Echo

I’ve always said that I don’t really believe in predictive astrology (or astrology that predicts events) versus psychological astrology, which I think is a powerful tool for self-awareness and therapy, but then I read certain things and they blow me away.

I was in the shower this morning and I suddenly remember reading a previous monthly horoscope from Astrology Zone which provides very well-researched and detailed monthly horoscopes. I remember it had said something about unexpected tension at home. Seeing as things were completely fine with my dad and completely blew up last month, I looked up last month’s horoscope. I’ve already posted that other one I found that was uncanny. This one was crazy, too.

Despite the lovely tone to this month, the full moon on February 24 may cause tensions to arise at home. This full moon will fall in Virgo in your home and family sector, in opposition to Uranus. Virgo is not an easy placement for you.

The problem is, Uranus will send a direct challenge to this full moon. Whatever comes up will be something completely unexpected. Try to keep your schedule light around this time, for you won’t want to be distracted with too much office work. If your actual physical home is not the problem, it will have something to do with a family member, roommate, or someone connected to your home, such as a landlord, decorator, contractor, or broker. If you have any situation brewing at the start of the month, try to get a handle on things before the full moon’s complicated dynamics come into play.

Full moons either bring a finish to an endeavor (in this case, such as a move or renovation) or bring feelings to the surface (for you this month, in your relationship with your Dad or another person connected to home or family).

That timing was that week after I came back from being up north when my dad went out of his way to ignore me and I realized how much shit I was carrying from growing up with him that wasn’t even mine.

I think astrology gets a bad rap from those stupid unresearched blurbs in newspapers and magazines. Most of it is just analysis of patterns based on thousands of years of data and observations.

I Found It!

The thing that drove me nuts in Switzerland because I had fallen asleep and left the TV on, and every 10 minutes, this came on (open the file for “The Annoying Thing.” I believe it was an ad for ringtones). It was driving me crazy, yet I was too lazy to get up and turn off the TV. I must have heard it a good 18-20 times.

Oops…

Update

I met with the potential producer and the line producer yesterday. The producer and I were talking about trust and responsibility and I was saying how I need someone I can trust is taking care of the things he’s supposed to take care of so I can concentrate on the things I need to focus on, and how I see everything from the perspective of teamwork, and he was telling me how he’s very trustworthy–he once sailed a boat to the arctic and in that situation, you learn that you have to recognize that every person’s actions affect everyone else, sometimes in life or death situations in the face of a hurricane or things, and that that was a situation where he understood the value of being trustworthy and responsible. And I’m like, dude, you sailed a boat to the arctic? I…played sports. The earliest he’s available is August because he’s about to be greenlit for a feature shooting in June, but I’d like to work with him so I might wait until August for the short. It’ll give me more time to raise funds and prepare, anyway.

Working with the Actors– Gameplan

I’m so excited about working with actors. This is my favorite part, the melding of psychology and creation. I’m very method and like actors with that background. The way I want to work with the two leads who have a very strained marriage with passive-aggressive resentment (the man cheated on the wife), is to put them through a simulated therapy, with me as the therapist. When I work with actors, they need to be able to be so immersed in their characters, any question I ask them about themselves, they will be able to instinctively answer and know it jives with the truth. What was your biggest fear as a child? What is your darkest secret? How do you feel about where you are in your life at this very moment? Is it where you thought you would be when you looked towards the future when you were younger? What do you like for breakfast? What is a trait about your best friend/wife that you secretly find utterly irritating? What kind of people are you secretly prejudiced against? etc. And then once they get comfortable answering these questions (more so with the act of answering and knowing that what they said was true than the actual answers themselves), then I tweak it by asking them questions that imply certain things that they have to adapt to, implying events, like, “How did you feel when your husband told you he’d cheated on you?” etc. This plants certain things in their characters psyche, which affects their psychological outcome and performance.

