge them for today's bigger monitors. Because of server limitations, I have to manually generate each photo album (as opposed to creating a batch project that does all of them overnight). It takes anywhere from two to ten minutes to create the album on the server. Even though it was not important that I finish today, I found myself unable to stop. I would tell myself, last one. I can continue tomorrow. But instead of getting up, I would decide to wait a few minutes longer until it finished. Then I would click generate on the next one, and tell myself just one more. You have no idea how addictive generating photo albums is for me.

It's similar to the MMORPG video games I play. While large parts of those games are not fun, I continue to chase the carrot at the end of the stick. No matter how often the carrot moves, I just tell myself just one more.

Seattle, WA | 2007.12.30 | Cast of Horribles | Computer, Julie, Projects

The moonlight in your eyes

It's past New Years and this is the first Horrible of 2008. At the last moment, I switched the doodle. The next Horrible in the queue had a suffering tag, and I decided that wasn't a good way to start the New Years.

We had a relaxing day at home. Julie's sister Jennifer is in town until tonight, and we visited the local coffee house (where I managed to write something. I'm not sure if it's post worthy. After I finish this I'll take another look and see if I can clean it up), took Ziggy to the dog park, and I took a long nap. I don't remember the last time I napped. I think it's been a long time, way too long. I feel groggy but my soul feels rested, if that makes any sense. I definitely need to take more naps.

Besides the new mastheads at sewcrates, this is the first Horrible I've posted using my birthday gift.

Happy New Years!

Seattle, WA | 2008.01.01 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Love, Moon

And now with feeling

Ah, Julie's singing career. That's me in the front row (even though I missed Julie's first concert in Taiwan last year). Julie's joined the Bluestreet Jazz Voices, a Seattle jazz ensemble. It's a great chance for her to stretch her voice into a new genre.

We bought new pillows this weekend (the second time we've attempted to replace our current pillows, which date back further than I care to admit), and we went with extra firm. Julie claims the first night I slept without a pillow. I don't remember. I plan to give them a few more days to see if they grow on me.

Seattle, WA | 2008.01.08 | Cast of Horribles | Dr. Julie Show, Julie

The hair makes the woman

We do love our anime. I drew this after we finished watching Witch Hunter Robin. We watched it back in October, so my memory is a bit hazy of the actual anime. From what I do remember, the animation was excellent and the story was at first intriguing and then tiresome: I slept through a few of the middle episodes.

It had an interesting set up and then never delivered on the full possibilities of the story. It's about a quasi-governmental agency that hunts witches. The witches are powerful humans who tend to abuse their powers. The anime hinted at what the witch power was but never fully disclosed how it worked or where it came from. There is some discussion about an earlier time where witches could control and use their powers. Whatever knowledge they had then was lost in modern times. Most witches ran around killing people with their power, and most of the anime consisted of hunting down these rogue witches.

There were good witches, and Robin was one of them. Through the power of religion, witches, if caught early, could be trained to use their powers for "good"--as in what the church believes was good. At the start of the story, Robin used her powers to help the agency hunt down the bad witches. She dressed like a nun and was seemingly raised in a convent where she developed the control of her power (a control that she did not perfect until she purchased reading glasses to allow her to see far away targets--weird, huh). She joined a well-knit group of investigators, some with witch-lite powers, that hunted the rogue witches. The co-star was the man in the doodle, who led Robin's field unit.

The story part consisted of an inter-agency plot and the development of a weapon that allowed humans to use the witches' powers. This part was never adequately developed. While the writers managed to bring the anime to a conclusion, it was not terribly satisfying, and, like many animes, seemed glued together with little more than good intentions and lots of hand waving.

We gave it four out of five stars on Netflix. We reserve four stars for animes that while not perfect (usually because of weaknesses in story or a terrible ending), we enjoyed, and would enjoy other animes of similar quality.

It finally hit fifty degrees yesterday in Seattle. We were growing tired of the cold and rain. We took Button and Ziggy to the dog park, and Button ran a bit. She's a fast dog. I watched from a distance as a dog started chasing her. She ran away from it at a normal pace, and when it got close, she shifted into super-speed mode. Unlike Ziggy, who when a dog gets too close when he's chased, turns his head and tries to run and look back at the same time, Button had no such concerns. She left the bigger dog far behind her as she blurred past a bunch of people who made comments like, "that is a fast dog."

Not that I need a fast dog to judge my self worth. Need is the wrong word: it's a deep-seated hunger brought about by my own clumsy past.

