I put that shit in the ground, my friends. That big, overwhelming, epoch-making project that I've been throwing 12-hour days at since the middle of January is now, officially, an ex-parrot. SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT!!

To celebrate, here's Sulu, largely because Sulu is awesome.

I feel freaking terrific. Yoga was better today, food tasted better today, all the pieces lined up and knocked down like perfect little action figures. I broke open the emergency rum and danced out the door at 5:30, finished off a book on the train as night fell, and sank deep, deep into the music. And my father must be some kind of god in human form, because I came home damn hungry and in a celebratory mood, and what was in the care package he sent me off with on Sunday night? Half a turkey, some stuffing, some gravy, and a peach pie. I made up some mashed potatoes with disgustingly thick mushroom gravy, and just went to town on the whole mess in the pirate bowl Rebecca gave me, and for a little while knew perfect happiness. This is how I gather together all the pieces of a long, disgustingly complicated thing-I-done: I put little bits of the happies in a big, decadent token, and consoom.

Hey guess what? After about four months of off-and-on efforts in this regard, I have finally put some of my movies on my video iPod. It took this long because Macs convert video for iPods that either a) are virtually unviewable because they're so digitally distorted, or b) have no sound. The no sound issue was particularly funny because if you Google "convert selection for iPod" and "no sound" you get message boards where half the Mac users are complaining about this very problem with converting mpegs to iPod video, and the other half are insisting that the problem does not exist. Which pretty much sums up Mac. "Nothing is wrong. Everything is working normally. Do not complain." Ho!

And now to the top-off: I came home and found a package waiting for me, and in that package was American Cinema on DVD. Which may seem utterly meaningless to you but to me is, quite literally, the arrival of the Holy Grail of the past seven years of buying DVDs for me, and is in fact a Grail of my entire filmmaking education and experience. This series, produced back in the mid-90s and aired on PBS, was essentially my film school primer. It is the exact thing that took the me who grew up watching The Making of the Empire Strikes Back and gave him an almost overwhelmingly intoxicating understanding of the wider context of narrative cinema as a whole. It is a Very Happy Thing. And now that I have it, all the little pieces have coalesced into one warm, satisfied whole. I exist in an attitude of gratitude.

"If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book. But my work was done. There would be no further drafts." - Atonement