I'm starting to feel compelled to do this ...

-Last day at the sushi bar was today. A bunch of my friends came in to eat lunch and wish me well, which was very nice of them. I was even able to sit down for a couple of minutes and hang out in their booth because my replacement, who I have been training this week, was covering me at the time. Some of our regular customers made a point to wish me well before they left, and my buddy Bang nearly refused to say goodbye. Leaving places is strange. I still have to go pick up my next paycheck.

-The bad news is that almost everyone in my office at Chapman is sick. The good news is that I feel fine!

-Went to see Casino Royale tonight with Ed, Kyle and Nicole. It passes muster.

-Afterwards, Kyle made us all listen to Damien Rice, who totally makes me fall asleep no matter what. There is ONE song on his new album that is not a sleepytime song, however, and it is currently stuck in my head. la la la.

-Tomorrow is Saturday, but I have SO MUCH TO DO!!

More of the haps

-Today was my last day tutoring at the high school. The first couple of weeks there I felt sure that I was an awful tutor and no good at teaching anyone anything, but now I have realized that teaching is something I really love, and that kids are amazing. That doesn't mean that it still wasn't my last day.
-I am working on an article about the film school for the next issue of Chapman Magazine that I have gotten to interview a lot of film professors for. It's actually really amazing because I get to sit down with some of the best teachers there (The designer of Blade Runner! The writer of The Sting!) and just talk to them about filmmaking and storytelling, one-on-one! I kind of feel like it's cheating, because I'm learning way more from these people than I'll ever be able to convey in my article, and I'm personally getting a lot out of it. It's almost like being back in school again, except without having to do assignments! Well, except for finish the article, I suppose.
-Saw a trio of one-act plays tonight. A one-act is a great format to experiment in, because you can go out on a bit of a limb and even if it's a bit akward, the audience isn't going to be thinking "oh lord, not another two hours of this!" All of the plays did some interesting things stylistically and were interesting, though some bits were more successful than others. This isn't really a review.
-I signed up to run a half-marathon in February one week ago. Guess I need to start running!

The Haps

briefly:
-I have been hired full time at Chapman University as their Public Relations Coordinator, which will be my first 40hr/week gig since working concessions at Mount Rushmore in the summer of 2003. It also effectively ends an eighteen-month period of job-vagabonding, which has included stints of various lengths as a pipe de-denter, bad freelance writer, Christmas light hanger, sushi bar host, high school tutor and public relations writer, and also rather palpitable plans to move to both Alaska and Istanbul, which were eventually discarded.
-I've been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan circa '64-'65 this week.
-I have been rather deathly afraid or writing, and have willfully avoided it pretty constantly. I think we can all agree that this is pretty stupid.
-I have been free of romantic entanglements for over a good year now. This is certinally a personal record, and I speculate that it might also place me atop a list of my friends and close aquintances. I also wonder if I even remember how to "date." The very act of kissing seems even more incomprehensible than it did when I was 15, and I am sure that if I ever again find myself in a place where !!kissing a girl on the lips!! is a possibility, I will botch it quite miserably. Perhaps I should just take a vow of, what do they call it? celebacy?
Except that it is not that I would not like to be involved with a girl, it is just that I don't want to waste my time and energy only to have something fail. Again.
-Actually, I feel about the same way about girls as I do about writing. I think. Goodness, what does THAT mean? I'll leave it for you, dear blog readers, to psychoanalyze. I need to go to sleep.
-I start working full-time on Monday.