From the Department of So-Very-Screwed

It's official: the world is off its meds. As the IDF rolls the clock back on Lebanon 20 years with its sustained bombing campaign, as Iraq continues its daily grind of blood and fire, as DC hipsters and yuppies find themselves pistol-whipped by the disenfranchised within *gasp* three blocks of a Whole Foods, as Britney Spears continues to reproduce, I find myself in one of those deep, dark places.

By which I mean mentally, not the downstairs bar of the Black Cat.

Producer 'postponed' our ridiculously hard-to-schedule script meeting to a to-be-determined date; I lost out on a job that I believed I'd been obscenely qualified for; my best platonic female friend/editor/screenplay partner just scored a long piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is fantastic news (I'm happy for her, believe me) but merely highlights that my freelance career over the last three years has been pretty much nil, Frommer's and pieces for bar magazines nonwithstanding. I'm gripped by a keen sense that I'm *losing,* whatever that means; that the world-conquering impulses that have governed my whole young-adulthood have been thwarted despite my best efforts.

So I'm on battle footing. New policies of professional viciousness have been instituted, plans laid out.