A Good Old-Fashioned Pants Kicking

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In many ways -- most ways, in fact -- I am like a child. By and large, you'd rather not know what I mean by that, but in regards to this post you should know that part of what I'm talking about is that when I have a day off from school (in terms of my life as an adult, this means work) I have a tendency to eat lots of sugar (cheese) and run around like a goon (lay on the couch) getting into mischief with my no-good pals (watch movies like Skyline all day long). Parents know that this can be counteracted by giving their children structure on their free days. So it is with me. As an adult, though, I've recently learned that this responsibility falls on me, which is bullshit, but whatever. The point is, I, in fact, have one of those free days coming up on Friday. Every time I find myself with an extra chunk of time to myself -- and really to myself, because my wife will be out of town, and I have no friends who might choose to visit -- I make all these plans about how I'm going to not only relax, but productively relax, by watching interesting movies I've never seen, or read, like, six books in a day, or write, and things like that. This almost never pans out because when the time comes I find myself thinking something along the lines of "Eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh......" as I watch a rerun of Bizarre Foods and then see what's up over on Fearnet. It's usually around this time that the microwave dings, announcing that my cheese has melted.
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But not this time! This time I'm going to kill two birds with one stone by enforcing this productive structure on my time. It will be not unlike the Night of Pain thing I did a while back, where I watched three notoriously unpleasant films back-to-back-to-back, and wrote about each one afterwards, but with two or three key differences. Here's how it'll work: starting Thursday night, I will watch a movie. Then I will write about it here. Then I will watch another movie. Then I will write about it. I will do this until I decide to go to sleep, and then pick things up again on Friday morning. I won't be restricting myself to unpleasant movies, either, but will limit myself to films I've never seen. Whether I draw exclusively from my DVD collection, or expand out to cable, DVR, OnDemand, I haven't decided. We'll see about that.
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Among the things this will achieve for me is filling in certain cinematic gaps (though it occurs to me that in order to keep up any sort of rhythm, I might have to steer clear of any film that is especially long, which eliminates a couple of possibilities; further, "filling in certain cinemtaic gaps" does not mean that I won't be watching all kinds of movies), kick this blog right in the pants because it needs it, and, frankly, possibly give me a little bit of practice for something I hope to be able to do later this year, involving a particular film festival (I should probably underline "hope to do" in that sentence). By posting this tonight, I've pretty much locked myself in to actually doing it, and therefore in a sense I've also imposed deadlines on myself -- maybe this is good practice, maybe it's not, but it's better than nothing.
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The whole deadline thing is very much an ancillary motivation. The main thing is that I like doing these sorts of things from time to time, because it can be a fun challenge. And gimmicky as this might seem, I will take the writing as seriously as I always do, even if -- again, in order to maintain a rhythm -- the posts are not as long as they might normally be. But who knows, if the my brain tells me to keep writing past the point I might have wanted to cut it off, then I'll keep writing.
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Anyway, that's it. Big announcement. Hooray. Sometime Thursday night, be here or go suck it.