Backstage: it's not what you'd expect. It's more, it's less, it's completely different from what you've imagined. The world behind the curtain is very, very different from the world that the fans see.

Edmund has apparently decided that, despite our trimming his claws an hour ago, we're still worthy of being shown his cute and cuddly side. As I type, he is lying in his accustomed perch to my right, curled up in a position that is neither on his side nor on his back, but a combination of the two. He has a paw draped over his nose in an attempt to block out the light from the ceiling fixture.

I am part of the chain.

Jeff, on the answering machine this morning: "Amy, turn on the television now."
Ten minutes later, to Kat: "Kat, turn on your television now. What channel? Any channel."
To Brad: "What are they saying up there? Please, tell me something I don't know already."
To Andrew: "Hold on, hold on….my God. It's gone."
To Heather: "Is Andy okay? Have you heard?"

After another night of delayed sleep, I made a thoroughly wavering, uncertain decision today to limit how much information I took in about the destruction in New York.

We bandy about the phrase "too much information," but in this case, it can be all too true. For each person it's different—but we each know when it happens—the moment when we know too much, and it's more than we can handle, emotionally or intellectually.I reached my moment about twenty-four hours ago over a specific, painful piece of information. For me, it was learning about a particular incident that the networks all have on videotape but refuse (rightly) to show. Even knowing of its existence was more than I could take. Jeff knows what that particular image was, but I will not repeat it here, for repetition is salt for the wound, not solace.

Have you ever asked yourself why you do something?

I did something today that I've been putting off for quite some time: I restarted my novel. I've known for quite some time that something wasn't right, and that I was going to have to scrap what I'd done so far, but I didn't know why. About a month ago, it came to me. My error was not in the characterization or my choice of plot, but in how the story was being told.It was to my horror when I realized that I was stuck because I'd chosen the wrong point of view. It's intended to be a character study of one woman, and in my plunging into the writing, I thought it best that I write from her point of view.

Jeff and I take some halfhearted malicious fun from watching the Miss America pageant every year. We never mean to watch it, and we never realize when it's about to air. But each year, somehow, we manage to channel-surf right before the pageant begins airing and one of us says, "Oh, hell, we'll get a laugh or two out of this, grab dinner and bring it in here!"

Kat picked me up after her last class today, and we drove to the video store. Over the past month I've mostly exhausted the halfway-interesting selection at Movie Gallery, and now must move on to the higher-priced Hollywood Video.

I mentioned how many movies Jeff and I usually watch during a week. She was boggled until I reminded her that we do not watch much television. It's not that we're regimented; it's that not much interests both of us. Mondays were once busy viewing nights. Adding Robert Downey Jr. to Ally McBeal turned me into a mostly-loyal viewer for about a season. Then they axed him, and I decided it was more interesting to write or read during that time. I'd move from that show to Daria, on MTV, but MTV periodically removes the show from its lineup, and 'now' apparently falls under the category of 'periodically.' Perhaps it will return—it has before.

In lieu of a new journal entry, I proffer the latest cat.net skin, "gothgirl." Like all the others, it's available at the skins page. With it, I'm inaugurating a new script that I plan to make available in a few more of the cat.net skins soon: random entries.