I'll Make a Real Post After This is Over...

Positive. Focused. Caffeinated.

Hot fucking damn. I just passed the half-way mark for NaNoWriMo.

I am now 26,530 in to my novel.

At this point, I can see it finishing. I am excited by this. I don't want to say too much about it, but I can tell that the next half is going to be fun and messy to write. The play is over, so there is lots of time to put to this now, when I'm not avoiding homework. Good stuff.

let's get INTERACTIVE:
You can track my progress.


Back to typing. Now.

People are Pissed Off.

So I guess I haven't been paying attention enough to the news, but apparently serious shit is going down in France.

Terrorists, Wars, Tsunamis, Hurricanes, Riots...

Time to call my schizophrenic great-aunt and ask her when she thought the world was ending and convince her to turn on the TV and reconsider it. But then again she never turns that on since the Government will melt her brain with it. I'll still call her though, to give her something to discuss with the sea-monkies.

I Have Fourteen Minutes and 59 Seconds Left

Once a long time ago, I went to a summer camp as a child. I had a counselor at the summer camp named Ben Folstein. He was basically the coolest guy ever and I considered him my mentor for a long time. Well, the man has become a renegade filmmaker, and gone done created a website of epic proportions.

* * * *

Once a long time ago, I helped Ben Folstein out in a short independent film he was making.

"Attack of the Fisher Cat."

Check it.

What a Great Use of Lots of Money.

"WILL A CLOCK THAT WORKS FLAWLESSLY FOR 10,000 YEARS BECOME THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE WORLD?"

Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.

Made of stone and steel, it is more sculpture than machine. And, like all fine timepieces, it is outrageously expensive. No one will reveal even an approximate price tag, but a multibillionaire financed its construction, and it seems likely that shallower pockets would not have sufficed.

So this crazy rich dude, Danny Hillis, who creates supercomputers out of tinker toys for fun, has designed this super-clock that will be 60 feet tall, embedded in a mountain in Nevada and use solely Bronze Age technology, and it will run for 10,000 years. Longer than the pyramids have existed. Longer than humankind has even been around yet. Crafted so you could tell the exact time of day, even if you do not use our current measurements of time, since it tracks the locations and rotation of our neighboring planets.

Pretty fucking crazy.

Pretty fucking amazing.

Crazy Crazy Crazy.

Things have been genuinely nuts as of late. NaNoWriMo has started and is almost a week over. I've managed to keep up with the 1700 words a day, but still find myself needing to write every night. I've got 9,755 words down. I need 10,500 by the end of tonight. I'm beginning to understand NaNoWriMo's motto of "No plot? No problem!"
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of confidence in what I'm writing, abandoning all sense of quality. So I'm basically taking a month-long shit into a Word document that if ever does get published via the Internet then I'll promptly set fire to and hopefully feel some sense of reward. I've really only been keeping up thanks to large quantities of caffeine. Sometimes other chemicals will enter the mix, but it's really caffeine that hasn't left my bloodstream since the beginning of November. 4:00 a.m. is my new bedtime. The Burnham Lounge has become my new night-time stomping grounds. It's getting rough, it's getting tough...it's fun.

Also, the show, Arms and the Man is up. Come and see it if you'd like, but you won't see me. I'm hiding up in a tiny room all by myself on the balcony playing with electrical equipment that control when large sounds happen. It's pretty cool. My only real important cues are in Act I, so Act II and III I can watch the show, or do yoga or pilates or something. I'm just kidding. I don't know any yoga or pilates. I need to play more ukulele, come to think of it. The Mountain Goats make me want to do that.

Some very odd things that have happened recently:

• 
  

  After a tech rehearsal last week I came into my building to find my brother and two of our better friends ever, Chris and Ben. They gave me a suprise visit which was all good and nice and we hung out and they met some cool college people and then we went to the mall to do nothing in particular, felt like losers, came back to campus and smoked some cigars and they left. Pleasant. I go inside and the fellows at the front desk are playing an original Ninentendo Entertainment System on a TV they set up on the counter. It was Super Mario 3, nonetheless. David C. Clark was there and we all started talking about the first time video games entered our lives. I mentioned "I remember the very first time I got a Super Nintendo, and Super Maro Land." and then one of the guys at the desk, who I only really see there, and have never really met, looks to me and says "So do I, because I had an epileptic seizure at your house."
  Wait.
  Stop.
  What?
  The other guys laugh, but I have a minor episode. Wait, I say, hold on. Only one person has ever had an epileptic seizure at my house, and that was when I was seven and living in Newmarket, New Hampshire, and our friends Jaime and Joseph were over because my mother babysat them and their mother would babysit us, and we were playing video games and Jaime had a seizure and scared us all pretty badly... and I WAS FUCKING SEVEN. THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO.
  I just stared at him in disbelief and fell to my knees and bit my hat. "You're Jaime" I said. "Yeah, I am." he replied.
  Holy shit.
  One of my ancient childhood friends from the Lost Vaults of Time when I lived in New Hampshire....is an R.A. on the 4th floor. A little mindfuck right there.
  
  

  So I got randomly IMed the other day. This happens to us all on occasion. A strange screenname masking the anonymous person who randomly wants to chat, how and why they have your screenname a mystery. On this occasion it was some girl using her ex-boyfriend's screenname who thought my screenname was funny. I was riding the caffeine wave and feeling good about things so I did not mind talking to her. We did some sleuthing and discovered why her ex-boyfriend had my screenname. About three or so years ago, I randomly met a girl through livejournal at a Saves the Day concert. We talked online for a while, figured out that she knew my cousin Mitchell pretty well, the stopped talking. It was awfully random and so was this.
  The random girl then told me she was going to go soon, but I could call her if I wanted to since she was going to be bored for a while. I wasn't quite about to go that far into getting to know a random somebody, so I told her I didn't have long distance and asked where she was . She said "Sabattus," where my cousin Mitchell and Kristen live. I said I had cousins out there and she asked who. So I said "Mitchell Waterman," and she just said "Oh my God." Her name was Molly. That's when I put it all together. She was Molly Waterman, Mitchell's cousin, my cousin through marriage. We knew each other when we were younger, at holiday reunions and stuff. My brother and I would go to visit our Aunt Cathy and Uncle Pete, and they would have Molly over too. It was so freakish and bizarre. So she called me on her cell phone and we freaked out together about how small the whole fucking world is getting these days.

I told you. Craziness.
I'm also not shaving for the month of November, so I fear I'm starting to look crazy too.

Ahh! Back to novel-writing!