most images provided by google search, just to spice things up
I woke up with the song "Robophobia" by Electric President in my head. It's a good song. It took me a bit to figure out what melody I was humming; in fact I didn't know until I caught myself singing the lyrics "They can't sleep they have no eye lids/Their bodies hum just like the heaters in our microwaves."
Last night's dream involved being on a film set being directed by my high school Japanese teacher and starring Clancy Brown, who was very patient when Atsuko insisted on rolling dice against a sort of D&D-style table to determine, minutes before shooting, crucial elements of the characters' backstory (specifically I remember we rolled against "How long has he known his wife was cheating on him?" and in the script the answer was "he didn't know at all" but Atsuko rolled and changed it to three years).
This in turn was inspired no doubt because a film playing elsewhere in the Northwest Film & Video Fest is titled Mom by one Kanako Wynkoop, a half-Japanese woman who has a phone conversation with her older, thick-accented Japanese mother. For four years I and all my high school friends were taught Japanese by an older Japanese woman named Atsuko Wynkoop, who'd obviously married into that name, and it was hard to believe it was just a coincidence. I mean, how many Wynkoops could have married (and bred with) Japanese women? Well apparently at least two, because I contacted Kanako, and she seems very nice but her mother isn't named Atsuko and her mother never taught English to a bunch of unruly High Schoolers, in McMinnville or elsewhere. So, that's weird. Anyway the combination of my old high school Japanese teacher and filmmaking obviously came from here.
In non-dream news, I went to the doctor yesterday. Found out about the two unrelated skin things I've had. One is no-big-deal eczema, here's some steroids, will be gone in a month. The other is a slightly bigger deal thing, tinea apparently, nothing uncommon or terribly bad, and I'm on a 20-day program of pill-taking-followed-by-sweating (which I hope will push me into the gym... starting tonight?). During this program I can't have any alcohol (inconvenient more than earth-shattering) and when this program is done, it will be 2 or 3 months before I'll know if it worked, and it works "about fifty percent of the time." Not super-great, since the pink splotches on my arms and the smaller ones on my chest kind of make me self-conscious, and I've always been disproportionately body-conscious to begin with.
But apart from eczema and tinea, I was given a clean bill of health. My blood pressure, my reflexes, all that. No lumps. My bad cholesterol is great, but my good cholesterol is too low, so I'm told to start taking fish oil pills. (In addition, I've noted that nuts, olive oil, and weight loss will all contribute getting my HDL level back up.) It's nice to know I'm mostly okay, though. I hadn't had an actual checkup in at least 13 years, and I hadn't had bloodwork in probably 6 or 7.
So the NWFest fliers are out and Every Room is Empty is all over it, particularly this image. It's on the webpage, too. It's playing as the first piece in the block "Shorts III" (which feels a little to me like the most prestigious spot in the least prestigious shorts-segment, but I know it doesn't work like that). For anyone reading this who doesn't know, it's going to be playing Sunday, November 8th, at 6pm and Friday, November 13th, at 8:45pm, at the Whitsell Auditorium. You should all come see it. Because why not?
That's about all. Waiting on a call back from Downstream, or I'll call them Monday and ask if Open can come in. Writing Group was interesting and deserves a whole post -- I've had a real bug up my butt lately to push WG to the next level, to make us Advanced Writing Group, and to encourage us to take our jobs as writers more seriously. Spawning from that and a rant about loglines and pitches, I gamely agreed to try and pitch my problematic One Day in the Future idea to the group, even though I had no pages, and maybe from it came some ideas... if nothing else, from it came a different way to rewrite it (draft 20 of the first 10 pages, here I come!), but being able to have discourse on the story is going to help me find focus and not lose steam. I think.
Well. One hour before work. I'd better go get ready. Spacecat is threatening to knock over the monitor she's so fucking excited to catch the mouse cursor (it reminds her of her sworn nemesis, the Laser Pointer Dot). Every day this cat is more rambunctious and huntressy than the day before. One day she'll be a chill cat, but right now she's an overstimulated monster adorable kitten.
