⫹DESKSPACE⫺ 002

Photo: Agatha Christie, best-selling mystery author of all time, seen here not wearing sweatpants or drinking a green tea latte from Starbucks, which begs the question: is she even a writer?

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I must be getting old, because I seem to be talking incessantly about the weather (though, to be fair, [a] the weather has been insufferably shitty, and [b] I am getting old). Anyways, it was beautiful the other day, I drove around with the windows rolled down, sunroof open, wearing shades, and then, later that night, had to navigate a winter storm that was basically the hyperspace sequence from Star Wars if it had been directed by David Lynch.

In short, fuck this winter. Right in its face. If I can’t see the edges of my lawn by the time the baseball season starts on Thursday, I’m moving to Kuwait (that’s still a country, right?).

⫹On My Desk⫺

I was in Toronto last week for the table read of The Screenplay, which was a very cool experience, and marked the end of our development period with the NSI’s Features First program. Cast was terrific, feedback was insightful, beers were cold. I’ll be hacking my way through another draft over the next couple weeks—but the horizon is visible, which feels, after two years, sort of miraculous.

(If you want some context for what a table read is all about, here’s a clip of the table read for The Force Awakens, which, in terms of star power and cultural significance, is just pretty much on par with what we did.)

In addition to this, which happens in the margins of the work I do to pay my mortgage and feed my children, I continue to scrape together seconds/minutes/hours to work on other things: the second book (sigh), the two other film things, the Secret Publishing Project, etc. Which is probably too many things at once, but, well, life is short, and starting things is so much more fun than actually finishing them.

This will all catch up with me, I know. Probably sooner than I think. (See below re: the horrors of time-management.)

⫹Away From My Desk⫺

While we were in Toronto, we crashed the opening night of the Canadian Film Fest, saw the premiere of Red Rover, and, more importantly, caught the short film that preceded it.

Here’s the description of it from the program—

A first-person journey through the mind of Quinn, a neurotic stoner struggling to get over her ex-girlfriend Allie as she slips from reality into a stream of heroic fantasies, wistful memories, and cringe-worthy dreams.

—which, honestly, made me not at all want to sit through it. But I did. And, of course, it was amazing.

Not many experimental short films warrant being seen in a theater, but this one certainly did. Beautifully shot, amazing sound design. Imagine if Terence Malick made a first-person shooter based on the TV series Girls. Very glad I stuck around for it.

Check it out below:

TERMINALLY IN LOVE

Terminally in Love is a first-person POV short film directed by Emily Jenkins and Justin Black.

⫹Things To Read⫺

“Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives” by Oliver Burkeman.

I read this article early in the new year when I was full of (misguided) aspirations to change the way I do things, like there might be some kind of secret process or method or habit that might help me cram 3x the amount of work into the same meager span of hours available to me each day.

This essay destroyed my brain. To the point where I overcorrected and consciously abandoned the many, many forms of workload management I’d developed over the past ten years or so—and completely fucking myself in the process. I’ve since corrected my overcorrection (because one must actually do some work), but, still, a lot of what Burkeman talks about hits a little too close to home. I mean, he opens the with a reference to “the eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death”…

Then there’s the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.

And, whoo boy, how about this:

One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create.

If you work in an office, or work as a freelancer, or have ever held a job of any kind whatsoever, read this—and despair.

⫹What I’ve Been Reading⫺

I recently finished Anthony Everitt’s biography of Cicero, who is a particularly interesting dude if only for the lucky fact that much of his personal correspondence has survived, and so, in addition to all his public acts, we have all sorts of insights into his interior life: he stressed about money, was annoyed by his wife, didn’t think he got the recognition he deserved—and was self-aware of his outsized ego and wasn’r afraid to make jokes at his own expense.

The parallels between what happened during Cicero’s time (aka. The Decline of The Roman Empire) and what’s happening now across the world – the rise of populism, irrational fear of others, leaders eschewing traditional rules of governance, etc. – is disquieting. But also sort of soothing. The historical perspective (aka. our smallness in the grand scope of Time) always gives me solace.

Also, if you only know Julius Caesar through pop culture references, and are picturing him right now as an effete old man in a toga and laurels, then you (like me) have some lessons to learn. He was a genius military general, a formidable hand-to-hand fighter, super-charismatic—and then there was that time he was kidnapped by pirates:

Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got on friendly terms with his captors but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. There were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. As soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

Worldstaaaaaar!!!

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and may you smite the expectations of the modern workplace with Caesar’s unsentimental savagery.

//JY