Don't just stand there...

I had a huge realization the other day.







Huge.

Okay, so I'm a writer, right?

Right.

I Write.

Typically, when I send a screenplay out to producers after months or years of toiling on it, there are people who become interested in it. That's nice, right?

Absolutely.

But here's the problem. It's like I'm walking down the street writing, having a nice life. then I send the thing out and after a while people stop and stare at what I wrote. I turn around and see people stopping and staring at my work. so, I stop. I stare....at the people stopping and staring.







The thing is: I stop and everything stops with me. Then I get anxious. And sometimes depressed. I get confused about what life is about. And I wonder why everything goes so slow and dear god will anything ever 'happen' with my work.









i become an unhappy kitty.









Here's where it gets good. The big AHA?

It's not my job to stop and stare at the stoppers and stare-ers. I just gotta keep doing what I do. Turns out if i just put my virtual pen to paper and start writing ANYTHING...



i'm happy as a clam. if clams are happy.

And I'm thinking they are.

Vertigo

There are a lot of rules in our culture and generally I follow them, but I’m not immune to how unbelievably stupid most of them are.

I’d like to know for instance, what genius decided that mustaches on girls are a bad thing?










And all the things we do to behave, be proper - I wonder if Miss Manners really existed or if, like Santa Claus and Yom Kippur, she was created just to keep us in line.

At this point in my life, I'm sure of only one truth...being a person is a funny thing.

So many rules exist telling you how you're supposed to look, how you're supposed to live and how you're supposed to react to your own experiences.These arbitrary rules reign supreme. But rules can be tricky.

Case in point: I've heard that when you jump out of an airplane for the first time, you experience vertigo.








You can even black out, because your brain has no frame of reference with which to understand the situation it's in. I've got this story stuck in my head; I saw it on the news - or maybe I read it in the paper. It was about a man who took sky diving lessons. The day came for his first jump. He leapt from the plane.

The news report claimed his body made a four-foot deep hole in the cement where he landed. So what happened? He took lessons. He learned the rules - how and when to leap, when to reach for the parachute rip cord on his flight suit. He was drilled and drilled until he was ready. So what happened? He jumped just like he was supposed to. He reached for the rip cord like he was supposed to.

But it wasn't there.

No one taught him what to do if the rip cord wasn't there.

He panicked. Panic, one of the unacceptable human responses, was not part of the lesson plan. The report said the guy scratched a huge hole in the fabric of his flight suit where that rip cord was supposed to be.

Apparently his brain went into overdrive and because of this brain freak called vertigo - He was grabbing and scratching for the rip cord on the wrong side of the suit.

The wrong side.

Some days are like that, you know?