On The Other Hand

A night spent by the flicker of a loving television.

Darin is sitting on the loveseat as we're watching Homicide. No, we couldn't wait until Thanksgiving to see one another again.

That sound you hear is me purring. I am one happy camper when my hon-bun's around.

I read the past couple of entries and I realized I've been a wee bit scattered of late. I'm sorry, honest -- it's either the touch of the flu, or the time of the semester, or just that I'm a raving looney. By the way, this isn't a poll; do not send in your pick.

• The conference with the head of the program went okay, although he's sticking to not letting us take any of the writing for TV classes until after we take the second semester writing class. I did say that that only leaves us two semesters next year to take them, and he helpfully said that we'd have to budget our time.

  Oh. Thanks for the tip.

• After the conference I drove over to David's for the pizza-and-short-films party with my writing class. We watched three and discussed them: two were okay, one was great. It's a BBC production entitled Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life starring Richard E. Grant as Franz Kafka. If you can find it, watch it. Diane sez: Richard E. Grant-fu, Kafkaesque humor...check it out.

• Last night, despite feeling completely ill, I went over to the Boys' house to watch Babylon 5. I became horribly depressed by a plot development in the show -- if you watched it, you know what I'm talking about. Garibaldi is my favorite character, dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Today, I got up late, went to Spring Creek, and spent the first hour or so driving around running errands. I then spent most of the afternoon editing Kathryn's grad school application essay and bitching about how ancient the office systems are, because one of my tasks was to help update one of the producer's Rolodexes. The old-fashioned way. By typing out new entries on little Rolodex cards.

Oy.

I talked to Kathryn about all the ways that Spring Creek -- and by extension, just about every production company around -- is in the Dark Ages. The Macs aren't networked; everything's done by fax, nothing by e-mail; a lot of stuff handled by typewriter. It turns out that they can't update a lot of their equipment on their own: they have to have Warner Bros., or rather Warner Bros.' unions do it. Which means it never gets done.

I dashed out of Spring Creek to go to the guest speaker session, which had two TV dramatic writers talking about what it's like to work as a staff writer on a series. I found it very interesting -- I think I'd like working on a TV series. The immediate feedback of writing it Week One, filming it Week Two, and seeing it on air Week Three.

Then I drove back to Studio City just long enough to get my phone messages and realize that Darin was going to be at the airport soon, so I booked on over to Burbank Airport to pick him up. He's feeling a little under the weather, but not so much that we won't have a good time being with each other this weekend.

"I'm rested, I'm back, I'm meaner than ever." -- Frank Pembleton.