Kind of a Mess

Things were going well for a while, and I expect they will continue to do so, but this week has been a wreck. Yesterday I went to an urgent care facility because I had been having some pains in my lower abdomen for a few days. Dr. Cho groped around and told me it wasn't a hernia, and I told her about my history of appendectomies as well (forgot to tell her about colon cancer risk), but she pretty much just said that if it keeps up for a week we could run an ultrasound or CT scan. I got the impression that she maybe thought I was just trying to scam for a prescription for pain meds. The pain I can handle. Not having any idea what's going on, that's more difficult to deal with.

Also, it turns out that I don't get any sick days at work. I hadn't thought to ask about it when I first took the "promotion", because I don't really get sick and don't generally need sick days, but this business got me thinking about it. I'm pretty much ready to tell them that if they don't want to let me have a week of sick days, I'm going to go back to just editing shows and they can find someone else to do the supervisory stuff. With no compensation, it's not worth the stress and responsibility.

After a few days of getting 10-13 hours of sleep a night, I realized that I think I might be depressed. Lately I've been feeling more socially incompetent that usual and I feel like I am trying too hard. But it's just as likely that I'm sleeping that much because it gets dark so early and laying down doesn't hurt.

Margaret and I are having a party at the apartment this weekend and the plan is for me to make a pie every day this week to serve on Sunday, but so far I haven't really had the motivation. I've assembled most of the ingredients, and that's about it.

The Survivor season is over, and I think I'm going to miss the steady, consistent work.

But I know that things will turn around soon. I'm going to Ohio, I'm going to see my family and old friends, I've decided to start playing music again and I'm going to jumpstart that in the new year.

Udpates all around.

Thanksgiving: Successful.
Prepared food. Cut thumb. Ate. Socialized. Made people laugh.

Los Angeles: Weirdly hazy for the last few days. I'm not yet sure what's normal around here (nothing) but the fog in the evening seems really odd, since it's not actually that cold out. The evening fog is dense enough that it collects on the face shield of my helmet and makes operating the motorcycle kind of difficult. I drive anyway. But calm down; I'm sure it will be fine.

Still not sure if I am going to go to Ohio for Christmas this year. I mean, in terms of raw numbers, I can probably afford the plane ticket, and I can afford to miss some work, but it's really difficult to justify paying 600 dollars for a few days' worth of Ohio hangouts. I may end up skipping the busy season again this year in favor of going for my mom's birthday at the end of January. That may end up being our new family tradition.

Lately I've been feeling guilty about not taking advantage of everything that LA has to offer in terms of arts and culture, so I'm going to make a serious attempt to embrace more of it. Last night I went to this event at the CalArts theater and thoroughly enjoyed it. I do get a little frustrated at events with Q & A sessions, for two reasons:

1. I usually have questions, but I never ask them because they are always technical in nature and I'm sure they and the answers they drew would bore most attending audience members, since I would allow myself to get really mired in the technical details of any approach toward making real art from audio/visual media.

2. I absolutely hate 90% of questions I have ever heard at these events, whether it's at a straightforward film screening with David Lynch, or this avant-garde presentation with the artist last night. It just seems like most people who are willing to pipe up and ask a question (in front of a couple hundred people) crave the attention, and thus load up the interrogative with a dense exposition that attempts to clearly demostrate their full mastery of the weight and symbolism of the event at hand. AKA you're a second-year film school student who loves the sound of his/her own voice. Please stop.

In brief, I would love Q&A sessions if the Q's were different. And shorter than the A's.

We had that little weight loss competition and I won. It was nothing monumental, but I dropped about 10 pounds and 1.5% body fat. In the interest of continuing with that momentum, I am going to take the $250 I won and use it to join a boxing gym, to further the quest to get back down to a reasonable weight.

Let's see, what else? Oh. I'm writing this now while I'm waiting for Survivor to show up. It's extremely late, but we have to finish it by the end of this week, so I have to start on it as soon as it arrives at 9pm. At the moment I am considering going straight from work (I'll leave at 6am) to my bootcamp class. I wonder if running a few miles and doing pushups after staying up all night working would make me pass out, right in the middle of lunges or squats or something.

Also, if anyone knows any (well-grounded) musicians in LA, please send them my way. This whole not-making-music thing is bullshit.

Oh So Summer

It's summer. God, it's fuckin summer.

