La pellicola corta piccola che potrebbe.

Well, yay me. <ESC> was just invited to the SEDICICORTO International Film Festival Forlì, in Italy no less. Funny that Soap Opera wasn't, and it's actually in Italian. (Of course, the English translation is... erm... different than the actual Italian.)

I wonder when I'm going to start feeling like a one-hit wonder? But at least I'm now an INTERNATIONAL one-hit wonder!

Message received?

It's the silence that's killing me; a reply, whether good or ill, would at least be a resolution. It would also let me know whether I've caused great trouble, or (as I suspect) I'm not even a blip on a radar screen. Whatever the case, I can't do anything about it; I've worn out my welcome already, and probably eliminated any small chance of friendship there might have been.

Phonetic danger.

My folks are attempting to sell two homes at once, for reasons I won't go into, but have to do with Precarious Financial Situations. Yesterday morning, a buyer called who had fallen in love with the farmhouse in the country. My stepfather was on a plane, so my mother text-messaged him to let him know, and read the message aloud as she was writing it:

"Australian couple interested, 6 mil, offer in July or August."

My jaw hit the floor. "6 mil?!" I stammered. "I thought you guys were poor because of all this...!"

Mom looked at me blankly, and then said, "6 Mill Road. It's the address!"

Back on the farm.

Well, here I am in Just-Outside-Of-Philadelphia, visiting my mom and stepfather, writing a blog entry on my sister's very annoying Toshiba laptop... why I even had to install Firefox before I could do anything! The horror, the horror! And if I hit "home" one more time when I mean to hit backspace, I'm going to scream. I never truly appreciated the simplicity of my PowerBook's keyboard layout until now.

Although I admit this Compose Mode thing for Blogger is pretty nice (it doesn't exist in Safari, alas).

Had great fun for April Fool's Day. I rented a car to come up here, and even though I had asked for an Economy vehicle, they gave me a free upgrade to a Cadillac (!), so I told everyone that it was my new car. Mom even added the wrinkle that K "had bought it for Zach for his birthday." No one bought it, though. If it had been a Mini Cooper I think we could have had them going.

And in other news, it's still not going away. Maybe it's time to write a song... that's always been good therapy in the past.

I am an April fool.

It's not going away, damn it. It's not going away.

MUST... STOP...

Site Meter strikes again.

Ya know what I hate? People who search for my name (or a portion of it, anyway) but don't tell me why. Come on, tell us who you are! It's not like privacy actually exists in this world or anything.

And another thing!

I got two compliments on Soap Opera today: one from a gentleman who had seen it in Cleveland and requested a DVD copy, and another from someone who saw it on the vodcast and said "Today at school I kept singing, 'Don Ivory, I have come to clean your bathroom!' " It's always nice to hear that sort of thing. And those compliments are for you too, Godfrey, as I'm sure you know.

Did I mention the freshly repainted schools?

Far too often, I blog only when things are going poorly, which leads those people who read my blog and care about me (all three of you) to conclude that my life is a cesspool of shame and depression, rife with missed interventions, pain, and self-pity. Well, believe it or not, even when this is the case, I do have some sense of perspective, and so I thought I'd share some good things that have happened, mostly unrelated to the things that I've complained about over the past few weeks.

• My son, D, who is slightly autistic, is now learning and performing at his grade level for the first time ever, according to his teachers at a recent review of his IEP (individual education plan).
• I was recently elected President of the board of directors for my daughter E's cooperative nursery school, for the 2006-2007 school year. (Of course, this is "good" news--note the scare quotes.)
• I'm also substituting for the nursery school's administrator while she's out sick, so I'll actually earn a real, physical paycheck for the first time in many years.
• I'm going to be a groomsman at a wedding in late April--one of my best friends from college is marrying a wonderful woman (also a good friend of ours, now) whom he met while at graduate school.
• Two short films of mine, <ESC> and Soap Opera, were shown at the Cleveland International Film Festival two weekends ago.
• Noises Off, despite all the, ahem, heartache, was a smashing success, and if you missed it, you should feel bad.
• The vast majority of my family is not in prison.
• I am, despite my best efforts to fuck things up, still married to a gorgeous Swede (excuse me, now I must take a cold shower).

Now what?

It's over!!!!!

And now I can get on with my life, and hurt the people I love in my usual, subtle fashion, instead of the blatant crap I've been pulling lately.

Copycat.

I've decided I'm going to copy Medley and put up a list of "Books Read in 2006." (At least, I think I'm copying her. I mean, I'm sure she's not the first one who thought of it, though that's certainly possible; she's been on the web a long time.) I'm not sure how I'm going to do this, just yet, because I don't want to edit the darn template every time I read something. I'm thinking of tagging an Amazon (or other) link every time I finish a book, and using the tag feed; there must be a way to splice that into the sidebar, right? Suggestions welcome...

