Made my acting debut last night in a TV commercial for D&H Drugstore in Columbia. Kim Sherman directed, Dave Anderson was D.P., Michael checked footage, Mousel held the boom. A major component of my role was wetting my armpits with paper towels. The same for the female lead, Holly. It was beautiful. It was fun filming in a store after hours and yeah, man, Kim says I’m a natural.
Also, I completed my first Italian to English translation for the GBD. Big fella. 10 pages. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned, but I’m happy to say that I am now something of an expert in the field of stillbirths, feto-neonatal mortality, and odds ratios for both.
I had a Matrix moment after I finished translating. I sat there absorbing words for hours and then finally when I left the coffee shop where I was working, I walked out to the street and realized I could describe everything I saw. Given, I could only describe it in terms of retarded intrauterine growth, but I marvelled at the fact that I had just learned over 100 new verbs, conjunctions, and scientific terms in a language that I speak more often in dreams than in waking life.
I got back to the US from studying abroad in Italy in 2002 and since then have only had a handful of Italian conversations, mostly on the phone with Nava and Marcello, my roommates for the year in Bergamo. I should get in touch with them again. Tomorrow! Tonight, I’m going to watch more interviews with Charles Bukowski. Hey, it’s OK… Come on… It’s alright… It’s OK. I’m OK… Yeah…