Day: July 7, 2005

This sweetened condensed milk, the organic stuff, doesn’t kick as much ass as the crappy “asian” stuff I got at Ranch 99. The organic stuff I got at Berkeley Bowl.

I’m using this to make Vietnamese Coffee, which they call French Coffee. Normally it cranks the hell out of my brain. I am full on crazy for like a day and a half. But lately not so much.

Has my coffee gone stale (it’s been sitting in the freezer)? Or is there a lot of unlisted crap in my usual condensed milk selection that is the real thrill in my coffee? Better living through chemistry.

Making “asian” coffee? Then use the “asian” milk. It’s not Chinese, it’s not Vietnamese or Thai, it’s certainly not Japanese… it’s “ASIAN.” Ehyeah.

I’m rereading McKee’s bible of screenwriting, Story, to tighten up a script I’m working on. Some of it is helpful, some of it not…

What is especially not helpful: I don’t quite know what I was thinking, but I bought a used copy which has had at least 4 previous users from the look of the various pricing stickers.

Usually when I buy a used textbook I flip through it… but this time I must have neglected that step, because the margins are filled with the most insipid notes and observations imaginable.

Some of them are simple ignorance, like the circled word “triptych” and a question mark. Others are clearly someone trying to summarize something to get through the chapter for a class; except it’s clear they are picking phrases at random and not really internalizing anything. Some chapters have every topic sentence of every paragraph underlined. I remember seeing biology books like this, where literally every word which was not an article had been highlighted.

McKee name-drops Heidegger and Sarte, and the reader has underlined the entire paragraph and written “Heidegger” and “Sarte” in the margin. Yeah, uh, I didn’t quite understand these two sentences in this paragraph, so I’m going to attempt to summarize all of Heidegger to cater to McKee.

Bah!