I hope I'm laughing WITH

And not at? I'm not sure...it makes me a little nervous. I hope I'm not being sexist.

Passed on...

From anonymous.


Powered By Rabbit Vibrators

Embarrassing admission #857

From this week's Entertainment Weekly TV section:

Sunday 3.30 9-10:30 PM PBS
Sense and Sensibility

Sad-but-true fact about me: There's a street in Los Angeles called Willoughby Ave. and whenever I drive down it, I say "Oh, Willoughby!" loudly in an English accent.

Ahem. Jennifer Armstrong at Entertainment Weekly, you are not alone, sister.

I'm a tad saner... I say it in my own head, and then vow to NEVER settle for Colonel Brandon. Join us for Jane Austen Porn Club night anytime!

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?

You're Mariane Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility! You are the romantic youngster, also found in Jane Austen's work as Catherine of Northanger Abbey and possibly Georgiana Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. You wander through life like Red Riding Hood in the forest, picking wildflowers and humming a happy song... and you can't see the wolf right in front of you! Ruled by heart and not by head, you are best advised to to learn a little caution, before you are forced into a better acquaintance with the ways of the world.
Take this quiz!

How to please a woman

Here's another great article by Alison Armstrong, founder of the PAX workshops.

Searching for Intimacy in a Box of Chocolates
by Alison A. Armstrong

What do women really want for Valentine’s Day? Well… We want chocolates, mushy greeting cards, flowers sent to the office, real jewelry and much anticipated marriage proposals.

Or do we?

“It is when a man is expressing his passions that he is the most vulnerable. It’s when he’s talking about the things that make him happy that he is the most available.”I think what women crave more than anything else is Intimacy. Connection. Closeness. And I was hoping to find it somewhere in that box of Valentine’s chocolates. Is it between the caramels and the nut chews? Maybe the chocolates are an expression of his Feelings for me. And if I could break open those feelings, like I broke open that mocha crème…

In my search for intimacy, I would gaze intently into my boyfriend’s eyes and ask, “How do you feel about me?” I thought that if I could get him to talk about his feelings, then I would experience being close to him. If he would “open up emotionally,” then we could have those intimate moments for which I longed. To know him, to connect with him, I must connect with his emotions. I must hear about his feelings.

Or so I thought. (read more)

Happy Easter!

Post Secret is great today.

Congrats to our friend Jim Troesh, the Hollywood Quad, on the success of his spec pilot with the amazing Bryan Cranston of "Breaking Bad."

Guaranteed way to meet men

Stand in line in sweat pants at Rite Aid with condoms, douches, zit cream, and Peeps in your arms waiting for your birth control prescription to be filled.

Seriously. Try it.

I found four straight hunks. They'll never date a girl standing in line with condoms, douches, zit cream, and Peeps. But I proved they exist.

Okay, I have to go get pretty now and go out for Saturday night...guaranteed the hunks ALL DISAPPEAR...

Real beauty

Yea Jamie Lee Curtis! She's posing topless in AARP! Check out these two articles about her beliefs on aging.

Curtis Drops Top to Make a Point
Jamie Lee Curtis Drops Her Top To Make a Point

I love what she says about all the possessions she's given away.

Arthur C. Clarke on death

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."
– Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Unbreakable

One thing I've always agreed with Harry about is Unbreakable. It also breaks my heart that we will never have the trilogy of David and Mr. Glass, and I too wonder what would have been in store for us, in the same way I used to dream of what would happen to The Avengers next month when I closed this month's issue.

Misunderstood genius. What are you going to do. Can't force the public to have taste.

Arthur C Clarke

Jewno

Understand women

Simply brilliant.

End the war

Sign on to Obama's plan.

What. The. Eff.

Soooo...McG (Siiiiiiigh) is directing T4 and cast the younger version of the great warrior Kyle Reese.

So let me see if I have this story straight.

This possibly crazy knight:

Who has grown up underground, in the dark, in war, battling unstoppable killing machines all his life...


...Travels through SPACE AND TIME to save the life of and spend one warm night of solace in the arms of this woman king:

...knowing he will have that one sublime night and then die, but that he will impregnate her with the great military leader of the resistance who might just grow up to save the human race.

Yes? That is the stupendous Terminator story.


