Item: 1 Westin hotel ballpoint pen

It has been a totally miscellaneous day.  This morning I was at the Writer's Faire (don't you love that spelling?) at UCLA, where I attended a few different discussions, the most interesting ones being on staying power (that is, making it to the end of the book you're writing with the same level of intensity that you had at the beginning), and one on issues of honesty when writing about personal material (like, say, if that material involves other people who might not care to be portrayed in the way that you're portraying them).  I scribbled down a lot of notes, some being ideas, others just more questions.

I got home about the time that a crowd started gathering at the mosque across the street, and I heard voices shouting.  The police were there, as were the news vans.  One of my neighbors told me that this had happened last year as well, that it was some sort of 9/11 protest, and that there were 2 groups on opposing sides on either side of the building.  The group closest to the street was carrying early American flags with the 13 stars in a circle, and shouting something about racists. It wasn't clear to me what their message was, which made the shouting more disturbing.

Then I left and went to church, for the first in a series on "life's toughest questions" -- the questions coming from people in the church who had sent them in.  Tonight's questions centered around the nature of God and why there is so much suffering and pain in the world, but you could talk for hours on that and not even get close to the bottom.

Hence I have a lot of things that I could be thinking about; too much, actually.  I hate using the word "processing" in terms of thinking about something, but that's really what it seems like is going on.  There's an overload at the moment, and nothing's processing.