I’m in a very irritating state right now.

I am sleepy, yet I can’t actually get to sleep. Call it daytime insomnia. Given the vampire’s hours I keep these days, it would be highly appropriate.

Normally, when I feel like this, I just take a nap. But something or other is keeping me from being able to relax enough.

Maybe something is bugging me and I’m not aware of it.

I can’t think of any worries I might have. My life is pretty sweet right now. I have around as much work as I can handle. It brings me a little extra income, which is very nice. Recently my boss, Prasad, thanked me for my patience in continuing to write the scripts even though I hadn’t heard from him in a while. And he swears he’s had three episodes animated and will upload them real soon now.

That would be nice.

But the thing is, I am actually enjoying the work. For the most part. I mean, work’s work and there will always be times when you have to do it even though you don’t feel like it at all. But for the most part, I am getting a hell of a lot more out of it than money.

I’m getting a ton of highly valuable experience. My writing skill and confidence grows with every script, and at five scripts a weak, that’s really something. As I develop, I find myself using the instrument that is animation in a more strong and inventive fashion.

I have even, spontaneously, started writing cutaways. And that’s magical. And not just because that’s what the big boys like Seth Macfarlane do.

It’s because I write to pagecount/time, and cutaways fill that space quite easily, even with my trying to get them across in as few words as possible.

Tat’s because I have realized that we were told in Writing for Animation class that the animators don’t want us doing their jobs for them by visualizing in the script. They want us writers to tell us, in detail, what happens, but how it looks and how it’s actually is execute is their job.

I probably shouldn’t be using an inline markup system I pulled out of my ass in order to figure out how to write this stuff in order to tell them where the punchline is and where the visuals go and when they should go there.

But as a comedy writer, I feel like I have to control the timing of the gags. I can’t do that without pointing the animators at the right parts.

I realize that this is one of those control/trust issues I have. I should just trust that they know what they are doing and will not butcher my script with their own ideas.

Unless they’re funny. People are free to make it funnier. It has to be funnier to me, but I am always open to making things better. The play’s the thing… the show.

If other people’s ideas can make the show better, then I will take ther advice and I will thank them for it and I will use their ideas and it will still be only my name on the script.

After all, for the most part, people just wanted to contribute. They want to feel like they are doing their part to further the group objective. They want to feel lijke what they think and say matters.. They want to feel like a part of something.

I would be happy to give them that.

Compared to that, matters of who gets credit for what pales in comparison.  Myself, I am scrupulous about such things. Mostly, that is due to my own moral code.

But it’s also because, on a purely selfish level, taking credit for someone else’s work is gross to me. My work flows from myself into the world as a living, organic part of me.

Other people’s work is not part of that, and hence foreign and alien to me.

The only solution is to make sure everyone gets full credit for their ideas and thus make it very clear where their body of work ends and mine begins.

God, it sucks to be this sleepy. It must be the heat that’s doing it. Just pounding the life out of me, like it does. I am trying to stay hydrated, but it’s tough.

Mainly because the heat is making me too lazy to get up and get more water.

Summer is like that, at least for a fat old tubbalard like me.

I wonder if I will make it to the beach this summer. Odds are against it. There’s too much social anxiety in the way. Plus, I have never been to a beach all alone. It’s always been with friends and/or family and/or neighbours.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

I’ve never even been in the ocean without there being someone around to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t drown.

I’m not sure if being on the beach by myself would make me feel really lonely or really free. Probably both, and in that order. I know that I would not be able to stop myself from looking around at all the happy families (and all the normal ones too) having fun in the sun, relaxed, taking the close bond they have with one another for granted because it has always been there.

And that would give me that deep feeling of being locked out of life, able to watch it but not to be a part of it. The sad boy alone at night looking into the window of a house where everything seems warm and happy and loving.

I wish I’d known what that meant back then. I wish I’d realized that I had a problem and it was up to me to solve it. That how I lived – lonely and isolated and miserable – was not normal and something should be done about it.

But like I would do for the rest of my life, I did nothing about it, and just kept on trudging forward because I was too timid to ask for help.

And I am still that way at 44.

But I am getting better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.