I want to work with them separately, fine tune their own characters without the other knowing what exactly has been created, build up their positions, discuss their marriage and their resentment of the relationship and their partner from their own subjective perspectives, really delve into that resentment. Then put the two together. I don’t want each person to know what the other has said about him or her. But because it’s been talked about, it’ll color their interaction. It’s like, each person knows the other talked shit about him. But they don’t know exactly what, creating an underlying tension and resentment. Furthermore, I plan to keep them fairly separated throughout the preproduction process and during production. During the “therapy” stage, I’ll schedule one after the other with a slight overlap, keeping the other waiting in another room so each person is well aware that the other is talking about them. I also plan to have an exercise where they sit together in an empty room facing each other, but aren’t allowed to say a single word to each other. I’ll do this the first day, make them as uncomfortable around each other as possible. Since this couple is passive aggressive, by the actual actor not knowing exactly what the other resents him or her for or where the other is coming from, it should create a genuinely passive-aggressive and tense interaction to work with, which is what I need to carry this film. And then we can all go out for beers when this is done.

I’m so freakin’ excited.

Rejection

I watched Remember the Titans for the first time tonight. What an awesome, uplifting movie! I’m partial to sports movies anyway, but not since Monster’s Ball have a cried like that while watching a movie. It’s such an inspirational story, with amazing characters. The fact that it’s based on a true story just makes it.

Afterwards, I was watching the DVD features and they talk with the screenwriter. He tells a story about how, after writing the script, his agent said, “If this doesn’t sell, we’re in the wrong business,” and then they go out with it, and it tanks. It was turned down by every studio, even multiple times by some, and everywhere they went, they only got a “No.” The screenwriter talks about how he was trying to drum up the courage to tell the guys that the movie was based on that no one in Hollywood was interested in making their story, when Bruckheimer called and asked to see it, and it all went from there. They get a sound byte from Bruck saying how sometimes, you just need one person to believe in a project to get it rolling.

What an amazing story. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know that in itself, the events are wonderful and tragic and uplifting. But to hear that such a great tale was rejected over and over by the powers that be in Hollywood, is a reminder that as a writer (or director or actor or whatever you are), you can’t let that stuff get you down. You can’t take the No as a reflection of your work. You just have to believe in it, and sometimes, things that seem dead in the water are given new life when the timing is right. You just have to keep the faith.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the movie, watch it.

Why Brian is a dialogue-machine:

(on his co-worker being in Amsterdam):

“He’s probably smoking some hash right now while watching some skank juice oranges with her cooter.”

Last Night’s Dream

I was in my high school, which was actually this large, multi-level building like a large mall rather than the flat shitspread that it actually is. There had been a serial killer loose there for a while, and I was the criminal-behavioral psychologist who had been profiling him. I had recently made public statements that the killer was a latent homosexual and most likely impotent, trying to rile him up and push him into making a mistake.

I was hanging around the school, hoping to catch him lurking when I saw some people suddenly screaming and running. Knowing it was him and that he had been pushed into a killing spree in broad daylight, I tried to sneak into the area to try to catch a glimpse of him. Unfortunately, he saw me and started chasing me. We ran through the halls and up stairs and he was one level behind me. I knew that if I slowed down even a little bit, he’d catch me. He was a tall, lean guy in his 30’s, very wiry and fast (looked like that dude from Scissor Sisters but not flaming). So we’re running and I’m on the verge of getting away by faking him out and going down another staircase rather than up and creating distance between us, when for reasons I had no idea, I decided to stop running, even as my brain screamed, what the fuck are you doing?!?

I stopped and turned around abruptly. He came running around the corner and stopped, looking kind of confused but nevertheless, thrilled with his good luck. He approached me menacingly.

I said to him, “I know you’ve been watching me and the things I’ve said about you in the press. We’ve been playing a little cat and mouse game, haven’t we? But let’s be honest–you didn’t come here to kill me. You came here to fuck me.”

And sure enough, there was that sexual tension sitting between us that was now out in the open and on the table and boom…he rips off his shirt and that man was ripped.

So we’re back at my parents house, in my room, having sex, but rather than this being a sex dream, I’m in my head thinking…the impotence was a profiler bluff but the homosexuality was something I believed to be a part of his profile. And here I was having unprotected sex with him. So I asked him if he’d had unprotected sex with men and he said he’d been with two men. I asked him if he’d been tested and he said no. And I flipped out that I was at risk.

