Monthly Archives: September 2007

I’ve taken a real step back over the last week or so, not so much physically (thank goodness), but mentally.

I’m all too aware that moods change on a regular basis and that it’s more than possible to be up one minute and down the next – that changes in the tone of life are rarely long-held and that normality will be restored with time.  But right now things just seem more difficult than they have been for a while.

I’m not entirely sure what kicked it off, although I suspect it was accelerated last Monday when I didn’t go to the cinema.  It seems like a strange non-event to become a catalyst for a wave of negativity, but it seems to have encapsulated a lot of hang-ups all in one go.

I was supposed to be going to see a flick I’ve wanted to see for a while with a friend of mine who had the week off, who then had to cancel as he’d promised himself to another mate for his birthday all day and couldn’t swing the time for the movie.  It wouldn’t have been much of an issue in the past, I’d have just gone along on my own.  But I realised that I had neither the strength nor the confidence to face going to the cinema by myself any more.

From there, things descended down what I suppose is a fairly inevitable path of reassessment of what’s going on in my life and unpleasant realities creeping into my consciousness again.

All of a sudden my inner-eye has switched focus from what I am still able to do with myself from day-to-day to what is now beyond me.  All I seem to be able to focus on is what I can’t do rather than what I can.  And there’s a lot more things that I’m unable to do than things I can still do.

Everyone has these periodic reassessments of life – where you find yourself taking stock of where you are and how it compares to last year, how it compares to where you thought you’d be, how it compares to where you want to be.  And everyone inevitably faces battles against what they expected and what they find – it’s the way life works that we almost never find ourselves in precisely the position we would like to be in.

Still, I can’t seem to shake the dark cloud that’s descended on me again, dragging everything around me into a mire of misinterpretation and moping.  I don’t like this me, I don’t like being so downbeat about everything and struggling to appreciate all of the wonderful things I’ve got in my life.  But try as I might, I can’t see the light through the dense forest of overwhelming bleakness.

Even the simple joys of spending time with K’s nieces and nephews has been taken away this week as they’re all coming through the early-autumn cough and cold season.

I’m trying so hard not to let myself get beaten down by the hard stuff and to enjoy the good stuff that’s still around but I just feel so bitter and resentful and angry with the world sometimes, but I’ve got no outlet for it.  I don’t have the energy to shout and rant and rave and let it all out.  I don’t have the energy to take myself off for a cathartic drive around the back roads like I used to.  I don’t have the energy or the inclination to do anything to help myself out of my funk and it makes me even more angry – with myself and with my situation.

It’s a vicious circle and I know that I’m helping to perpetuate it by allowing myself to wallow in my unhappiness.  I just don’t know how to take myself out of it at the moment – I can’t see the proverbial wood for the trees and I can’t remember what cleared my head of this fog last time.

The one hope I do cling to is that I know I’ve been here before – I know I’ve felt this bleak, dark blackness and I know it’s gone away, so I know it’s beatable.  I just can’t remember how.  And I hope like hell I’ll find the trump card soon.

PS – I’ve mixed so many metaphors here you could make a cake, so I apologise.  It’s not the kind of post I feel like re-reading to spell-check or clean up, though, so we’ll just have to live with it.

Hurrah!  I finished the first cut of the Live Life Then Give Life ad last night and I’m really pleased with it.

Ironically, after spending a couple of weeks picking and piecing things together (on and off), the actual picture edit didn’t take me that long, once I’d got to grips with the tools.  What actually took the time was the 15 seconds of titles at the end, which required 3 separate, fully-rendered images created in a separate program and imported into the editing software.

You always know you’re in trouble with a piece of software when you open it’s electronic user manual (it’s another one of those which doesn’t come with a hard-copy version as it would, presumably, take up a whole book shelf) and it says,

“Because LiveType is a creative tool, documentation can only go so far in describing its
potential…In the end, you are limited only by our own creative vision, and the way to push the limits of LiveType is to jump in and start creating”

Or, to paraphrase in more precise language: we’ll tell you what the buttons do, but then you’re on your own.

And in case no one reading this blog has noted it in the past – I’m not very good at being on my own…

Still, soldier on I did and churn out something fairly brilliantly acceptable I did, too, if I do say so myself.

Seriously, I’m actually really happy with this as a first cut and I’m keen to show it to the rest of the gang at Live Life Then Give Life to see what they make of it.  Once I’ve got their feedback, I’ll have to pull my socks up and launch myself into another cut of it, no doubt killing some of my creative babies on the way, but such is the world of film – it doesn’t pay to be precious.