Seattle, WA | 2008.02.10 | Cast of Horribles | Anime, Julie, Witch Hunter Robin

She doesn't need me anymore

It's late and I almost forgot to post this. We enjoyed two beautiful days this weekend. It feels as if we've turned the corner toward Spring.

Seattle, WA | 2008.02.17 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

Dr. Julie Hsieh's Website

I finally got around to designing Julie's website for her clinic. I went with something simple for the first draft. The next one will likely be more interesting. Take a look and tell me what you think:

juliehsiehmd.com

Seattle, WA | 2008.03.15 | Clinic, Family Medicine, Julie, juliehsiehmd.com, Links

We're only automatic ballthrowers to him

I cut back on my Horribles postings again. With preparing the Castle and finalizing the stuff for the Villa, I haven't had much time to doodle. That my computer still is acting weird hasn't helped things. I now only post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I still have a nice backlog, and I'm averaging about a new Horrible every week, so things should continue to move along smoothly.

We lifted the Villa's inspection contingency yesterday, and the next step is closing, which is planned for March 31st. Julie has been doing a wonderful job of preparing our post-close activities, including getting people into the Castle to fix it up for showing, planning the Villa's dogroom, invisible fence, painting, and floor rebuffing. While doing that, she also picked out our new furniture and has arranged for it to be delivered after the contractors (should) finish. The earliest move-in date would be April 6, although it may be later, depending on how quick the contractors and movers work.

For now we wait and enjoy our last few weeks in the Castle. Jennifer is visiting this week, so we've been trying to entertain her.

Seattle, WA | 2008.03.18 | Cast of Horribles | Dogs, Julie, Ziggy

You can't say I never take you anywhere

Julie and I had this discussion on Sunday: we were sitting around in the evening after visiting the Villa to choose paint colors. We had watched too much Grey's Anatomy (a wonderful show I found on the xbox a few weeks ago), and I needed to get out of the Castle as I was being smothered by the television and the dogs and the stillness. We couldn't figure out where to go. We already ate dinner (leftover Drunken Chicken, which was better the first time around), and it was getting late and dark and cold. It wasn't snowing anymore, thankfully, or thunderstorming, although it has been doing more of both lately. (Funny thing about Grey's Anatomy: it's set in a fictitious hospital in Seattle, and, not surprisingly, it's always raining. But instead of rain it's always thunderstorming, which is probably easier to portray than the sprinkling rain Seattle is famous for. I pointed this out to Julie, and she agreed: it almost never thunderstorms in Seattle. That night it snowed, thunderstormed, and the sun came out. I think it all happened in a fifteen minute window.) Anyway, so we're sitting around and I'm slowly going crazy and I'm trying to figure out what we can do. It's getting late as I download and begin watching yet another episode of Grey's. We can't go to the movies anymore because tomorrow (that is the tomorrow of the weekend, which was on Sunday which meant Monday) was a work day, and I needed to sleep at a normal time to be normal and get work done. So after three more episodes, we decided to call it a night and go to bed. We never did end up doing very much. The next day I thought we should have gone to Lottie's Lounge and drank something. Julie doesn't drink and I'm not much of a drinker either. That said, we could have done something, which would have made this paragraph much shorter--a win-win for all of us.

Don't ask. I'm in a weird mood after closing yesterday and I felt like sharing. The doodle brought it up.

Seattle, WA | 2008.04.01 | Cast of Horribles | Castle, D&D, Julie, Stars, Warrior, Wizard

Periodic Elements

A while back, Julie and I went over to our friend Scott's house to play Rock Band. This was our first time playing the game, and we had a great time. (We went for a second visit a few weeks ago.) Besides the three of us, we were joined by Scott's family. I concentrated on the bass, while Julie, not surprisingly, did most of the singing. We created a tour group called the Periodic Elements, in honor of the lead singer's name of Phospherous.

While I keep promising to post photographs of the Villa, I can never seem to find the time to post (or take many) photographs. With the help of some awesome friends, we stayed in the Villa until midnight the past few nights putting stuff together and getting ready for our move in day. The house is shaping up nicely, and once the dog room is complete, we'll be ready to officially move in. It should happen by this weekend at the latest.

Seattle, WA | 2008.04.10 | Cast of Horribles | Blue Guy, Julie, Rock Band, Video Games

"He's never going to leave his little world now"

My new Cintiq! My birthday present! Okay, it's not that new anymore, and we're four months past my birthday. It survived the move to Mercer Island, and is now on my fancy new desk in my fancy new office in my fancy new house.

