running on empty

It's Thursday night, and I'm supposed to be going home tomorrow morning. If I know anything about myself, I won't get going until around 1:00, but the goal is tomorrow morning. Problem is, I have so much to do between now and then, and I can't decide if I should power through the exhaustion and do it now, or if I should sleep, hope I wake up at a decent time, and do it in the morning. I should probably go to bed, but I keep hoping I'll get that burst of energy where I just clean and pack like a maniac for an hour and get everything buttoned down. But I can't muster the energy to summon that burst, so I sit on my bed writing things that no one will read or particularly care about.

Am I being a downer? I'm sorry. I shouldn't be. Tomorrow I'm going to my favorite place in the whole world, and on Saturday I'm going to my second favorite place in the whole world, Camp Gold. No one is coming with us- it's just me and Mom and Dad and the forrest. Well, and the other campers, but they are unimportant. What's important is that in 48 hours I will have filled the gaping hole in my sanity that has been slowly growing over the last two years in LA- I'll be out in nature, sleeping with the stars and dirt and trees, spending the day reading and taking pictures. It will be sad with no Spense or Zach or their respective families, but... I need my mountains, and then I'll be ok.

We wrapped yesterday on our reshoots for Dockweiler, my thesis film. I will post photos soon. Reshoots took FOREVER because on the morning of our first day, before we shot anything at all, our main actor collapsed because of high blood pressure and was taken to the hospital. So that day was scrapped, which caused problems, although not as many as you'd think. The main problem was the extra money it would cost to shoot another day (the losses weren't covered by AFI's insurence, because AFI apparently never springs for extras), and the fact that I was supposed to go home on Wednesday... it was no big deal to anyone else for me to push back my drive home, but it was a really big deal to me. At least now things are done. They were slightly cursed- not only did Tony (our actor) get sick, but one of our locations, this cool bridge in Malibu, had completely filled up with sand in the three months since principle photography. Stupid seasons changing. I think it will work out ok, but we had to do some kind of strange shots to make it work. And it was really hard to find crew- hard to find it for the first two days, and REALLY hard to find it for the re-reshoot day we did yesterday. I can't wait until I don't have to beg crew to come work for free... or, for that matter, when I'm a successful enough DP to not have to drive my own grip truck, or download my own film and take it to the lab at night. These things are a luxury I have not yet known.

I am 100% completely exhausted. The kind of exhausted where if anything goes wrong, my first reaction is to cry. So I guess I should go to bed...

The important thing is that I'm DONE, and that I'm going home tomorrow. Home, Camp, home, and then Oregon for our family reunion! I cannot wait to see my gigantic crazy family again. I may just come back to LA a complete person.