Misc.

November 16th, 2004 Posted in Blog Posts

On Productivity

I seem to have hit upon the secret of productivity: cold, cold temperatures. I recently came across the thermostat in the condo I share with a roommate and discovered that the heat had been turned off. I set it so that if the temperature dropped below 68 degrees, hot blasts of steamy air would billow from ducts until the place was once again toasty.

LA, it turns out, is built in a desert and, like a desert, gets really hot during the day and freezing at night. For the last three or four weeks, I’ve taken to waking up at 5:00 or 6:00 am because of the chill. I’ll try to curl up into the comforters as best I can to warm up, then finally give up and run for the shower for the blessed, blessed warmth. Already up and showered, and facing the unpleasant thought of hanging around my chilly apartment for another few hours, I usually get dressed and go to work by 6:30 or 7:30, which, needless to say, is utter madness.

Having found the thermostat this weekend, I’ve since enjoyed two mornings of not having my room become a walk-in meat freezer around 3 am. Because of this, I’ve slept in a further three hours on both days, then laid in bed for another hour in drowsy, womb-like warmth before climbing out of bed for a leisurely masturbation session, then a shower and some TV before waltzing into work around 10:00 or 10:30, when everyone else at my office does. Now, at 12:30 in the afternoon, I’m already lazily sipping at a coffee and thinking about skipping out early.

The lesson from this should be clear: comfort is your enemy. But since all evidence seems to point to more temperate climates yielding less industry, then logically, the Northwest Territories should be responsible for every scientific and creative innovation since being colonized—and as far as I know, the Northwest Territories’ contribution to science has to date consisted of the snowball and the dead seal. Plus, let’s not forget that Captain America was frozen in an ice cap for fifty years before being discovered and thawed to fight international super-crime with the Avengers—and those fifty years of ice encasement mark, let’s be brutally honest, the least prolific of his career. So perhaps it’s not that warm temperatures make everyone less industrious, per se, so much as they make me less industrious. Or maybe it’s simply that I, unlike Captain America, am hot-blooded. Check it and see. I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three.

On Girls Mentioning Their Goddamn Boyfriends All the Time

I was chatting to a friend who’s been hanging out with a girl who constantly brings up her boyfriend. I’d been through this whole “hanging out with the girl who can’t stop jawing about her damn boyfriend” situation and offered my sympathy. Unless her boyfriend is off signing Declarations of Independence or colonizing Mars, his day-to-day actions simply don’t merit the constant updates to me, the frankly disinterested third party.

Don’t these girls know the universal flirting code? Honestly: one mention and the point’s been made. Continuous mentions just comes off as gratuitous. Talking endlessly about a boyfriend is, when translated into flirt-code, literally like saying “You don’t have a chance You don’t have a chance You don’t have a chance” in non-stop succession—the verbal equivalent to some sort of water-powered windmill groin-kicking machine. I suggested he parry with some flirt-code of his own to level the playing field again, saying things like “I value our friendship too much too ever jeopardize it,” which to the best of my knowledge translates directly to “You’re not nearly attractive enough to have sex with.”

On Los Angeles

Many have asked about my continued silence about LA. Do I like it there? Am I having fun? Empirically speaking, do I wish they all could be California girls? Respectively: yeah; yes; and most definitely. LA’s fine, the job’s infuriating but fun, and the ladies are of sufficient grade-A standard to make me wish the world could, indeed, be composed entirely of girls of the California persuasion.

There does seem to be a downside to all the luscious, sun-dappled T & A, however. The daily immigration of North America’s hottest ladies to Hollywood has made the gene pool perfect to the point where I keep waiting for the moment where, like in a Michael Chrichton novel, it all goes wrong, and we’re forced to pay for our genetic hubris with rampaging supermodels in a theme park reduced to a frantic game of suvival.

Either way, my proximity to the UCLA campus has allowed me to get a few phone numbers. However, the hottie-to-norm ratio here means, I suspect, that I’d better get used to hearing “I value our friendship too much too ever jeopardize it.”

Work’s fine, if frustrating creatively. I don’t really even need to go into any detail to explain why—I’ll simply say that every Hollywood cliche you ever heard about backstabbing, career climbing and allergies to original concepts are all true. I’m desperately trying to cling to my sense of fair play, being polite, treating others as you would have them treat you and being honest in a city where everyone sees these qualities as quaint weaknesses of a bygone era.

On Looking Back

I recently decided to do a retrospective on some of my obituaries over the years, and went trawling through a Yahoo group I used to post at with about fifteen other friends. From 2000 to 2003 there was on average 20-60 posts a day. Most of these guys I knew through comedy connections, and in looking through it last night, I couldn’t help but think: “What a waste.” There are something like 12,000 posts on it now—no way to export or save them for posterity, of couse. And it’s funny—people posting bits, images, article, essays and scripts, constantly, throughout the days and weeks. And the only people reading it were each other. Most of it now, sadly, is unusable, as so much of it was spoofing contemporary events or needed the context of what was being discussed. A while ago I picked through it and pulled out some posts of mine that I later sold as articles—poking through it now, I still haven’t touched the surface. One of these days, years from now when I completely run out of ideas, I’m going to dive into it and drain that pool dry.

On How You’re Doing

Well, enough about me. How’s you doin’?