Bright Light! Bright Light!

Darin arrived this morning right on time (even though he'd been afraid he wouldn't make the plane -- he overslept. We drove immediately to Babylonian, where I introduced him to Jeffrey. Jeffrey said hi, then called us animals because, as it turned out, Darin's fly was down. (Like I said, he overslept, so he hurried.) What a great intro. I was sooooo embarrassed.

Anyhow, then I showed Darin around the sets (he could name exactly what they were, as opposed to my saying, "This is, um..." The best thing we came across was a chart in the "Loading Dock" area, which shows silhouettes of the types of ships used in the series from various angles: side view, top view, diagonal view. All of the ships are incredibly distinctive and differentiated, of course -- the spidery Shadow ship, the squid-like Vorlon, and so on -- until you get to the bottom one. The Unidentified model, which is simply a round disc.

We also watched a scene from the episode currently being shot. I held my hands over Darin's ears when an important arc fact was dropped, but not quickly enough. We must have watched this scene being run six or seven times. Bruce Boxleitner kept blowing one line in particular, which usually indicates to me that it's time to change the line (because the actor can't get a throughline on it as written). We eventually had to move because the 2nd AD thought we were distracting Boxleitner and interfering with his eyeline. Darin's shirt, after all, was yellow.

We went to lunch and then met the realtor for a tour of four houses, all of which I had seen before and which I thought would give Darin an overview of the best we'd seen. If you'd asked me beforehand to rank them in the order that we saw them today, I've had said:

1, 4, 2, 3

After seeing them, Darin's ranking was:

3, 4, 2, 1

Anybody notice any possible conflicts with this?

Darin didn't believe me when I said he was the pickier of the two of us. Well, he is. He pointed out some very real problems with the house that I liked -- it wasn't, actually, in move-in condition...there were things we'd have to change. And my objections to his favorite house were kind of, shall we say, silly: the master bedroom is pretty much the bottom floor, and there is no complete wall around the bedroom, and I wondered if perhaps anyone could hear anything emanating from the bedroom... Other than that, of course, it was a gorgeous house.

Still, we're talking more money than we'd ever have thought it was possible to spend on a house, even with California housing prices the way they are.

We're seeing three more tomorrow. We may not find it -- although I suspect Darin wanted to write a cheque for House #3 today, there and then -- Darin is relieved to see that there is some stuff out there he likes. And I know more of the kinds of things he likes and wants now.

And I realize that some of the features I like are totally pointless for the way we live and come more from my traditional view of what a house should be than from how I use a house. Like having a formal dining room. We will never use it. We use our dining room table and we should definitely have an area for it, but an entirely separate room? Like we're going to entertain formally all the time. Darin's insistence on having a large gathering area, rather than separate living and dining areas, makes sense. And trendy as well, with the popular Contemporary design. If you're ever trying to prove that Darin is just one of the masses, just mention "Contemporary design."

We did a little food shopping as we talked over what we'd seen, then came home and vegged out a little. He started snoozing on the sofa and my eyes started to close, so I went in to the bedroom and lay down. Darin came in and joined me at around 6. A few nanoseconds later it had gotten completely dark and was 8 p.m. We fell asleep so quickly, I don't think Darin even had time to snore.

The rest of the evening we spent puttering around, making dinner, watching TV, talking houses. I started flipping through my copy of Practical Homicide Investigation -- uh, why did I want this again? fascinating, and unbelievably grotesque, all in one 900-page textbook, complete with hundreds of actual crime scene photos. If you've ever wanted to see a decomposed, insect-riddled body, this is the book for you -- and we watched Millenium and Homicide, and I am trying not to see a connection between my TV habits and my reading habits.

We headed to bed after Tom Snyder's show. I started reading Conversations With My Agent, the other book Darin brought down for me. I'd ordered both of these books a while back with Amazon Books and had them sent to our house up north. CWMA is a good deal cheerier and relevant to my life than PHI, and it doesn't have nearly as many crime scene photos. It's a funny look at a former film student turned over-goddam-night success as a TV writer. More review as soon as I leave Chapter 3 and finish the book.

We turned off the light and went to sleep. Or tried to. Toss. Turn. Toss. Bump. "Ooops, sorry." Toss. Shift.

"Where are you going?"

"To take some melatonin."

Lie awake. Toss. Shift. Sigh.

"I'm going to read some more."

"I was thinking about going out to the living room and writing a Paperwork."

"Okay." Pause. "Watch out!"

"Watch out for what?"

"I'm going to turn on the light. It's like that scene from Gremlins."

"What scene from Gremlins?"

"Bright light! Bright light!" Darin turned on the light and sat up in bed. His hair had tufted in the center. My own little Spike Gremlin.

"I was hoping you weren't talking about the feeding them after midnight part," I said.