I'm starting my day with The Terminator. I love The Terminator, and I haven't seen it in ten years, so this is kinda nice. Plus it's a nostalgia trip; my first crush was Michael Biehn, when I was about 13. The first time I watched was with my mother who decided to educate me in the ways of kissing by telling me that 'there's no way that guy is a virgin; look at the way he's holding her head, he knows how to kiss, now that's a real man'. Which personally I still think is the stupidest bit of faux advise I've ever heard. At 13 I gave her the benefit of doubt ect but soon realised it is the most pointless statement about kissing ever conceived. I'm generally on a bit of a nostalgia kick at the moment; I'm wading through the Golden Girls, cos I love Betty White. Let me repeat that: I LOVE BETTY WHITE! I wish I was related to her, or that she was a neighbour I could treat like a surrogate grandmother. If I ever met her I'd probably fall apart and start telling her all my darkest secrets in the hopes she'd tell me I'm alright and offer me a cookie. When I was a kid I used to watch Golden Girls all the time and the lingering memory of all that was watching and knowing its just a sitcom, bordering on a fucking soap for gods sake, but with the delightful silliness that makes it a worthy guilty pleasure. And I thought like so many other things that after all these years I would cringe because the delightful touch was all in my head, but no! My obsession with Rose was definitely justified :D She comes out with the weirdest dialogue, talking about making every recipe with fish and the fantastic references to Rose husband as some sort of sex god.
Yesterday's writing session was pretty good, and it taught me something new: I don't like writing in appropriate outdoor clothes, and I need a sofa. I had been thinking that writing at home in random loose clothes and always on my sofa might be a mistake, but apparently not; I found yesterday exhausting and I got really uncomfortable after about two hours. Good to know.
I was happy with what I wrote though, as a start; it was useful on this occasion to write it around other people, helped maintain perspective I think. I waded into the scene that I hope will exorcise some demons, and that was bothering me the most; the educational, expositional diagnosis scene. You know, character upset, sad sad sad, how doctors talk, poignant etc. It was the part that was bothering me the most precisely because it was the bit I was likely to get lost in, so I've been delaying it a little bit, but around other people I didn't get stuck into my own head. And then I wrote a summary of all the medical stuff that happened to me in the first month or so, the order that it happened in, which I actually amused me no end - written down in a summary, even notetaking with only vaguely what you could call sentences, it took over a page, and it looks really comical written down, which bodes sort of well for the script, giving that I don't want the medical stuff to be boring, nor solemn, nor sad; I've been designing the medical stuff to take place in a split screen so that all the prodecural stuff is like a visual overload, quickly and intensely and then to focus on the relationships of the characters getting to know each other because of family or proximity during that period before the stuff of the second act.
Anyway, I won't go into that now. Something else is interesting me today: apparently Days of our Lives is currently running a storyline about medical staff in a prison stealing organs from prisoners to sell on the organ black market - and apparently the transplant community is outraged and urged to write to the show stating why the storyline does incredible damage to the already slanted public perception of organ donation in America.
I was reading this on http://donatelife-organdonation.blogspot.com/ . Donate Life is an excellent website and I certainly understand the drive to urge the show producers to reconsider the storyline as it stands. But naturally my urge to think philosophically and pretensiously abstract kicked in and I started thinking about how the bigger issue is the other side of perception. As far as I'm concerned the issue is not just that negative storylines with an element of fear inducing sensationalism leads to compounds the already established fears about donation and the transplant community. The issue is more specifically about the lack of a wider understanding of the community, the lack of, or inefficient counterpoint to the negative portrayal is the stronger background.
However, the day is disappearing before my eyes. I might have to come back to this later; Ant wants to try n get to West Park today. Um, now.....................
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