fore!

While in high school, I played for a brief stint on the golf team. The reason was simple: we students were exempted from gym class while actively competing in a school sport, and, having tasted the freedom of a prep period throughout the long wrestling season, I was damn sure I didn’t want to head back to running the mile, cranking out pull-ups and straining through the “sit and reach”.

So, after reviewing the spring season possibilities, I decided to join the golf team. A reasonably sensible idea, except that I didn’t actually know how to play golf. Undaunted by that reality, I picked up a cheap set of used clubs, took two lessons, and spent about a week practicing on the driving range. The first time I set foot on an actual golf course was the qualifying round for the team.

In retrospect, I must either have had excellent potential, or the pity of the coach, as I ended up making the team, despite making a travesty of the game for 18 holes. And while I did improve steadily (a result of playing three or four days a week with the team), I was always far and away the worst player – not surprising, considering that all of my teammates had been playing for eight to twelve years, rather than my eight to twelve weeks.

Following that brief stint, without the specter of gym class for motivation, my game languished for years. In fact, during the six or seven years following, I played no more than five times, and headed to the driving range only a handful of times more. But since arriving here in LA, with the strong sun beating down summer-like through the smog, I’ve been regularly taking advantage of the weather and my small patches of free time by heading over to the Rancho Park Par 3 course.

And, amazingly, I’m playing significantly better than where I left off. Perhaps as the muscle memory atrophied over years of disuse, my swing whittled down to a simpler, more effective version of itself. Or, perhaps, now that I really don’t care how well I play, I’ve reached a Zen state of great efficacy. Whatever the reason, for the first time, I’m hitting greens from the tee, chipping to the pin, and sinking long putts over odd lies.

Granted, I won’t be heading off on the PGA any time soon. Nor will I be stocking up on argyle socks, pleated khakis and wind-resistant polo pullovers. But I am, for perhaps the first time, good enough to legitimately claim I can play golf. Game on.

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cupid’s arrow

I am giddy as a schoolgirl, as I have developed, over the past month, a whopping, middle-school sort of crush.

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precocious

Apparently, while in kindergarden, I so liked this poem by Pulitzer winner Sarah Teasdale, that I memorized and recited the entire thing:

Stars

Alone in the night

On a dark hill

With pines around me

Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars

Over my head,

White and topaz

And misty red;

Myriads with beating

Hearts of fire

That aeons

Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven

Like a great hill,

I watch them marching

Stately and still,

And I know that I

Am honored to be

Witness

Of so much majesty.

In kindergarden. How cloyingly precious.

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being happy

“People who are engaged in challenging activities with clear goals tend to be happier than those who lead relaxing, pleasurable lives. The less one works just for oneself, the larger the scope of one’s relationships and commitments, the happier a person is likely to be.”

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Future of Happiness”

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cultural understanding

Knee deep in production for I Love Your Work, and I am sick. Not acutely so. Just with the low-level, long-lasting, flu-like symptoms caused by extended sleep deprivation and high levels of stress.

This, of course, is no surprise, nothing new. The last time I produced a film, I dropped nearly fifteen pounds. Those who know me will attest that I’m not a large individual, am already rather svelte. In short, I don’t have 15 pounds I can healthfully lose.

Similarly, Adrienne Gruben, the co-producer on I Love Your Work (and fast becoming one of my all-time favorite people), recently confided that she had been hospitalized for liver damage after a prior shoot. And she hadn’t been drinking.

There is a word in Japanese, “karoshi,” which literally means “death by overwork.” For the first time, that concept is beginning to make a lot of sense.

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digital delinquency

Over the last few weeks (and arguably the last few months), the regularity of my blogging has been rather suspect. And while I’ve felt rather vaguely guilty about that from a purely personal perspective (the initial motivation behind the site being to create a regular writing exercise for myself), I’ve in recent days been frequently reminded that the site (oddly) does draw a fairly large reading audience, many of whom have been more passionately displeased by my increasing digital delinquency.

There is something remarkably addictive, it seems, about voyeuristically impinging on the lives of others, and the withdrawal from such is an ugly, ugly thing.

So, having been duly (and repeatedly) chastised, I have resolved to once again return to habitual blogging, to do this damned thing every day, to make blogging as second nature as brushing my teeth. And, while on that topic, to start flossing regularly.

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tiny bubbles

A final thought for the morning: without a doubt, there is no hangover more brutal nor more severe than that from an evening of binge-drinking champagne.

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monkey business

Having spent too long focusing exclusively on film, and feeling starved for some hard science, I spent the past hour or so reading through a very well written set of articles discussing the probabilities involved in the old “monkeys typing shakespeare” saw, and the application of such statistics to arguments for intelligent design (a theistic position in favor of, minimally, God as watch-maker). Though I’m not sure I agree with the article’s conclusions (in particular, it glosses over the possibility of dependent ratchets in the early stages of chemical evolution), the articles are certainly intriguing and well written. If you have time to kill, you can read them here, here, and here.

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silver lining

I realized at last night’s New Year’s Eve party that a wonderful side-effect of rampant egotism is never feeling starstruck. Simple celebrity can’t undercut long and carefully developed narcissistic feelings of superiority.

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