Dementia Praecox

What I really want to do is go back to sleep. Which is ridiculous, because I got at least eight hours last night. I've noticed that I haven't been as rested recently, and even though our bedroom faces East, the sun hasn't been doing a good job of waking me up. Darin has, though: "Hon, it's 9. Get up."

Somehow, this is much more effective than bright sunlight. Go figure.

By the way, remember my complaint about cold and grey days? Strike that: it's now clear, sunny, and hot. We have the AC on and thank God, it works.

We're moving my office upstairs, into the "little girl's bedroom", the one with the stencil around the top of the walls of the cow jumping over the moon and the cat and the fiddle. Now I work in the opposite corner of the house, on a different floor from Darin. This is going to make communication trickier, as a simple yell won't do it. Perhaps we could even start using the intercom system we've noted and mostly ignored.

Darin and I decided that the experiment of working in the same space didn't work particularly well. Sigh. It's going to take time for Darin and me to get in sync, more time than either of us expected. For example, on Friday we had a long and often difficult discussion about how much time we're spending together. It seemed to me that we were having an overactive social life and I needed to buckle down and spend more time writing. It seemed to Darin that we were hardly spending any time together and I needed to budget my time better so that I could write and spend time with him.

The difference between our perceptions being, of course, that I'm always on the run to Babylonian or USC and he stays home all day working. So he wants to go out and see people (and he likes for both of us to go together), whereas I could do without ever seeing another person by the time I get home.

Darin and I spent most of Sunday together. In the morning I went off to John Copeland's house to fix his ISDN/modem setup, which took me an hour and a half, including travel there and back. The previous guy he'd had in had not only not fixed it but screwed everything up worse and then billed him $4000. As John gleefully told me, "$4000, yeah right, I'm going to pay that for messing up my service." I fixed everything quickly and was on my way. I did not make protestations of how easy it was, though it was. I just left.

At home I took a short nap, then Darin and I started in on the small bedroom, which was the last uncharted territory of boxes and mess. We took a break for dinner (actually, I told Darin, we had to stop for dinner because I was so hungry I was in danger of doing the death scene from Les Miserables, I just couldn't decide which one), then finished the job around 11 at night.

It's not even really done, but you can walk from one end of the room to the other now, which is a definite improvement. When we first started the job, we kicked up so much dust I asked Darin to open the window, which he couldn't do because he couldn't reach it. Now he could, but we have the AC on and I'd be very annoyed if he let all the air conditioning out.

Yesterday, when I got to Babylonian, I told Jeffrey that I needed to be out of there a little earlier than usual and I wanted to leave by 3. He said fine. I don't think either of us thought there would be a problem, as most of the time they either haven't needed me or have only needed me for half a day.

However, whenever I have to leave, inevitably something happens.

Yesterday it was that the Fan Club coordinator had, um, left last week and the assistant coordinator, who hadn't been here last week, had to fill his position without knowing how to do any of his job. Enter Diane, who may not know how to run a Fan Club but does know all the software and computer tricks the new coordinator will have to learn.

Plus Jeffrey actually had one metric buttload (the standard measurement for the rest of the world) of office work for me to do, including, yuck, photocopying. As I kept saying to myself as I was running off the copies and collating, "Brain the size of a planet, and I'm doing this." But I did it. In between copies I'd run back to the Fan Club to work some more magic on the computer.

Three o'clock came and went. I was going to have to leave instructions for Elizabeth on how to download the mail, how to do this, how to do that...I was still collating...I was going nuts.

At a quarter to four Jeffrey walked into the Fan Club with my purse and sunglasses, which he made me take as he started pulling me out of the chair. "Do it Wednesday," he said. "It can wait until Wednesday."

"Then I'm not coming in Friday," I said.

"That's fine," he said, walking me to the front door.

I came home, ate quickly, then dashed off to USC to meet with Kathleen and see the final cut of The End of her Rope. We had Directing class last night and I got a lot of comments back on the piece, most of which were fair and useful. No one out and out hated it, I think. After that we watched Love Always, a new indie movie produced by our teacher, Isaac Artenstein.

Let's just say that road movies about freewheeling females that have an episodic structure aren't my cup of tea.

I came home at 11 (!) and Darin wasn't here. I know he spends Monday evenings over at the Boys'. There were phone messages so I listened to them: a couple for Darin, then one from Jeffrey in the evening telling me he appreciated all the work that I did today. That call really made me feel good.

Jeffrey is King of the Schmooze, but I get the feeling he isn't bullshitting me. I'm one of the few people he doesn't have to bullshit.