And this is the douchebag McG thinks Kyle Reese was ten years prior to this story:

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.

That's one big steaming pile of Awesome that McG wants us to eat. I mean, I guess if I squint hard I can see callouses on the kid's hands from the work camps humans are slaves in. And the gun practice and the hand to hand combat and...What? No? You can't see this wuss scoring McLovin' from one of the world's hottest, fiercest, most brilliant women of all time? You think you could probably give him a wedgie and he'd cry and let you take her to the Prom instead?


I hope McG pays his security guards a lot. Maybe he's got one of those newfangled invisible forcefields around his McMansion. Because I'm picturing an army of schizo T -100 fans in aluminum foil hats flailing their arms and running at it repeatedly, screaming "23 great wounds, all got in battle"...all of them more frighteningly convincing than that poor wuss actor.

Biased media

I felt fascinated by this Salon article. What do you think?

PAX

I've been studying men and women and learning how to build empowering partnerships through this amazing series of workshops. The word PAX is Latin for peace, and it is their intention to end the war between the sexes. It also stands for Partnership, Acceptance and Xtasy...three of my favorite noble qualities.

This info goes beyond "recommending" from me...this is life-changing, world-transforming, should-be-required-of-high-school-students work. I'm going to be talking about PAX more over the next few months, as their philosophies are becoming so integrated in my life it would be impossible not to.

So here is an awesome article to start with:

Learning About Men From Men
by Alison A. Armstrong

In over a decade of studying men, we have learned the most from listening to them. Most graduates of Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women® will say that the Panel of Men in their workshop was the best part. By learning how to listen to men, and practicing creating the kind of environment in which men really open up and express themselves, you can hear the same extraordinary responses from the men in your life. To help you, here is a list of 101 Great Questions to ask men and some reminders of what is really important to remember when listening to men.

How to Listen to Men
To create the kind of situation that enables men to communicate fully, remember this:
Continue

Paul Coussens

My friend died.

He was a lion if I ever met one. Fought cancer for seven years, and ultimately didn't die of it. In fact, I didn't even know he was sick. He was my best friend Valencia's father, and a really cool guy. Free spirit. Lived life with gusto.

Paul was incredibly kind and supportive of me. Very proud. He, Valencia and his ex-wife and son ended up in the film, too. One of the days he was on the set, he was so concerned about my stress levels and how hard I was working, he took me for a long ride through the vineyards and told me to scream. How great is that?? Let me tell you, on a movie set you have to have your own friends shipped in to notice you and take care of you, because no one else is going to.

God, I feel so guilty. I was supposed to be with them in Tahoe just three weeks ago, and he was so excited because I was going to come up and show them all the movie, but instead I stayed longer with Todd and kept editing...

And Valencia's 6 months pregnant with her first child...

I feel awful. My heart is all shriveled up.

Can't believe I was thinking of Valencia all last week and didn't call.

I should have learned this lesson in spades by now, but please people, put your people first in your lives...

Lion follow up

I mean no disrespect calling men lions.

Are you aware of how much love lions are capable of? Here is one who had the thorn in his paw removed by a mouse.

Several years ago this woman found a sick, malnourished lion cub in the jungle. She took the cub home and fed him and brought him up until he was too big to keep anymore. Then she made arrangements with a zoo in Colombia, South America, to take the lion. Here's a video of what happened when she went to visit him in the zoo for the first time.

Are you a lion or a gazelle?

There's a famous statistic that men think about sex once every 60 seconds. There's some dispute at what man st/age that's relevant, but nonetheless...It's accepted that women think about it MUCH less. Like once a day-ish.



Now what we are closer to thinking about as much as men think about sex is...rape.

Why? Well on average, 1.3 of us are raped every 60 seconds. Even in America at any given gathering you're at, look around the room and know that the conservative stat is that 1 out of 4 women has been raped. Usually by someone they married, or dated, or were friends with.



Even with vast improvements, pregnancy-related complications worldwide still account for a female death a minute as well. Don't think our female DNA doesn't know that. For women, everytime we have sex we are risking our lives. That's part of why it's such a big stinking deal to us.


So the next time you're flirting with a strange woman, remember you have to give her time to get on your wavelength. Because she's not got the luxury of single-focus evaluating if she's attracted to you. Her diffuse awareness is on where she is, if she's safe, if you're a creep, if she's dressed "too provactively" (to be judged by a jury of her peers), and what exactly it is you want from her.

