I have a slight headache today. It’s throwing off my schedule. Work was busy today, and by the time I arrived home, I was in the throws of caffeine or video game withdrawal, your choice. I delayed the beginning of this writing because of it, but now it’s late enough where if I don’t start writing soon, it’ll be a long night. I leave for New York City in two days, and I’m excited about this trip. Seeing Doolies two weekends in a row is a rare treat. And my family two weekends in a row is almost unheard of.

We leave on Saturday morning, spend Saturday through Tuesday in Brooklyn, check into the hotel on Tuesday night, and leave Saturday. It’ll be a fun filled week in my favorite place with my favorite person. Okay, now I’m getting so icky I’m disgusting myself. I’ll move on to less interesting things.

I’m looking ahead to the pages of empty space I need to fill this evening and it’s rather discouraging. I’m barely 200 words into this, and I only have one or two topics left to talk about. I’m get through it somehow, of course. It’s just a question of how much pain I cause my readers and me.

I wish I had inspiration every day. Yeah, I know that I don’t need inspiration to write—this is evidence enough. But there are days where I’m inspired and everything around me is interesting. I sit at a table and every person who walks in is a character, and I can’t type fast enough to describe them, trying to capture the moments or their imagined personality before they run off. Those days haven’t happened often lately. Mostly, I’ve thrown about imagery tales in the hopes of finding a thread I can pull far enough into a story. I’ve failed, obviously, but I’ll keep looking and pulling, and when I’m not doing that, I’ll continue complaining or looking for those moments of inspiration where my vision opens far enough to talk about anything that passes near me.

My head is not doing well as I took a break to read the web for the fourth time today. I definitely have a problem with web addiction. I haven’t been able to find a way to fix it yet, though. I keep trying to limit my browsing to twice a day, but always something during the day distracts me long enough where I click on my reading list and begin looking through the sites. The ones that update every fifteen minutes are the worst. I know there’s new content on them, and it’s extremely difficult for me to resist clicking on it. I’ve thought about cutting myself off completely, but in this day and age, it won’t work. I can’t just cut the cable like I did with, well, cable. I need the internet to, among other things, post these word thingies, and check Chuck’s site, and my hotmail, and the myriad of other useful places with information that will help me personally and professionally. (I’m very good of convincing myself of these things.)

This doesn’t mean that I won’t do it. I want to do it, but I need to figure out a convenient way of doing it. Imagine, if you will, a world where David spends his time actually typing these musings/stories/consternations/crap instead of pretending to type while secretly exploring the back corners of the internets. It would be a wonderful world. If I could limit it to twice a day, I would be dancing in the street. I’ll let you know if I find the mechanism for that. For now, I’ll have to try to wean myself off slowly. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll try to limit my clicks to one thousand. Ugh. Even the thought of it gives me the shivers.

Speaking of withdrawals and shivers, it seems that tomorrow night Doolies and I will not be playing video games with Will and Erik. After a short burst of e-mails in the beginning of the week, Will, Doolies, and I agreed that Friday would work, but Erik noted a possibility.

Sorry for the interruption. Doolies called me from her call room—she’s on call today (I was wondering how many “call” words I could use in one sentence, call. As she dialed my number, she was paged, so we didn’t speak except to explain the situation. It was very complicated, and since she just woke up from a nap, her explanation was not very, well, explained. Looking back over my explanation, mine isn’t all that well explained either.

Getting back the wayward adventures of video game planning, Erik e-mailed us today to say that he couldn’t make it tomorrow, meaning that the video game night is off. Remembering that we’re going to be in NYC next week out of range of our computers and fast internet connections, this means we’re not going to be able to play video games for over two weeks, having played last Thursday. Shivers, I tell you. Cold, cold shivers.

I like that word “shivers” today. I don’t see that word often enough. There are lots of words I don’t see often enough. I’ll try to point them out to you when I have nothing else to talk about. Like today, for example.

I’m closing in on the halfway mark for this musing. Of course, it’s always possible that I’ll go over my allotted 2,000 words. That mark, if you remember, is only a minimum for each day. I haven’t declared a maximum, but I’m thinking around 10k should be the maximum—anything more and my wrists my break in two. Now, all I need to figure out is where I’m going to find the last half of words.