Dawn was breaking and I knew I had to get him out of my house before my parents woke up so I walked him out, but when I came back in, I saw my mom wandering the hall in her pajamas. I could tell she was looking for me because she had probably looked into my room to check on me as a mom thing that she does and had seen that I wasn’t in my bed. I was also worried that she had noticed, um…stains on the sheets or something and would know what I had been up to.

I Own It!

I have been hesitant to post about this since originally talking about it because I didn’t want to jinx anything…but it finally came in the mail today and it’s official: I now own the rights to the story, “A Good Head for Murder” by Charles Runyon. The signed agreement from his agent just came in the mail today!

The next step is filming it. There’s a Michigan film competition in June that I want to try to get in for. Prize is $2,000 worth of Fuji film which would help me out with the feature I’m trying to put together at the end of this year, but who knows…maybe the thing is rigged anyway since they all know each other in the U-M coalition. I’m meeting with a producer tomorrow to talk about these projects and he seems really cool–a down-to-earth Australian. I’ve got a line producer who’s going to break it down soon so hopefully, we can shoot in the next month and I can have it done by June. I’m psyched!

In case you’re wondering, the story isn’t about a blowjob gone wrong. It’s about a woman and man in a strained marriage, who are driving down a dark, desolate rural road in Mexico when they start seeing what may or may not be severed body parts lying on the road. It’s a pretty freakin’ cool story.

Stay tuned!

3/18/04 Crime Notes

Palo Alto, CA– A cellphone was stolen from a student’s backpack at a local Palo Alto School. Student Michael Shih returned from lunch to find his Nokia cellphone missing from his bag; the theft was immediately reported. An extensive search enlisted the help of school staff but turned up no results. Later in the day, the owner of the phone called his own cellphone repeatedly in an attempt to pin down the identity of the thief, but calls were answered by an irritated woman who angrily asked the young man to stop calling her. The young man’s sister has put in for a gang hit on this woman, and is asking that anyone with information on her identity, to report it through the underground.

He. Tried. To. Hug. Me.

(i shouldn’t even need to say who)

Whatever happened to Mighty Mouse? I’d like to see a live action version starring David Faustino titled, “30 Years and 30 Trips to Rehab Later.”

I’m sitting here putting my 2004 financial picture in order because I’m heading over to H&R tomorrow, and I’m reminded how much I love this stuff, handling money. But I’m also reminded of how piss poor my organization is, since I always wait until the week that I’m supposed to go in to prepare taxes to actually go through my bank statements, checkbook and credit card bills to organize everything and inevitably, nothing ever balances because I have no idea what all these vague purchases and deposits were. And all I can hear in my head is my dad saying, “You’re going to get audited.”

And then I’m reminded that this Saturday is my rich uncle’s 60th birthday, and my entire extended family will be here (all ninety of us), including my father. And how it’s been about a month since I last spoke to him, and how he will probably be ignoring me, with my cousins coming up to me asking me why I can’t be a more filial daughter since my poor old man looks so lonely getting drunk all by himself in the corner and harassing my baby cousins, as he’s known to do at large family gatherings. And it makes me tear up, amid my sea of bank statements and receipts, because it’s sad. But what has being compassionate ever gotten me with him? How far has digging deeper to find that lifeblood well of love gotten me with him?

I hung out with Urethra, her boyfriend and her visiting father a few weeks ago. We went to the House of Blues Gospel breakfast that featured an all-you-can-eat Southern brunch followed by live gospel music that put us all in not only a great mood, but gave us a need to dance in a way only Steve Martin from The Jerk could understand. The walk to House of Blues was about a mile each way, which we figured was to our benefit considering, again, it was an all-you-can-eat Southern brunch and Asians are the foremost experts in how to most efficiently (and gluttonously) attack a buffet. Walking there, I spent some time talking to Urethra’s dad, who was a pleasant fellow and an easy conversationalist with plenty to say about basketball, television and anything random this Gemini could switch subjects to. I concluded, Urethra has a nice dad. And I realized, even though it’s always been quite obvious, I do not have a nice dad.

