i know she said it's alright, but you can make it up next time

My mind is blown.

There's really no use in describing most of my day; it was just a bunch of work, which I showed up five minutes late to with dripping wet hair. I did have a v. overdue lunch with Sarah and Joann at In-n-Out, since Sarah is in town from Japan for the week, but the rest of it was a boring slog. Then, I left at five and rewrote two scenes (yay me) before meeting up for dinner and a movie with John and Jess.

We had dinner in Sunnyvale at a v. good Mexican restaurant, and I got to see their new place (which is quite lovely). Then, we hightailed it to the theatre, and got there just in time to see "Inception", which I have wanted to see for several weeks and finally had the excuse to check out. And, as a result, my mind is blown.

I won't give any spoilers here, since I'm sure some of you haven't seen it -- but it was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. It was so good, in fact, that it forced me to stop analyzing it somewhere around the midpoint. One of the perils of my insane focus on storytelling is that it's hard for me to *enjoy* stories purely; I tend to either consciously or unconsciously pay too much attention to the way things are structured, how characters are developed, what types of scenes are included, how the vision is laid out, etc. And at first, I was ticking off the types of scenes I was seeing -- laying out the 'normal world', the invitation to the special world, locating a mentor, assembling the team, training sequences, point of no return, etc. And now, even though I can retroactively identify the points where the characters kicked into obsessive drive, or experienced dark nights of the soul, or whatever, I had stopped thinking in analytical terms long before I got to those points.

Somewhere around the point where they got on the plane, I stopped caring about the mechanics of the story and just *felt* it. And the actors were good enough to really sell it to me. If I could get a fraction of the emotion and perilous stakes of the climax into my own work, I would be a v. happy camper.

I may have to go back again and watch it with a notebook in hand -- but for tonight, I just want to dream about it again. I came home and immediately got a smashingly violent headache, though, so we'll see whether my dreams are vibrant or bleak. But now, I must sleep; I must finish editing sequence two tomorrow before packing for LA, so I need to get a lot done. Goodnight!

Daily word count: -411 (-20.55% of goal - the price of editing is that I cut stuff)
Productive time: 1hr
RescueTime productivity rating: 0.25 (global average: 0.34)