Udpates all around.

Thanksgiving: Successful.
Prepared food. Cut thumb. Ate. Socialized. Made people laugh.

Los Angeles: Weirdly hazy for the last few days. I'm not yet sure what's normal around here (nothing) but the fog in the evening seems really odd, since it's not actually that cold out. The evening fog is dense enough that it collects on the face shield of my helmet and makes operating the motorcycle kind of difficult. I drive anyway. But calm down; I'm sure it will be fine.

Still not sure if I am going to go to Ohio for Christmas this year. I mean, in terms of raw numbers, I can probably afford the plane ticket, and I can afford to miss some work, but it's really difficult to justify paying 600 dollars for a few days' worth of Ohio hangouts. I may end up skipping the busy season again this year in favor of going for my mom's birthday at the end of January. That may end up being our new family tradition.

Lately I've been feeling guilty about not taking advantage of everything that LA has to offer in terms of arts and culture, so I'm going to make a serious attempt to embrace more of it. Last night I went to this event at the CalArts theater and thoroughly enjoyed it. I do get a little frustrated at events with Q & A sessions, for two reasons:

1. I usually have questions, but I never ask them because they are always technical in nature and I'm sure they and the answers they drew would bore most attending audience members, since I would allow myself to get really mired in the technical details of any approach toward making real art from audio/visual media.

2. I absolutely hate 90% of questions I have ever heard at these events, whether it's at a straightforward film screening with David Lynch, or this avant-garde presentation with the artist last night. It just seems like most people who are willing to pipe up and ask a question (in front of a couple hundred people) crave the attention, and thus load up the interrogative with a dense exposition that attempts to clearly demostrate their full mastery of the weight and symbolism of the event at hand. AKA you're a second-year film school student who loves the sound of his/her own voice. Please stop.

In brief, I would love Q&A sessions if the Q's were different. And shorter than the A's.

We had that little weight loss competition and I won. It was nothing monumental, but I dropped about 10 pounds and 1.5% body fat. In the interest of continuing with that momentum, I am going to take the $250 I won and use it to join a boxing gym, to further the quest to get back down to a reasonable weight.

Let's see, what else? Oh. I'm writing this now while I'm waiting for Survivor to show up. It's extremely late, but we have to finish it by the end of this week, so I have to start on it as soon as it arrives at 9pm. At the moment I am considering going straight from work (I'll leave at 6am) to my bootcamp class. I wonder if running a few miles and doing pushups after staying up all night working would make me pass out, right in the middle of lunges or squats or something.

Also, if anyone knows any (well-grounded) musicians in LA, please send them my way. This whole not-making-music thing is bullshit.