Turning the Safety on Usually Helps

I shot myself in the foot (figuratively)

I've been reaping the fruits of my labor (or lack there of). Dropped the ball once this weekend on a group assignment, but I did manage to salvage it, and I think we're fine there. Got an assignment back from a week ago and it was a 60%. The middle of my semester has been one giant slack fest, and it's now coming back to bite me in the ass.

Now at the end of the semester I'm staring down the sights of hopefully 2 A's (one of which is a pass fail) hopefully 2 B's (low, but hopefully a B) and probably one C (well, we're not sure, but we're in bleak mode right now).

It's one of those reap what you sow situations, and i sure sowed a lot of crap. So now I've sprouted a crap tree.

It's time now to buckle down and rock the shit out like I always do.

In writing news I started a NaNo, but I doubt, unless i can organize my time for the rest of the semester better, that I'll be able to finish it. I've also not touched the rider since the start of Novemeber...

I just have to keep telling myself that this semester is almost over, and I can step it up over the next 3 to do alright.

And the beat goes on.

The Vagabond Life

I went out West to La Grange last night with my friend Lane. I met his dog, the now legendary Charlie, who was the basis for the dog in his novel. I met his mom and his brother. I visited the La Grange public library. It has an amazing graphic novel selection. I read the majority of Infinite Crisis, which was just ok. Afterwards we went to the bar and I had a french dip and far too much to drink and spent far too much money. I also met Lane's girlfriend for the second time, and I'm 2 for 2 for meeting her while I'm inebriated. Then we went back to her house and I fell asleep on her couch.

The floors of her townhouse are very loud. One of her roommates, who wakes up early for work was stamping around the house (by which I mean she was stepping as lightly as is possible) and into the living room to get something off the coffee table near where I was sleeping. It was after 6:30, so already I was in a half conscious morning-after daze, unsure of most everything except that I'm on a couch, and the roommate makes enough noise to jilt me a little further awake.

"Sorry kiddo," she says.

Now, quick aside. The only person who has ever called me "kiddo" is my mom, and she does it very often. Back to story...

So I, hearing kiddo, and still feeling a little spin from the alcohol look around more scared and surprised and had to stop myself from asking loudly, "Mom?!" It was the first time ever that I had a "where the hell am I??" moment.

I'd left my phone charger and my toothbrush at Ryan's apartment, so when I got back into the city I went up there to pick it up, and also borrowed his shower. And now I'm sitting in a Panera, waiting to hear back on a couch for the night.

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So this post is going up later than I planned. When I went to hit the send button last night and put it up for you all to see I got this warning that I had used all my available peak time. And the above was all that was saved from the post before the internet decided to stop.

Afterwards I went with my friend Sam over to the house of my director and his Gaffer/DP, Mike and Andrew (respectively). We smoked a lot, drank a lot, and got Sam signed up to produce Mike's independent film, currently titled "The System." Then Mike and I stayed up very late talking about Star Wars and actually good movies, and future project ideas. I crashed on the couch there and now I'm at the library with Andrew discussing a potential future comic/mock movie preview for our hero, The Purple Magnificence. We're thinking of getting it together and squared away to have as something that can be passed out at the Chicago Comic Con either 2009 or 2010. More to come on that later.

Now it's time to do homework

This Is Sunday

This is senioritis in a nutshell:

I got 10 hours of sleep last night, and I'm starting to get a blister on my left thumb from playing too much NCAA Football 07 on my Xbox 360. There's this great minigame called Option Dash where you have two minutes to run the option play over and over, and it scores you on how well you do, touchdowns, yards gained, tackles missed, etc. It's far more addicting than it should be.

I typed up "I'm Just A Boatman" on Friday and passed it off to a bunch of friends to read over and edit. I'm at that point in my writing, and probably will be for a few more years that the best I can do in editing right now is line editing syntax and word choice and spell check. Actual content is not something I'm good at yet. It's a hard thing to look entirely neutral at your own piece of work, and then to say, yep it's good, or my god what is this shit? Mort said that it would take upwards of 6-10 years to reach that point. For my sake I hope I can scoot through it quicker.

I've also decided that I need to stop ordering take out. Nuff said. I'm just eating out waaaaaaay too much and it's costly and it's unhealthy. I can't wait for this weather to stabilize and for this semester to get over with so I can be at home and be exercising every day and writing every day and seeing my friends more often. So Monday (because I'm going to breakfast with a friend I haven't seen in months and months today) I'm done with the eating out. Take out. Delivery. Doesn't matter I'm gonna make my own. And while we're at it, no more soda (or pop or whatever you want to call it). So there. That's my weekend resolutions.

Now I'm off to breakfast, and then back to clean house. Then I've got to type up chapter two of the Jack novel for my advanced class, and I probably have a stack of other work to be doing too, but we'll see.

Holy Word Count Batman!!!

I think it's safe to call today a victory.

After spending a majority of the day sitting around wondering what I should be doing, and then going to Clarke's for pancakes and omelets (Oh my, you should eat!). I came home and on a whim of inspiration, after dinking around for some time, decided that I should write.

Now here I am, 6 hours later. A fresh 5,000+ words added and another 4,000 previously written and then spliced in today, I'm teetering right near the 200 page mark. I'm within 100 words of breaking 40,000 words, and if my brain wasn't a nice shade of crispy brown I would add them in.

Now I'm waiting for my roommate to call me back and come celebrate my evening of awesome productivity with a nice tall pint of crisp wonderful beer.

Too bad not a single word of this counts towards any homework, so I am now a day further behind on what I was supposed to be doing... Oh well.