Monday, May 23, 2005

I'm not sure I actually like vacations. We went down to New York and East Hampton so Hunter could see his Dad. We rambled around Chelsea with the incomparable Denis McG, and saw the latest Jasper Johns exhibit at Matthew Marks, which was sort of interesting -- Johns seems to have been messing around with exactly four motifs in the past 15 years, a sagging piece of string, a harlequin pattern, an old photograph, and a weird image with a cartoon dog. Denis wondered how he could get away with writing the same screenplay for fifteen years, and I was tempted to bring up Joe Esterhazs, but that's not really fair, and more to the point I said you can do that in a TV show, well, not for fifteen years, but for seven if you're incredibly lucky. And Anne N flaked out, as actresses will. And then we went out to the country and rooted around in the basement and hung out with more friends. And today we're driving back.

I'm so glad to be back. I much prefer being places to going places, and I think I prefer being at home to being in other people's homes, even my parents'. I don't much like it when I don't get any writing done. The truth is that we did put together a pretty good pitch for a comic drama on the way down, which I have to write up. And after I complained to Lisa that she keeps having good ideas, which tend to squeeze out my own ideas, which come but rarely, we came up with a supernatural drama concept. Which I wrote up on Saturday, but only got into it far enough to run up against the fact that I don't know what happens every episode, i.e. I don't have the show yet, only the concept. So it felt like I didn't get any writing done. Certainly none after Saturday, if you don't count some dinking in the book while we were driving, and some work related emails I fired off yesterday.

I get grumpy when I don't have some time clear to get writing done. Sunday felt like I spent most of the day chasing after the Pikapie when Lisa needed to sleep, packing up stuff from the basement, hanging out with our friends, and cleaning up the place. Somehow it always seems to take several hours to clean up my parents' place after a visit, which makes short visits even shorter.

As usual when I write it up, it sounds all more productive than it felt. And it sounds like a guy who's incapable of enjoying time off from the writing. And that is almost certainly true. If I don't get some writing done on a day, I feel irritable. If more than one day goes by like that, I get very grumpy indeed.

I hope there aren't too many interruptions tomorrow!

And I can't believe I agreed to wait until Friday to see Revenge of the Sith.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow bad head.

8:30 PM

2 Comments:

It sounds like you have about as much fun as I do when it comes to travelling, Alex. It's always such a headache for me, with the packing, the driving/flying, finding a bed to sleep in, unpacking, going to meetings, making phone calls, doing email catch-up. I have time to visit only one museum or tourist trap before I collapse into bed around midnight, then it's more of the same the next day. I really hate it. I won a free trip to Europe last year in a raffle (I was going for the Hummer but got 2nd prize instead) and turned them down flat because I didn't want the hassle.

KJC (who intends to wait until late August to see SW III so she can avoid the crowds)

By  Anonymous, at 2:45 PM  

You wanted the Hummer??? Why???

Granted, global warming wouldn't be entirely bad for those of us who live in Montreal but still...

By  Alex Epstein, at 3:04 PM  

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