The Thursday who was a man

Today was a lot like yesterday, just like yesterday was a lot like the day before. That tends to happen in the middle days of the week, and I suspect tomorrow will be a lot like today, except a little more Fridayish.

This evening, I met my parents at the train station in Hicksville, a couple of towns over, and we went out for dinner at a nice local Indian restaurant. My father had just been to the eye doctor to follow up on the procedure he had last week, which according to the doctor went extremely well. My father’s vision isn’t yet 20/20 in the eye, but he’s made a speedy and almost full recovery, which I think allayed some of the concerns he was having.

I did a little writing on the train, knowing that we might get home late and I might use that as an excuse not to, and I think I may be slowly getting past this stumbling block that’s kept me from moving ahead on this one particular story. (Despite having a pretty clear idea of where it’s headed and what happens next.) I think the trick to overcoming writer’s block is not to believe in writer’s block. On the walk to Penn Station this evening, I listened to Eddie Izzard in conversation with Elvis Mitchell, and Izzard talked about how the only way to overcome panic was simply not let yourself panic. It doesn’t help if you do, so you just have to force yourself not to. Easier said than done, maybe, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to do it.

(It’s a little like Jack says in this clip from the first season of Lost: “Fear’s sort of an odd thing.”)

And I watched the second episode of Saturday Night Live‘s first season, which is almost unrecognizable as Saturday Night Live. It’s a little less over-stuffed than the premiere episode, but mostly because it spends so much of its time being just a live music show. There were a couple of amusing filmed segments, and some surprisingly not-very-funny Muppets, but there weren’t any sketches, unless you count a couple of commercial parodies and “Weekend Update.” It’s like watching alternate universe version of the show, or at least very different than the standard Cliff’s Notes version you get in most SNL retrospectives. I don’t know that I enjoyed the episode, but Art Garfunkel was surprisingly good, so there’s that.

Anyway, that’s about it.