July 29, 2003
Kathy gave me a great card for our anniversary. It says, “If I hadn’t found you....I’d probably be driving somebody else nuts.” Ha. She also got me two great shirts and I got her cowgirl refrigerator magnets. We also treated each other to a trip to Bashas’ to get cereal and milk (instead of going to Dairy Queen and pigging out). We both felt serene and quite smug with ourselves.

Got caught in meetings all day yesterday. Rate increases, grand-fathered accounts, online polls, icon bios, Final Draft editing tutorials and whore mongering ad placement.

I’m excited about some dynamic changes that are going to be happening here to move our website away from a static site to a more active destination. Stay tuned.

Had a disastrous meeting with two very creative types. While I was upset and embarrassed for them, I had to reflect on the many times I have been on their side of the table. We creative types are constantly thinking of ways to improve ideas and this leads to risky leaps of imagination where we hand in something that is totally different than what the client has asked for (the movie Adaptation is probably the best example of this, where the screenwriter was hired to adapt a New Yorker magazine article on an orchid poacher but ends up turning in this opus that includes himself in the story and he has an evil twin and he’s going to screenwriting classes to desperately try and figure out how to make this “adaptation” work. Surprisingly, it did.). This adaptation wasn’t as successful.

The moral for me is that I need to be very specific in what I ask for. And I need to be more courageous in being blunt. I was reading the new Entertainment Weekly about Jerry Bruckheimer and his new movie Pirates of the Carribean. He flat out fired the music guy because “it didn’t sound like a pirate movie.” Now imagine how devastated that music guy is, but imagine how the movie could have sucked if he had been nice and let the guy finish. That’s my growing edge: nice guy vs. the right guy—who knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to demand it.

”Don't tell me how rocky the sea is, just bring in the ship.” 
  --Vince Lombardi (I know this is the same quote as yesterday, but it works even better today!)