She is a gazelle in high heels, alone on the tundra in front of a lion who either wants to devour her, or have her take a sliver out of his paw and become her fuzzy protector.



How good do you think we are at knowing the difference?

Say you're at, I don't know, BLOCKBUSTER, and there are three of you lions circling and flirting with her at once as you pin her against the cash register, and she looks really confused and skittish as she tosses out bon mots about Will Smith and Team America to hold you all at bay...

It might take her five minutes after she's fled to the safety of her locked SUV to realize that actually you were kind of sweet and funny and had good taste in movies and had pretty eyes when she was able to meet your eye contact and DIDN'T hurt her as you followed her around the store watching her select DVDs...

So it's not always about you...and if you want to ever get further with a woman, it might be helpful to be aware of the hurdles she's leaping over in stilletos either at you or away from you...
Confidently offer her companionship so she can make a choice other than survival...

Not becoming Jane

Soooo...just saw the Becoming Jane trailer again, and besides wanting to throw up because of how much James McAvoy looks like Jeremy (why bother with pseudonyms for a man I'm never going to see again anyway, eh? No more Mr. Tumnus/Captain Awesome. His name was Jeremy.), I was also reminded of an exchange editor/friend Todd and I had several weeks ago about Becoming Jane.

Todd quizzed me about how much of the movie romance was fictionalized. My somewhat dodgy answer (considering I've only read 3 of her autobiographies and the subject is quite in dispute by historians) is that absolutely, Tom Lefroy was the love of her life. The movie makes great usuage of the fact that he named his daughter Jane. They don't mention fun facts like Tom's country-trekking trip to be at Ms. Austen's funeral, or his own deathbed confession to a grandchild confirming the family rumour that grandpa had that hots for Austen.



Most importantly of the facts not shared in Becoming Jane, there were inside jokes written TO TOM in every one of her novels (including their shared love for Tom Hardy and that each of her novels has a character with one of his relative's surnames). As a fellow writer, that is the most damning evidence to me. Because we writers do that. Truly.

However, I do believe the historians who think in fact that HE was the inspiration for Elizabeth Bennett and that Jane Austen herself is Mr. Darcy (rude temperment, misunderstood and disliked by society, afraid to love) are the correct ones, which would have been a wonderful twist in Becoming Jane, a rather by wrote movie capitalizing again on the Shakespeare in Love formula.

Anyway, I really loved Todd's take on the entire Jane Austen msytique. Todd's completely baffled how someone who didn't have the balls to go after love is held up in esteem by romantics (even to the point that movies like The Jane Austen Club purport all romantic problems can be solved by following her guidelines).

He thinks basically Jane Austen was a wuss. A wuss who then spent her entire life fictionalizing the life she was too petrified to lead. A life that could very well have turned out happily for her, both with career and man.

God bless Todd. Everytime I bellyflop in the shallow end of love, if I can just flashback to his befuddled face shaking his head at the failure of brilliant esteemed Jane Austen to even dip her exhaulted toe in...

Would you like a helping of schmolitics with your bitter?

Am I the only one in America who doesn't give a damn? I mean, I'm sorry, I dutifully vote and all, but it's not like I believe we really have a "choice," or that both "sides" aren't equally puppetted by corporations, or like my vote isn't "lost" by Diebold in the process because I'm an educated liberal woman, or that air quotes aren't "annoying"...I mean, is anybody still naive enough to believe they're making a difference?*

And are people really surprised by The Emperor's Club? Give me a freaking break. Like every thriller since the 70s hasn't cast a lady of the night with a politician. Sigh. I just don't see what it matters. I really don't.

Last week a conservative friend quizzed me about my politics, and I just couldn't muster it up. I think he wanted some kind of Sam and Diane heat, and all I could do was sputter a platitude about conservatives letting our environment go to shit. Which apparently was all he needed to hear, because he won the fauxrgument by kissing me.

