Monday Monday
Sep. 10th, 2012 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustMan, I'm tired. It's a physical lassitude concentrated right behind my eye-sockets, pressing into my sinuses. I feel as though I could crawl back into bed at any given point, sleep heavily and then wake up feeling exactly the same. And yes, I did drink on Saturday--we ordered a couple of pitchers of lime Margaritas at the Rancho Relaxo dinner after the Bakka book-launch for Madeleine Ashby's Vn--but it seems more than a little weird to feel this way two whole days later, especially when I didn't even end up having a hangover. Ugh, aging body follies.
Anyhow...I just spent a couple of hours writing this very long pitch memo consolidating several potential future projects. The best part about it was realizing I actually knew exactly what the full arcs of both the novels I'd never pitched before were going to be, something I really only discovered as I was putting those paragraphs together. Experimental Film: A Novel's pitch looks pretty coy by comparison, but I think it's just a more mysterious narrative, in general. I kind of like the idea of having to discover how its components fit together as I go along.
The weekend was good, meanwhile. I've gotten into this pattern where I conk out earlier and earlier in the evening (last night I felt like I wanted to go to sleep around 11:00 PM, but made myself stay up and get everything ready for Cal this morning, which gave me a second wind and knocked me out around 1:00 AM instead), which maybe explains how I've found myself waking up at 7:00 AM every morning, often before the alarm, no matter when it's set for. So I manage to get a bit more done, and feel like I'm being a bit more efficient in terms of time/Cal-management. Steve, OTOH, seems constantly tired as shit, as though he really isn't getting much out of anything. I think he needs some time out on his own with other people, in much the same way I increasingly seem to need to spend some time doing yoga almost every day.
Otherwise--we saw this brilliantly entertaining Hong Kong movie on Friday, on a total whim: The Bullet Vanishes, with Nicholas Tse and Lau Ching-wan, which plays a bit like a cross between Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and L.A. Confidential, except set in Shanghai during the Warlord Era. And Cal's been very communicative, in his own way--ie, he's come up with some pretty crazy amended echolalia which then needed to be re-phrased for him, but he's also made some interesting strides forward in terms of answering direct questions.
On Friday, for example, we went into a store where, instead of saying: "Water!" or "I want water, please, Mommy", he turned to me and said: "[Fake laugh] Yeah! The water is safe, it's okay!" I just looked at him. "What is that supposed to mean?" I asked, and he immediately replied: "I want to buy some cold water to drink please, Mommy." To which I said: "Wow, that's great asking! So much more effective in terms of getting what you want than just spouting some random piece of echolalia with 'water' thrown in, as opposed to using the words 'buy', 'please' or 'Mommy'." This is the sort of thing Mom tells me not to do ("Too many words!"), but damn, it really seems to have worked, because we're got a hell of a lot more of him actually rephrasing stuff himself when called directly on it since then. Fingers crossed.
Sunday morning, meanwhile, I saw him playing with a puppet in front of a mirror--like, actually making it talk. "Hello, everybody, this is T-Rex. Hello, T-Rex. [Moves T-Rex's mouth, puts on dinosaur voice] 'Hello!'" So I talked to T-Rex and Cal made him talk back, then said: "Hello, Mommy! Where's that music coming from?" I said: "Does that mean you want music? Maybe it's coming from the CD player." So he went over and used T-Rex's tiny little hand to turn on the CD player, then danced in front of the TV screen, making T-Rex "sing along" with the first song.
Does this bode well for the second part of his psychological evaluation, which is on Thursday? Or his first Stagecoach class, on Saturday morning? Or his Wednesday music lesson? Hard to tell. But...yeah, it seems different. I like it.
Tomorrow, OTOH, I'm going to try out for the same choir my Mom's been singing in, Echo Women's. The somewhat hilarious thing about this is that when she got me to apply, she was still there--she's since moved on to another choir for this "session", which leaves me in a position I truly hate, ie having to do something I've never done before while surrounded by people I don't know. But I guess it might be good for me; that's the assumption. Vegetables, and shit.
Okay, back to it...
Anyhow...I just spent a couple of hours writing this very long pitch memo consolidating several potential future projects. The best part about it was realizing I actually knew exactly what the full arcs of both the novels I'd never pitched before were going to be, something I really only discovered as I was putting those paragraphs together. Experimental Film: A Novel's pitch looks pretty coy by comparison, but I think it's just a more mysterious narrative, in general. I kind of like the idea of having to discover how its components fit together as I go along.
The weekend was good, meanwhile. I've gotten into this pattern where I conk out earlier and earlier in the evening (last night I felt like I wanted to go to sleep around 11:00 PM, but made myself stay up and get everything ready for Cal this morning, which gave me a second wind and knocked me out around 1:00 AM instead), which maybe explains how I've found myself waking up at 7:00 AM every morning, often before the alarm, no matter when it's set for. So I manage to get a bit more done, and feel like I'm being a bit more efficient in terms of time/Cal-management. Steve, OTOH, seems constantly tired as shit, as though he really isn't getting much out of anything. I think he needs some time out on his own with other people, in much the same way I increasingly seem to need to spend some time doing yoga almost every day.
Otherwise--we saw this brilliantly entertaining Hong Kong movie on Friday, on a total whim: The Bullet Vanishes, with Nicholas Tse and Lau Ching-wan, which plays a bit like a cross between Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and L.A. Confidential, except set in Shanghai during the Warlord Era. And Cal's been very communicative, in his own way--ie, he's come up with some pretty crazy amended echolalia which then needed to be re-phrased for him, but he's also made some interesting strides forward in terms of answering direct questions.
On Friday, for example, we went into a store where, instead of saying: "Water!" or "I want water, please, Mommy", he turned to me and said: "[Fake laugh] Yeah! The water is safe, it's okay!" I just looked at him. "What is that supposed to mean?" I asked, and he immediately replied: "I want to buy some cold water to drink please, Mommy." To which I said: "Wow, that's great asking! So much more effective in terms of getting what you want than just spouting some random piece of echolalia with 'water' thrown in, as opposed to using the words 'buy', 'please' or 'Mommy'." This is the sort of thing Mom tells me not to do ("Too many words!"), but damn, it really seems to have worked, because we're got a hell of a lot more of him actually rephrasing stuff himself when called directly on it since then. Fingers crossed.
Sunday morning, meanwhile, I saw him playing with a puppet in front of a mirror--like, actually making it talk. "Hello, everybody, this is T-Rex. Hello, T-Rex. [Moves T-Rex's mouth, puts on dinosaur voice] 'Hello!'" So I talked to T-Rex and Cal made him talk back, then said: "Hello, Mommy! Where's that music coming from?" I said: "Does that mean you want music? Maybe it's coming from the CD player." So he went over and used T-Rex's tiny little hand to turn on the CD player, then danced in front of the TV screen, making T-Rex "sing along" with the first song.
Does this bode well for the second part of his psychological evaluation, which is on Thursday? Or his first Stagecoach class, on Saturday morning? Or his Wednesday music lesson? Hard to tell. But...yeah, it seems different. I like it.
Tomorrow, OTOH, I'm going to try out for the same choir my Mom's been singing in, Echo Women's. The somewhat hilarious thing about this is that when she got me to apply, she was still there--she's since moved on to another choir for this "session", which leaves me in a position I truly hate, ie having to do something I've never done before while surrounded by people I don't know. But I guess it might be good for me; that's the assumption. Vegetables, and shit.
Okay, back to it...
