I'm listening to Trancespotting II, which is a pretty pleasant album for verifying bugs and starting a build, but perhaps too fragmented for writing. Every time I start working in this window... how to describe this? I feel internally distracted. I notice it first with the music, which become intrusive instead of background, and then my mind fragments in several directions, and inevitably I end up switching to do something else. This isn't my occasional lack-of-focus, because I'm getting work done quite nicely. It's just the journal where the white noise of my brain drowns out words. I'm hoping that continuing to plod along will clear it up.

Last night Jim and I had dinner with Marith and Trip at Satsuma, which meant lots of sushi for all involved. I had glorious amounts of unagi (two orders of nigiri, plus the unagi-avacado roll), some ebi, and some negihama (hamachi with green onion). Writing about it is making me hungry for it again, especially for the negihama. Am I entering a new phase of being hungry for sushi all the time? That would be sort of annoying; why am I never hungry 24-hours-a-day for something cheap & easily obtained?

Rereading my entry from last night I feel I was very spacy -- I completely forgot to mention Company! Marith and Jim and I went to see the final dress rehearsal of a production in Saratoga, and it was quite entertaining. I disagreed strongly with their interpretation in a number of places, but it's the interesting intellectual sort of disagreement as opposed to feel like they committed heresy. I do wish they hadn't cut Amy and Paul's wedding breakfast scene, and I feel like the show really loses something without "Tick Tock" in the second act -- so, okay, I do feel a little like the committed heresy. But for some reason I have a great deal of faith that they thought these things through and did them very deliberately, which makes me more forgiving.

It would be neat to have the chance to direct theatre someday, although I'm not sure how one gets into it, or even if I could do it. I have lots and lots of opinions about shows, but usually only after I've seen it at least once. Reading a script doesn't do much for me, but give me a performance and I'll have fifty zillion opinions on how I would have interpreted the show better.

I finished rereading Eight Skilled Gentlemen, and was not quite satisfied with it. It definitely isn't as good as Bridge of Birds, largely because Hughart uses many of the same devices to move the story along, and the revelation of the bad guy follows a similar path as previous revelations. I nonetheless plan to reread The Story of the Stone.

Movie rentals tonight! We may have dinner out with people (Rachel, Jeremy, Eric, Harold, Yair) first, which would be pleasant. I'm glad that my life is more restful -- more time at home -- but I do miss going to dinner frequently with my friends. Not just the company, although that's nice, but the chance to go out and eat interesting food with a lot of people.

I seem to have an interesting love/hate relationship with food. Sometimes I really like to eat, and I think about food a lot, and I wish I tried new things more often and that food was a more fun part of my life. Other times I feel like food is this huge burden which has no good points, and eating is just this annoying thing that is necessary because I get depressed when I don't do it. I wish I would settle on the former one of these; maybe then I'd start cooking.