It's not exactly new to me. My brother and sister in law cancel each other out in the polls every election. Hell, my first boyfriend was a Reagan worshipping Muslim Persian I dated for years during the FIRST Gulf War. His father was dethroned from politics under the Shaw badness of the 70s. I really don't care to change the politics of the men I sleep with. Really. No need to go through the motions and pretend I haven't heard it all before. Are you courteous and have some honor? Aren't going to light me on fire or cut out my clit? Great. Turn out the lights. Shhhhh....

Frak. Can I go live on a different planet? I'm so over this one. It's not like I'm going to see a USA lady president in my lifetime anyway.

I have to go suck my thumb now and live in my happy fantasy world where women over 22 get to change the world. With their pants on. Bye.


* Read or see every political thriller story created since Watergate

Progress

Working on the new website, taxes, and applied to Cannes today. Fun!

Male instinct at work

There's an awesome article in this week's People (the one with Drew Barrymore on the cover) about a male cat named Cwtch who's turned into a klepto since his owners had a baby. His way of providing and protecting for the little tyke is to swipe plushies from the neighbors and present them to the baby. All in all, he's hunted nine. And he looks so proud! Little puffed up cat chest.

Pretty freaking cool. In an environment that encourages honor and the best in them (ie NOT Los Angeles), men are so freaking rad. Even the feline kind.

Effing lunacy

Okay, just hung up from chatting with my gay dear friend, few olders than me, who's so done with LA men who won't date anyone their own age. He's finding the same thing on Match and other sites, which is guys whose age range is three years younger than themselves to twenty years younger. As he says, "big red flag. It just means they're not interested in an equitable, healthy, real relationship." Exactly my point. Ewwwwww!!!! I don't want to date daddys who want to control me or sons who want me to raise tehm, and that leaves me with this wasteland of men in their 30s who truly only want a booty call with an 18 year old who could be their daughter. Sigh. And ick!

God I miss New York men. New York men, New York men...I could sing you a little ditty about how wonderful they are...

Effing awesome

Okay, I've watched Millionaire Matchmaker. Not for the reasons you think.

I actually started watching because I had a bizarre experience with one of the millionaires asking me out last fall in an innappropriate way that gave me major oogies, and so that hooked me into what I considered a trainwreck of a show. Just the worst qualities in both sexes meeting and mating. Greed vs. lust. Uck.

But then....the season finale was spectacular! A bachelor actually looking for love and marriage. Who listens to Patty the matchmaker instead of his groin, and picks the grounded intellectual close to his age with a masters degree instead of the cheerleader in college whose contribution to the conversation is that she likes to wear stud earrings with cute animals on them (I shit you not).

It's great to watch this couple get along. They align on four qualities I've only found in a couple men in my lifetime: intellectual, emotional, phsyical and emotionl butterflies. Bliss!

(I would actually add character to that, and I think character takes more than a night to judge...you have to have a string of actions to analyze).

And at the end of the first chaste date, after calling her mother and grandmother, he proposes to her.

Siiiiiiiiiigh. Love at first sight. I so believe in this. Anyway, great episode. Check it out if you're a romantic looking for the real deal.

It's from me and Jack

Loved Darjeeling Limited. And what a great opening. Aren't men gods' gift to women? They were so dear and heartbreaking in this film. When the three of them are in the train smelling the Voltaire perfume "that's her." I got all weepy. Men are so wonderful.

I don't understand people who don't understand Wes Anderson movies. Particularly The Life Aquatic.

I'm so bored already, and I've already done all my favorite tricks...eat, nap, watch movie, look online...

So don't want to shower. Way too much work. Which means I'm going to drop off the movies and Blockbuster boy will be there, and I'm going to avoid him because nobody can love me dirty. My life is so painfully predictable and average. Why aren't I on a train in India? My life would rock if I were a man...

General update

Enjoying my cleaner home, and my Chinese food leftovers. Mmmmn.

First Match guy I sent my phone number to wanted to have phone sex. Here's hoping the next five are serious gentleman.

Have you seen the photo of Shia?

Blockbuster dude wasn't working yesterday either. What the hell? Turned off 30 Days of Night, freaking loved Right at Your Door, and am about to embark on The Darjeeling Limited.

I've had incredibly itchy palms, which in my family means money is coming.

Learned to make sure if I screen the movie for someone to make sure to show them the whole thing. Really important.

Setting up screenings for all the bands we're featuring in the film. Love the soundtrack!