Redmond, WA | 2008.04.15 | Cast of Horribles | Birthday, Cintiq, Julie

We're registered family

Yes! Finally, we hit upon one of my favorite Anime doodles. This one was for Solty Rei, a cute if somewhat schizophrenic story about a bounty hunter searching for his lost daughter. He is helped by his would-be-surrogate daughter, Solty Rei, who is a physically powerful girl with daddy issues.

We returned from our trip yesterday morning. I’m still recovering. We’ll post photos over the next couple of days. I know I keep talking about posting photos—I’m again having wireless internet issues with my house. I can’t seem to get a strong wireless signal from one side to the other. I’m beginning to think my television is somehow interfering with the signal—as before it was delivered, the signal was much stronger. I need more time for investigations.

Mercer Island, WA | 2008.04.22 | Cast of Horribles | Anime, Julie, Solty Rei

Giving in to the masses

After many arguments, I finally gave in and added a simple menu to Julie's Medical Practice website. I thought I was pushing the envelope by not having a menu: for me, it is easier to scroll than click. But I guess my views are not shared by the majority of people. Here's a screenshot (and this time I remember to use .png instead of .jpg):

juliehsiehmd.com

So much for progress. You need to click the image or link to see the full website--I'm looking at you, Mom!

Mercer Island, WA | 2008.05.01 | Clinic, Family Medicine, Julie, juliehsiehmd.com, Links

Asmin calls to you

The World of Warcraft doodles continue. This is Asmin, Julie's Hunter character, and her pet wolf Snowflake. They haven't been calling to us lately, but I'm hopeful a new Asmin will one day rise from her ashes.

A headache found me this afternoon. I'm hoping it loses track of me soon.

Seattle, WA | 2008.05.22 | Cast of Horribles | Asmin, D&D, Julie, Ranger, World of Warcraft

Button comes home

Wow, it has been a long time since I drew this. It's dated January 29, which seems an impossibly long time ago. We've had Button for almost six months. She's much different from Ziggy: where he is gregarious and always looking to play, Button is more laid back. She's a terrific eater, elegant and sweet--when she's not trying to push Ziggy out of her way to get our attention.

This was my first attempt at drawing her when we returned from our Honeymoon (notice our fancy bathing suits). There are a few more coming up in the queue. I've not drawn the iggies in sometime. I'll have to rectify that soon.

Julie is complaining that I'm not posting often enough. I have to agree with her. I've fallen back into my rut of only posting on Horrible days. Another rectification is in order soon.

We are rapidly approaching Julie's birthday weekend. I made reservations at a Seattle restaurant for Saturday night (her birthday is on Sunday). I'll likely cook a fancy meal on Sunday--assuming we're not still stuffed from the Saturday night extravaganza.

Seattle, WA | 2008.06.05 | Cast of Horribles | Button, Dogs, Julie, Ziggy

Julie's Birthday!

It's Julie's birthday today. Happy birthday, Julie! I gave her my gift--and, yes, a fancy hat and scarf IS a good birthday present. Julie shares her birthday with my niece, Rachel. We gave up trying to find gifts for our nieces, and decided to send amazon.com gift certificates for all birthdays (that and contribute to their college funds--they're not as excited by that as their parents).

Getting back to the Julies (which is exactly what she was thinking at the end of that last paragraph), we have reservations at the Waterfront Seafood Grill in Seattle tonight to celebrate.

This has been a very busy year for the both of us. Last year on Julie's birthday: we were not married, still lived in the Castle, Julie had not opened her medical practice, and we didn't have Ziggy or Button (oh, quiet bliss!). A lot can happen in a year. I'm hoping this year is just as exciting!

Mercer Island, WA | 2008.06.08 | Birthday, Julie

Be scared, very scared

Before we moved to the Villa, we started playing tennis at a local center near the Castle. Julie had played tennis for many years when she was younger, and I had never owned a tennis racket. We went a handful of times before we moved to the Villa. We purchased tennis rackets (mine a bit fancier than Julie's to handicap her), and a few cylinders of balls, all of which now sit in the garage awaiting a tennis revival. I'm noticing a scared theme in these competitve doodles. Do you remember the scared chess one? (As I looked through my old doodles, I'm not sure I can call two doodles a theme.)

