tv

Well, that was Sunday

So anyway, that’s the weekend done with.

At yesterday’s blood drive, I learned that there’s a point system, where you earn for each donation and can then trade those points in for valuable prizes online. The NY Blood Center sent me an e-mail this morning to confirm this, as well as to thank me for giving blood yesterday. I don’t do it for gifts, which is good, because I’d have to donate more regularly, and probably for several long decades, before I’d earn enough for even the smallest of prizes. I’m at 75 points right now, plus whatever I earned yesterday, and a box of 100 self-sealed business envelopes, for instance — a featured item — is worth 445 points. So it’s going to be a few more hundred thousand pints before I rack up enough points to do any real damage.

Meanwhile, today was pretty uneventful. I went for a short walk, since the weather was still so nice, and I struggled to finish the New York Times crossword puzzle. (I still haven’t, and probably won’t, but I did at least get all the theme answers. I also watched a short British miniseries called Murderland. It was okay, though not at all remarkable, and Robbie Coltrane seems pretty wasted in it, honestly.

I could be watching the Oscars, I suppose — I even have a kind-of pseudo-Oscar pool running with a friend of mine — but our cable company dropped ABC first thing this morning in a contract dispute over money. (Why either of them should be getting money for a broadcast channel I’m not entirely sure, but that’s another story.) I didn’t feel like scouring the web for a shaky, bootleg live feed — which is apparently all there is to be had — and frankly, I didn’t really feel like watching what, from all the Twitter comments I keep getting, is shaping up to be an exceptionally boring show.

So instead, I think I’m just going to go to bed. Although there’s no red carpet, no video montages, and nobody ever wants to know who designed my pajamas. Goodnight!

A possibly haunted house

Today was Friday, and there’s not a whole lot more to say about it except that. I wrote a little more this evening, which is tough to do while standing up on a crowded and bumpy train, but I like where the little bit I got down is headed. It may helps me get closer to where I think the story overall is supposed to be headed.

Then this evening, I watched The House of the Devil, which is an interesting movie. It’s a pitch-perfect homage to ’80s horror and sometimes really genuinely scary. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, it’s a movie that “understands that if there’s anything scarier than haunted house, it’s a possibly haunted house.” I’m not sure it’s a whole lot more than a skillful imitation of movies they don’t make a lot of anymore, but I enjoyed it.

Now I think it’s time for a little blind capping, then maybe the Burn Notice season finale and bed. That’s a halfway decent Friday, no?

The Thursday who was a man

Today was a lot like yesterday, just like yesterday was a lot like the day before. That tends to happen in the middle days of the week, and I suspect tomorrow will be a lot like today, except a little more Fridayish.

This evening, I met my parents at the train station in Hicksville, a couple of towns over, and we went out for dinner at a nice local Indian restaurant. My father had just been to the eye doctor to follow up on the procedure he had last week, which according to the doctor went extremely well. My father’s vision isn’t yet 20/20 in the eye, but he’s made a speedy and almost full recovery, which I think allayed some of the concerns he was having.

I did a little writing on the train, knowing that we might get home late and I might use that as an excuse not to, and I think I may be slowly getting past this stumbling block that’s kept me from moving ahead on this one particular story. (Despite having a pretty clear idea of where it’s headed and what happens next.) I think the trick to overcoming writer’s block is not to believe in writer’s block. On the walk to Penn Station this evening, I listened to Eddie Izzard in conversation with Elvis Mitchell, and Izzard talked about how the only way to overcome panic was simply not let yourself panic. It doesn’t help if you do, so you just have to force yourself not to. Easier said than done, maybe, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to do it.

(It’s a little like Jack says in this clip from the first season of Lost: “Fear’s sort of an odd thing.”)

And I watched the second episode of Saturday Night Live‘s first season, which is almost unrecognizable as Saturday Night Live. It’s a little less over-stuffed than the premiere episode, but mostly because it spends so much of its time being just a live music show. There were a couple of amusing filmed segments, and some surprisingly not-very-funny Muppets, but there weren’t any sketches, unless you count a couple of commercial parodies and “Weekend Update.” It’s like watching alternate universe version of the show, or at least very different than the standard Cliff’s Notes version you get in most SNL retrospectives. I don’t know that I enjoyed the episode, but Art Garfunkel was surprisingly good, so there’s that.

Anyway, that’s about it.

Live from New York

Today was about as close to yesterday as it could get without being a weird repeating loop in the space-time continuum. I spent it mostly reading through a revised chapter on a counseling book we have in development, and also reading through a few of the stories that keep coming for Kaleidotrope ever I since opened the zine back up to submissions in January. It occurs to me, with just the tiniest hint of accompanying panic, that the next issue has to be out next month, in April, and I should probably get some layout work done as soon as possible. I think it’s going to be a really good issue, but I need to bring it all together before that happens. And, because I’m just a little crazy, I’m still thinking about doing three issues this year, the third one coming sometime in July.

This evening, I watched the very first episode of Saturday Night Live (then NBC’s Saturday Night), since I recently purchased — on the cheap, although those prices don’t seem to be offered anymore — the first two seasons on DVD. I’d seen a lot of it, in retrospectives and the like, but I’d never seen the episode in its entirety. It was…interesting, occasionally even amusing. Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse routine is still kind of inspired. But it was more of a weird relic from a time before the show really got a handle of what it would morph into. (Although, after 35 years on the air, it’s safe to say the show has morphed more than a few times.) Intriguing, if only because that first episode is so over-stuffed — George Carlin, two guest comedians, two musical guests (with two songs apiece), the Muppets, and the expected sketch comedy — but not hysterically funny.

And now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for bed.