I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why I’m fixated on it, but the whole fallen priest theme fascinates me. Maybe because it’s a little bit wrong to find that particular theme attractive. Maybe it’s the whole forbidden thing, or even the obligatory angst (and we all know how I feel about the angst) that theme presents. I don’t know. Damn Thorn Birds.

Father Ralph

So I’m watching The Sopranos (Thanks Mike!) for the first time ever (hey I don’t have HBO. Blow me.) last night, mostly because of course it’s one of those shows that’s become ingrained into American culture and I’m continuing my habit of getting into a series a few years after it begins. Of course it’s great show and after 5 episodes I can safely say I’m hooked (Argh, thanks Mike.) Of course episode 5 of the first season features Carmela and Father Phil getting just a little too cozy.

Father Phil

I loved it. I hope there’s more of that in the series because – and I might just be a little twisted – I dig on that quite a lot. I could wax on about the whole evil Eve tempting Adam causing his downfall and so women are forever punished because of that, or seen as wicked seductresses, and because that pisses me off, I want to see the holy man fail the test.

That’s the first thing that comes to mind. The other thing is that it’s just hot. Hot hot hot. Blasphemous? Probably. Will I burn in hell? If there is a hell, I’ll have a window seat please because I think I’ll always be interested in the theme.

I think I do blame Thorn Birds for the fixation on it. It’s really quite an epic struggle between a man and his God and his belief that he’s something more than a man and to give in to temptation would burst that bubble. Very interesting.

Anyway, enough blather, just had to get all that out.

Gunt, I dig the audio blogs btw 🙂 Were they difficult to do?

As I was writing the previous entry my daughter wandered into the room and I was telling her about some plans we might have to talk to her and her friends about the HP 6 midnight release party for the paper.

Then we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the last one. Here’s how we spent some great time together thanks to my hero, JK Rowling:

We showed up at Hastings somewhere between 11pm and 12am and ran into fellow diehard fans we knew from work. The grownups chatted while the kids ran amok in the store having fun and anxiously waiting for their books. There were games and prizes and it was generally a lot of fun.

We got our grubby mitts on 2 copies and raced home and began to read together in my room, me from my book, Shan from hers.

Unfortunately it was so late that we didn’t read for long before burning eyes and jaw-cracking yawns reminded us that we needed sleep. So we slept, but both of us were up early despite that so we could devour the book whole.

I sat in my chair and Shan lazed on the bed and we spent the entire day reading Order of the Phoenix. This is an 800-ish page book mind you. But I really cherish that day we spent reading. Into the wee hours of the next morning we carried on reading. But with only a few chapters to go, Shan could no longer prop up her eyelids and she reluctantly went to bed. However, I just couldn’t do it. I had to finish it and I didn’t have as much to go as she did so I ended up finishing the book about 17 hours after starting it.

To some it might seem quite sad to spend a whole day inside reading a book, but for Shan and me, it was heaven. And in about a month, we get to do it again. So thanks JK 🙂

Since I’m so intrigued with the Piano Man, and I’ve got such itchy fingers tonight I thought I’d get some stuff out of my head about the case. A sort of fan fiction experiment on this enigmatic, lost man.

I wrote the above paragraph about 10 minutes ago, and then I somehow got distracted by Trading Spouses. Why I don’t know, I meant to turn the TV off. I think the alt-tab world in which I live has weakened my attention span. When I finally came back to my screen here, I lost the mood to write something.

There. TV off. I always seem to have it on when I get home, but I never really watch it. I’ve talked about this before, but for some reason the quietness is louder than having the TV on. The throbbing hum of the AC in the hall outside my bedroom is a steady noise until it shuts off for a cycle. While it’s on it causes enough vibration to make the large picture I have hanging above my bed vibrate like a fingernail tapping on a desk. Occasionally I can hear the kid tapping on the computer in the living room. She’s in the middle of attepting to write a book and has excerpts and ideas throughout a myriad of old spiral notebooks and she’s trying to get them into a cohesive order in Word.

Either that or she’s on Neopets again. I hate it when she’s on that site because I agree with Wil Wheaton when he says the Internet(s) is full of freaks, present company excluded of course 🙂 But I have rather disturbing images of a 45 year old hairy man with glasses masturbating as he pretends to be a 13 year old girl on Neopets chatting to my daughter. I don’t know why the perv has glasses apart from most of the images of serial killers and pedophiles I’ve seen, they’re wearing unobtrusive but large glasses with wire frames.

But I know her passwords, usernames and all that and check her regularly (which she knows) and so far nothing quite that obscene.

