I Lost Weight?

I biked most of the northeast side of Ann Arbor today. Saw a large chunk of North Campus (though I'm still unsure where my buildings are). I'm now sitting and watching some of the Women's Triathalon via www.nbcolympics.com. It's only slightly more exciting than the marathon, which I watched yesterday with my roommate Adam.

While biking today I saw a couple funny things that I didn't snag pictures of. The first was the Prickly Pear Cafe (It's uhhhh.......). I also saw a robot repair shop. Not entirely sure of the roads I found myself having made tracks all the way to the south side of town. I also passed over the Huron river.

My room is starting to take on a semblance of roominess and no longer messiness.

When I made dinner (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some carrots) my roommate, Adam walked in and for a second my mind kept throwing up warnings that I was intruding in someone else's home and I should be ashamed for getting food out of the fridge. Here I am a rent paying individual living in this house and I feel like an outsider. I hope I can shake this feeling in the next day or two, or else eating is going to be a rather awkward task.

Here's something else that's kind of funny. In the basement bathroom there is a scale, I'm assuming my roommate's. I went and stood on it just before taking a shower just for the hell of it. At the beginning of summer I weighed myself out at about 175ish. Today I clocked in at around 160-162ish. I can't believe I lost almost 15 pounds. I guess that's what happens when you start running, though I have to admit I've been eating like shit all summer long. I'll be interested to see what happens to my appetite now that I'm reformatting it to be a little more healthy, and when I start lifting after school starts.

I would've made a blog post last night, but by the time I was able to connect to the internet I was sitting in a chair watching Michael Phelps go for his 8th freakin' gold medal. At that point I'd packed up a trailer, drove to Ann Arbor, unpacked the trailer, assembled a desk a futon and two bookshelves, unpacked maybe 4 boxes, and walked a couple of miles. Needless to say I was exhausted.

This morning I've been unpacking. Just like the last time I realize that unpacking stuff in one room amounts to pushing it around in circles over and over again until those piles disappear. It's a very slow and grueling process but I have definitely made some serious headway.

I think I am going to stop for a while now and go explore Ann Arbor a bit, maybe figure out some loan stuff, and then come back once the weather gets bad (which it's supposed to do today).

I finished the majority of my moving in today. It was a whole lot of pushing piles in circles. I'd move a couple things where they should be, tuck a few other things away, and the pile would rotate in another circle. It is mostly frustrating. Packing is far easier than unpacking. Especially when you have more space.

I sent Mort Castle the first chapter of the Center. I finished it a couple days ago. It was one of the easiest chapters yet. I'm writing it with the mentality that I am going to just toss a page break when it gets boring, and keep it moving nonstop. Growing constantly to action and to intensity. Maybe I'll send it out to the F Magazine Novel and Short Story Contest. I need to get more things out anyways.

It takes me nearly an hour to commute from my apartment to Columbia. This gives me a lot of time to read. I also have a feeling that I am going to be putting a lot of miles on my iPod over the next year. I'm nearly a third of the way through the second book of The Dark Tower (The Drawing of the Three). I'm hoping to finish that book this week. I'm also hammering my way through the 22 disk epic of the Historian. It is very good. Everything the Da Vinci code should've been, and more. And it's about Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, or more importantly, Dracula.

Class starts tomorrow. I'm taking "The Fundamentals of Communication," and "Prose Forms." There are only 5 people in my prose forms class. This is both a blessing and a curse. I've got 2 days that I am going to want to miss. One is next tuesday because I turn 21. The other is the thursday afterwards because it is a few days before Ben Logan's wedding. If I've got the skips I'm going to use them. Life is just more important than the 12th floor.

I wanted to post something clever here about moving in, and about coming back to Chicago and all, but nothing is really coming to mind. I got a call from my tutor. She described herself as being hard but fair, which I think is a way of saying I'm a jerk, but I give the occasional praise. I realized then that people who describe themselves as hard but fair are a new pet peeve.

Moving out is actually not that exhilarating. It's a whole lot of moving everything out of the room, organizing a bit, and moving it back in. Moving it out, and then back in. Wash rinse repeat. I need a desk, and a midday so I can pound stuff into walls without waking anybody up.

For a change of pace I am going to leave a bit of a piece that I started. Something that I'm not really sure of, but sounds cool when read out loud with traveling music underneath. Here it is

-----------

I was thinking of you.

I've spent a lot of time in cars lately. Driving from here to there. Riding passenger mostly. With my headphones in and a first print run of The Gunslinger with a broken spine in my lap. I should've finished it days ago but I keep nodding off.

I went in to Canada today, no problems on the border. I'm camping for the first tie in years, and I actually saw stars tonight. I know it sounds funny, but when you finally don't see them you really miss them. They twinkled and glowed in the heavens. In the freshly mowed field where I stood, I glowed back. You've never been, and I want badly to take you camping.

When we were gathered in the mess hall, looking at pictures from camps that I missed for work or some other excuse I start to wonder if you got my text, and I want to check it, but international fees are too steep. And for once it feels nice to unplug. Except for my iPod. I can't live without music.

When I get back home I plan on taking you out for coffee again. I keep having this self-important daydream of me pulling into my driveway in two days with my tent in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. And you run across the lawn to greet me. We embrace then, and through your chest I can feel the steady thump thump of your heart. You're alive and that is supposed to mean something to me that I am wholly unclear on.

You should've seen the sunset. With our 20% chance of rain blowing quickly over our heads. The towering thunder clouds, purple mountains from the heavens. The sun burning like a golden doubloon. It was something. I get a lot of sunrises where I'm at, but I'm never up for them. Except for last week when work got so backed up that I put in a seventeen hour day at home Sunday night from noon till five AM, crashed for another two hours, and was back at the office at eight.

