Give me your poor, give me your tired, give me your skinny graduate students. Sixteen years ago today I took my first ever airplane flight and landed in Philadelphia to start my new life as a graduate student. Wow. That's a long 16 years ago.

I was away from my desk for over an hour, just now, having lunch with a friend, and when I returned there was one only email in my inbox, with the subject-line "Waste Management Industry". How appropriate. It's that time again at work. The time when expensive, skilled professionals like myself sit in their deluxe offices while their minds slowly decay through lack of use. I know, I know, I've bored you all silly over the last three years, complaining incessantly about my job, and how unfulfilling and boring it is. Why, you ask, haven't I done anything about it?

The answer's complicated. On the one hand, I'm frequently tempted just to quit my job and to hell with the consequences. I tell myself that no creature comforts are worth enduring the soul-destroying feeling of being a useless, expensive piece of machinery. I tell myself that I'd be willing to give up my nice apartment, my hot yellow SUV, my cleaning lady and my personal trainer, in exchange for a more meaningful, more fulfilling job, while I pursue my film-making interests in my spare time. The problem is, you know what pays for that film-making pursuit? For the classes, the software, the equipment, the fees for submission to film-festival? Yes, it's the darned job that pays for it all.

And the chances of finding a different, and better job in my field are slim, and, in the current economy, next to non-existent. By sheer chance, my career path has taken me into a level of experience and proficiency in an area where, unfortunately, 95% of the jobs are in positions you wouldn't want to tell your Mom about: credit-card marketing programs, and pharmeceutical data-analysis.

I ate two pounds of chocolate this weekend. That sounds bad, doesn't it? Really bad. It was an attempt to lift my spirits, and it was an attempt that actually worked. I don't normally give into my desire for chocolate, but, I figured, I'd been so good recently in following my diet and exercise regimes, that I deserved the weekend off. So on Saturday night, I stayed home to watch "Amelie" and eat a huge bar of Symphony chocolate.

On Sunday, I went to see "Confessions of a Mormon Boy", a one-man, auto-biographical play by a cute guy in his early thirties named Steven Fales. I'm not particularly partial to theater; I find that I can't suspend disbelief as easily as I can in watching a movie, and, usually, the seats are too tiny and cramped in theaters for somebody of my height. But I'd read several reviews of this play, and expected an honest and touching exploration of the internal conflict coming out of being a gay Mormon. However, for much of the performance, I wondered why I'd come. There were a lot of the things I don't like about theater; jokes with obvious punch-lines accompanied by a grin at the audience, and the disturbing tendency on the part of the performer to burst into song every fifteen minutes or so. So I resisted liking the show until towards the end, when he built a convincing image of how wrenching it must have felt to be in his shoes; married, with three young children, an important member of his church, and yet crumbling inside with the urgency to express his homosexuality. In the end, I think the partial standing ovation was a recognition of his actualizing so convincingly the process of coming out, something all gay men have been through, with all its consequences, both forseen and unintended. Oh, I think there was also a little bit of appreciation thrown in, there, for his smooth, sexy, muscular body, and the last act where he's mostly shirtless.

I'd gone to this show on one of my weekly "Artist's Dates". Yes, this was a date with myself. And no, it's not quite as pathetic as that seems. I'm trying to follow a program called "The Artist's Way", which encourages practices that free up your creativity. The idea of once a week making sure you experience something new and different, by yourself, is a good one. It serves to recharge your mind with new ideas. I've always noticed how many ideas I get when I travel. Here, then, is a simple way of keeping the ideas flowing when you're at home in your humdrum world.

Last week's Artist's Date was a trip to SF MOMA, our modern-art museum, followed by a photography session in the streets downtown (see below). For my next Artist's Date, I think I'll hire an exotic Peruvian belly-dancer to strip in my living room. Or something.

"Infrastructure," Harrison St, San Francisco

Pipes, San Francisco Musem of Modern Art

This Saturday, I went location scouting for the reshoot of my movie "A San Francisco Waltz" It looks like, finally, I'm moving ahead with this project, after a year of humming and hawing, trying to figure out how to get past some obstacles. I've found a talented young 16mm cinematographer to work with, and a perfect location, out in the wastelands of Treasure Island, the former navy base in San Francisco bay. Now I just have to find two male actors who know how to waltz.

Location scouting with my cinematographer, Tyler, Treasure Island. This opens out into a large panorama.