La Grande Secrete

"There's more Internet on the TV than there is in real life."

Remember this, the next time you think being online makes you trendy.

I didn't think I'd wait three days for my next entry. I've just been so tired.

The secret of the title is finally out of the bag at Magic so I can mention it here. Remember a couple of months ago when Darin and I were driving to Santa Barbara and I got all emotional about our conversation? Well, perhaps you noted that I didn't exactly mention what the conversation was about.

We drove through the In N Out Burger and discussed how much we were both hating this see-one-another-on-weekends type of setup. He asked about how I was feeling about the future. I said, Well, if I'm really going to do this, really make a career of screenwriting, we have to move to LA.

His exact response was: "Okay."

He whipped out my cell phone and called his brother Mitch, who lives in Sunnyvale. He asked Mitch if he'd like to buy or rent our condo. "Sure," said Mitch.

And that was that.

Sometime in the next year -- then the next six months -- as soon as damn possible -- Darin and I were permanently relocating to LA.

When I first decided to go to grad school down here, Greg said he wanted to start a pool about when Darin would move to LA. I told him to put me down for "Never," which I honestly believed. Ha!

The past couple of months have been spent trying to figure out when and how we were going to do this. What Darin would do for work. Where we'd live. How completely and totally our lives would change.

I've been freaking out a lot about this over the past couple of months: Am I doing the right thing? Is this some kind of pipe dream that's going to mess up both of our lives? Why leave our happy little community of computer geeks in Silicon Valley for the world of plastic, shallow people?

Imagine my trying to do this at all if Darin weren't supportive.

We've begun meeting with a realtor and I'm going to start touring houses to see what's available around here. How much bang for the buck. I know Los Angeles is expensive, but can it be terribly more expensive than the Bay Area, where one-bedroom homes can go for two or three hundred thousand?

Let's see, what have I been doing this week:

• Monday: Drove Darin to the airport. Since I was up at such an insanely early hour (after not getting to sleep for forever because of insomnia) I went to Babylonian. Jeffrey wasn't there yet, so I went to set and hung around, watching them set up. I also did some Xeroxing and rediscovered the old maxim that lack of sleep makes you act and feel incredibly stoned: I couldn't figure out how to make the Xerox machine do what I wanted it to.

  I did a lot of computer stuff all day, trying to get John Copeland's computer to talk to America Online over his ISDN line. I tested it and retested it, and I was pretty sure I'd gotten it to work. (Of course, yesterday evidently it started barfing -- my thought is that it's FreePPP causing problems with AOL -- and John said, "Where's Diane? Call Diane!" He knows my name. This makes me very happy.)

  Then I had directing class, where I got to see the results of what I directed last week. I was late because I lay down to close my eyes "just for a second." I wasn't especially happy with the finished product, and part of that is the editors' choice of music -- "Light My Fire" by the Doors, which lent a far more comic aspect to it than I wanted. But they edited it, so they had final cut.

• Tuesday: Worked on my outline for writing class after having thought about it for a million years (and I still felt like I didn't know what I was doing). Went to meet the realtor and discuss what Darin and I want and need in a house. Went through the pre-approval process, which mainly consisted of me telling them a bunch of numbers that might or might not be true. Rough estimates for both of our purposes, I guess.

  Writing class: Pretty good. We worked over a couple of people's stories, and I got to hear how different writers worked out various ideas.

  Business: Brooke brought in a producer who used to be a bigwig at Fox and now has gone indie-prod (that's showbiz for "independent producer") to tell us about the relationship between producer and studio and financing men. I was interested, but I was tired at that point.

• Wednesday (today): Got up early to get to Film History class, where we watched Dodge City, a Western starring...Errol Flynn? Unfortunately the Technicolor had run, so there were a lot of pink plains. The audience -- which included a few girls sighing heavily over Flynn, that "homosexual Nazi spy child molester," as some of us in the audience took to calling him -- really started getting into it, making MST3K type comments back to screen. This class is much more fun than I thought it would be, but I'm still unhappy it's at 9am.

  I headed over to Babylonian, where I mostly did two things: worked on John Copeland's computer some more (anyone know why I couldn't get OT/PPP to work with his ISDN line?) and drove to Studio City and back to get a book. Difference between Babylonian and Spring Creek: Babylonian's going to buy me a whole tank of gas as payment for making this round-trip.

Now I'm home, determined to write this entry before I fall asleep. Actually, I'm thinking about making my first takeout/free delivery order since getting here, because I'm too tired even to make myself some soup. How's that for tragic?