I finished watching “Spanglish” tonight, the new movie (well, relatively new, since I Netflixed it) starring Adam Sandler. The acting it in, particularly Sandler, was rather painful, but it was a light romantic comedy with what I thought was a good ending. It was situational, but not painfully situational, and the characters were well developed, if not well acted. It’s a simple, well-trodden story about a Mexican maid who, with her daughter, spends the summer with Adam Sandler’s family. Adam Sandler (I didn’t like calling him Adam, and Sandler felt so impersonal) plays a generally good guy. A successful chef/restaurant owner who’s nice to his family, his staff, and wants to see everyone get along. When I get around to rating it for Netflix, it’ll probably get 3 stars—enjoyable, but not memorable, and certainly not something I’d see again. Now do you see why I wouldn’t be a very good movie critic? What do I have to add to this discussion?

Speaking of movies, I still haven’t seen SWIII. I’ve been waiting for Doolies, and our plan is to watch it while in NYC. I’ll let you know my thoughts. I received probably the most accurate review of the movie today: the last 40 minutes of the movie made it worthwhile. And we all know what happens during those last 40 minutes. Evilness!

Doolies called again. The person who paged her paged the wrong person. She hates that. She decided to go back to sleep, stewing in her anger about the wrong pager. It usually happens at 3am, which I can see why that would be annoying. But I’m back, throwing down more words in the hopes of getting closer to the Goal. I’m trying to resist checking the internets. I check the internets so often that I often run out of places to check. The internets are big, but there are too many times where I’ve checked all the interesting places, and there’s nothing left for me to do. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s rather pathetic. And, no, I don’t know why I call it the internets. It was the funny thing to do when what’s-his-name called it that. I don’t remember who it was, but he was political, and everyone and their mother used the plural form as a joke. I was slow on getting on that joke, so I decided to throw it into this paragraph, which has grown longer than I expected with even less protein than I thought possible.

I’m starting a new paragraph here. The word count is growing rather fast tonight. It must be the flan I ate before sitting down to type. My head still aches a bit, but it’s a small ache, and it doesn’t appear to be affecting me too badly. I don’t know what I would do without Word telling me the difference between the uses of affect and effect. I still have the darndest (is that a word?) time telling the difference. I know the effect is the verb, but it usually takes me a few times reading the sentences to figure out what it means to be the verb in the sentence; particularly since effect is rarely the primary verb of a sentence, if that makes any sense.

I’m on the homestretch now. It’s amazing how much I’ve improved in saying nothing. Getting back to the flan, it was of the plastic cup variety. Doolies and I bought it at the PCC when she was over this weekend because she likes flan. It turns out that she didn’t like this flan, though. When I opened it for her, I mushed over the top because to me the top looked artificial, looking like the skin on the top of chocolate pudding. I thought with a few artful spoon maneuvers, I would make it look professionally baked. Doolies thought it looked like vomit and refused to eat it. I ate the second plastic container in the pack of two. It didn’t taste like vomit. It was more like a highly fructose snack with little to no nutrition. If I’m going to eat a snack like that, however, I prefer chocolate.

There I go again. I had to resist clicking on the internet. It pains me that I’m this weak. I did resist this time, but I know it’s only a matter of time before I give in. There’s a chill in the air in Seattle. After an uncommonly hot weekend, the rains descended, and the sunny/rainy days have returned. There are times during the day where there is nothing but white puffy clouds in the sky. I’m convinced during that time that the rest of the day will be beautiful. An hour later, though, the dark gray clouds descend on Seattle, and I can’t believe that the sun was shining such a short time before. It does create spectacular rainbows. A few weeks ago I saw a rainbow while driving home that was breathtaking. The purples were so dark and deep that it was almost unreal. Almost.

I need to speak about one more thing to finish off the night’s typing. I didn’t mention much about stories today. Much is such a relative term. I spoke about it at the beginning, but a paragraph or two for me is rarely sufficient to get across my true feelings on the subject. Seeing as just mentioning storytelling has pushed me over to a little more than a hundred words to go, I’ll leave it that. I’ll see if tomorrow will spark a story, or let me continue with the George story I jumped back into last night. I’m hopefully, but not holding my breathe, if you know what I mean.

I won’t bother editing today’s writing because there’s not much here. I’m sure I said little and didn’t say that little so well. I want to say how I’m disappointed with writing such crap, but then that little voice in my head reminds me that I shouldn’t be disappointed, that even useless days like this—brought upon, of course, by a lack of a dose of caffeine—is pushing me ever closer to my goal of real writing. I just wish I was getting there quicker, is all. Word count for the day: 2013. Caffeine: none.