I hope October is a boring month, I've been saying lately. Why? So I can experience sitting on the couch, drinking a beer, maybe watching teevee. Savoring the few projects I have, and enjoying downtime inbetween.

I've been running around like nuts. And enjoying it! Returned from Tokyo yesterday, and finished a text adventure game in the afternoon for class in the evening. Submitted an article today*. Polishing up a short film for tomorrow.**

Fellow student Doox hooked me up with a 3rd year film student who wants a location to shoot her final film. Doox suggested me. Today she came over and explained that it would involve 25 people being in my house 12 hours a day for six days, two of the weekends of October. So much for boredom. It did sound like a crazy experience - watching a 35 millimeter short get made. But I was thinking to myself, why would I bother? Why not just relax and enjoy my house for myself? It pays a little bit of money, but it's a lot of time and a lot of presence.

Then the woman pitching me the project explained that one of her Production Assitants would be on hand cooking fresh dumplings all day long and I immediately signed on.

* I talked to Simon at GamaSutra about writing up some TGS coverage (like I did last year); the assignment didn't work out, but the tentative deadline stuck in my head - September 30th. Unfortunatly, I transposed that with my TheFeature deadline of September 28th. This morning in film class, during a lecture on editing, I received email - "Where's your article?!" At 9:30 I promised to have it done in two hours. I worked on the article during the lecture until 10:50. Then class had a ten minute break - I extended the break by 25 minutes and turned in ~900 words at 11:30 (I liked what I did: Playing with Mobile Media - thankfully I had taken very thorough notes on my Treo during each of my interviews, and I'd already retyped them and fixed them up on my computer - I was ready to rock and roll. A little bit of primal journalist instincts that saved my ass!). My teacher later asked, "why did you miss twenty minutes of class?" I had to explain, my article for a Nokia-sponsored research publication on mobile phones was due at 11:30; I was caught off-guard and had to write a thousand words during the break." He seemed taken aback enough to let me off, or maybe he was just being nice. Just like my TheFeature editors -

I don't want to test too many people's patience too much. i.e., if I lead a more boring life, I wouldn't have so many contingencies or responsibilities. But I want to experience and experiment, so hopefully I can learn to be a more graceful juggler. Right now I'm just amazed that I'm not dead tired. I am clenching my teeth though, as I work - I can notice some growing pain in my molars.

My Mom arrives Wednesday morning at 10am; her first visit to my new house. Had to do some serious cleanup this afternoon!

** Finished my short film about the Tokyo Game Show at 4am. Here's a preliminary draft TGS2k4.mov - 41meg Quicktime.