I’ve taken a bit of a leap in second-guessing people’s level of understanding and how quickly they’ll marry the intentions and the images, so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it works of if I, having been so close to the material for so long, have made some major assumptions which stretch things too far.

We’ll wait and see and I’ll report back, no doubt.  Watch this space.

I’ve spent most of my day today sat in front of my shiney mac edit suite working on cutting together a pilot ad for Live Life Then Give Life.  I’ve been working on it, on and off like most things, for the last few months and we finally got all the footage in the can last week, with thanks to the wonderful Rheya who shot all the video for me.

This is the first time I’ve used my Final Cut Pro system to edit anything with a purpose, beyond toying around with it.  And boy, is it a steep learning curve.

The whole thing comes with bundles of documentation to go with it, ostensibly a guide-book, but it’s the kind of program where reading the book actually doesn’t do a whole lot to help you get to know the software – the only way to learn it is to just throw yourself into it and see what happens.

Patient as I am with technology(…), it’s managed to make even my cool-headed, even-tempered approach a little fraught at times.  It’s hardly surprising, though, since the whole edit suite is a package of 6 different programs, with an instruction manual 4 VOLUMES long – and that’s just for the video editing program.  All the other programs, like the soundtrack, titling and colouring software don’t have hard-copy manuals, only electronic copies within the software installation.

So I’ve been bumbling and fumbling my way through the most basic of practices, quickly establishing that everything I do has a) at least 3 other ways of achieving the same thing and b) they’re all quicker and easier than the one I tried first.

I’ve also discovered that a) I don’t know as much about this software as I thought I did at first and b) my brain isn’t big enough to learn all the things I need to learn in a single day just to keep up with the pace of the work I’m trying to do.

Similarly, it has emerged that a) everything in the instruction books is written into progressive lists of steps from A-X and b) it’s really hard to shake the habit of working through a whole day in list form.  And c) my brain is still at overload point.

Still, the ad is looking pretty good.  I had a bit of a mad one this afternoon, when I frantically text a bundle of friends for suggestions as to what music track I could put underneath it, which yielded some interesting results – anyone else keen on hearing ANOTHER inspirational clip backed by M People’s Search for the Hero?  Didn’t think so.  Nor me.

My music knowledge is pitiful, so I always fall back on asking the people I know who know their music and they all came up trumps.  The annoying thing about it is that I know all of the tracks (or almost all of the tracks) that they came up with, it’s just that my brain doesn’t work musically, so none of them occurred to me.  It’s an interesting side-note, that: if anyone wanted to think of a film-clip or quotation to fit something, I’d be right there, but asked to find some music to fit something, my brain draws a blank.

Amusingly enough, I had been cutting the piece to Mika’s Grace Kelly as a temporary fill-in with the right mood, and as I was getting my replies in, I finally managed to make the piece work with Grace Kelly underneath it, so as it happens I may not have needed the musical SOS anyway.  Still, it’s nice to know I’ve got people who still reply to my text messages, I suppose…

Tomorrow I’m off to Oxford in the morning for a quick once-over (nothing dramatic, I hope) and I’m hoping I’m not too tired to get back on with things in the afternoon.  That said, I’m not sure my brain can take 2 straight days of new information – it might over-heat slightly.

Full to the brim with new software knowledge I’m off to a) grab myself a cuppa and b) take myself to bed, where c) I hope to stop thinking in lists.

As previously detailed in the hereabouts, I have a mild addiction to Studio 60. Not only that, pretty much all the drama on TV that really passes muster (read: gets on my Sky+ series link) can be found with an American accent on one of the 4 channels. (That’s not as in “one of four channels” because that’s just stupid: I have Sky and therefore a zillion channels, most of them pap. One of the 4 channels meaning Channel 4, E4, More4 or Another4*)

What this means, apart from the fact that I’m essentially paying my television licence fee in order to sit and watch dramas from the other side of the Atlantic whilst my money gets frittered away on 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of God-Awful Soap Operas, is that I spend most of my viewing time fast-forwarding between ComparetheMarket.com idents which would appear to crop up almost randomly within any given Channel 4 show.

I fully suspect that were I, in my late-afternoon stupor, to sit and watch an entire hour of Richard and Judy, I would find that they’ve replaced the You Say, We Steal Your Money feature with Same Car, Dramatic Difference.

