Today, as I sat in my newly repainted light blue office, it occurred to me to wonder, “What happened to my calendar?”

I’d had a calendar over my desk, and I’d taken it down and set it on a table out in the library before the painting began. But I brought all that stuff back in on Monday. Where was the calendar? It wasn’t a small calendar. It wasn’t likely to be hidden under a pile of papers.

I turned things over, off and on, for a couple hours.

At last I looked up, and noted that I’d already pinned the calendar on the wall.

Sometimes you hear of geniuses like Einstein, who got so caught up in deep thinking that they just lost track of the world around them.

I hope I’m one of those. Because otherwise I need a keeper.

Today is my birthday. (By a strange coincidence, I had one on the same date last year.) So far it’s been pretty good, by the standard of my birthdays.

I consider it a birthday gift from God that three Norwegians came to the bookstore today. An elderly gentleman in the party engaged me in conversation, speaking VE-RY SLOW-LY so I could understand him. That was pleasant, and they even bought some things.

And the crew at work bought me a cake for afternoon break, and signed a card. Good cake, too. Tonight I treated myself to half a small Domino’s sausage pizza (they’re knocking half off the price of any pizza ordered online this week. Doubtless just for me).

I also got an e-mail from a guy in Russia, who claimed to be a fan and asked for an autographed book plate for his copy of Wolf Time, and a photo. I can’t figure out a way for this to be a scam, so I’ll be spreading the joy to the eastern hemisphere as well.

And to top off my indulgence, I’ll post my book trailer, because it’s my birthday and you have to humor me.

Today I was back in my office, and it seemed strange to me, as if something essential about it had changed. Which was in fact the case. The walls were pink when I left, and now they’re blue.

I said it seemed strange; I didn’t say it was a surprise. Getting it painted while I was out was the plan from the beginning. Our school’s custodial staff did a bang-up job with it.

When I first took on the office of librarian and book store manager, almost the first thing they said was “We plan to get it repainted.” The lady who had been the first to use the office, when the new building was built and the library moved up from its basement quarters in the seminary, thought a darkish pink color would be a good choice. (I’m sure she called it something more technical, like Dusky Pink or Cream of Liver.) Nobody else I’ve spoken to since has concurred in that opinion.

But somehow the years passed without a change. I didn’t really chafe living with the color – interior decoration isn’t generally something that engages me – but when anybody brought it up I had to admit that I’d prefer something else. Still, repainting meant carrying all my junk out and then carrying it back in, which sounded like a lot of work.

But it’s done now. Now I’ve got a light blue office. I’ll have to think of a technical name for the color – Hypothermic Lips, maybe.

In college, my world literature professor introduced us to Shrink-lits, humorous little poems that sorta-kinda summarized important works like The Iliad, Hamlet, and Crime and Punishment. Now, Andy Naselli has summarized each of Screwtape’s letters in one sentence to the benefit of readers around the world. Now, if he could sum up each chapter of Anna Karenina, we would all be blessed.

Here are three from the list:

• Make him live in the future rather than the present.
• Encourage church-hopping.
• Encourage gluttony through delicacy rather than excess.

Darren Aronofsky is making a movie about the patriarch Noah, and some film people are talking about the script they have read, which may or may not reflect the final story. Peter Chattaway offers some thoughts and a bit of criticism of what Brian Godawa said about it. There’s no blood on the ice here, just a little back-and-forth.

The biggest issue plebeians like us will notice is the heavy environmentalism. In this story, original sin led to violence which led to the greatest of all evils: environmental waste. From what Chattaway can tell, the story may be thought-provoking, if we can hold our noses through the eco-propaganda. I wonder if the world will be a rainforest paradise after the flood washes through. (via Jeffrey Overstreet)

A “Speculative Cosmographer” gives us a few maps of imaginative lands.

