Diary: November 2003.

This was one of those months that came at a generally frustrating time in life, and so I really only remember a couple specifically memorable events.

I was tying to direct the Nocturnal's production of Shelley's Cenci, but I was running into just about every barrier along the way... lack of space, lack of fund, unable to find a full cast; ideally I would have either quit my job to pursue these problems full-time or have aborted the project then and there. But I was saving up to buy an engagement ring, and I couldn't quit my job. And I was too stubborn to give up on the project.

I did run an evening-long workshop where we discussed Radiohead and J.M.W. Turner and how they could interface with the play. And politics. Like I said: all ambition and brimstone, but short of hope.

It didn't help either that I was a month into a yearlong temp assignment, which would turn out to be stressful by dint of intradepartmental drama, if not the workload itself. I was getting paid $10 an hour, which was more than I'd made before, but not much, and not a whole lot considering what I was paying in rent and student loans.

But wait wait wait wait wait wait wait...

I'm missing important stuff...

This was the year that I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and drafted a novel called Adrift on the Mainstream, which would become Hungry Rats. Now I remember -- there was a launch party at a bar on Irving Park and Ashland, where I ended up spending the evening talking with a topologist from the U of C. Later that month we met up with a girl at the Med and discussed our novels-in-progress. And my own was finished at 41,000 words, so I had to scribble out 10,000 words of gibberish to cross the finish line. So artistically, this was a very memorable month for me, even if (evidently) short on good cheer.

I was running a role-playing game too, based in an Inca-derived cosmology that abutted J.R.R. Tolkien. So that helped to alleviate stress.

When I went home for Thanksgiving that year, I told my mom a secret; that I was going to propose to my girlfriend. That was why I had gotten a McKinley Park Studio for $435.00 instead of the Art Deco apartment I wanted off Bryn Mawr.

Character building?

It wasn't a bad yet; it was simply very fraught with.

Where were you in November 2003?