{"id":1867,"date":"2010-01-04T21:27:33","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T21:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1867"},"modified":"2010-01-04T21:27:33","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T21:27:33","slug":"back_to_the_grind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2010\/01\/04\/back_to_the_grind\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to the Grind"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot<\/i>. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I’ve taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it and post the whole lot of them to Flickr<\/a>. I was going to set up the digital picture frame my parents gave me for Christmas a year ago, and I was going to send long-overdue and just plain long emails to several people I haven’t contacted for a while. I was going to give my house a thorough cleaning, and go through my clothes and pull out a bunch of stuff I no longer wear and give it to charity, and I was going to sit in the sun streaming in through the window and read a fat novel and sip hot cocoa. I was going to listen to a whole mess of podcasts I’ve got saved on the computer and go to some movies, which, believe it or not, I haven’t really managed to do for the past couple months. I thought I might even take a nice drive up to Park City one afternoon and try breathing some less-smoggy air for a change. And when all that was done, I was going to actually write<\/i>… not the lame-o crap I do around here all the time, but real<\/i> writing, creative writing. Fiction, in other words, the stuff I used to think I was going to spend my life making.<\/p>\n

And just how many of all those planned activities do you suppose I accomplished? Well… I managed to do a couple of memes for the blog. Yay me.<\/p>\n

So what did<\/i> I do over the break? I visited friends on Christmas Eve. I had a very rare stress-free Christmas Day with my parents. I spent an afternoon with my buddy Jer, who I only see a couple times a year because he lives in Vegas, and I enjoyed the annual reunion dinner with The Dudes, i.e., my buddies from the old multiplex days. I also enjoyed a New Year’s Eve video party with a different subset of friends I like to call The Usual Suspects. (Geeks that we are, the evening’s viewing selection was 2010: The Year We Make Contact<\/i>. Of course.) And then I did penance for that party all the next day. (I’ve decided that champagne doesn’t agree with me; every time I drink it, I end up with one of those headaches that sits right behind your retinas and threatens to explode your eyeballs any time the treacherous daylight sneaks through a chink in the window blinds.)<\/p>\n

I helped The Girlfriend’s parents organize and store their Christmas decorations, and was rewarded with a little road trip out into the hinterlands for lunch at one of those small-town greasy spoons I love so well, a place called the Stockton Miner’s Cafe (sorry, no web presence that I could find). I hung some framed photos that have been sitting on the living-room floor for several months. And I managed to see a<\/i> movie, Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes<\/i>. (For the record, I liked it. Well, I liked the story and the performances, at least — people who are screaming about revisionism don’t know their Holmes — but I am never<\/i> going to get used to the modern way of putting together an action scene. Undercrank the camera, freeze for a moment, then overcrank and smash cut to something else, all shot in close-ups so you can never see where anything is in relation to anything else… ugh. The action in Sherlock<\/i> is a lot more intelligible than the messy fights in those damn Bourne movies, but I still long for a nice steadicam shot once in a while.)<\/p>\n

And all that stuff was great, it really was. But now, as Ray Liotta says at the conclusion of Goodfellas<\/i>, it’s all over, and I’m back at work in the comma mines and feeling like a tremendous failure for not crossing off a few items on that “to-do” list…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I’ve taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}