And another box has been checked off my list of things to do. Remember that Miller Analogies Test I took a week ago, the one that disappeared in a cloud of electrons? I took it again today, and this time it worked, and I’m done with that. The preliminary score I got when I finished was 475 out of 600, which disappointed me at first. But according to what I’ve been able to learn in a web search, it would seem to actually be a pretty good result, because of the way it’s calculated. Scores above 500, I read somewhere, are pretty rare.

Here’s an interesting item by way of Instapundit: Apparently there’s a reason all the movies you watch these days seem the same. It’s because everybody’s following the same identical template.

Apparently a guy named Blake Snyder wrote a book called Save the Cat!, published in 2005. It became a hot seller in Hollywood, and everybody has been following his pattern to the letter ever since.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. If any community in history has valued creativity more, and possessed less of it, and lived in greater fear of failing in creativity, than Hollywood, I can’t imagine what it could have been.

I’ve always been leery of step-by-step templates. Partly because I’m too lazy to count pages. For years I’ve written on the basis of a simple, general formula – Hero has problem. Tries to solve it. Fails, making things worse. Tries again. Fails again. Makes things even worse. Repeat until he either succeeds or fails in some way that’s significant.

Call me, Paramount. We’ll do lunch.

What elements of your life have economic value? Your family photos? Your casual thoughts? The video you took of a stranger making a shameful fool of herself?

Our new social networks allow us to attempt to market everything in our lives for audience or follower consumption. Tim Challies applies an old analogy to it: when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Some experiences are too full to distill to 140 characters and too rich to capture in a photo,” he reflects. “Sharing such experiences through social media serves only to cheapen them. Do not allow yourself to ruin a beautiful moment by seeing it primarily as an opportunity to share it with strangers.”

They weren’t his people, and they wanted to make sure he knew that. Or maybe they were afraid of him, though they wouldn’t have admitted it. Alan Jacobs has written a story about a childhood experience in Birmingham in which he and his friends picked up stones to assault a black boy who walked through their neighborhood. Alan didn’t throw a stone or yell at this Other Person, but he did stand with his friends as the boy’s enemy.

Today, a couple of breakthroughs. I don’t think I’ve actually told our blog readership about my recent travails at work. Three weeks ago a catastrophic virus infestation was discovered in our computer network. It appears it all probably entered through my own office computer, because through some oversight I didn’t have antivirus protection. (I should have noticed that and asked questions. Noticing and asking questions aren’t things I’m good at.) So they took my box away physically, and our IT lady has been struggling to scrub it clean and save whatever files she can ever since.

She was so busy she never got around to telling me what was happening, or why I couldn’t have it back. So I’ve been twisting in the wind, trying to find things to do other than the things I ought to have been doing this summer.

On Monday somebody finally showed me how to access my work e-mail, so I was able to get my messages. Unfortunately one of them said I’d sold some used books through Amazon, and the order was now well overdue for shipment. I’ve apologized profusely to the buyer, but haven’t heard back whether he still wants the books or not.

Today, though, I got a substitute laptop to tide me over, which makes things much better. Sometime in August I get a new desktop.

In other news, I told you last Friday about the Miller Analogies Test I took, and how the laptop they assigned me shut down, and we weren’t sure whether my answers registered or not. Today I learned they hadn’t. But they’ve offered me a re-test, at no charge, so I’m going in again this Friday.

Although it’s a small inconvenience (especially with Highway 694 torn up), this is actually a good thing all in all. I’ve had the chance to preview the test for free, and I’ve gained some insight into the (diabolical) way it’s designed. A second try can’t hurt.

The proctor lady was very appreciative of my patience and good attitude. I’m always kind of surprised that anybody chooses to get shirty about things like this. She certainly didn’t cause the problem herself. There might be some momentary satisfaction in chewing someone out and putting them in their place, but in my experience that satisfaction lasts about twenty seconds, after which remorse and guilt set in. Who lives long enough for that?

I suppose some people walk away from scenes they’ve made with the warm satisfaction that comes of time well spent.

I do not understand those people.