It wasn’t until recently that I thought about, if my dad weren’t my dad, what would I think of him? This is a question I have never really wanted to delve into with the needed objective perspective, as I didn’t want to ruin the inherent love and need a daughter has for a father and frankly, I’m afraid of him. It’s one of those deep-seated fears cultivated in childhood that even adult perspective, distance and intelligence can’t quite shake. This one is rooted within the emotional muck deep inside a person that no logic or intellectualizing can quite force into more appropriate decorum. It belongs to that vulnerable little kid who exists within each and every one of us.

Last month, the therapist I went to see said, you can sit here and intellectualize and analyze and make a laundry list of grievances, but at the end of the day, you need to come to terms with that fact that plain and simple, you had a shitty father. I’m not saying he’s a bad person, but he was a father who was too busy putting his own issues on other people and taking care of himself to take care of you, and you got gyped. And plain and simple, that really…sucks. So once you’ve recognized and grieved for that loss, you pick yourself up and do all the things you ever wanted to do because now…you’re free. Because your life, your choices, are still in your hands.

And it all was too simple, but it finally seemed like something be done (overcome), probably because I’m finally in the right place to take this whole thing on.

My brother just happened to call right now, interrupting the post, and I was sitting here all stuffed up. I talked to my mom and told her I’m not going to the party on Saturday. I decided that while writing this post. Choices are just that easy and obligation ain’t worth shit. Obligation is an invisible force that doesn’t even exist, and being a slave to it at 26 is tantamount to being afraid of the dark or afraid of boogiemen under my bed. It’s laughable. I told my mom that I’m so sick of my dad’s act every time we’re around his family, of him appearing so tortured because he has a family that just torments him with their lack of love for him, or the flipside, of him being the generous, gregarious uncle that everyone just loves, who’s willing to big-brother everyone, willing to flash a hundred-dollar bill and buy cigars or expensive whine or an entire banquet meal, acting like he’s finally found people he likes because my mom, my brother and I are such a shithead, disappointing family. After 26 years? Yeah, eat it.

When I was young, I would often wish my father would die, or mentally prepare for his death, telling myself it that at the end of the day, it would be for the best. I would always feel horrifically guilty about it, and I thought maybe this was a product of how he would always tell me that he had a heart condition or that we were causing him life-threatening stress, but usually, I thought I was a malicious little shit who had the capacity to wish people dead. And I felt guilty about it my entire life, how someone supposedly so nice and kind could think life would be better off without her father.

I reread that IM between my mom and I last night and that part where she says getting conditional love is worse than no love because at least with no love, you don’t expect it, and it made me think about having a father–how having a father who was emotionally absent most times, often volatile and habitually emotionally and physically abusive is so much harder because you still have hope that one day, things will turn around and the love will come pouring forth; but if your father died, you would know that you no longer have a father, so you would mourn and move on. In hindsight, I don’t think I wanted him dead, specifically. I think I wanted the not knowing to end; I think I wanted to be able to move on in my life, instead of always being stuck in one place, being stuck in the same precarious emotional state, of wondering if–I change, things change, he changes–suddenly things will open up and I’ll have a paternal figure who loves and appreciates me. I was tired of the stress of thinking that I was the root of a slow miserable decline towards death anyway, because no one in my house seemed happy (trick mindfuck. We all die anyway). Dead father= no father. Easy to face. Live father who doesn’t know how to love you = maybe something will open up tomorrow. And then you start to hate the part of you that holds on to hope, the part of you that’s so STUPID and UGLY for believing in love and kindness, for clinging to despicable vulnerability.

Fuck that. Baggage whores are pussies.

If you can get away from the things on the outside, the things in your past, the people and things that claw out your faith in yourself, your purity of heart and your belief in the great love that connects everything in our universe, you give yourself the chance to be something special and powerful in this great big world.

So why not try?

Creative Differences

Sandra Oh and Alexander Payne are getting divorced. Amicably. Some words of advice to Alexander:

New pussy can’t cook!

*****
Speaking of Sandra, here’s my favorite performance of hers. It’s from Six Feet Under, Season 1, when she plays a “Porn Starlet” giving a eulogy at a dead porn star’s funeral:

Porn Starlet (Sandra):

When I first met Viveca, I met her on “Deep Diving.”

