This has been one of those weeks where you get home late each night, exhausted, fling off your clothes, climb into bed and get up early again the next morning, and have to fight your way to your desk to check your e-mail because of all the clothes n all over the floor. It would've been a difficult, stressful week anyway, but as luck would have it, my boss had one of his periodic bursts of inspiration and gave me only three days to prepare a huge, hour-long presentation, which I have to give t of our offices in the Western region at 8 AM on Monday morning.

What else has happened this week? Well, what would a week be for Keith without the usual medical appointments? On Tuesday, I spent an hour with a physiotherapist telling her the sorry tale of my wrists. As a result, she now expects me to do the ny little hand-puppet exercises no less than four times every 15 minutes. Not to mention bathing my friends and wrists (I promise - that was a genuine mistake by my voice recognition software - it was meant to be "hands and wrists") in alte g hot and cold water baths for 20 minutes at a stretch twice a day. Quite how I'm going to fit this in, I'm not quite sure. You see, my other physiotherapist, the cute German boy I see on Thursdays, expects me to spend 20 minutes, twice a day, doin e leg stretches which I can only describe as being somewhat homosexual. The one bonus of this latter program is indeed the cute German boy that comes with it: each Thursday I get to recline on a gurney wearing only shorts and a t-shirt while he slow ipulates my huge legs and feet. It's really quite intimate and I'm trying to figure out if he's straight or gay. To help matters along, I found myself helplessly going on and on about this German girl I know. I'm sure he now thinks I'm a breeder.

So why do I keep going back to the class? Well, the truth is that I need this guy's experience. For example, I'm going to buy extremely affordable insurance from his production company for my own film shoot next month. See, I'm becoming just li ypical filmmaker already: cultivating relationships just for what I can get out of them. Still, there have been times during the last two weeks where I've truly wondered why am I making movies? You can truly count on the fingers in front of you the r off filmmakers in the Bay area who are making a decent living. And even then, they are enduring massive amounts of stress and frustration.

Case in point. Throughout the last week I've been continuing to push through the problems and issues surrounding the movie I will shoot in mid-October, my first 16mm production, the remake of my miniDV movie "A San Francisco Waltz." I r am making progress: I've cast the movie with two beautiful dancers who are both competitive ballroom dancers. One of the principal problems with my original version of this movie was that my two friends had never waltzed in their lives until their b ent on film. Not to mention, that they'd never acted before. Don't get me wrong, they did a great job in the circumstances; but to see my two new dancers move across the room in twinkling elegance is to realize the difference between beauty and the

I've also finally completed the shooting script and storyboard, and I'm waiting to hear how much the Treasure Island Development Authority will charge me for a permit to shoot (I'm hoping, nothing). Finally, I've been exchanging e-mails in German a symphony orchestra in Vienna in an effort (which is looking promising) of getting free permission to use a recording of "On The Beautiful Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss. (I've been using the translation engine on the search engine AltaVi help compose these e-mails. And I've been writing the original English versions using my voice recognition software. So we have their double the opportunity of amusing mistakes creeping into my German e-mails. Lord knows what I've really been say this Austrian orchestra.)

Series of shots from our storyboarding session on Treasure Island. Shot from my camcorder so we can show the camera movement in a series of screen snapshots.

Then I've been trying to figure out how I will edit the movie once its shot, and talking to all manner of people to get advice, all of whom make contradictory suggestions. And I haven't even mentioned my worries about how much this whole productio cost me

All this time and I never realized that I look like Chris Kattan

All this preproduction activity should really classify as "fun." Shouldn't it? But for me, being a worrier, I get caught up in the need to get things done, rather than enjoying them as I do them. As my therapist says, I'm not a " s person." A process person enjoys the process more than the results. My therapist also says that I can learn to become a process person. I asked her how one become a process person. She said, not surprisingly, it takes a process to become a s person. So let's get going, said I.

The most exhausting evening of the week was Wednesday, a long evening which didn't even begin until after 8 PM. My friend Jim had asked me to be the Director of Photography for his miniDV short movie, and Wednesday was the second and most complex ing day. Over the course of six hours we shot about four minutes worth of the final movie. It's extraordinarily difficult to film a movie, and light it correctly, when the entire thing takes place in an apartment at night. You have your actors sta in a corner talking. You have to light them for film, and make it look as if the light is coming from already established light sources in their apartment. Of course, the problem is you have these nasty, huge shadows on the walls behind the actors. ou shoot in a studio you can put the lights high on the ceiling so that the shadows fall beneath the frame of the camera. Or you have a big enough set, that you're not forced to position your actors near the walls. Needless to say, we had none of t dvantages. Fortunately, Jim had another friend come around to help with lighting. This guy, Justin, had the real stuff: genuine motion picture equipment -- lights, stands, various types of screens and gels, as well as lots of experience lighting &qu l movies." I'd expected to feel a little challenged by his presence since he had so much more experience than me, yet I was the Director of Photography. But unlike me, Justin did not have a prickly ego, and the evening went smoothly.

I even had time to go to the symphony this week though I fell asleep during the Stravinsky (inexcusably so) and the Tchaikovsky (understandably so). Fortunately, I didn't snore and embarrass my friend Scott, who'd invited me. By the way, one of th advantages of using voice recognition software is that, unlike me, it knows how to spell the word "Tchaikovsky"

I ended my last journal entry mentioning that I was getting back into dating. But I find that I've reached the end of this long, almost endless entry and I still haven't had time to give that subject full justice. So I will promise to go into fu explicit detail next time. I take that back: strike the word "explicit."