Keep checking the price on this beautiful silk chemise online at Saks. I'm lounging around in a satin one right now, and boy would I like to upgrade to this silk one. Yum.

Avoiding showering and taxes. Not going to spontaneously go to SXSW. Am spontaneously going to nap in my luxurious hotel-like bed. All weekend. Maybe with Blockbuster boy if I can find him? Men are so elusive...

That's me, for now.

When it rains...

Finished "The Commune" Monday and turned it into our first big festival.

Cleaned my apartment AND got laid well Tuesday.

Today contacted back six local men from Match who all want to take me on real dates.

Game on! No more hiding. Here I am, boys.

Watch October Road tonight!

Support our actor friend Rebecca Field and this feisty, scrappy show! It's worth your time, and they need your body count to stay on the air.

Last week's SNL

...with Tina Fey was pretty great. Worth watching on nbc.com

It's a good life, cont.

Last night we screened "The Commune" for two of my other favorite men, Charles and Charlie (in no particular order). Charlie (don't miss his blog's quote log) was in the movie but hadn't seen a cut, and poor Charles (who inadvisably let me corrupt his 7-year-old in the film) hadn't seen it since giving valued feedback on Version 2 (We're now at 10). What a fun, glowing night! Success!

Got to meet fellow blogger/filmmaker/wit Eric Escobar today. Fantastic lunch at a blink-and-you're-in-Paris cafe. Jealous of their mussels recipe; absolutely divine. Mind-blowing when dipping french bread into it. And the cheese plate! (And yes, I continue to have awesome skills at finding real life friends via blogging. You people always rule as much as your Matrix avatars).

Then came to my second home, editor Todd Miro's, where his long suffering wife Jeanine graciously put up with me staying yet another night as we finish "The Commune" in time for the LA Film Festival deadline. So far I've managed to crash his b-day, her b-day, their anniversary, and Valentine's Day...and they're still together!!! It's true love if you're still putting up with your hubby after that level of inconsideration from me. Urgh. Can't wait to surprise them Christmas Eve. I should show up on their doorstep with two suitcases, "Honies, I'm home!"

Tonight's rolicking Saturday night was Jeanine in bed at 10 pm exhausted from their two firecracker boys and a full work week, and Todd and me MST3king to "It's Alive", and watching "The Matrix" and dreaming of storyboarding "Pistoleras." So pretty much the only thing different about this Saturday night from any other is I didn't look like a crazy person talking to myself, and I got to have more of the delish petite syrah Charlie left us.

Raaaaaaad

Gotta gets me a unicorn. Is that redundant if I am a unicorn?

Great googly moogly

Soooo...I should be enjoying my new cheap laptop. Blissful and happy right? Especially since I was tired of everyone making fun of the way my old laptop regularly let out a bantha scream and shut down every 12 minutes.

But no...EFfing Vista. I can't find anything, nothing works the way it used to, it came preloaded with garbage that takes up 40 gigs of my harddrive...that's all the room I had on my old laptop, and I functioned just fine on it for three years! And I still haven't figured out why it won't let me on the internet, so now I have to have both computers set up all the time...

Oh, and the piracy prevention tools? They let you go ahead and use the software, then have it shut down and kick you out when you try to save.

Awesome.

Can I wake up and have it be early 2007 again when I could effectively work on a computer? Please? Twilight Zone gods? I've got shit to do...

And you mac users, stop snickering. I bought that computer for 800 US dollars. That wouldn't have even gotten me Photoshop in Mac world. Must be nice to be rich.

Fucking Ben Affleck

I'm enjoying this all way too much. What a great couple...all four of them!

Soooo cute

I'm staying at my best friend's house in San Jose while we do sound in Emmeryville, and she's six months pregnant with her first child. A daughter. Name has changed a few times, so no working title right now. Anyway, she is so cute...all morning she's been going through boxes nesting, totally single focused...I want to hire her to come do my house!

And no, I have no biological urges to have a baby watching her. I'm a total freak of nature. But I'm stoked to be an aunt again!

Here's the rub

LA industry is sooooo incestuous that every guy I know works in the film industry and wants to keep our relationship either a friendship or a real boyfriend/girlfriend thing because they want to work with me in the future and they get how hard it is for women to emotionally disconnect and have just casual sex. Being respected and adored and expected to succeed by my male friends is very flattering...and can be a bitch.

