Flying home on Wednesday, I was sitting in Business Class, trying to concentrate on my writing, hoping to finish the screenplay I'd been working on throughout my trip. Others in the cabin had their laptops open too. In front of me, I kept getting distracted by the screen of one laptop. It's owner was browsing through Powerpoints for his business trip, and I kept seeing titles such as "Why Choose XXX Preferred Services: It's the Value Proposition!" And all of a sudden, I found myself getting thoroughly depressed. The specter of the return to work was looming.

In San Francisco you see a lot of tourists, and I remember always feeling slightly jealous of them when I'm working. I'd go downstairs from my office to get a coffee at Starbucks, and there'd be tourists sitting in the cafe, maps on the table, writing postcards, and I'd think to myself that I wished I was in their shoes. Well now I'd been doing that for the last month, and I didn't want to go back to my previous life!

Once I reached home on Wednesday evening, to a spotless, warm San Francisco evening, even the pleasure of being in my own place again weren't enough to lift the blues about returning to work. And it was more than that. Before going on vacation, I'd just wrapped up a major film project. Now, coming home, I had nothing immediately lined up, so it suddenly felt that I didn't really have a purpose. I knew, really, that this was just a temporary feeling of anti-climax. But it took me until last night to start back on an upswing.

Friday was my first day back at work, and it was as depressing and boring as I'd expected. All of my friends at work were out of the office, so I literally didn't speak to anybody all day. But at least it left me the leisure to think about my future. At my worst moments, I can be in a real funk about my future. I continue to see no easy way to break out of my job. The avenue that gives me hope, though, is film-making. But the progress is so slow there. It takes months to make even a short movie, and then months to promote it and try to get it into a film-festival. I have a definite feeling that one day I'll be able to make a living from film. But I hate the thought of maybe another couple of years, at least, of sticking in this job.

I've started to move on some new projects, though, and this is what started to lift my spirits last night. My screenplay is finished, and I'm going to share it with my collaborators Jim and Scott as a potential for our next project. I'm also hoping that we can together submit our work to the director's competition at Project Greenlight. I have my own little personal film project, called "Split Infinities", which I'm about to start shooting. And I've started to put out notices to find a collaborator to reshoot "A San Francisco Waltz" in 16mm. I suppose I've just reaffirmed that the only way to become a working film-maker is to make films. It's obvious really. It's amazing how easy it is to talk your way into inactivity. In the end, though, if you want to get somewhere, you just have to get up off your butt and get to work.