The sunlight came like a thunderclap a couple of days ago, jolting me out of bed. Most years I wait eagerly for the summer sun to come so I'm anticipating it each week, each day, but this year I was completely blindsided, enveloped in rosy gold before I even started to yearn for it. The sweat that's now perpetually on my brow is equally annoying and rejuvenating, like plum juice on my chin while I'm lying on my stomach, feet swaying up in the air, reading you a passage from the book I'm reading.

It's funny that I'm so pumped about it this year, since I now live in a place that has very little difference between spring and summer (and fall, for that matter). But I am; I couldn't be more excited about the semi-arbitrary freedom that a summer mindset lends, warm night bike rides, summer fruit, more tomfoolery than debauchery, and sun. I don't always like the warmth, but god, do I drink up the sun. I'm too pale to tan but I love to burn. I can't wait for the freckles, the farmer's tan, the tops of my feet red and stinging in the shower. I'm going to bike to Santa Monica every week until I see dolphins. I'm going to have a picnic in Griffith Park. I'm going to visit the Aquarium in Long Beach. I'm going to as many outdoor concerts as I possibly can. I'm going to drink white wine even though I usually prefer red. I'm going to go rollerskating and chew gum and drink rootbeer floats. I'm going to have flowers at the apartment, the only living things as fueled by the sun as I will be in the next three months. I will find a way to make it far enough away from the city to look at stars. I will stay up too late. I will ride too far by myself. I will actually go out of my apartment. I will meet people. I will ignore those people and lie on grass by myself anyway. I will ride my bike with no hands, no helmet, and no health insurance. This one is entirely my own.

Writers' Strike

A few people have asked me how the writers' strike is going to affect my work, so I figured I would take a stab at answering this question in public (while restarting Pro Tools after it crapped out on me).

Since our facility works mostly on reality TV, most of us editors and mixers are not directly affected by the strike at all. We do have a few feature films in here at the moment, but I don't think we get more than a handful of those per year, though we would like to.

As far as I can tell, the strike is going to affect us positively in the short term and, maybe, negatively in the long term, if it lasts that long. Since reality shows (theoretically) don't have scripts and thus don't have writers, production companies are focusing on producing more reality TV during this time. And networks are airing more of it to fill the airtime between commercials. This is, for example, why the most hyped thing on NBC is the new American Gladiators series that is starting up (sort of the 'less talk, more rock' approach to dealing with the strike). So we will end up getting more work from the production companies that already come to us, and hopefully we'll get new clients as production companies expand their reality departments or as new companies start up to generate content.

In the long term, it's likely that other post-production audio places in town will shift focus to work more on all the reality programming that is going to pop up, so they may try to take some of our business, and we could be negatively impacted by that. But it's more likely that they will be working on shows from production companies with which they already had a working relationship. So they are probably not going to take clients away from us.

There is also the pipe-dream hope that we'll get some new clients who start up to make reality TV, get some success, and then after the strike ends, they'll start producing some scripted shows and they'll continue working with us on those, so we'll have more of that type of work around the facility.

I'm dreaming of what?

Due to uncertainty in my work schedule and lack of planning ahead on plane ticket prices, I'm not going back east for Christmas this year. It's not a big deal, I guess. I was in France last year and I was in the South on tour the year before that. To be honest, I'm really not that big on Christmas to begin with; I think Thanksgiving is the best American holiday and Halloween is a distant second. But I have to say that I was looking forward to the snow. It's almost like the cold and the snow are a part of me, as much an aspect of my culture as local art or music. I feel like My People are, by default, dressed in layers ranging from hoodies to parkas, all the way from October to April. My People spend three months out of the year subsisting on hot chocolate and maybe warm apple cider. My People know how to drive in slippery conditions and know how to properly use the windshield defogger. Though My People are not necessarily MountainDewXtreme enough to go snowboarding, they all know at least three good spots to go sledding. My People love snow days. So I feel a little lost without any snow in the foreseeable future.

Come to think of it, I got just a taste of it in August, actually, up in Lake Tahoe.
...though maybe mountain snow is cheating.

Anyway, it's definitely the time of year when you know, beyond all possible doubt, that every reasonable person working in a retail store somewhere is already sick of Christmas music. Candy Canes abound. But it's still... Los Angeles. Do you have any idea how silly Christmas lights look on palm trees?

This time last year I was in Brittany, where it pours incredibly cold rain in the winter, but rarely snows. The science there escapes me, to be honest. In early December, when Emily and Jerome were still around, we went up to the coast near Plouha, stood huddled up on the rocky cliffs and peered over the sides at the thrashing water below while the winter wind combed through the long tufts of grass that grow there.

