Spring blah.

I haven't felt like doing much of anything this week. Maybe I'm still wiped out from the film festival. I haven't worked on my screenplay, haven't even done much reading. I'm about 100 pages into Moby Dick. Great book. (Duh, you say. But for some reason I never read it before.)

I haven't been sleeping well. I toss and turn and by 6 o'clock, I'm wide awake. Sometimes I'll fall asleep again at 8 or so, but I've been making myself get up because I don't want to sleep all day. I've actually been getting bored sometimes during the day, which is rare for me. Usually I feel like there's too much to do. But, since I haven't been able to make myself write much and don't feel interested in reading, there's a lot of time to fill. The last few days, I've been filling it with either reading blogs or browsing the gay hookup posts on craigslist. I haven't been interested in meeting anyone, I just get mesmerized by the often very strange pictures.

Oh, and gardening. I've been doing that. And that's satisfying.

I got out of the routine of meditating during the film festival, and when I'm not doing that, everything becomes more difficult.

Yesterday I had an appointment at the STD clinic to get screened for everything. They have test results for HIV and syphilis is about 20 minutes, which was nice. HIV tests have previously caused me so much anxiety that I've avoided them, or even a couple times, when I've gone to have blood drawn, I haven't been able to bring myself to call for results. Anyway, my tests were all negative.

Overall, the clinic experience was top-notch here in Austin. Since I've been without insurance most of my life, I've relied on free and low-cost clinics for most of my health care. And I've been to some extremely unpleasant clinics. But yesterday, I was in and out in an hour, the place was clean and cheery, and the phlebotomist and nurse were both pleasant and efficient.

In the evening, Z. and I went for a walk around Town Lake then had dinner at Marakesh. (Finally a Middle Eastern restaurant that stands up to the high standard of my old Jersey City haunts.)