[Everyone claps]

Thank you. And I had never gone down on a girl before, so, naturally, I was nervous, but Viveca was so warm and relaxed about it. She really put me at ease. Well, her and the two Zanex she gave me. (laughs) And when I first had to do a double penetration, I was like a total wreck. But Viveca came through like, you know, like such the pro she is…I mean was. (She starts to cry.)

I’m watching Smallville Season 1 right now, and the thing I don’t like about the show, is how obnoxious the writers are about “Hey! We went to college!” Like the characters may as well be winking at the audience after they deliver their lines, so tickled are they over their own cleverness. For example, in the episode I watched last night, Lex gave Clark a fencing foil as a parting gift and said, “Every hero needs a foil.” Get it? The literary foil gives the “foil” to the literary hero? I groaned and hid my face in a pillow, wishing I was watching “A Simple Life” right now. At least Paris and Nicole always say what they mean, and there is never, ever, EVER any cleverness involved.

*****
Girl Scout Thin Mints are the best cookies ever made.

*****
No wait, these chocolate chip cookies with chewy fudge centers that this hotel once left in our room were the best cookies ever made. But Girl Scout Thin Mints always make punching an 11 year-old girl in the braces worthwhile.

I made a shirt.

Confession

My new coworker has a twin brother. He showed me a picture of the two of them standing side by side along with some family members and said, sarcastically, “I bet you can’t figure out who’s who.” So I’m looking at it and I’m really thinking, I have no idea which one is him and which one is his brother, since he has dreads now and in this picture, both of them are clean-shaven. So I’m about to laugh and say, “I have no idea” but he says, “It’s so obvious, isn’t it?” So I’m thinking, “Shit.” It’s obvious but obviously, I’m dumb.

I take a random guess and point at the taller one and say, “That’s you, right?”

He says, “Who?”

I say, “That one,” continuing to point at the tall one.

He says, “Who?”

And I continue pointing to the same person, but now I’m getting nervous.

Then, for some reason (luckily!), his angle must have been weird because he thought I was pointing to the girl in the photo. So he rips it out of my hand and says, “The girl? Very funny.”

I found out later, I was pointing at the wrong guy.

Did I Ever Tell You the One About the Writer…

First of all, sorry for the length of time between posts. My computer has been debilitated by a virus. 59 pop-up ads in under 3 minutes! Nasty.

So I had this dream the other night where somehow, I misdialed on my cellphone and instead of whomever I was trying to reach, I accidentally called Kate, our resident Hot Librarian. So rather than saying, “Hey Kate, this is Julia, I’m sorry but I misdialed,” I tried to disguise my voice and just said, “Sorry wrong number” before promptly hanging up. Then I spent the rest of the dream worrying if she recognized my voice.

When I woke up, this reminded me of a similar incident from my waking past.

In college, I wrote film, TV and book reviews for the school paper. One of the books I reviewed really spoke to me so on a whim, I decided to write the author a fan letter, telling him how much I appreciated the book and included a clipping of the four-star review. A few months later, to my surprise, the author wrote back and was equally excited, as apparently, I was his first ever fan letter. Thus began a steady correspondence as he found out that I, too, was a writer, and I found out that he lived in Berkeley which is 30 minutes away from my hometown. That summer, we arranged to meet face to face at a coffee shop in Berkeley. I was 19 and he was 39. I was painfully shy but I think he was excited to meet a fan, so we talked about writing and literature and life itself. We kept in touch and we met up again the next summer. I brought him my writing portfolio of short stories I had written over the last year at school. We chatted again, like old friends, and we talked a bit about our personal lives. Of course, being 20 and a bit of a social recluse, I didn’t have much to say. I can’t remember how personal his stories were but to be honest, nothing really fazes me. That night, I went home and tried to dial a friend of mine to see if he wanted to hang out. But instead, I dialed this writer’s number. He picked up and I realized what I had done, but instead of identifying myself and telling him that I had misdialed, I just hung up.

