The course I was teaching ended on Sunday, and the post-production job I’d been working on at the studio wrapped up yesterday. Today is my first day off in weeks. It’s beautiful outside. I believe I will soon take my camera and go on a nice long walk.
I’d been getting a little tired lately–lots of work and late hours, combined with poor eating habits. I’m a carnivore with a fast metabolism and I need lots of food to be happy.
Yesterday I resolved to get things back on track. I got home from the studio around 6 and cooked a nice piece of salmon. A couple hours later I was hungry again, so I had a steak. Then around 11pm I felt like a little snack, so I cooked and ate a big thing of chicken wings.
That’s a lot of meat. By 11:30pm I had so much energy I didn’t know what to do with myself. I got up from the kitchen table and started jumping up and down in the middle of the kitchen floor. I was pacing back and forth in the kitchen.
I went up to my room and put on Schubert Symphony Number Four and jumped up and down on my bed and waved my arms around like a conductor.
I made a list of things I wanted to do that night and it had 31 items on it. To start with, I decided I wanted to write a screenplay. I have a disc with some screenplays on it. I decided to read one to get an idea about the format. I read Blade Runner and then I proceeded to read Fargo and Ghostbusters and Interview With The Vampire.
In some ways, I enjoy reading off a laptop screen more than reading from a book. I went into the dark living room and sat on the couch and read in the dark off the glowing laptop screen. I thought it was great being able to read in the dark without my mother coming in and saying, “You’re going to ruin your eyes.”
My roommate Geoffrey came downstairs on his way to the kitchen and I called out from the couch. “Hey I’m reading in the dark!” I said.
“That’s really bad for your eyes,” he said.
“No, it’s a laptop,” I said. “It’s great. You can sit in total darkness and read.”
“Reading from a computer,” he said. “That’s supposed to be even worse for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It has something to do with the light source being surrounded by darkness, and your eyes are trying to adjust to the light and to the darkness at the same time, and apparently it can really screw you up.”
“But it’s no different from watching a movie,” I said. “You go to a movie, and there’s the screen, and then the whole room is dark.”
“Hmm,” said Geoffrey.
Geoffrey and Erin hung out in the kitchen for a while, and then Erin came into the living room.
“Hey, guess what!” I said. “I’m reading in the dark.”
“That’s really bad for your eyes,” said Erin.
“That’s exactly what he wants you to say,” said Geoffrey.
“It’s no different from watching a movie,” I said. I was reading the screenplay to Interview With The Vampire.
“I find it’s always worse with computers,” said Erin. “My eyes always hurt if I look at a computer screen in the dark for too long.”
“I feel fine,” I said.
“Mm-hmm,” said Geoffrey. “Check in with us in a couple of hours.”
A little while later Geoffrey and I were both sitting in the living room in the dark. I closed my laptop and got up and suddenly fell to the floor.
“Aiieeee!” I said. “My eyes!” I started rolling around on the living room floor. “NO! It burns! It burns!”
“What’s wrong with you,” said Geoffrey.
I was pretending to claw my eyes out. “Nooo! The pain! It burns!”
I rolled around some more and then grabbed his ankle and tried to bite it.
“Ow! Hey! Stop that!” said Geoffrey. He got all twitchy and pulled his foot up onto the chair. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m really into my personal space,” Geoffrey said later. Geoffrey’s from Ontario.