It’s not even really the fact that by the time you’ve seen them for the 44,352nd time they get a bit repetitive, same-y and repetitive. It’s the arbitrary way in which they are shoe-horned into the programs that really gets my goat (if I had a goat).

I know it’s unfair to blame it on ComparetheMarket.com, but hey – we live in a world where it’s necessary for Blue Peter presenters to apologise for the mistakes made by THEIR BOSSES to the littl’uns who wouldn’t even understand what they’d done wrong if they had it explained to them Very. Slowly. Seriously – if you’re old enough to understand what they did wrong, you shouldn’t be watching Blue Peter by now anyway. Go put your hoodie on and sit on a street corner with the rest of the degenerate youth of today.

The timing of the ad breaks in Channel 4 dramas is so ridiculously out-of-place as to be almost comical. I say “almost” because despite it’s cosey up nicely to the mistress of mirth, I still find myself throwing objects at the screen every time they break the flow of a scene to blare 5 more minutes of capitalist propaganda (too far – sorry, go all high-horse Marxist in the middle of my rant there…). It’s getting worse, too. Last night it was the TV remote, which threatened serious damage. Tonight I damn near through K at it.

I KNOW the Americans have a very weird system of throwing ads in almost willy-nilly, but at least they do it at moments that feel right to the show – in fact, all shows on Network TV in America are written AROUND the ad breaks, they actually plan for them when they’re knocking out the scripts.

So why oh why oh why oh why and a few more why of whys can’t Channel 4 either ride shotgun with the Americans and surrender to their ad patterns or – at the very least – work the ads into a sensible spot in the drama.

I’ve lost count of the number of times an episode of Brothers and Sisters has stomped all over the emotional denouement of a scene to go to commercials mid-thought, when there is a fade-to-black which pops up within 2 minutes of the return of the break. Would it kill them to hold off on the ads for another 120 seconds? Would the regulators go bananas? Would their ad clients be raging on the phone? I’m going to guess not – if for no other reason than I chose to heap all of my scorn for the shoddy ad-break practices of Channel 4 Television onto ComparetheMarket.com who have the misfortune of having spend hudreds of thousands of pounds on a sponsorship package for shows which get ruined by arbitrary commercial breaks thrown in by editors with no sense of emotional beats or story arcs.

So come on, people, sort yourselves out. We clearly can’t all enjoy US TV series ad-less, like Heroes on BBC 2, but at the very least we can stop the ad breaks being quite so unflinchingly (or is that flinchingly?) annoying.

I’m starting the Campaign for Correct Placement of Ad Breaks (or, rather more niftily, I think, CFCPOAB) today – to run right alongside Save My Remote Control.

*May or may not be a real 4 channel.

I feel like I should be doing a great, big week-long catch up on here, but I don’t seem to have the impetus to go back over the whole of last week and work out what happened or didn’t.  I seem to remember largely feeling pretty knackered, thanks, no doubt, to the IV’s.

The good news is that they really did the trick and we got on top of the infection before it could develop properly.  My CRP at the start of the course was at 89, which had reduced to just 33 after 7 days, which is good going.  The extreme fighting going on is probably the major cause of the tiredness, too, alongside the drug doses.

I also feel like I should be entertaining you all with a blow-by-blow account of my troubles with Sky, but I think I’m so tired of all this malfunctioning technology and maladjusted people on the end of helplines that I can’t even bring myself to muster up a random thread of expletives to describe the situation.

The IV’s finished on Tuesday and I was up at Oxford yesterday for a quick post-IV once-over.  The best news of the 2 weeks (and recent past) is that my weight is now up to a rather impressive 54.4kg – the heaviest I’ve ever been.  I’m hoping that I can keep it on and keep adding to it even as I slowly start to reduce my steroids.   My lung function had improved greatly, too, back up to 0.8/1.3 after dipping down to 0.6/1.1.  It may not sound like much, but when you consider that’s a  25% drop in lung-function,  it goes to show why I may not have been feeling my best.

I have continued, on-and-off, to look at and sporadically work on new projects and a couple of old ones, although clearly a lack of internet access is a bit of a hindrance to most productivity.  Of course, being offline and having nothing else to use my computer for, you’d have expected, I guess, that I would make some significant progress on the screenplay.  Rather impressively, however, that’s not the case at all, and it’s sitting just as untouched today as it was when I lost the internet connection 10 days ago.