Just got back from an ADR session with Dave and Chauntal, followed by me going to Blockbuster to hit on the witty flirty check out guy. He wasn't working. And the hot guy in the parking lot whose eyes bugged out when he saw me drove off too fast for me to ask him out. Damn, you menfolk keep missing out! Seriously, if you see a woman who looks like a coked-up Jessica Rabbit wandering around LA staring at men's crotches this afternoon, you MIGHT want to take your lunch break and take her home right now...she really needs you to be good to her...

Guh!

Got shot down on 2 different booty calls last night (still haven't picked a boyfriend, so trying to play it safe emotionally). The 24 year old didn't respond, and the hot smart one I almost dated in January (who stood me up for our first date - twice) was busy with taxes and putting his kid to bed and was really worried we'd end up hurting each other emotionally. Probably true. I just couldn't have cared less. Just wanted to hook my leg around his shoulder.

Ack ack ack.

I leave at 2 pm to go back up north into sound and color correction sessions all week, and I'm a walking mess. I don't know how you guys got anything done in your early 20s. Life is the pits when you actually NEED sex and can't get it.

I can't concentrate at all, and if someone said "boo" to me right now, I'd jump ten feet like a cartoon character. Can you actually see me vibrating with nerves and anxiety over the web? I bet you can. Only the most important week of my life and I'm fucked now in the wrong way...

Oh, and Captain Awesome/Mr. Tumnus?

Got up the balls to call him this weekend in San Diego. His phone is disconnected.

You missed seeing me sob the way I did when I mom died.

Magic!

Today is the three year anniversary of my blog, and the day I'm hitting 100,000 hits.

Thanks all for your friendship and ears. I've appreciated being heard.

And I still miss mom.

Tell me what you don't like about yourself

There hasn't been one episode of fifth season Nip/Tuck I haven't wanted to blog after, but I've refrained as I only know writers who are watching it.

There's a really good reason for this.

I often get asked if I can still enjoy film and tv now that I know storytelling structure too well...I've seen behind Oz's curtain...

And often, the answer is no. Not because I can't be swept away still, but because what I see the most often is LAZY WRITING.

Lazy. Writing.

Boring. Trope-filled. Hackneyed. Cloying. Third draft. Obvious. Predictable. Cliche-filled choices. Agenda-pushing. Not-aware/responsible-for-writer's-own-prejudices. Lazy. Writing.

Look. A good film script takes a minimum of a year to write. A "good" one. Because it takes THAT many drafts to fix the above issues. Pistoleras is a great, award-winning script. That I spent two years and 16 drafts and two live readings on.

Writing is rewriting. Not regurgitation, not therapy, not picking the easy way out. And throw in a deep, abiding curiousity for the philosophical whys of human nature. There's a small number of people who have these skills and interests, and a large number of people calling themselves screenwriters.

It's particularly hard to find great TV writing because of the time crunch involved in creating TV. But in the last decade with the advent of auteur-led shows with less episodes... you know my feelings about some of the greatest works of art showing up on cable. FX in particular has championed audacious, balls to the wall artists.

So....

Nip/Tuck.

Poor, misunderstood, red-headed step child Nip/Tuck.

I get that you don't get it. That you think it's too much. Trashy. Just trying to be shocking for shock's sake. Crude. Focused on superficialty. They've even joked about it in their series tagline: The deeply superficial series returns.

No.

It's not true. That's an embarrassingly supereficial reading of what's at play here.

The level of craft that goes into this show astounds me every week. The interest and compassion in unlikeable human behavior. And what they've built into their mythology...

I firmly believe it's a show by writers for writers, and I am grateful for it.

Doubtful that Dirt and The Riches and Breaking Bad would exist without our McNamara/Troy antiheroes charging the way.

I have never seen an episode where showrunner Ryan Murphy and particularly writer/producer Jennifer Salt didn't take a plotline to the negation of the negation. I won't bore you explaining that Robert McKee technique here, but trust me, almost no one is brave and skilled enough to do it. And they have done it every episode for five edgy seasons.

Five seasons of surprising me in every episode. I always guffaw. I always drop my jaw in horror. Nod my head. Even the "bad" episodes. Smile at a universal truth about humans. Reversal after reversal, never the easy uneducated choice. Brilliant.