I'm a very competitive person. Lately, I've not put myself in many competitive situations. I used to have basketball and driving. I had to give up my road-rage-inspired driving after realizing how ridiculous and dangerous it was. And basketball fell by the wayside when it became inconvenient to play. Bicycling and weight-lifting (which I haven't done in over a year) are fun but not competitive since there's no winning. Work at times is competitive, when there are contentious issues being discussed; although this is much rarer than it should be. Even video games have grown less competitive as I mostly play co-operatively with Julie and Steven.

Tennis did provide a short release of competitive energy. While it isn't as competitive as basketball--mostly because I don't get the opportunity to wrestle for rebounds or push myself into the box--I refused to lose to Julie. I'm quicker than her on the court (thanks to my long skinny legs), and I am able to get to the ball faster. I'm also nastier, sending lots of short balls barely over the net for easy points. I won all of our games (we may have tied and ran out of time during the last few games we played). Whenever it looked bad for me, my competitive juices would churn and I would focus intently and begin dinking the balls, scoring easy points and tiring out the Julies. I miss these opportunities to play (and win!) competitive games.

Looking through my mail today, I received an e-card from my mother. Until I opened it I couldn't figure out why she sent it. Today is our New York wedding anniversary. (I guess it's true what they say about men's ability to remember anniversaries.) As I mentioned in my last anniversary post, we are alternating our celebrations. For my mother (and, in reverse, Julie's mother), there is no alternating: we were married in New York on July 1st. We're okay with that.

Seattle, WA | 2008.07.01 | Cast of Horribles | Competition, Julie, Tennis

I lose myself in there

We're back from our Kansas City and NYC travels. It's nice to be back in Seattle.

There are remnants of the snow still on some streets and in our backyard, but the roads are back to normal.

Update: Julie believes this doodle is pornographic. Not to be defensive, but I focused on the eyeballs looking at each other to come up with the title. And, besides, they're squiggles!

Plane from San Jose to Seattle | 2008.12.30 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Love

There's something I have to show you

It's the return of Super Little Guy and his wife. And before you ask: I have no idea what I planned to show her. I just wanted to go for a little flight.

Yesterday was a rather blah day. There was a get together of graduate school alums in downtown Seattle, and when I returned home, I was in a dark mood. I'm not sure if it was lack of food or too much socialization, but it continued throughout the night. Julie convinced me to play Warhammer again a few days ago, and even Warhammer's nestled embrace wasn't enough to shake the mood. It made it worse.

Today dawned better. Hopefully it'll last the day. I have a pile of work waiting for me, and I'm looking forward to starting.

Mercer Island, WA | 2009.01.13 | Cast of Horribles | Flying, Julie, Super Little Guy

"You were so cute--what happened?"

I was a cute kid. I have no idea what happened between then and now. Life, I guess.

Mercer Island, WA | 2009.02.23 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Picture Frame

"You know you want to join me"

I do, I really do! We're almost out of video games. We're scraping the bottom of the console. There's not much we want to play. We've played through Horde mode on Gears of War II too many times, hitting the ceiling at level 40. It looks unlikely we'll make it to 50 unless we find a fourth person. We gave up on Warhammer Online a couple of months ago. We talked about going through Halo 3 again--although that seems tiring. We need a good sword and sorcery game, something that lets us level up and keel the bad guys with large lightning bolts; preferably one with nice outfits for the Julies.

After a bad start yesterday morning, I evened out after a dose of Advil and a small cup of coffee along with our delicious Crepes. I even managed to make a new chicken recipe for dinner. It turns out not all beer is the same in chicken stews.

Mercer Island, WA | 2009.03.02 | Cast of Horribles | D&D, Julie, Warrior

I just keep staring at it

The doodle is referring to this photograph, which was my wallpaper for some time before I doodled it.

I tried to write yesterday. I finished about a paragraph before calling it a day. Yes, I'm pathetic. But it's the effort that counts, right?

Mercer Island, WA | 2009.05.04 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Nature

The queen

It's our anniversary day (part deux)! The doodle came from this Taiwan wedding studio photograph (you do remember our wedding shoot, right?). This was the next doodle in my queue, honest. Last week Julie did the math on my queue and realized what I was going to post. She's a smart cookie.

It's a beautiful day outside--after a brutally hot start to Spring, Seattle has had beautiful and 70s weather almost every day. We have reservations for dinner tonight. Before you set this date in your calendar, we'll be celebrating the Taiwan wedding date next year. Not only do I have to remember the anniversary, but I also have to keep in mind which day it falls out. That's a lot of math. Luckily I have internets and I can check back on my last Anniversary Horrible.

