Sunday, 31 March 2002

You know how some people can never think of anything to do? I'm not one of those people.

That's not to say that I can't relate to people who don't know what they want to do with their lives. But I can relate from the side of "There's so many things I might do, and so many positive and negative trade-offs, that I'm not sure which way to go." There's the other side. There are people who can't think of anything they really want to do.

My girlfriend in college was like that. She was a psych major and had thought she wanted to do counseling. But after a couple of volunteer gigs on a crisis hotline and working at a daycamp for troubled children, she decided that she didn't want to do counseling. That would have been okay, if there was something else she wanted to do. Sure, it would have been a drag to change her major and maybe have to take another semester to graduate with a degree in something else, but it wouldn't have been terrible. But there wasn't anything else she wanted to do. I still remember her saying, "I don't know what I'm going to do," and me saying, "Well, what do you want to do?" and her saying, "I can't think of anything." I never understood it. I still don't.

One of the many things I'd like to do, if I ever had a bunch of extra time and money, is to make movies.

At the office we're fast approaching the date of the Urbana Design Center's second annual film festival. I didn't produce a movie for the event--I don't have a video camera, for one thing. But the idea appeals to me. From time to time I go out on the net and look at stuff on making movies. Tiny little video cameras can now make broadcast-quality images. Just lightly bigger (and more expensive) cameras can make cinema-quality images. The software for editing is cheap and easy to use. I keep thinking that just a few thousand dollars would buy a great camera and a new really fast computer with lots of disk space and all the software I'd need to make movies.

I slept late this morning, staying abed until 7:45.

We made only a little more headway in our struggles against the forces of entropy. But we got out for a walk and had an Easter feast, so that's worth something.

I had a possible idea for the miracle drug story. It solves two problems, but it moves the POV from the character who's feeling the most to one who's not really involved. That might not work. Maybe I can combine them. But then I have to figure out how the reader figures out that the other character is not what he seems. I'm still thinking about it.