Okay, clearly I've completely gotten out of the habit of blogging. I was telling my wife I feel like I have nothing to say. She said I have plenty to say. In a sitcom, she would have then rolled her eyes. No, I don't know, I have nothing to say that feels worth sharing on a blog, how about that. But I'll recap the past couple of weeks of blog posts I didn't write.
-- Yesterday was my grandma's 94th birthday (in addition to Mothers Day). Her condition, mentally and physically, has been remarkably stable since I last wrote about her (perhaps a year ago). Physically, she's in really good shape for 94. She can get around, she can walk, she has no pain. She sleeps a lot, but I think that's as much driven by stuff on the mental side as physically. Mentally, she's no better from the stroke she had two years ago, but she's also no worse. In the present, she knows what's going on, she knows who she's talking to, she makes sense. It's just that very little sticks and there's no short-term memory at all. And there's enough self-awareness about it that she knows she can't remember anything and she's extremely frustrated by it at times, and very confused at times. She tries to justify -- she tries to make it make sense. So I'll be talking to her, and I'll remind her I saw her the previous day, and she'll say she doesn't remember, and isn't it a shame that she's so old that she can't remember things, and why do people have to live to be so old they can't remember anything. And I'll remind her she had a stroke, and she'll say that's terrible, but that explains the memory problem, and she hopes to see me soon. And I'll remind me I saw her the previous day, and she'll wonder why she doesn't remember. It's frustrating -- all news is new news for her, all conversations restart as soon as there's a break in them. But there are glimmers of her -- she's still in there even though it's hard to coax her out. I'm used to how her mind works now -- I know what words to use to get us past something so she won't be as confused -- she asks me if I'm married yet, and I know that if I can dump a bunch of details into one sentence, I can get us past the next eight questions and onto something else. I can tell her what I'm working on writing, in a short burst of a sentence, and we can get to the next question. She knows her nouns and adjectives -- she can have a conversation about some food we're talking about, or the weather, or what makes for a happy marriage -- it's just that it all evaporates three sentences later. It's been a real loss -- obviously less of a loss than if she wasn't here at all, but still a real loss, and a loss I'm reminded of the four or five times a week I talk to her, so it's impossible to push it to the back of one's mind.
-- Yesterday a friend and I filmed half a comedy sketch we wrote. We've written a bunch of sketches loosely themed around the recession, and the goal has been to film some of them and put them up somewhere. I'll obviously link to this one when it's done -- the process has taken a fair bit longer than we wanted, because filming things requires logistical work that neither of us are terribly excited about doing. One of the things I'm frustrated with about myself -- more in the past couple of years than previously, because I don't think I needed to have these skills as much before these past couple of years -- I don't have much of an interest in the logistical pieces of putting a project together, and really have to force myself. The writing is the (relatively) easy part. But trying to convince a deli to let us shoot a 10-second scene there, or trying to find an apple that looks appropriately rotten, or asking friends to be extras in a web video -- these things feel like torture. And they're not, once they get done. But they still feel that way beforehand.
-- My wife has a 1998 Honda Accord that lives at her parents house, and we never use. We've been paying insurance on it, thinking we were going to end up using it sometimes, but we really don't, so we figure we should sell it -- the chance that whenever we again need a car, a 1998 Honda will be the car we want to drive seem pretty low, it's in drive-able shape but it has six digits of miles on it -- but the logistics of selling it also seem like torture. So if anyone knows of ways to sell a car that don't seem like torture, I'm all ears. I googled and found a place that claims to buy used cars at market value without the hassle, which sounds nice but I'm skeptical it's as nice as it sounds.
-- The Anonymous Lawyer TV stuff made me appropriately skeptical about nice news being actual nice news as opposed to temporary nice news, but I had some nice news about my Anonymous Lawyer screenplay that will hopefully turn into more nice news, and won't just be temporary nice news. That's about as much as I would have blogged about that, if I'd blogged about it. I'm now trying to make some nice news happen with some other stuff I'm working on, so hopefully more nice news about something, sometime.
-- I have convinced myself that brown-shelled eggs have a thinner shell than white-shelled eggs. But it may just be a case of small sample size.
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