Observation 11/29

Homes are good. And, contrary to popular belief, you're allowed to have more than one. But the homeist home of all is the home where you laugh, a lot, loudly, and with people who make you feel like you're home without ever saying any silly words to that effect.

Observation 11/23

Small moments and little memories bring the most disparate groups of people together.

A 1990s game show that revolved around people running around a grocery store can help you re-bond with people you haven't talked to in years.

Observation 11/22

Sometimes knowing a different language (or some of a different language) makes working in your mother tongue slightly frustrating when those two languages cross over. The word "pays" is obviously a verb concerning money in English, but in French it is the word for "country."

So, caught up in the middle of composing something, and having your eye fall on that word, and confusing yourself for a good three minutes and being incapable of thinking of the word as anything but the French form, is frustrating. And odd. But exciting nonetheless, that for once you are identifying first with another language before the one you've known all your life.

Observation 11/17

Hemingway was overrated. And forcing someone to write in his style--or anyone's style, for that matter--is an insult to all involved parties.

Observation 11/15

I wonder if cat ladies (I mean the truly crazy ones) ever feel lonely.

Observation 11/14

Too often enough, people criticize Christmas for being too commercialized, saying it takes away from the real meaning. But honestly, is there any harm in the pure, sincere, ecstatic joy that comes from putting up decorations or listening to the season's music? If that's commercialization, sign me up.

Observation 11/13

Sometimes, we hide the most from the people we love the dearest. Maybe it's because we know they care. Maybe we're afraid to admit it aloud at all. Maybe we don't want to burden them with more. Maybe we're frustrated because we feel that if we're hiding something from them, they're hiding something from us, and while we know we want to know their troubles and help them because we love them, we can't ever know for sure if they want to know our troubles and help us.

In the end, we keep ourselves covered in our layers, carefully shielding our deepest secrets even when we wish we could take it all off and expose ourselves to those we love, in the faint hope that they could just hug us and make it all go away for the length of that hug.

But if there is a rare moment where we shrug off a bit of our protective shell and let someone in, even just for a moment, that's where we find our deepest friendships.

Observation 11/7

Modern computer animation is astonishing. Places and items and even animals can be re-created with such stunning accuracy and breath of realism that they can be confused with a live action version of themselves.

Yet no matter how perfectly rendered, there is something about a human being that makes him (at least thus far) impossible to craft without a real human spirit behind him. All the code and programming in the world cannot quite recreate the essential humanness that lies within even the worst actor in the world.

Observation 11/1

I love characters. Creating them gives my overactive imagination something to do. And unlike plot (existentialist literature aside), they never have to make sense. After all, real people don't make any sense: we're all so much more than the sum of our parts, after all, and it's tremendously exciting to put a physical description with a favorite hobby and a facial expression and a reaction to a moment or a person and an intonation on a line of dialogue and see what person explodes out of that little list and comes to life.