It’s not a champagne party. It’s research.

Okay.  It’s kinda a champagne party.  But here it goes.  Many of us assume we know what we like.  We have brand loyalty, good memories associated with a certain kind of wine or beer or champagne.  For example, my family always gets Mumms Cordon Rouge for celebrations.  But is that really our preferred champagne?

For the party you need two or three good friends (any more and it’s hard to differentiate) who each bring a different split over, a set of stickers (the more fun the better as in, I think the fairy princess is crisper than the fuzzy rabbit) and a designated pourer.  Also, I suggest that everyone brings over their own champagne glasses as different sizes and shapes affect the amount of bubbles you get in the glass.   The designated pourer assigns a sticker to each bottle, fills up the marked glasses with the corresponding sticker, and then administrates the champagne.  Sip and chat, discover your favorite.  Repeat with other brands until you’ve narrowed down your favorite.  

This can obviously be done with beer or wine or whatever else you choose, but it’s important to remember you’re doing some really serious research here.  It’s soul searching.  It’s getting beyond stereotypes and advertising.  It’s very, very deep.  

It’s champagne.

the 411 on dialing 911

Okay, I’m still sick.  This is day eleven.  It sucks.  The only good thing is I’m getting a lot of reading done, and I have another tidbit to share.  Call it a public service message.

Turns out when human beings panic, they revert to learned behaviors.  This is why soldiers are constantly drilled, so when they’re in combat and their brains turn off, they still function in ways that can save their lives.  So, cut to normal, everyday panic, and something that requires dialing 911.  Most of us have never actually done it, and if you’re in a situation where a loved one is in peril, chances are “panic” is a good description of what you’re going through.  What most of us HAVE done, however, is dial 411.  Apparently, it happens all the time, freaked out people dialing 411 over and over, thinking they’re calling for help and unable to understand why they keep getting freakin’ information.  In they’re head they’re thinking “911″, but their fingers are drilled into dialing “411.” 

 The solution?  Every once in a while, unplug your phone and practice dialing 911.  Sounds stupid, but wouldn’t you rather do something stupid a few minutes a week and know that you’ll be capable if it ever comes down to it?

 There you go.  Homework for the night.

Heart in Hands

Okay, so the pic at the top is actually me and that is an actual human heart.  Not that many people have pictures of them holding a human heart and less so looking quite as devious — and if you DO have similar pictures, please, please, please send them to me and I’ll post them.  We’ll have a contest — so, maybe it deserves explanation.   Especially since I can’t think of anything else to write about this afternoon.

One of my best friends has has a double lung transplant because of disease.  He kept in contact with the girl who coordinated the transplant, mostly because she was hot, and introduced her to me several years after the fact.  Not a week later I got a call at about 8pm wondering if I’d like to witness an organ harvest.  “You’ll have to lie, though,” she told me. 

Let me digress a moment and answer the question that inevitably comes up at this point, namely, “Why would you want to say yes?”  Well, because I’m a writer.  And I believe that as a writer, you need to experience as much as possible, and know at least a little bit about as much as possible.  And when an opportunity like showing up at a hospital in the middle of the night to be changed into scrubs, silly booties, a bad hat and a mask to witness a terminally injured man be scooped out comes up — you take it.  It might come in handy one day, it might not, but at the very least, now I know what happened to my friend.  I know, in fact, a lot more than he does about what happened to him.  That part anyway.

Back to the heart.  I was worried about my reaction.  I was encouraged to take pictures, which I saw as a godsend because when you look at something through a lens, you’re removed from it, and I figured if I got too upset and weirded out, then I’d just bring the camera up to my face and take a break that way.  It turned out that I didn’t get nauseated and I didn’t get freaked out.  I got really, really hot.  For whatever reason, that’s how my body reacted.  My skin felt like it was on fire.  Several times during the surgery — it took hours — I backed up and rested my bare arms against the cool tile of the operating room.  That was all the relief I could get.  I also had to step outside to take that awful mask off occasionally because it traps your breath and that’s hot, too.

Two of the operating rooms next to the harvest rooms were going as well, and I got to visit them.  In one, a woman was waiting for a single lung transplant, and in the other, a man was put on bypass to get the new heart.  Yes, the heart in my hands is his old, defective heart, after it was taken out so the shiny new one of the guy who had been shot in the head by members of his former gang could be put in.

So, that’s the picture.  I will say, though, that I was in the room when they finally turned off the machines to let the donor die after everything inside of him was finally ready for the scoop and run.  I remember the room standing still.  Everyone stopped and waiting.  I remember the guy finally flat lining, and I remember something disappearing from the room.  Maybe it was just that all the doctors and real nurses stopped and we were all really present in that moment, together, and then the moment he flatlined, all their attentions scattered to their, specific task, their specific organ.  Or maybe it was that was the donor’s last moment, his last second alive and he filled everyone there who witnessed it.  He glowed in this last bit of his usefulness, and when he died, when he was gone, it deflated.  You can make your own decision.  I was there and even I don’t know.

On Killing

So, yesterday I had a meeting with a really cool management firm and I think I’m going to broaden my horizons and hire a manager.  The guy I met with seems like the answer to my prayers.  He’s all about me writing original material and getting it out there, developing things together tailored for the directors they represent and the actors my agency represents.  All of a sudden, I was getting into that real, exciting world I’ve been working for so long. 

 I knew I needed someone else when my agents sighed, “Well, if you’re going to keep writing pilots…” as if it were a bad thing that I gave them new material every three to four months.   I’ve finally found my advocate who actually wants that.  We already started talking about writing things with the current business needs of the industry in mind, what we would start to develop next.  On the cusp of being a real, working writer.  Even closer, anyway. 