Later Emily went back to the States and winter vacation started and I was the only one left on the school campus. From the refectory to the dorms, all the classroom buildings and offices, everyone was gone for the break. And I was the only one without anywhere to go, the only one passing through that big metal gate at night, around the dark corners in the half-light. So they turned off the institutional oil heat and supplied me with a small electric heater, which worked out alright. I turned it off when I went out during the day, to the market or the library, so my room was always frigid when I returned. (Why is Inside-Cold so much colder than Outside-Cold?) Those twenty minutes waiting for the heater to warm up the room were always 'fun' in that at-least-it's-never-dull kind of way.
I spent a lot of time under blankets that winter. Under blankets, watching VHS movies (WTF, PAL speed-up?) from the local library with the amazing AV section, taking days to binge on one director at a time, Hitchcock (subtitled), Truffaut, Woody Allen (subtitled, poorly), Polanksi (st), Besson, Godard, Jarmusch (st, p), Tarkovsky(st), blah blah.
The school has these energy-saving light switches in the hallways that all run on a timer. There is a round button, illuminated by a thin orange circle, and when you push it, a soft grinding sound starts, and you get about two minutes to get where you're going, and then it turns off again, to prevent it being left on unnecessarily. A good idea for an institution. Hell, a good idea in general. But it does mean that at night, the hallway is always really dark in the time it takes to get from your room (or the kitchen, or wherever) to that little orange circle. That, combined with the fact that I was all alone in this big building, combined with the creaky, smooth hardwood floors, and the five-hundred-year-old stone stairs, so well-used that there is a scoop worn out of the center of them, made it pretty eerie to watch Hitchcock up in the living room and then creep back to my bedroom, dashing around corners to the next little button to illuminate the next (creaky) segment of the walk.

Actually, now that I think of it, one of the lights in the bathroom was on the same setup, so a couple of times I was surprised, two minutes into a shower (after manually turning on the electric water heater, also turned off during break) when I was left in darkness. Showering in the dark is actually kind of nice, it turns out.

Maybe it's just that I'm never satisfied. Always longing after whatever season it isn't. After winter break, in the middle of that winter that was heavy and dark, without giving the satisfaction of snow, I drove a borrowed car on the weekends to other places on the coast, mostly the beaches, bundled up against the wind and the rain, looking longingly at the sand and the waves crashing against rocks and even the German bunkers from the war. I remember picturing those same beaches in the summer, and picturing myself returning there, thinking, "Five months and forty degrees from now." I wanted to go and sit by myself on the beach and get sand in between the pages of all my favorite drunk authors, maybe make some new friendships that would only last twenty minutes, absorb a little sun, lie there and think about things. I remember thinking how much I wanted to eat summer food, bread and fruit, let the juice get all over my fingers and leave me sticky and preoccupied about it until I rinsed them off in the sea. Maybe that would leave them all salty, but that's probably better, anyway.

So maybe I always displace myself a few months or a few thousand miles ahead. In the meantime, there's good news: I just found out where to ice skate in Los Angeles. And I can drink warm apple cider even if it's not that cold out.

Slimy

It's raining in Los Angeles. It's not quite up to late-fall-in-the-midwest standards, with all their gloppy, loud, kinda painful glory. But it's a lot more that the usual drizzle. Pretty rare.
It's rare enough that it's kinda dangerous.

The rain mixes with the grime and filth on the roads and it makes them very slippery. In most normal cities, it rains often enough that the grime is regularly washed away, so we don't notice it much. In LA, it builds up for months, so the first few hours of a rain mix all that mostly-dry film on the roads into a nice sheen of slippery, gooey good times. It's something of which I became frighteningly aware the first time I lived in LA, when I rode a motorcycle. Note: Sliding around on a motorcycle is a lot less fun than in a car.

So I didn't even attempt to ride my bike. Especially since I just finished work and I'm tired enough from being up all night (note time of post) that my equilibrium is shot. I just took the metro and walked my bike from hollywood and highland.

I was working on a new show that we got recently. I'm not sure which network is going to air it, but it's about a highschool marching band and somehow, it's actually pretty good. I liked working on it, in part because it's not one of the frustrating pseudoscience ghost shows we do.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, though, that the really good thing about the rain is that even a really light sprinkle pulls the smog out of the air and the views around town are WAY more clear. downtown, mountains, everything. Ok, maybe all those pollutants being pulled down into the water table isn't a really good thing, but, you know.

Anyway the view from the roof of my (14-story) apartment building is going to be amazing!

Ok, enough. I'm going to bed.