Only I could manage to ignore a chance to turn a technological disadvantage into an advantage – looking the mis-guided gift horse in the mouth, as it were.

There’s not much else to add, really – I suppose it’s been a bit of a boring week or so, or certainly that anything interesting that has happened seems far too long-winded for me to dredge back up right now.  I’m still tired.

Ho hum, let’s keep rolling along and see what tomorrow brings.  Sorry for being boring today.

This isn’t actually a proper post, but I do have my internet back (more on that tomorrow) and thought I’d point you here to a letter I had published in the Guardian Media Section today.  It’s not often I big myself up, but I’m really rather proud of this chappie.

Just a quick note to all the regular readers who may be getting a little antsy at the lack of updates.  Full story and update when I can get online properly.

All queries should be addressed in writing to Why Can’t Sky Sort Out My Smegging Broadband, The Stupid Annoying Lazy Bunch Of Muppets c/o Sky or seriouslyhowhardisittosendoutamodem@sky.com.

Emails and blog messages welcome, but I won’t read or reply to them until I a) get my broadband up and running or b) get back over to Mum and Dad’s to check the accounts again.

Current mood: flippin’ furious.  Current status: disconnected.  Current bun: yes, please.

Stay smiley. 

I’m in an advanced state of “how to deal with the dude at the window?”.

For reasons un-bloggable, the living room is currently out of bounds, so I’m holed-up, not unhappily, in the study, surfing the ‘net a little to catch up on some of my favourite, but not every-day sites.  Whilst I browse, the familiar clinking bang hits the wall and the half-creak, half-screech of a man climbing a ladder grows ever louder in my ear.

Sure enough, miliseconds later, armed with cloth and long wipey thing which has no discernable purpose beyond making it look like they’re actually doing something, a man appears at the window.

So now I’m stuck in that awkward zoo-like state of strangeness wherein you don’t know if it’s appropriate to turn and acknowledge him or just to ignore him.  You’re perfectly well aware that he’s there and he knows that you’re aware of it, too.  But where do you look once you’ve turned to look at him?

If you do acknowledge him, in what way and for how long?  Obviously, being in a first-floor flat, opening the window for a quick “how do you do?” isn’t going to be a warmly welcomed idea, and communicating through double glazing is hard enough when you can wave and shout and point at things, but given his donkey-on-a-pole status with buckets, chamois and wipeys everywhere seems a likely impossibility.

Is it rude to ignore someone who’s closer to you than it’s natural for one man to be to another if they’re not considering amourous relations or celebrating a sporting triumph?  Does the pane of clear sheeting between you justify the pretense of ignorance?

I figure that most people opt not to acknowledge their window cleaners if they have something sufficiently distracting to legitimately hold their attention away from the window (say, writing a blog or performing micro-surgery on a wasp unlucky enough to die slap-bang in the middle of the desk).  This conclusion leads me to believe that if I, being so occupied, were in fact to turn to acknowledge the presence of the ladderman, I would in fact so startle him as to risk his ability to maintain his balance and thus his position some 3 metres off the ground.  Not wishing him to become too prematurely re-aquainted with the earth, I decide on grounds of health and safety to ignore him completely and settle back, contented with my  caring and considered manner in dealing with the problem, into constructing my witticisms.

For some reason, though, I can’t escape the feeling that he’s just climbed down and moved on the next window whilst muttering to his mate, “That miserable git up there has nothing better to do than pull the wings off flies and yet he can’t even muster up a wave while I clean his bleedin’ windows.”

I’m in a very weird situation with my body at the moment.

On the one hand, it’s reeling from the effects of the infection and is suffering the usual IV hangover that comes with the first few days of pumping extremely high doses of pretty hard and powerful drugs into your system.  On the other hand it’s simultaneously feeling a huge surge of energy and general boost that comes from having large doses of steroids crammed in on top of everything.

It can’t decide whether to be super-tired or super-energised and it’s seemed to settle on some sort of manically-driven half-way house, where I feel like I can take on the world if only I could have a 10 minute cat nap first…

Still, the main thing is that whatever’s happening, it’s definitely doing the right thing.  Without a doubt I feel hugely better than I did earlier in the week, tiredness aside, and I know that if my appetite is returning (or back with a vengeance) – even if it is steroid-related – then I’m definitely on the mend.

