I’m not normally a germophobe, but this morning at the gym, someone did something that icked me out something awful.

When you swim, you’re supposed to rinse off in the communal shower by the pool before and after. This both helps prevent dirt from getting in the pool (before) and helps get rid of some of the chlorine (after).

Some people like to also take the post-swim rinse as an opportunity to shampoo their hair, and perform other parts of the showering ritual, just in a bathing suit. I find this odd, but not gross.

What I found gross was the woman who insisted on brushing her teeth in the communal, open shower. Spitting onto the floor that everyone walks on, as if the mere fact that she was showering while doing it makes it okay.

I can see doing that at home, where you are the only person who has to stand in that, and the one who has to clean it up. But in a shower by a pool? Where people you don’t even know go? Where everyone can see exactly what you’re doing?

Frankly, I don’t think there are shower shoes in existence thick enough to make that okay.

I took my current job just under 2 months ago. Since then I have driven over six thousand miles, almost all of it either to, from, or for work.

I have bought 28 26 tanks of gas to accomplish this feat, at a total price of $1031.28.

I am really starting to wish I had a Prius.

Normally it takes me 45 minutes to get from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita. Today, it took me 1 hour, 35 minutes.

15 minutes spent just getting ON the 405 freeway to go north, because for no apparent reason, the 10E-405N interchange was ridiculously backed up.

Then after I finally broke free of that, I got right past the last exit before you go down the hill towards the 101 when traffic ground to a complete halt.

Just under two miles and just over 35 minutes later, I finally passed the source: A flipped-on-its-side pickup truck, along with the Scion that apparently hit it (whose entire front end had been reduced to a six-inch scrunch of metal) and a Lexus that glanced off it with more moderate damage.

The whole thing closed down three of the six lanes of the 405, right before the giant mess of the 405-101 interchange. It was staggeringly awesome.

Depending on who you read, talks between the AMPTP and the Screen Actors’ Guild either ended without a deal or completely fucking imploded tonight. You know it’s serious when Nikki Finke breaks out the clip-art alarm bells.

So now, we’re staring down the barrel of another potential strike, this time by the Actors.

A smaller union, AFTRA, is probably going to cut a quick a deal to undercut SAG on TV deals in order to gain a larger percentage of jurisdiction, but the vast majority of primetime TV (which I work in) and all feature films are SAG signatories.

The threat of a SAG strike has already ground a lot of stuff on the features end to a halt. Anything that’s not already filming or that couldn’t use the time without actors wisely (for example, Transformers 2 building more models and working on the VFX while everyone twiddles their thumbs) is not getting greenlit, because nobody will insure anything with a post SAG-deadline end date.

SAG’s contract doesn’t actually expire until June 30th, so there’s about two months where TV shows are going to try and crank out as many episodes as they can, and networks will jam in as many pilots as they can (I’m actually leaving the pilot I’m on at the moment to go work on another in a couple weeks; more on that in a later post).

The difference between SAG and the WGA is that if SAG walks, everything grinds to a halt immediately. With the writers, people could still shoot finished scripts, with the directors making “tweaks” on set.

But without actors? No shows. No movies. No nothin’. No jobs almost immediately for a huge chunk of the already-hurting SoCal economy.

A SAG strike would be a colossal disaster for everyone involved, but SAG and the AMPTP seem to hate each other enough that they’d rather destroy themselves in order to destroy the other than let the other side even appear to win.

That mentality is almost exactly the same one that led to a three month writers’ strike that drove a fair few people I know to the brink of bankruptcy.

I wish I could be more optimistic that both sides are going to pull their heads out of their respective asses and make a deal in the next few weeks, but at this point, I’m stocking up on ramen.

…at 5:30 this morning as I dragged my sorry ass to the gym: A freakishly gigantic spider dangling from my porch light RIGHT AT EYE LEVEL.

I considered stomping on it when it rapidly descended to the ground, but the damn thing was so big, I feared I would only make it angry.

I’m just praying that leaving it alone will cause it to never actually try to get in my house. I was too tired to scream externally, just to give a brief “Euugh!”, but in my head, and if I ever see that in my house, I was giving a full-throated horror movie scream.

Hours worked this week: 76.6, for a six-day week.

Miles driven for work this week: 841. And I didn’t even drive anywhere Sunday.

Days I still managed to drag myself to the gym: 4, exactly as planned. I now know I can do this and am not allowed to make “But I had to work sooooo much” excuses.

Brain and Sanity: Gone! Hee hee!