Mercer Island, WA | 2009.07.01 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Queen

To the love of my life

Bonus Horrible for the Julies!

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.02.14 | Cast of Horribles | Flowers, Julie, Love, Valentine's Day

So different yet so similar

The posting of this Horrible is rather appropriate.

Sorry for the late post. You should expect another late post tomorrow as well. The weather outside is climbing close to 70 again. I love Spring (except when it's rainy and cold).

New York, NY | 2010.03.23 | Cast of Horribles | Jennifer, Julie

"I'm trapped in here, please help!"

I'm tired. I spent the night dreaming I was some sort of superhero/vampire hunter. Now I'm paying for all of my nocturnal activities.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.04.06 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

She's so cute

Yes she is, she really is.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.05.18 | Cast of Horribles | Glasses, Julie

"You are the ugliest of them all"

Julie does not like my conspiracy guy. It makes him sad.

A cold morning. Tomorrow is bicycle-to-work day. I will be biking both to and from work. I have not ridden my bicycle in over a year. This does not bode well for me.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.05.20 | Cast of Horribles | Conspiracy, Julie, Ugly

I think I may be allergic to her

I was polka-dotted for a while back in January (wow, my Horribles queue is getting a bit ridiculous). It was caused by some type of bug bite. It could have been fleas from the iggies or something more mundane. Luckily the hives didn't spread to my face. It was a bit weird looking but it didn't itch until it started to go away. Then it was a few days of torture.

I'm happy to report that I'm polka-dot free now.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.06.03 | Cast of Horribles | Allergy, Hives, Julie

Julie's Birthday 2010

Photos: 11

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.06.08 | Photos | Birthday, Julie

The winter will end soon

. . . but it certainly doesn't feel that way. Another cloudy and rainy morning. I know, too much about the weather. And, no, there's not much going on in my head besides the weather. I am that pathetic. I also haven't done much in the way of doodling or writing lately. I'm still digging out of the doldrums.

This doodle was inspired by a background from Ballot Box Bunny, as usual from here.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.06.16 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Trees, Winter

There's something she needs to tell you

It feels like another Monday although I know deep down that it's Tuesday. Funny how that works.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.06.29 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Pregnancy

They're here to protect us

. . . from the heat. And they're not doing a terribly good job of it. The unseasonably hot weather is descending on Seattle. I know it's bad form to complain when NYC wallows in triple digits. But that's what I do: complain about the weather.

This Horrible was based on a Justice League cartoon, with a wonderful art style, a strong beginning, and a boring, drawn out conclusion. For that reason I won't bother linking to it. Western cartoons are missing humor. I used to think it was annoying and childish in the Japanese animes. Now, when I see a cartoon without it, I miss the personality it provides to the story.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.07.07 | Cast of Horribles | Anime, Blue Guy, Conspiracy Guy, DC Comics, Julie, Justice League: The New Frontier, Purple Boss, Stars, Superheroes

It's the size of a Gummy Bear

. . . she's no longer a gummy bear. She's more like a gummy town.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.07.14 | Cast of Horribles | Baby, Julie, Pregnancy

Would you kindly stop staring

A dark, dark Monday. Relaxing and quiet weekend. This week is shaping up to be the same.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.08.09 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

You can't make me

N'yah n'yah n'yah, n'yah.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.08.19 | Cast of Horribles | Argument, Julie

"Get a hold of yourself before you disappear"

I'm back at work after taking two weeks off. I'm afraid to look at my inbox.

Mercer Island, WA | 2010.10.11 | Cast of Horribles | Invisible, Julie, Rescue

Sometimes she needs her own spotlight

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.01.11 | Cast of Horribles | Julie, Spotlight

Once more for good luck

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.03.02 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

"You're right, they are all spying on me"

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.04.04 | Cast of Horribles | Conspiracy Guy, Julie, Realization, Spying

It's nice to see you again

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.06.13 | Cast of Horribles | Greeting, Julie

She's almost here

From here.

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.06.24 | Cast of Horribles | Beach, Julie, Ocean, Pregnancy

"What big eyeballs you have"

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.06.29 | Cast of Horribles | Julie

"This huge ocean starts and ends here"

From here.

Mercer Island, WA | 2011.10.27 | Cast of Horribles | Beach, Dalia, Hawaii 2011, Julie, Ocean, Sunglasses, Water