The View Up Here

The impact of this week's immense losses to pop culture and media gluttony has yet to be revealed. I am especially saddened by Farrah's untimely passing. As girls, my best friend and I would play "Charlie's Angels," and Farrah was beyond any level of our imagined attainment. When other blonde TV actresses in the 60s-70s-80s were playing the ditzy bimbo (Suzanne Sommers, Goldie Hawn - don't get me wrong I love Goldie but c'mon), Farrah quit "Charlie's Angels" and did "The Burning Bed." Her fight, her spirit, her work are to be commended. Michael Jackson. King of Pop. Pedophile. I'm sick of the glorification of his personal life. The man was mentally ill and could've used some help while he was alive. Let's hope and pray someone helps his three kids. Ed McMahon was a class act on the Tonight Show, though I have no idea of the man as a human being. He left late night a legacy every bit as much as Johnny did. As a Buddhis...

My plans to teach this summer have been thwarted. I was prepped and ready to go on an English 100 class at the nearby community college, and I showed up on my first day of class to find an empty classroom. Moments later, the Dean walked in and apologized profusely that there were no students enrolled, therefore the class was canceled. This was to be a "run off" class that would have been filled with students from Eng. 101 who needed more developmental writing work. However, those students were not required to take 100, only recommended to, and as it so happens none of them wanted to. Firstly, as for my inconvenience, the Dean was very gracious and offered me half-pay for my time and trouble. I appreciate him and genuinely like him, so no hard feelings. But, as for the students, I think the college is doing them a great disservice by not requiring them to take Eng. 100 per their instructors' assessment. Those students are non-native speakers of English, as it so happe...

Resurfacing. The lake is green today. Now I'm remembering how it makes me feel. To connect To feel the waves touching sky and earth. Wind making energy making waves traveling growing faster powerful creating motion creating sound against itself, rocks, sand, boats, swimmers, life. Sun and water ions Together again. Wind keeping things real.

I just spent a glorious six days devoted to my writing at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts artist colony . I completed a final draft of "Beauty Is..." (see log line below*). Also worked on the sci fi screenplay that is just about done, and started in earnest writing a TV pilot. Other than that, I went for walks in the woods, hung out with turkey vultures and deer, and did Yoga. Now it's back to the semester's work: grading mid-term portfolios. Here's to life! Beauty Is... In a small Connecticut town in 1953, a 16-year-old tomboy is forced to go to “finishing school” for the summer, where she encounters a mysterious club of feminine vigilantes who frame her mother for stealing the town’s precious historical silver. This summer, she must stop the vigilantes, clear her mother’s name, and learn how to walk in heels. * Registered with WGA 2008

According to this article on english.chosun.com, Korean kids don't get enough sleep. The final paragraph is of special interest: The research team said, "We found that the more hours the children spend at private cramming institutes, the less satisfied they and their parents are with their performance; and the more obese the children are, the fewer hours they sleep." "Special attention is needed, because sleep deprivation has negative effects such as diseases, psychological instability, poor performance, and stunted growth," it warned.

I'm excited to start 2009 with a TV spec script that I developed over the last month. I'll have a few days at the Constance Saltontall Foundation for the Arts colony in a couple weeks to get started on that script. I also plan to finish a solid first draft of "Beauty Is..." my coming-of-age mystery set in 1953. I'm stoked to be teaching 2 sections of Advanced Screenwriting at Ithaca College, and one section of Short Narrative Fiction (screenwriting) at Tompkins Cortland Community College. I'm hoping this will the beginning of a fruitful relationship with TC3 as they grow their screenwriting program. I have relocated my home office into a much more suitable space for yours truly, leaving my husband with the spare room for his office. It's much warmer out here, for one thing, and the chi just seems to be more conducive to my creative dedication. Recently, I reconnected with one of my college roommates, who lives not so far from Ithaca. She told me the othe...

When I was in grammar school (yes, back when it was called grammar school), we had dedicated class time for doing SRAs. The SRA was a student-directed reading skills-building system. The cards were color coded for difficulty level, and every activity involved a reading with vocabulary, comprehension and other questions. I LOVED the SRAs and was quite competitive with them. These days I don't do much with SRAs, but I still read quite a bit. Here's my current list: The Gathering , Anne Enright The Six Perfections (a Buddhist text), commentary by Geshe Sonam Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam. Romance and the "Yellow Peril," Gina Marchetti On-and-off/as-needed: Chinese Medicine for Women , Bronwyn Whitlocke