trying to get the hook up

a e-mail to a book agent friend

What's doing? How's your life? Hope everything is a-ok. I'm treading water until my next job, just hanging out and living the dream.

I wanted to ask a favor of you. My friend wrote a novel a few months ago, and he's just now starting to show it around a bit. I've read it, and I think it's pretty good. Would you take a look at it, or hand it off to someone who could? I can provide you with a plot summary, if you want.

I'm around until October 12 - let's get drinks before then...

sports malaise

With the start of the NBA Finals and, to a lesser extent, the end of the Stanley Cup Finals, we're now into the beginning of my least favorite sports-related time of the year. There's nothing to watch except baseball, and it will be like this for about eight weeks or so, until football training camps open up. And watching baseball in the middle of the summer is extremely boring - nothing gets meaningful or exciting until August 1.

(Yes, I am aware that tennis and golf are in full swing, but I'm only a casual watcher of tennis, and I don't like golf.)

So what's a boy to do? Last year I played a lot of Playstation, and that may be the ticket again this year. Or I could watch the NFL Network and prepare myself for the upcoming season.

What I really should do? Read a few good books.

plane thoughts

written on a plane

Landing in Valley City in twenty minutes. I'm excited to see my friends - Fred & Ginger, Big Bird, Trouble. It's always nice to get out of the city, and I think that the mental break will be great. It would be perfect if I could get some beach time in, but VC is not that kind of town.

I just re-read a fantastic book, called Acting Is A Job. It is the most realistic look at the biz out there, and I can't recommend it highly enough, even if you're just curious about what the life is like. Here's the Amazon link - check it out, really.

More later.

magazine love

I'm a magazine reader. I have subscriptions to three:

Rolling Stone (which is a lifetime subscription)
Esquire (which gives me something to shoot for, and is surprisingly affordable)
Time (since my freshman year of college)

I generally save these magazines for commutes. When I work at the theater, I often come home late at night, so between riding the subway and actually waiting for the train to arrive, I can have an hour-long trip. My magazines are perfect for those.

So you know what I hate most? When someone steals my magazines.

This used to happen fairly frequently at Sleepy Hamlet. But tonight, someone lifted my Time (with POY Vlad Putin) from the box office. One minute it was there; the next (when I was grabbing my scarf and prepping to leave) it was gone. Boy, was I hot.

The only saving grace is that my brother also subscribes to Time, so I can read the rest of the issue when I go up to his house tomorrow. Still...I hate it when people take my stuff.

race relations

Thanks for all of your support, public and private. The post below was in response to a dialogue I've been having (with several others) with Miss Fire on her blog. You can check out her posts here and here. It's her blog, so I suppose that she eventually gets to have the last word.

There are just some lines that I don't think that people should cross. And using that word, with that much venom behind it, is a deal breaker for me. I mean, hey, if that's what you feel in your heart, that's on you. And if that's how you think, and you truly try to make amends for it, and work on it, and change your line of thinking, that's great. But I don't see any evidence of that in these conversations. Please point it out to me if you think I missed something.

I just finished reading a book called Founding Brothers, and in it the point was raised that one of the reasons that early American leaders allowed slavery to continue was that they had no idea to do with all of these black people once they were free, because there had never been a truly biracial society before. That thought just blew me away. And I suppose that's why it's so hard - we're doing something that's never been done before. And we didn't exactly start off on the right foot.

I get really frustrated, because just when I feel good about race relations, something always comes along to destroy my hopeful thoughts. A character in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun says that so many of the problems in this world occur because people just don't sit down and talk to each other. I try to live my life as the conduit between worlds, exposing people to a way of life that they may not have understood before. This experience isn't going to dissuade me from doing what I'm doing. It just motivates me to work harder.

Good God, it's almost 4am. I've got to go to bed.