Changing the subject… I used to have a blog where I kept most of my writing attempts, iedas, exrcises etc. Maybe I should dust it off and use it again. But I always start stuff like that with good intentions, and then gradually I end up distracted by other things until the dust begins to gather again and I put it away.

Anyone who might have read some of my old entries here might see a pattern in my enthusiasm for writing. The desire washes over me in great thundering waves and I become “serious” about writing and sometimes I do even make some progress. Or I get some grand idea like, “How about if I start a blog about my writing process, the ups, he downs, the in-betweens. It could be a repository for ideas, a virtual sounding board!”

Sounds good in theory, at least to me. So I start it, I write in it. I collect story ideas, I bitch about the lack of story ideas, or the lack of progression in a particular one. I force myself to freewrite for 10 minutes to let the ideas flow. Pretty soon the desire dries up, the waves recede and I retreat into my mundane life for a while, mindlessly getting up, going to work, coming home, watching a bit of TV, reading, then going to sleep.

Why does that happen? Is it because I maybe doubt myself too much. Even writing this silly blog I deleted some things I wrote because I know a few of the people who read this and I don’t want to ‘come off’ a certain way. How stupid is that? Pretty damn stupid quite frankly.

And how’s this for an abrupt ending? I want to blog about something else but in a different entry.

Why do I torture myself over silly things? The column thing was just an honest goof between a couple of editors which makes me feel so much better. I’d totally rather it be something innocuous like that than find out what I wrote was shite. Not that I’m incapable of writing shite 🙂 My nanoblogmo attempt is a case in point of shite writing.

Of course shite is subjective but there you go. Anyway, all is well column-wise and I stressed about it for absolutely no reason and you’d think I’d know better but apparently I don’t.

Piano man is still an enigma. The google alerts have trickled off so I don’t know much about the progress on his case. I’m still intrigued though. I’d love to sort of adapt his story into some kind of fiction and make up my own ending to his case. Maybe I’ll putter around with that for the evening.

Anyway (and sorry Gunter) I’m boring myself with this entry. A sure sign I should stop.

Argh column due, column due. I’ve got about 300 words and now I’m stuck. Filling 22 column inches on short notice is difficult. But I thrive under pressure. No really, I do.

But the cool news of the day today is that my boss is sending me to a writing workshop geared towards people like me who work in the news biz, but have no formal training in writing for a paper. I’m stoked 🙂 Maybe I will learn a few tips (like it’s impossible to be interesting for 800 words on a tv show. 500 maybe but that’s pushing it.)

Anyway, an update on my Piano man: They still don’t know who he is.

Okay enough stalling. Back to work.

I’m in the semi-state of boredom right now where I feel tired – that is to say, my eyes feel sleepy; that weak and tingly sensation you get from them when it’s probably time to call it a night – but the rest of me feels like doing something. Anything. Watch another movie or flip on the TV. Restless. Yeah that’s it. I thought if I came out in the living room and blogged for a bit I’d feel less like heading out into the night for a walk and more like going to sleep. A walk would do me good, sure but it’s late at night and I don’t like to leave the kid home alone this late.

My fecking computer’s being a bitch tonight though so blogging’s making me even more restless. I’ve got who knows how many spy/adware viruses on this thing and not any idea how to get rid of them short of formatting the hard drive. The stupid thing keeps switching to some kind of… invisible window or something right in the middle of typing and it’s pissing me off. It’s like it’s trying to switch to another program that’s running only when it does it, nothing is there but the window I’m working in is no longer active and if I’m not looking at the screen when I type, I go on typing until I look up and see that the past 3 or 4 sentences I’ve typed out aren’t there. God it’s really pissing me off.

Nothing like frustration and anger to wake you up.

Anyway… It’s been Hayden Christiansen evening tonight. For some reason I found his work in Episode III compelling. Very dark, very angry and angst-ridden. Obviously of course, it’s the character he’s got to portray but I found him very raw and I liked that. I know he got a pretty bad rap for the way he played Anakin Skywalker in Episode II and I can’t say I disagree with that. He was very wooden and whiny. But I chalk it up to Lucas being more interested in the effects than in directing his actors.

I rented “Life as a House” and “Shattered Glass” tonight, both starring Hayden and I was pretty impressed. Sure he was angsty and whiny in “Life” but he was supposed to be. It was how I would have liked him to play Anakin and it showed that with the right direction, he could have brought more to that role than he was able to. I’m not going to write a formal review or anything but I will say it’s a movie I’d like to own. Apart from the fact that Hayden looked good as a little Mansonite goth boy with piercings everywhere, he showed a lot of range, and I hope there will be more to see from him in the future.

