I woke up at about 8 AM yesterday but it wouldn't take and I crashed until 2:30. When I woke up I watched Roman Holiday with Kim and the last two minutes or so were cut from the TiVO recording. That final Gregory Peck/Audrey Hepburn exchange of witticisms is now something I must search out. It's a pretty great film that would probably drive me nuts if it were released today with different actors, but that's Hollywood's golden age for you.

I took some time and started reading Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, the book that Antanas gave me, which also contains some essays and short stories by various writers. I couldn't help but nod at some of the early descriptions of the writing process and the psychology of the writer, put in ways I'd never heard before and read as very apt descriptions of my personality, like this one from Anne Lamott:

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head...Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren't there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behaviour, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I'm on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don't come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it.

It's bits and pieces like that that I wholly identify with. I'm convinced that the "voices" I hear (which aren't really voices, but very vivid memories of emotion) are not schizophrenia but my analytical mind overtaxing itself, pushed along by feelings like guilt, anger, happiness, and sadness. An experience resonates and I play it over and over in my mind and sometimes actually physically cringe or react at the thought of it. But to me, this is what it's like being a writer. It's taking a moment and making it real, bringing it to the present so that I can apply my own narrative to it and calm the voices down. The problem over the last year or so is that I haven't recognized this at all. I should be writing about these thoughts, not thinking about them over and over. Being a writer doesn't just mean that you write; it means that you experience the world in a very unique way, and each writer has his/her own methods of coming to terms with that experience.

I finished Richard Bausch's Peace and read some more of Life of Pi. I went for a walk a bit later in the day. It was raining outside and I was carrying an umbrella with two broken metal arms, listening to Death Cab For Cutie and Coldplay. I walked up High Park to Dundas and turned to walk south down Keele, the old stomping grounds. For awhile my back and leg didn't hurt at all. I walked by the old site of Gwendolyn MacEwen's childhood home and turned back towards Matt and Kim's place. When Matt got home we cracked open a couple of beers, ordered vegetarian pizza and watched Land of the Dead.

I'm heading home tomorrow. I miss Andrea tons.

I don't use Internet forums, but there are a few I check out from time to time, specifically the Ain't It Cool News forum, the CNN political ticker comments, and the IMDB forums. I don't know why I look at these, because they always leave me feeling kind of depressed and angry about how bitter, uninformed and just generally stupid humanity can be. Deep down I know the Internet is an amazing opportunity for people in a democracy to voice their opinions, but lately it strikes me that the Internet is making all opinions worthless via oversaturation. It's like eating a chocolate sundae. Eating a little bit of one is great. But you don't want to eat one that weighs two hundred pounds, because after awhile it starts to taste like shit. Nobody cares about your opinion, and yet everyone cares.

Andrea and I went to see Get Smart last night, which was quite funny. Leaving the apartment, I was able to take in a few of the last remaining hours of spring as the sun was setting, tossing a radiant glow into the grass and the grey cement of a street that had spent the last couple of weeks undergoing a frequent pounding of rain. I normally wait until I'm on the bus to pop in the headphones, but I needed music to accompany the moment. I put on "Strawberry Swing" from the new Coldplay album and it was perfect. Later on I played the song for Andrea and she said it was "summery," so I think she understood.

Before bed I wrote a near-2,500 word essay. It's part of a gift I'm giving someone.