Well, he *69’d me and called back. I picked up and hung up. He did it again so this time, I picked it up and I was like, “Hey, what’s up?” He asked me why I called and I said, “I didn’t call.” He said, “Yes, you did. I star-69’d you.” And I just said, “Oh.” So instead, he started talking about liking my writing so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Did I act like a retard? Yes. Do I have any idea why I acted like a retard? No. The actions of Ms. Julia often make no sense within the realms of this universe.

I always felt awkward about that episode and we lost touch for a while, until a few years ago, after I had been firmly entrenched in Los Angeles, I got an email from him. He explained that he happened to be googling women whom he’d wanted to sleep with but didn’t get the chance to, and found some sites with my movie on it. So he wanted to say hi. I wrote back that I was happy to hear from him and asked him what he’d been up to.

Until a few days later, it hit me. Wait a minute…he had wanted to sleep with me?

I was the most clueless, innocent, naive kid, just meeting an author she liked, hoping to gain a mentor. It totally went over my head that he might have ulterior motives.

So the moral of my story is:

If you misdial someone you know, just identify yourself and say that you misdialed because chances are, they have Caller ID. And moms and dads–don’t let your kids write fan letters to figures who are twice their age.

3/8 Recap

The highlight of my day was hearing from my good friend Rie out in Michigan. I hope things work out for her. Otherwise, I had to deal with a particular…”sour” personality at work who’s like a little nipping lap dog but with a much more malicious personality. I can think of a very warm place that this person could go.

I met with a guy named Joey, a restaurant consultant, to talk about the ice cream place. He’s a friend of my coworker’s, a chef who’s also opened a bunch of restaurants around the country. My coworker said we’d hit it off because I was looking for someone trustworthy, responsible and very serious, and…he likes Asian girls. Regardless, he seemed to know his stuff and so I’m waiting for him to come back with a proposal. Let’s hope the estimate for this thing is under $100K. Because…you know…I don’t have that kind of money. Damn the high cost of real estate in Los Angeles.

I came home, banged out a 12-page screenplay for a horror short, based on a short story by Charles W. Runyon, a story I randomly found in an old collection that I bought for 50 cents at Goodwill. Perhaps if I shoot this short, then I can find financing for my feature horror. What surprised me most today was that I wrote the whole thing in under 3 hours, including a half hour break talking on the phone, and then another half hour worrying about my uneasiness in regards to the idea of relationships. What surprised me least was that I wasted time that could have been used creatively on worrying about my uneasiness in regards to the idea of relationships.

I told someone once that when I get married, I want to live next door to my husband. Like, we have separate apartments, and we probably end up sleeping in the same bed most of the time, but we still have our own space and a place to go to be alone if we need it. He thought it was weird. I thought it made sense.

1. I’m in negotiations for a promotion, which includes long term commitment to my company and more responsibilities.
2. I want to start an ice cream concept with a 3-tier development plan ranging 5-10 years.
3. I want to shoot a movie.
4. I want to be in a relationship.

I’ve realistically put all of these things into motion. How am I going to find time to balance everything? I’m scared something bad is going to happen. It just seems like too much. But I’ve always been a workaholic. But out of the four, I know which one I’m usually willing to drop first. Men hate me. Sometimes I don’t blame them.

And how are YOU guys???? I hope you’re all having a great week! And that somewhere out there, you guys are smiling, if not outwardly, then in the warm, fuzzy place that counts. No, not there. Get your minds out of the gutter.

United Colors of Benetton Celebrate Failure

Last night Reggie, Kate and Cody (not pictured) came out to support Peyote in the weekly turtle races at Brennan’s in Marina Del Rey. I am chagrined to announce that my turtle FAILED me. Yes, I know I promised him ice cream whether or not he won his heat, and yes, he was racing a size-class up against turtles twice his size who were crawling all over him at the beginning of the heat, scaring the hell out of him. But honestly, for him to be the only turtle who didn’t even come out of his shell for the entire race? Shameful. My camera only had enough juice to take this one picture because I only charged it for 10 minutes before leaving the house. Hopefully, Kate, our resident hot librarian, will email me the picture of Peyote sitting at the starting line so I can share the failings of my spawn.

Peyote at Home

Shame, Peyote. Shame on you.