Anyway, at the moment it's going to be heavy on Kage Baker's Company novels, which if you haven't read, you really should.

Update: Well, that was easy. Now you can all be jealous of my lit'ry pretentions.

"Why did you grow a beard?" -- They Might Be Giants

For once, I'm ahead of the trend. Of course, I've been telling everyone I'll shave once Noises Off closes, so...

Can YOU make your own decisions?

Heh. (Originally from here.)

Fortran porn?

Input: Reason. Output: Pleasure.

Grated cheese.

Medley writes:

Apart from all that maturity above, though, you've reminded me why I'm glad my spouse doesn't have time to do any community theatre!

Besides making me LOL, that comment reminded me of a conversation long ago in college (with Mike, I think), when we were wondering whether acting was a particularly dangerous thing to do if one is susceptible to crushes. Or, since correlation does not equal causality, perhaps it's acting itself that causes dangerous crushes, hence all the crazy Hollywood marriages one hears about.

Certainly that's the case for me, and it's probably good that I wound up falling for a scientist instead of an actress/musician/etc. (though K is actually an excellent visual artist in her own right), because I doubt any of the crushes I've had would have worked out for more than, say, a month or so if that. And there have been a lot of them, though this one has been one of the worst (otherwise I wouldn't be so broken up about it), second only to one which nearly broke up our marriage (although in truth, there was a LOT more going on than that--this was just before I was diagnosed with clinical depression).

But to return to the topic at hand... is there something about acting that increases the intensity of infatuation? Or if not acting, performance in general? I mean, I get on stage not for the process, certainly not for the audition thrill (?!?!?), but for the applause. And if you have a cast to whom you're close, that applause tends to bind you together--at least for that moment--in a profound way. Does it create something else beyond just the closeness of a cast? I don't know, since I've never acted with anyone with whom there was a mutual attraction. (Not just because I've been with K for essentially all of my adult life; I'm sure my manifest unattractiveness has something to do with it.)

I don't know. My stepfather once joked that I turned 40 when I turned 14, and he might have been right; unfortunately, I managed to turn 14 when I turned 22, and that's pretty much where I've remained in the subsequent 12 years...

(No, the title has no relation to the post. Sue me.)

Update.

The good news is that the crush seems to be dissipating with time. The bad news is, I don't want it to.

At least I was honest with my wife (had been long before the previous blog entry, so it's not like she read it in the newspaper). Telling her helped with the guilt a lot. Of course, I dare not ask how much it hurt her. She says she's OK. Certainly, I was the one wailing and crying, not her, so...

In other news, I'm considering disabling anonymous comments. Come on, at least leave a pseudonym, people!

Spring in the air.

First day of spring, and it's snowing in Washington.

I will conquer this.

And so it continues, every fucking day... the ache in my heart, the images in my head, the inability to see all the good I have going for me, simply because of one thing I cannot have...

It's a fucking mess, and I don't know what to do other than wait it out. And yet, to wait it out seems to be even more painful than anything else, because there is forever the "what might have been?"

My son and daughter smile and laugh, and my wife hugs me... I'm loved right here and now, and yet I want to be away, gone, somewhere, somewhen, and somewho else. All for... what? A fancy? A joke? A flick of hair?

Nothing will come of it; nothing can come of it, for should I try, I'll destroy everyone I hold dear; not to mention I will lose any semblence of respect for myself.

And yet, though next week should be a relief, because the temptation will be gone, I find myself dreading it, because the temptation will be gone. And at this one particular, infinitesimal slice of time, I can't live without it.

Extremism comes to Maryland.

My son's school bus driver is a surly old man who never even acknowledges anyone's existence, despite the numerous times I've said "good morning" to him. (And no, he isn't hard of hearing, because I have had a conversation with him, once.) This morning, he gave me another reason to dislike him: he was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with "Minute Man Project."

For those who don't know the ins and outs of the Minutemen, who are a vigilante group dedicated to "protecting" the U.S. border with Mexico (and who may or may not be the reason the number of border crossing deaths spiked last year), I recommend perusing David Neiwert's blog.

What I find most interesting is the clear connection between the Minutemen and white power/white supremacist groups... and that D's bus driver is African-American.

Update: Right after I wrote this, I caught up with some leftover Washington Post vodcasts that I had downloaded a few weeks ago, including this one, an excellent overview of the new Minutemen chapter in Maryland, as well as the whole "day laborer" issue. Well worth a look.