So here's the deal.

I don't care that you don't know the characters or their intricate backstories. If you have even a cursory interest in storytelling, watch this week's episode. It's the season finale called "Candy Richards", named for the great guest star character Jennifer Coolidge plays. Oh yeah. Watch it for the astonishing world-class acting, directing and editing, too.

It's an astounding work of art. Go bask in it, on whatever level you can find enjoyment. Please? For me? Because I love it and you so?



"Engrossing and utterly fearless..." - USA Today

Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Won best series Golden Globe in 2005.
WGA nomination 2006 for Jennifer Salt for episode "Rhea Reynolds".

"Big -- reveling in the excessive and grandiose...It's the most watched scripted show in basic cable of all time." - Variety

Love at first sight?

Hey, how many of you out there believe in LAFS? I actually do, and have some theories behind it.

Now mind you, I also believe LAFS may totally be caused by instantly recognizing someone who has all the bad patterns and button pusher issues you're working on, which is why many psychologists kindly suggest running away screaming from LAFS and dating someone you're NOT attracted to...

Okay, here's the mulling I've been doing the last few weeks. There was this fantastic "House" episode about a Hassidic Jew who married his wife the day he met her. And one of his amazingly thoughtful defenses of the practicality of this tradition was asking the short bald doctor (sorry can't remember his name!) if he loved his wife, and the response was essentially "as much as the day I met her" followed by his look of shock and conceding that HJ just won the argument. Because that is the way we speak about love in our culture. Not about it growing, but if we're lucky enough to maintain it at that fresh intense level of the first day.

Does this make sense? I wish I was just speaking this instead of typing...

So anyway, then I started thinking about all the great friends I've had in my life. And male or female, I almost without exception knew the day that I met them. Same thing. Just that big ch-chunk thunk Law and order noise of a puzzle piece falling into place. Instant comfort, instant kin. If anything, as I've gotten older I've become even more adept at recognizing my soulmates, no matter what the relationship. So why wouldn't it be the same for a sexual partner?

Hmmmmn...more to chew on this weekend while I'm at an exciting conference in San Diego learning about men's relationship to sex and love.

First time I've been in San Diego since Captain Awesome eviscerated my heart in July...wow I've come a long way since then in knowing who I am and what I want and what behavior is unacceptable to me and in astronomically loving men more in general. Even so, hard not to think of Mr. Tumnus with the kind eyes and mad kissing skills and what it would be like if he kissed me elsewhere. I'd probably black out.

I think I'm going to hide my cell phone so I don't call him, and spend the weekend flirting with other San Diego men. See what comes of that. Perhaps San Diego is on some kind of leigh line of soulmates for me, and I'll effortlessly hone in on one who's ready to see me for a SECOND date...

Heads up!

If you saw The Police on tour last year, odds are good you were forced to buy a Police membership for $100...and agreed to an "evergreen" contract that automatically renews that $100 membership on the same credit card used to purchase the tickets UNLESS you go before it's too late and cancel your membership at thepolice.com

God dammit

The incessant helicopters have started.

Oscar week is a war zone in Hollywood, and I am a huuuuge anti-noise pollution person. Drives me nuttier than usual.

Only five more days to live through...

J'accuse

AOL, of all places, calls foul on the double standard of female vs. male partying portrayals. Hmmmmn. And obviously, yes.

Der.

My bigger interest is in what agenda it's serving the Murdoch-owned, porno-owning AOL conglomerate to bring up media sexism as a news topic....what are they up to exactly? Murdoch is one of the biggest proponents of the schizm between the sexes...so why is big brother lulling us to sleep on this..."Don't worry kids, we've noticed you've noticed, now drink your Kool Aid and take a nap while the adults handle the problem..."

I feel an ugly checkmate coming on...

UPDATE: ha haaaa...whoa, not AOL. New York Times article. Ah so.

Now I'm wondering what feisty content picker at AOL is being fired at this moment for slipping it through...

Where's Marion?

She's aged better than all y'all anyway. Give a dame some credit.

Come on guys. Didn't need 3 hot shots of Cate. We want to see the female archetype we loved.

Join me!

Take the 21 day challenge! I'm wearing my Pistoleras bracelet instead.