how to overcome boredom

That's not really a title to this story as much as it's a question.

I was at our retail store for just over 7 hours today. I had two walk ins. That's it.

Not customers. Not lookie-loos. Walk ins.

These people look, sniff, and walk out, and the only thing they accomplish is letting cold air leave my nice and comfy store.

I've moved on to the short lived television series Firefly. It's amazing how some of these studio executives actually never watch the shows they cancel, because it's obvious that if these guys ever gave Firefly a shot, it would have taken off.

I mean, people who make movies, right, the ones who make these films for low budget and then end up making ridiculous amounts of money... these guys are set for life. As long as they don't make stinker after stinker, they will always find backing for a film.

You'd think it was the same for television. Buffy had to be one of the most profitable television shows. It spawned a spin-off, a board game, probably something loosely comparable to civil war re-enactments...

I was lucky, I watched Serenity, the feature film, first. Then I went straight out and bought the Firefly series. This will be my third time watching it. It's brilliant. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand why it was canceled.

But I digress.

It's just one of the ways I overcome boredom.

Recently, I've become a reddit junkie. Though try as I might, I can't get my articles to post on the damn thing. Something about karma and my lack of it.

Got turned on to it by Robert Stevenson, who has a very funny blog, check it out.

There are other sites, but I need more. Here are the sites I visit every day. I mean, hourly.

Joblo.com - not porn. A movie news and rumor site. Love these guys.

HSX - not porn. Boy I might have to say that a lot. HSX is the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Been doing this for years. You join, you get an account and you buy and sell movie stocks, star bonds... it's awesome. You start at $2 million. I just passed the $450 million mark.

Don't look at me like that. If you didn't know I was a geek, you must be new.

Ebay - ok, this site you should check out. It's online auctions, and they have EVERYTHING. Not too many people know about it, so go there now and go often, you'll find crazy stuff like healthy white babies and indentured servants.

Apple Movie Trailers - I love trailers. They get some great ones. Sometimes they're slow, you can find most any trailer earlier than what Apple puts them out... like Yahoo and IGN, but the quality at Apple is superb.

CAF - IT'S NOT PORN for god sake. ComicArtFans.com - this place is amazing. Bill Cox created this site for people who enjoy collecting comic book artwork, and that's me all over.

You can see my gallery here.

There are some NSFW images there, a lot of them I painted, so be prepared. It's not lewd stuff, but I was trained painting nudes at school, and it's classical subject matter. Sometimes not, sometimes it's cartoon stuff, sometimes light erotica stuff. Sorry, but it's a big market.

Huh. I never touched on my schooling here.

Well, I went to School of Visual Arts in NYC. I wanted to be a comic book artist. I learned watercolor painting from the great Irwin Greenberg, a genius. He taught me a lot.

I re-began watercolor painting about two, three years ago, after a long stint of writing screenplays and running a screenwriters website, wordsfromhere.com. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take many classes, but at the Art Students League in NYC, I found that Greenberg was teaching again, so for a few months before I moved from the city, I took his class again. It was fantastic, and I learned a lot.

You can see my class pieces here.

So, the thing is... I can't really hire a model, and so I had to work from online photos.

Here in Florida, I'm sure if I had some crack, or maybe just some peanut butter, I could hire a model to sit for 6 hours, so I could paint him/her. But it's not worth the hassle.

So that's me. Painting is what I want to do for a living. I'll get to it full time once I destroy leave Florida.

I'm tired today. Not too tired, but my body feels sluggish. I'm not getting enough exercise.

Perhaps that's because it's been over 90 degrees the last three days. The thought of doing something to sweat additionally seems counter productive to the laziness gene I inherited from my father.

I've worked hard to live up to the standards that gene requires. Very hard.

Ok, actually, I haven't worked hard at all.

You see how that works?

Hmmm... yeah, nothing else really rocked my world today. Karen, my girl who still lives in NYC, had jury duty today. Poor Karen. She got to see the worst of the worst white collar criminals today. Maybe a flasher, too. She sounded excited earlier, I must get details.

We're trying to wrangle up some tickets to Vegas for our birthdays. I haven't been to Vegas since... god, it's been a while. And I really enjoyed it. I hope those people remember my name. I mean, I was a good tipper, you know, six years ago.

They have to remember me, right? Maybe throw a few free drinks my way while I'm at the tables?

Maybe if I'm a snappy dresser.

I hope you all had a good day that revolved around sex, money, food and going to the bathroom.

In that order.

J