The most shocking thing to me about seeing the change of season, day by day, is the awareness of the incremental passage of time. Growing up & living in So Cal, as it turns out, is just a blur of eternal summer.
My friends who grew up in New England have been unimpressed with my dazzling insight.
As I’ve mentioned before, in Chinese the number four is considered unlucky because the word for “four” (四 sì) sounds like the word for “death” (死 sǐ). This why, in an abundance of sensitivity to superstition, I avoided telling older Chinese people that I was, in fact, David IV.
Today is my birthday. I turned forty-four. That’s right. Double death. Kinda badass.
I saw a family of deer grazing on the side of the highway as I drove home from work. Delightful. And they weren’t nearly as pushy as the turkeys.
As I was getting dressed this morning, I looked at my particularly poor choice of clothes and thought of a phrase my mother used to say to me as a child when she’d disapprove of my appearance before I would leave the house:
“You look like an orphan!”
She’d then comb my hair or straighten my collar or make me wash my hands or whatever. I haven’t thought about that in years. (Only now do I notice the implicit narcissism. Fundamentally, she was saying “You don’t look like you have me” or “You look like I’m not doing my job.” But she meant well.)
In all the chaos of moving, I didn’t realize until today that the third anniversary of my mother’s death had passed by without me noticing. It was my start date at Blue Sky.
While nailing down details for my trip to Australia in November, I came up with a sort of insane plan. I’m going to do it.
In recent times, perhaps since moving back from China, I’ve found that a useful guiding principle in deciding if I ought to do something big is if I can say the phrase “That sounds like something David would do.” It was the main thing that got me to drive to Idaho for the eclipse, for example. So far, no regrets.
Drove home from work in torrential rain and appreciated my new car and its All Wheel Drive.
This is the view out the window by the elevator when I get home from work.
Driving the quiet, winding, forest route to work this morning, I had to stop to wait for a line of wild turkey to cross the road.
Apparently, the building in Greenwich CT where Blue Sky is located is of some architectural note.
The downside of living on the top floor of an apartment building is the long, slow Bataan Death March down the stairs when there is a fire alarm.
4:30am. False alarm, apparently.
A favorite singer/songwriter/guitarist of mine, David Wilcox, took a request from an audience member one time when I was seeing him in concert. It was an older song of his, one he played rarely. After fumbling around on the fretboard a moment or two, he found the right notes and said, “Ah. The fingers remember long after the mind has forgotten.”
Having not worked for over a year and I half, I was really, really worried that I had forgotten everything I knew about computers. But opening a UNIX shell, my fingers remembered.
Today was my first day at Blue Sky Studios. First time I’ve started at a new company in seventeen years.
The last time was in 2001, starting at DreamWorks. My second day of work was 9/11. Here’s opening Day 2 at Blue Sky goes better!
I walked outside to discover several of the nearby streets were blocked to traffic. An arts fair was overlapping with a farmer’s market. (Apparently it’s a thing on summer weekends.)
How has it taken me this long to realize that I’m living in the same Stamford as “the Stamford Branch” of Dunder-Miflin from the U.S. The Office?
(On the left is the view out my window of the Long Island Sound and on the right is my TV with Jim Halpert staring out the window at the Long Island Sound.)
I saw this DVD lying in the leaves next to this sidewalk. My immediate thought was “Not idly do the discs of Jackson fall.”
