Sunday's dilemmas.
What do I do about El? The time's come to do something, but with care.
How much project can I finish before I go back tomorrow to the Factory? April in Africa's hard work -- lots of elections (allAfrica), who knows what else?
Is it 'Voices of Women', more of the LP screenplay or another sit-rep? Ah, priorities, priorities...
I want something to show for the past week. When I do, watch this space for the weblink.
Progress on my "spare-time projects" has seen constant setbacks and also left me with daily choices between commitments to other interested people and making the most of time long intended for my immediate friends.
Mostly I chose to do my best for the latter, because I've chosen a lifestyle in the past few months based on knowing I get my biggest kicks from doing stuff for other people. I'm through with me!
Still, today the phone gets answered to nobody.
"I should kill you," I told Francis yesterday evening, on going back to his news, books and stationery shop for the third time.
He has deadlines. I despise deadlines, but meet them and like to help others faced with the damned things. When Francis isn't earning a living, he's into artistic endeavours his squalling adorable brats keep interrupting. He was so stuck with a presentation due on Monday that he pulled a face and a voice stunt I've never heard before from a feller, just the Kid and one or two older women who know how to manage a winning pout.
"Please, please, please ... unless I do it tonight I can't. I get so little time to myself."
So I was nice, but burning him a CD full of the tools and guides he needed ate into three more precious hours of LP time! After all, he's not rich but has had the sense to abandon a silly fling with Bill Gates -- a false economy, now admitted -- and return to the fold of Mac users.
"How can I --?"
"For starters," I cut in, "one day you come round and I show you how it works instead of wasting ages making you write it down and doing you silly pictures. And I'm 'borrowing' this." Six euros worth of the latest 'Fantastic Report' issue snatched from a shelf; there's a big choice in France (info-Presse, Fr), but this one stays in my budget. "Next week, who knows? I might even pay you for it. Bon week-end!"
zzz
Now I know what it's like to be an African president who's up front, like Kenya's, and making a determined effort to crack down on financial mismanagement.
For two weeks now, I've been banned from writing a cheque and using cash machines and a now defunct VISA card number. The hassles entailed wasted so much time but were a lesson in just how many people insist these days on a valid credit card. I'd thought it was a convenience, but find it's almost indispensable to have one, which I will next week.
The bank's bought my long-term solution, so the staff say, which is a remedy more radical and paid off more quickly than anything they ever proposed. But meantime, the minion I dealt with before going over his head in frustration and an anger kept just under control gave me his "interim" plan to sign.
He'd recovered from my counter-offensive of Tuesday and wrapped his "product" in glittery garbage. I imagine the IMF works the same way and was sure once he came out with it: "Have you got it, monsieur? This is an 'economic recovery scheme'."
Oh yes, I'd got it. But then he said: "We wouldn't do this for just anybody, you know. You realise that?"
I should have sneezed as rudely as Will Smith, but hadn't seen 'I, Robot' (61 per cent "fresh"?) until last night when I'd done enough work on the LP, overcame reservations and watched it because the Kid's said it's good.
As the cop, Smith sneezes when the future Bill Gates of robotics does some preaching of his own.
"Sorry," he says. "I'm allergic to bullshit."
Though a well-read sci-fi fan, I never liked Asimov. Ideas sure, but his two-dimensional characters never convinced me, and the Foundation (and Empire) stuff -- now "e-books" -- bored me as an export into the future of behaviour and industrialised societies shaped in ways I find primitive and governed by absurd, outmoded laws.
'I, Robot' was OK as a film, with more effort put into characters than in the book it claims to be based on -- so loosely that Asimov fans protested all over the Net.
My own screenplay's become more intriguing.
What I'm enjoying is putting the Quiet Revolution it recounts into practice in a world where there's a war on, a very new kind of war which looks inevitable to scientists in many disciplines, not just me.
Today, but not here, I'll tell you more, if you're interested in further news about 'Sting in the Lotus'.
Ellie's film!
It'll always be that, though the LP's come so far since the first scene was completed she'd scarcely recognise it.
So much the better. However much I might loot people's lives, they do have a right to some privacy.
zzz
The guy at the BNP was predictable when it came to my projects and how much they cost me. His immediate question was: "Where's the gain? How much profit?"
One of my friends is right, that's a "perfectly reasonable" question from a banker. But he went on to ask more with an attitude that simply let me know it's none of his business.
I walked out leaving him with the impression he'd recovered from my treatment of him in the presence of his boss and given me a pair of the blinkers people put on skittish horses to narrow their vision and keep them on track.
Not me. Their plan de redressement suits and it's been instructive to learn how to get by for a couple of weeks without having to borrow more than 10 euros from somebody who got it back within days.
I don't think, though, that without more determined tactics than those already used to tackle the bank, it would be easy to go on avoiding dragging friends and their money into it, so my deep sympathy for some of the poor buggers driven out of their homes on to the streets with a begging bowl grows. It takes very little imagination to understand how they got there once you've felt the first wheels of the meat grinder at work on you.
With my friend, it was easy to discuss ways of quantifying "profit and loss" by criteria that have nothing to do with money. That makes Lauren the kind of woman I'm writing a movie about.
The bank guy's nice enough if decently treated, but governed by values so different that when the warfare becomes open, as it will, I wonder whether he'll take off his own blinders.
I know which one of us looked happier at the end of our discussion.
1:08:32 PM link 
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