{"id":3800,"date":"2010-03-04T22:24:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T03:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3800"},"modified":"2010-03-04T22:25:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T03:25:09","slug":"the-thursday-who-was-a-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3800","title":{"rendered":"The Thursday who was a man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/4405630892\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2773\/4405630892_b66f32d233.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">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. <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3778\">he had last week<\/a>, which according to the doctor went extremely well. My father&#8217;s vision isn&#8217;t yet 20\/20 in the eye, but he&#8217;s made a speedy and almost full recovery, which I think allayed some of the concerns he was having.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">I did a little writing on the train, knowing that we might get home late and I might use that as an excuse <em>not<\/em> to, and I think I may be slowly getting past this stumbling block that&#8217;s kept me from moving ahead on this one particular story. (Despite having a pretty clear idea of where it&#8217;s headed and what happens next.) I think the trick to overcoming writer&#8217;s block is not to <em>believe<\/em> in writer&#8217;s block. On the walk to Penn Station this evening, I listened to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kcrw.com\/etc\/programs\/tt\/tt100303eddie_izzard\">Eddie Izzard in conversation with Elvis Mitchell<\/a>, and Izzard talked about how the only way to overcome panic was simply not let yourself panic. It doesn&#8217;t help if you do, so you just have to force yourself <em>not<\/em> to. Easier said than done, maybe, but I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s a better way to do it.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">(It&#8217;s a little like Jack says in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=f_9M7b119FI\">this clip<\/a> from the first season of <em>Lost<\/em>: &#8220;Fear&#8217;s sort of an odd thing.&#8221;)<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">And I watched the second episode of <em>Saturday Night Live<\/em>&#8216;s first season, which is almost unrecognizable as <em>Saturday Night Live<\/em>. It&#8217;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&#8217;t any sketches, unless you count a couple of commercial parodies and &#8220;Weekend Update.&#8221; It&#8217;s like watching alternate universe version of the show, or at least very different than the standard <em>Cliff&#8217;s Notes <\/em>version you get in most <em>SNL <\/em>retrospectives. I don&#8217;t know that I enjoyed the episode, but Art Garfunkel was surprisingly good, so there&#8217;s that.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">Anyway, that&#8217;s about it.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3800\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,17,12],"class_list":["post-3800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-personal","tag-tv","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}