 So for all you aspiring TV writers, let your agents deal with staffing you and get a manager if you want to go out with pilots and get into features.  Says the girl who has had one meeting.  It sounds like the way to go, anyway.  I’m happy.

 Anyway, to the title of this post.  I’m reading this great book called “On Killing” by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (love that Lt. Col. is there, but he decided to go for “Dave” instead of “David”) and it’s all about how human beings try really, really hard NOT to kill each other.  Especially in wars.  Most people intentionally miss, or never fired their guns at all.  In a lot of wars, it was the two sides aiming too high, aiming right, left.  Making it look like they were shooting at the enemy, but when they could get away with it, falling back on “incompetence.”

Turns out species are hard wired not to kill each other.  A rattlesnake or pirhana will bite pretty much anything that’s aggressive towards it, but among each other, a pirhana will slap tails with the other pirhana and the rattlesnakes wrestle.  They don’t use their lethal tools when it comes to one of their own.  It’s all about posturing until one of them goes, “Yeah, okay, you probably could kill me, you win,” and then that’s it.  Which, ironically, is what UFC is all about.  It’s about two guys in a ring trying to find out which of them could probably kill the other.  They tap out and then the fuckers hug each other.  You’ve never seen two guys more in love and full of respect for each other than the guys on that Ultimate Fighter show right after they’ve fought.  I’m sure that’s not universally true, you hear about true hatreds, but mostly these guys are crying and shaking hands and blubbering about how the other guy was just better and, “you did it, dude, you were great.”  “No, you really fought hard, you got me, you were so awesome.”  “No, you were.”

You watch it and can’t help but think, there’s something cathartic happening here.  These guys are finding out who they really are, they’re being pushed to the limits and finding out their deepest secrets they can’t discover on their own.  And after, they’re grateful to the other guy who got them there.  It seems weird and a little new-agy, I’m definitely not going to get excited about Ultimate Fighting as therapy, but when you see an outpouring of love from two guys who just moments before were trying to bust heads open and push noses through skulls…  It’s something to think about.

Popping Cherries

So here it is, my foray into the blog world.  My good friend, the Baron’s Wife, convinced me to do this over dinner last night and I thought, oh, what the hell?  Later on, this thought blossomed in to oh, what the hell… do I have to write that anyone would be interested in?

So, a primer.  I’ve worked in TV writers rooms for seven years.  Five in sitcom, two in drama.  Major network shows.  I actually wrote part of an episode, so now I get to call myself writer.  I’ve got an agent.  All I’m missing is, well, a staff, regular job as a writer on a current show that’s on air.  That’s been coming for some time now.  I’m all packed.  My dress is pressed.  I’m wondering if I need to start showing my garter to cars rushing past.  Perhaps a cartoon will stop and pick me up.  I can totally write a lascivious wolf.  Graaow.

In the meantime, I’m flush in writing pilots.  One’s in development, and three others are floating around in various stages of being ignored or barely read by my agents.  The fun thing about writing TV pilots for me, though, is discovering what I’m going to write and then researching it.  I’m not sure what other people do, but for me, something catches my fancy like, say, the UFC.  You know how much I knew about the UFC when I thought: interesting?  I thought it was the same as WWF.  Or WWE.  Whatever that thing on USA is that caters to the newly arrived alien to our planet with no appreciation of how gravity and/or physics and/or the human body works.  For them, WWF (or WWE) must rock. 

I wanted the UFC.

So, I got books from the library, rented DVDs from Netflix.  It’s possible I’m the only girl who watched entire seasons of Ultimate Fighter in a row while knitting (I knit) and got to say she was “working.”  That’s just part of it, though.  You can’t just fictionalize a reality show and expect it to work.  Like making a version of “Survivor” where it’s these people who, I don’t know, maybe have survived a plane crash on a deserted island.  Or IS it deserted?  What if there are OTHERS?  Wait….

I digress. 

When it gets interesting is when two things happen.  The first is you watch a show on cable about a Cultural Anthropologist who moves in with low riders in Austin, and then all of a sudden, you have the beginnings of a fish out of water story.  A guy observing a gym of Ultimate Fighters in training, studying their lingo, their traditions, their culture, in a way to serve it up as a “cultural study” to the New York Times readers.  Huh.  And then the second thing that happens is you find out that the Ultimate Fighter who comes from a good family background is rare.  These are kids who have had to fight from the very beginning, and I remembered something I read recently that abused kids are the best Human Lie Detectors on the planet.  Think about it.  They had their eyes glued to their parents, sensed every word, every muscle twitch, every mood.  You had to know when danger was coming because danger was getting the shit pounded out of you.  (or maybe just a little rosette you have to pluck out of your underpants and deposit in the toilet afterwards, but that’s not my story)  They learned what was real and what wasn’t really quickly, and these are guys I want to know about, to write about.

And then I start thinking about masculinity and I think, well, this Anthroplogist had to do something before his UFC studies and what if it was about the Gossip Girl crowd and that’s where he’s met his wife, the ultimate, family money, liberated chick who likes her poor little boy husband and what happens in that marriage when they move to Vegas and her husband starts to slip into the skins of his new subjects of study and how does that change how he sees his own masculinity and his role in this marriage?

For me, that’s how an idea happens.  And that’s what I’m working on, and this is what I was telling the Baron’s Wife about last night when she said, you should start a blog.

So, I did.  Here it is.  Welcome.