that was one lonely night

Sigh. Today started off good, almost ended wonderfully, and instead ended on a sad note. I woke up and worked for a couple of hours, fueled by some strong, smoky Russian tea, before proceeding to Palo Alto to have a late lunch with my friend Mahin at my beloved Joanie's Cafe. She and I worked at my former employer together, and now she's living in LA and pursuing film school + still working part time for our employer, but she was back up here for winter break. She seemed to be in fine form, and it was great to catch up and 'talk shop', as it were, about the creative life and what's been going on with our respective artistic endeavors.

Post-Mahin, the rest of my afternoon was sort of a fail; the errands that I intended to run all fell through, due to some miscommunications/government holidays/insane crowds at Target. So I got home around 4:30 a little surly and attempted to write for an hour, which made me surlier because I'm struggling with a scene I'm stuck on and couldn't unstick myself.

And then it was time to watch the Fiesta Bowl. Terry made chili and I made us two Hemingway daiquiris, which was all quite wonderful. The game was great, too; I kept saying that I just wanted it to be a good game, but I guess I should have specified that I also wanted Stanford to win. Unfortunately, it came down to my nightmare scenario, which is when a game is lost on a kick (or two, in this case, even worse) -- I hate when one kid walks off the field feeling absolutely certain that he could have made all the difference and instead cost his team everything. Ugh. However, it really was a fantastic game and hopefully shut up all the haters who thought Andrew Luck was a mediocre quarterback who had been overhyped, so at least there was that.

After the game was over, I spent an hour mourning and exchanging post-game commentary with family and friends on a variety of social media outlets -- including [censored], who went to grad school at Oklahoma State (I probably should have censored [censored]'s alma mater as well, but that would just be too confusing). Then I crawled into bed with the new pencils that [censored] gave me for Christmas and finally, finally figured out what was wrong with this stupid scene and how to fix it. Now that I have a roadmap, I anticipate that tomorrow morning's writing will go much more smoothly.

And so now I'm going to bed; I must write for hours tomorrow, and so my teapot is set up to brew me some more strong, dark, dangerous-tasting Russian tea so that I'm encouraged to get my ass out of bed before it gets cold. Goodnight!