The Niceness Project

I wouldn’t call myself a particularly self-aware person. I admit: I am deeply shallow. One of the reasons why I decided to do this experiment in niceness for one calendar year is to see if I can do a better job of being a human being. So lately, I’ve been reading a lot of self-help [...]

The production designer for one of my films emailed me out of the blue today. He just realized, two years after the fact, that he’d never received a DVD copy of the film which was part of his contract. He appealed to me for help in getting one from the studio. Since that film was [...]

I took the huge shipping crate containing Astrid, my new bike (Yay! My bike) to the Bike Oven, my local bike co-operative, today for expert advice on reassembling it. I discovered two things: 1. A lot of guys who are into biking and neighborhood co-ops are really cute. I must file this information away to [...]

Fica means fig in Italian. It’s also an Italian slang term for women who look and act like Paris Hilton. Fig leaves have been used for centuries by prudish church types to cover the goodie-bits of famous statues. Connect the linguistic dots… Today I picked five pounds of figs off the tree in my backyard. [...]

Today I mailed my old eyeglasses to the Lions Club who will forward my very wacky prescription on to my eyeball twin somewhere in the Third World. And by old I mean my glasses from college that I stopped wearing in the last century. I hope there’s not a time limit on random acts of [...]

I spent the day writing notes on a script written by a friend who used to be an executive. The company he worked for folded and he’s spending his out-of-work time interviewing for jobs with fifty other applicants and writing a screenplay “that he’s been thinking about since college.” He asked me to read his [...]