“Shattered Glass” was just as good in that he played the ingratiating suckup deceitful liar to the hilt. Definitely made me hate his character which I think is a sign he got the job done. The movie’s about Stephan Glass who was a ‘hot’ writer for ‘The New Republic’ in the late 90s until he got caught out for lying and completely inventing over half of his stories. I saw the 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephan Glass and Hayden’s portrayal was spot on.

So yeah, I’ll be a Hayden fan. But really it’s all about the angst. I love angsty stories, the ones that tear at you and almost make you cry out for these characters. Downfalls are especially good. Ultimately there’s usually redemption or salvation of some kind and I like that. But I have some perverse interest in watching the decay first. Maybe that’s why I love the movie “Thorn Birds” so much despite Rachel Ward’s hideous acting. The idea of a fallen priest is compelling. Or a volatile, destructive teen so angry at the world he doesn’t know which end is up. Or the tearing down of a man bent on revolutionizing the way the world regards sex simply because the ‘normal’ views are illogical to him (I rented Kinsey this weekend as well. Loved it.)

I don’t know, maybe I’m a freak of some kind but it’s the angst that grabs me. Always has.

I still don’t feel tired.

Spooky’s laying on my foot and it’s bugging me. I hate to push her away though, it’s kind of cute. But one foot is warm and squished under her while the other’s kind of cold. Okay I just moved my foot away and she didn’t even budge. That’s good. Least someone can sleep.

Meechie called me earlier today. I’ve been worried about him ever since I got a wild phone call from him back at the end of last year. I don’t want to talk about his personal life online because it wouldn’t be right, but suffice to say I worried for him. It was probably the oddest call I’ve ever gotten from anyone. But we spoke today and he sounded so happy he was practically gushing. I was glad to hear the tone of his voice. It sounded so much better. He’s found God and even though he was excited about that and couldn’t stop himself from sharing his emotions with me in such a rushed, tumbled speech, part of me kept hoping that it wouldn’t lead to him trying to ‘convert’ me. How selfish eh?

I love Meechie more than even he knows I think. He’s been my greatest friend since 10th grade. We’ve been through so much together and have always stayed fairly close even though I live in Nebby and he’s still in Monterey. Our lives now couldn’t be more different but he’ll forever be my best friend and I know he feels the same way. It’s just that… well I get so uncomfortable around religious people. Always have. I don’t believe. I don’t have that kind of faith. I put my faith in my family and friends and it’s always been enough for me. I’ve gone through some tough things in my life but I don’t feel like I ‘never would have made it if it weren’t for my faith in God.’ I did make it through them just fine, and pretty strong if I do say so myself. I don’t feel like I need a God to believe in. It feels too much like a crutch, or something to assign blame to if things don’t go right.

But that’s just me.

But I’d never try to dissuade someone from their belief in God. I’m happy Meechie ‘got religion’ if that’s what he feels he needed to get him through his own dark times. I just, I don’t know, don’t want to be preached at. It makes me uncomfortable. Religion, or lack of it, is too personal of a matter to try and force it on anyone. That kind of decision should be left to individuals to figure out on their own. Er, in my opinion. That’s why I don’t answer the door when the jehovahs or mormons come calling. Trust me, if I have questions or seek any kind of answers, I will do it in my own way, and my own time. Trying to push me into it will likely just make me shy away that much more.

I just hope I can make Meechie understand that. I don’t want to lose him as a friend because that would crush me. I’m happy for him that he’s found what he needed though and I’d never laugh at his decision or belittle him for it. If my Meech is happy, truly happy for once in his life, then I’m glad he’s got God.

Right enough of that. I think I’m going to try and sleep now.

A little while back, I was watching Good Morning America as I usually do while getting ready for work and they had a blurb about this guy who was found distressed, wandering on a beach in England, dripping wet and unable to speak.

They don’t have a clue who he is and he won’t speak so they think he’s suffered soem kind of trauma. The only thing he will do is play the piano or draw pictures of one:

The mysterious ‘Piano Man’

A very frightened ‘Piano Man’

One of the drawings he has done. The only way he seems to be able to communicate right now.

I’m completely intrigued by the story and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I find his image haunting – especially the one where he seems to be cowering 🙁 I just want to give him a hug, poor guy. Or maybe because the circumstances in which he was found are so mysterious. Dripping wet, wandering distressed along a beach, labels removed from every stitch of clothing he had on, won’t, can’t or refuses to speak…

Very interesting.

The latest update on The Piano Man is that the psychiatric hospital where he is being cared for has received a large number of tips on their hotline and are beginning to try and track them down. But it’s been a couple of weeks now and his image has been broadcast all over the world – surely someone must recognize him.

This is one I’ll be following. Here’s a BBC article about him and here’s another. You can google ‘missing piano man’ to find more if you’re as intrigued as I am about this man.