I’ve never been particularly good at recognising (or acknowledging is a better term, I suppose) the signs of an on-coming infection, so I’m quite pleased not only that I picked up on it properly this time, but reacted in the right way by getting myself to Oxford as soon as I could and not just waiting around for my next appointment, by which time it could have taken much greater hold and really started to kick my butt.

I was back at Oxford yesterday for a physio session, which is also a cunning ruse on the part of the team to give me a quick, unofficial once-over to see if there has been any improvement.  They think we don’t know these things, but we really do.  Still, cunning or not, it was reassuring to know that the team all felt I was looking better.  Being multi- rather than mono-syllabic must have helped.

Strangely, this period of minor health-hiccup has coincided with a bright spark of inspiration and I’ve finally broken the back of the script I’ve been working on for the last few months.  I’m now 70 pages in, about 20 pages from the end – at a guess – and it’s all coming together beautifully.  I actually can’t wait to sit in front of the computer and bash out the next six pages each day and often feel like I could do more, had I the alertness to keep focused for long enough.

Still, I’m hoping to have finished my first draft by the end of the weekend and to have redrafted within the week.  The stages between my first and second drafts are very quick – it’s pretty much a read through and polish with a couple of additional scenes, at which point I’ll then sit and work through it much more slowly and may seek out a couple of opinions from people who will give me good, honest notes.

Funnily enough, a great friend of mine for whom I am nominally writing the script, happened to text me on Wednesday to see how I was doing (health-wise, not script-wise) and it was the same day that the whole things became clear and concise in my head, so maybe there’s a spooky little connection thing going on in my head there, somewhere.  Whatever it is, I’m really enjoying it.

After waking completely breathless, despite still being on my NIV (which is quite hard to be breathless on) and finding myself standing in the bathroom fighting for air and trying to cough and clear my chest at the same time, it became apparent that my sleep/breathing/NIV difficulties were, quite simply, down to a big ol’ infection which I’ve obviously been brewing for a good few days now.

Horrible as it is and horrible as I feel, it’s good to know the causes of all the disruption in my patterns. I went to Oxford yesterday not looking for answers, but knowing that “all” I needed was a swift course of anti-biotics (hopefully the same ones as last time, otherwise things get complicated with sensitivities and allergies) and some extra physio.

Monday night was the worst night I’ve had in quite a while – waking at 1.30am with breathlessness and a large mucus plug on my right side and the complimentary headache which comes with it all, I then spent the rest of the night trying to find a comfortable and non-distressing way to sleep, which I managed for short, 20-minute spells on-and-off for the next 5 or 6 hours. Needless to say by the time I got up I was more exhausted than when I went to bed.

In Oxford I was pretty spectacularly monosyllabic with my team – which curiously meant I think they knew exactly what was going on; they know me pretty much inside out now. I felt really sorry for them, though, because I was so exhausted and feeling so sorry for myself that I really wasn’t much cop as a human being yesterday – offering hardly anything beyond the necessary replies to medical enquiries.

Still, I escaped the dreaded thought of ending up on the ward (which would just about have finished me off, I think) and came home with my first few doses of IV’s to draw up and the promise of my full delivery arriving some time later today.

The only minor hitch of non-planned IV starting is that I didn’t have time to get a preparation dose of steroids down me, which means I’m in for a couple of days of joint and muscle pain as my body reacts to the IV Meropenem before the oral pred [prednisolone, steroid] kicks in properly. I’ve also now got a nice collection of ulcers on my tongue in protest at the toxins being shoved into my blood stream. Can’t blame my body really, can you? I think I’d protest, too.

Reacting to IV’s is pretty much a common-or-garden response for me and is weirdly reassuring, because if my body is feeling it then you can bet that the bugs are, too. It may take a little longer to kill them off, but I know things will turn around soon. It means having to put up with a few days of tiredness (which was there anyway) and soreness, but at least now there’s the knowledge that things will start to improve by the weekend, rather than merely a looming sense of something not being right.

I’m off to do today’s first session of physio, then to take myself back to bed to sleep off my morning dose, in time to get up and repeat the dose and do another physio session. I do love being on IV’s…

NOTE: For the stats-lovers amongst you, my Lung Function yesterday was 0.6/1.1 (that’s roughly 15/20% according to this site), my Sats were 90% – not very impressive. My weight, however, was a massive 53kgs (fully clothed), so I guess that’s my silver lining.