I wonder what you're doing right now. Wonder if you think of me. Wonder if you've thought of me at all. I like to hope so. I wonder if I should even want to take you out again. I mean with the big California move coming in a year and all. Is it fair to me? Is it to you? I come home tomorrow for a week before going back to Chicago. Maybe I'll see you then.

Tonight we go out for our annual pie run. It's this little shop on the edge of London, Ontario. Near where I am camping. God my hands are freezing. After a long day of work that pie is starting to sound damn good. It means that need to get out of my tent. More importantly out of my sleeping bag. A down filled mummy sack. It could keep an anorexic supermodel toasty at the south pole...

-----

Anywhoo that is the story. What I've done at least. I can't really think of where to take it next, so I'm going to just let it sit for a long while.

I'm really excited about the fact that Starcraft 2 is coming out. It's been a long time coming, and I think this is an excuse to upgrade my PC. Though I shouldn't be spending the money.

And with that I am back to unpacking, moving and removing, and re-removing, until I'm ready to collapse.

More moving today.

My dorm/apartment is looking very bare. All the walls are stripped down, leaving little yellow stains of sticky tack where once there were interesting posters. We're not allowed to nail into the walls, but that didn't stop my roommate who hung a world map which was old enough it still reffered to all of Eurasia, and all of Northern Asia as the USSR. I always found that really funny, just like the framed puzzle he hung up of an underwater scene. I also really disliked looking at that painting because there was a single piece missing from it, and every time I looked at it my eye would gravitate towards that one spot and fixate on it until I was annoyed.

The large boxes on wheels had somehow managed to disappear so it left Matt and I to load in boxes from my room armload by armload, riding the elevator up to the 25th floor and down again....over and over and over... Thankfully I didn't pack everything seeing as I am going to continue living in this dorm room for another week or so in order to finish out the semester and to avoid having to deal with a 40 minute commute to get to my 8 o'clocks on Monday and Tuesday.

Mike got his film back today and he was able to review it. If I hadn't been busy with moving stuff I would've hopped on it and checked it out. He said that, except for a few minor incongrueties that will get left on the cutting room floor, everything they shot was really very good, and this project is going to be a hit. That really gets me excited about the prospect of actually filming and seeing "Interlude" this coming winter.

We also have started kicking around the idea of doing a zombie movie, which we both swore we would never do, but have decided that it would just be plain old fun to go out and experiment with a hack n slash, blood and guts, action movie. I pitched him the idea that it would be interesting to see it done with a winter premise. He fell in love with the visual idea of seeing the blood splatter the snow. So now I am busy brainstorming a whole ton of the ideas that would make it interesting. I keep leaning towards noir titles, like "The Dead Months" or "The Long Dead Winter" or something of that sort.

Going to be back in town tomorrow. Should be interesting. Still wondering how I am going to get all this homework done by next Monday. I've given up on finding an artist, so I think I am going to just slap together a basic pitch, and turn it in on monday, maybe see if I can crank out the excuse that my "artist is going slow" and get a few more days to finish it up. I'm a bad bad person. Anyways it's late, and I've got a drive ahead of me, mostly doing homework while Matt cruises.

I spent the majority of today moving my old friend, and new roommate, Matt, into the apartment that we are going to be sharing for the next year. Today was the first time I saw the place, and it is good to know that I am actually going to have some tangible place to work and live in. Up till this point it has been somewhat of an enigmatic idea. Tomorrow, or today actually, we wake up early load my stuff, and move basically everything I own in Chicago into the apartment, go home for the weekend and do the same to my stuff that's at home that I'm going to need. Should be fun, or at least exhausting and fulfilling.

I talked to Mike a little further about the idea for "Interlude." We discussed character descriptions, should it be a waiter or a waitress, lighting and color schemes. Ultimately we decided that the techniques used in "One Hour Photo" is something that we should try and emulate and that it should be a waiter, seeing as the devil would reserve the feminine form for customers because the character appears to be more passive and lovable as a woman.

One of my teachers gave me this technique that I want to experiment with over the summer. I'm going to get my hands on a roll of paper, maybe from the health department where my dad works, and tack it to the wall. Then I'll get some big markers and just scrawl all over it with ideas, plot outlines, scenes, dialog, everything; creating a map of my novel for me to then piece together and create into something that is (hopefully) publishable and tangible.

I'm going home this weekend. I'm really looking forward to seeing my pets, and I'm hoping that when the time comes for me to move into this apartment that I'll be able to get a kitten. Just the thought of having my own pet is really exciting. I want to give it a cool name. Something like Caius, or Lopt, or something mythological or philosophical... I don't know. Cats are really bizzare and interesting characters.

I started having some interesting ideas for The Center, today while listening to the song "The New Year" by Death Cab For Cutie. Something called the Infinitum kept popping up, and there was also this really vivid image of Edmund (my protagonist or antagonist, depending on how you look at things) standing in the back of the cockpit of a B12 Bomber as it comes through the clouds soaring over one of the 9 cities of the East. He then says quickly to "drop it." The plane releases two bombs that plummet into the city (MASSIVE CITY) and explode in twin mushroom clouds of a nuclear blast. He is also referred to as the Red Horse (which is an obvious tie in to the horsemen of the apocalypse).

Another idea that has been interesting me has been a line from Neil Gaiman's American Gods, where Shadow and Wednesday are discussing who is a "Black Hat" vs. a "White Hat." This is in reference to who is good who is evil. Then a title occured to me. "The Grey Hats." I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'll keep you posted.

Anywhoo I'm off to bed for the evening, to pack and move tomorrow, and then to possibly talk comics with my artist (hopefully) so that I don't get a failing grade come next monday.