Just turned in the more-or-less final copy of "Sitter," a DV short I did last year with Jen and Mary and Carrie, to those blessed happy people at the VC Filmfest. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, it'll be interesting to see what the audience reaction is. It's not really horrifying enough to be a horror movie, but I think it's fairly creepy.
....Also, lost my cell phone a couple days ago. Life is so much more peaceful, or at least less aggravating, without a cell phone. It's too bad they're so insanely useful.
...There was a wonderful moment today at work where someone finally spoke up to one of the regular players, let's just call her K, who ordinarily rules the table with a mix of nepotistic authority and constant screaming whiny bitchiness. Another player, let's call him F, decided enough was enough and says, calmly but forcefully, "Why do you complain when you win? I have no problem when people complain when they lose, but when you complain when you win, I got a problem." (It is true that K's only means of communication at the table is by complaining about everything, and for aforementioned reasons and other complicated ones we have to tolerate infantile behavior that in any other environment would have earned her a regular series of smacks in the head.) The complaint in question arose when K won a $1000 bet and then started whining because the dealer paid her in a stack of $100s instead of a single $1K chip, and K started her customary screeching along the lines of "Why you pay me in white chip I say I want grey chip! This dealer always blah blah blah." F's was a brilliant counter-complaint, superbly timed, because, having just won the hand, K's choice was to either fire back at him louder and prove, indeed, that her whole life is about complaining about minutia, or to keep some semblance of dignity and shut the heck up. She chose shutting up, which was perfectly satisfactory for all involved. Anyway, I started to feel a little sympathetic afterwards, because after the hubbaloo of F's hubris wore off, she resumed her standard complaints about the dealer and her luck and her money ad nauseum, but they didn't have their usual conviction. It was like she'd been sliced through a little bit by the comment, and maybe she had a moment outside her usual pathetic gambler's self-interest to see that her entire way of being is totally annoying to normal people. Or maybe not. For better or for worse, we never get to really see people who recover and redeem themselves for their behavior within the casino (assuming there are any), because if they do have that life-changing introspective moment, it must, to be of any worth, cause them to never come to the club ever again.