I watched a movie on my commute

Never Done: I watched a movie on my commute

Some days you just want to zone out. And in fact, I would say that some days it's important to just zone out, at least for the parts of the day it's OK to zone out. The reason I'm thinking about this is that I have already started to think about how I could work on my commute, because there is just more to do in my normal work hours than I can foresee being able to accomplish. To that end, I set up my email (and calendar) so I can access it at home, and like I said, started to think about mining my commute time. But I actually want to protect my commute time. Mostly I've been using it for blogging, and when this Never Done year is over, I hope to use the commute for screenwriting.

Hope. Did you catch that little word? It's this week's mide (middah) and has become quite hard for me. Somewhere along the way -- I am thinking it's been a couple of years -- I became one of those people who doesn't want to hope because I don't want to be too deeply disappointed. A person who armors against disappointment rather than planning for a hopeful future. Among the things I'm not hopeful about lately is my ability to keep a writing practice while working a full-time job. (Despite the fact that I've been writing successfully on the train every single day.) To counter all this hopelessness, I downloaded a movie that intertwines vignettes in a way I am trying to master with one of my screenplays, and I plugged in my earbuds, and I turned it on at Grand Army and watched all the way to 72nd Street, and then set aside to finish Southbound at the end of the day. The movie, by Rodrigo Garcia, is called things you can tell just by looking at her.

And wouldn't you know, the movie is all about hope -- people trying to have some, people crushed when they do and it hurts them, and people who barely even let themselves start. And it does a lovely job of intertwining -- not too often, not too forced, not too coincidental. It did what I hoped it would to help me think about my screenplay. Which I hope to have time to write this Fall, two hours a day, rocked steady by the northbound and southbound trains.