So, if you're having a bad day, be thankful that the following did not happen to you: you did not go to a Starbucks, did not get a grande iced nonfat mocha, did not walk down the street and did not happily blow bubbles in your drink, which did not cause the overfull container to overflow and no iced mocha ended up all over your nice, clean white t-shirt.
On the other hand, because of this I had to come home and change (strangely, into the exact same t-shirt; the dangers of picking up souvenirs from computer companies) and so had time to write this entry.
Yesterday I came home at 10pm, completely wasted. I worked all day at Spring Creek pictures, my first full day there, and it made me grumpy. Periodically we'd get phone calls like, "Two copies of Such-and-Such for the meeting that's going on upstairs," and we'd have to immediately drop everything (and we were usually in the middle of doing something like making 14 copies of another screenplay) and make those two copies. I placated the fickle, high-maintenance Xerox machine to get it to spew out copies while Kathryn counted and collated.
At one point, Kathryn heard me swearing at machine and she said, "Do you want to take a couple of minutes outside?" I said no, I was just stressed, I was fine. So we switched places and within minutes Kathryn was swearing at the machine in the exact same way, so I asked her if she wanted to take a time-out. She laughed.
After that I drove over to USC for my Business and Legal Aspects midterm. I was overjoyed to realize, as I pulled into the parking lot, that one of my headlights had burned out and the other one was dim. Didn't have time to worry about it. Went to go study. It seemed like the more I studied the less I knew, but I counted off the 5 rights of copyright and the 5 points of defamation. I would have prayed but what the heck good was that going to do me? For one, I'm an atheist, and for two, even if there is a god I'm still the one who has to take the test.
Took the test. A couple of the questions threw me, so I just wrote down the best answers I could think of and hoped. We had to write our own contract for an assignment at the end of the test. Eeek.
After the test every year Brooke holds a junk-food party, because the midterm is right around Halloween. This year the second-year students came and we gossiped about teachers and other students in the program and who's doing what. I discovered that there are definite factions forming in the first-year students, some of which I had a clue about, others of which I had had no idea. Interesting. Must keep an eye on that.
A couple of us walked over to the parking structure together -- first we walked Carolanne to her car, then Gregory came with me and I drove him to his car. No problem. Except that when it came time to get on the freeway, the ramp was closed.
I drove over to Adams. That ramp was closed too. There were some poorly arranged signs pointing to a detour to a part of Exposition Park I'd never been before. White fright in action: I had one headlight and no idea where I was going. I finally drove down to Martin Luther King Jr. and got on the 110 there. Phew.
This morning my first piece of business was to fix my headlamp. I went over to an auto parts shop and bought the correct lamp. I opened the hood, looked in, checked out the plug with the back of the lamp -- nope. Went back into the shop, got the correct lamp this time (which consisted of the bulb and lens housing), borrowed a screwdriver, and set to work. It took some time and boy did I make a mess of myself. But I managed to remove the old lamp and put in the new one and even get all the screws back in except one (which I had to screw it vertically and which slipped out of my fingers, either lost in the engine or it rolled under my car).
I also discovered why the other light, the one that was still working, was so dim -- it was filthy. The reason being that whenever I get my car cleaned, the headlights are down, so they don't get washed. And I don't usually walk in front of my car when the lights are up.
Then I couldn't get the headlights to go back down. For some reason, the lights were stuck in the up position. I drove over to a mechanic the auto parts guys recommended and Karin, a Russian guy, explained that the headlights were on a timer -- I had pushed a button inside the car that raises the headlights without turning them on. Sure enough, after a minute or so they went back down.
So, my big accomplishment so far today is changing my own headlight. I always feel like I've accomplished something magnificient when I do something like that, instead of running to someone and pleading, "Please do this for me." Of course, now I have grease in the creases of my fingerpads that no amount of Borax seems to be able to get rid of, but oh well.