Monday, October 11, 2010

Progress Report: 10/11/2010

Tap. Tap. Tap.

No, I'm absolutely not sitting here drumming my fingers and compulsively checking my Inbox and messages to see if there is a message from my prospective agent.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Those dents in my desk were there when I got it. The fact that they fit my fingers is one of those great mysteries of life.

Tap. Tap.

I did have this dream that I got an email from the agent that went as follows. Subject Line: "That was fun." Email Body: "Pass." I thought it was rather cold behavior, but then again dream agents aren't as polite as real ones. Fortunately, I have not had any successful history of predicting the future with my dreams, so I can simply brush that off as a whimsical offering of my subconscious.

Tap.

Okay, so apart from all that, the big thing this week was my wife Candi's 42nd birthday. Because she's a lifelong horse lover, it was very appropriate that it turned out to be an extremely horsey week. The highlights were:

  • Watched a lot of the World Equestrian Games. These are kind of like an Olympics devoted entirely to horse competitions. To a true horse lover like Candi, pretty much any competition is fascinating. To a lesser horse lover like myself, I find some of the events riveting (like Eventing, jumping competitions, etc.) and some less so (Reining is what I'm thinking of here. This is an event where everyone has to do the exact same routine, which involves a great deal of charging around in circles. It's entertaining the first couple of times, and then it gets somewhat repetitive).
  • Went and saw Secretariat, which I enjoyed immensely. I'm in accord with Roger Ebert's assessment of the film.
  • Went to Cavalia, which was beautiful beyond description. This is the horse/circus show created by one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil. Seeing it simply made me happy to be alive and in the world at this moment, which I think is one of the best things that great art can do. I've never seen anyone train horses quite this way. I've seen horses trained to perform incredible tricks, but in Cavalia, the trainers appear to be working with the horses as partners far more than normal. There are lots of portions of the show where the horses are let loose and trusted to do their own thing in an entertaining way, and as a result they look like they are spontaneously playing with their human co-performers, not enacting scripted tricks.
So those were the highlights of a very equestrian week. Now I'm going to go back to not compulsively checking my Inbox. I haven't looked at it now for about fifteen minutes. See? No worries here.