Cameras and Wanderlust

Things to look forward to

2011-12-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

I haven't written in this thing in ages, but the introspective wanderer in me wants to start again. I have a couple potential projects up my sleeve, and a couple potential trips (although I'm still saving, so who knows when they will really happen), so I'll try to stay on top of things, for anyone who is still actually around to read.

If you're still around: hi guys! Thanks for hanging in there!

So, just a couple things to be excited about in the next few weeks:

1. Next weekend, Charlie is coming to visit! Not me specifically, but all his friends in the Bay Area. He is my cute Italian friend from Northwestern, Kevin Cannon and Nazan's old roommate from Turkish house, as exhibited on the far right here:

As you may know, I LOVE VISITORS, so this is exciting.

2. In the same vein, Kevin Welch is coming to visit in two weeks, to work on a project we have cooked up with Adam. We are going to talk to some people who may be able to help us out, and part of this involves going up to Sonoma and Napa, which always makes me happy. I was up in Sonoma last weekend to have lunch with my cousin Whitney and then take her to the airport, and the leaves changing on the grape vines was just about the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I am so frickin' lucky to live in this place, where everywhere I turn there's something that makes me happy to be here.

Anyway! End schmaltzfest. Kevin being here will be lots of fun, if for no other reason than I will have someone to go to movies with who actually knows things about movies. Maybe I can drag him to the new Herzog movie (you know, the one about the death penalty that everyone else refuses to see with me)!

3. There *might* be a cast and crew screening of Friend of the Bride, the feature I shot in September. My first feature! It will be un-color-corrected and un-sound-designed, but! My first feature! I hope it's good! It has the potential to be really funny and touching, and I'm not so much worried about that stuff as I am about hating my own work when I first see it... I always hate what I shoot the first time I see it cut together. I later get over it, of course (especially since for this one I had about 3 lights, no lighting crew, no focus puller, and no prep time), but still... I'm NERVOUS! Excited, but nervous.

So those are some good things. Hurray for good things. Hope everyone's doing very well and that the holidays are shaping up nicely =)

for September 11th

2011-09-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, as it seems I always do. For now, though, I'm going to just do what probably every other blogger in the US is doing today- remembering September 11th, 2001.

I've heard a lot of stuff on NPR recently about the attacks, and people's opinions of them then and now. A lot of testimonials and position pieces. They all seem to say the same thing: that feeling of terror still feels present and immediate, as though ten years haven't passed at all. It's very similar for me, but linked to all sorts of other fears as well.

That summer of 2001 was my last before college. I spent it working at Pacific Primary and then at the Leakey Foundation; at a certain point all my friends went to college and I was left behind, taking the bus to the Presidio every morning, listening to Graceland and generally feeling sorry for myself. All my friends were gone and I didn't know what was awaiting me once Northwestern's quarter system finally started. I was due in Evanston on September 14th.

My dad woke me up on the morning of September 11th by saying something dramatic and confusing along the lines of "Cameron, wake up, New York is under attack and we're driving to Chicago." It made no sense until I stumbled into the TV room where my mom was watching the news coverage. I remember being stunned, and crying when I began to think about all the friends I had in New York, just starting college- were they ok? They were, all of them. One of them IMed me later that day and asked me to let her mom know that she was fine. I don't remember a ton of details of the rest of the day, to be honest. I watched the news. I called Ana and wished her a strained "uh... happy birthday?" I packed up my life in San Francisco, because as Dad said, we were driving to Chicago. The airports were closed and would be for days.

We left the next day for a three day drive across the country. It sounds naive and overly-simplified, but 9/11 and that 3-day drive kind of marked the end of my sheltered childhood. Not that I wouldn't continue to be pretty damn sheltered at Northwestern- it's more that I started to realize then how big the world was, how many people hate us, and how different my life would be from then on. Starting September 12th, I wouldn't live at home anymore, or be monitored 24/7 by my parents. I would make my own decisions and feed myself and get myself to class. I would meet people with points of view that I'd never even fathomed- Republicans! The Midwest was crawling with them. Hell, I even ended up dating a Libertarian that first year in college. Driving through states I'd never seen up close- Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and finally Illinois- peppered with American flags and "united we stand" banners everywhere you turned, I got a sense of the country I'd lived in my whole life. I rode in the back seat listening to the news reports, buying a newspaper at every truck stop, feeling incredibly disconnected yet in awe of what was happening to the country. I had my camera with me (of course) and took some photos that I still love of what we saw on the way:

Before 9/11 I had a pretty small worldview, no matter how cosmopolitan, worldly and open I thought I was. I had great friends and a wonderful family and the most uncertainty I'd ever dealt with was not knowing where I'd go to college. After 9/11, I found a whole new world. I made new friends who introduced me to the film industry, I dated boys, I explored Chicago, I visited new cities and towns; I lived in a world that was constantly uncertain, constantly thinking that maybe the Sears Tower was next, always a little afraid to board a plane. I still live in that world today. It's a weird feeling, to look back and know that that's the day your life changed, not through any direct involvement with the attacks on the East Coast, but because of what it set in motion. It feels like it's been a lot longer and not very long all at once.

I don't have much that's profound to say about it all, about the sacrifices made and the unspeakable loss of life. I still cry when I see images from that day, and I'm not even always sure why. The bottom line is that on September 10th the world seemed pretty safe, and the next day everything was up in the air. I still have no idea where my life is headed, but I'm glad to be here, and I'm grateful for all the people who are fighting to keep me here.

on Father's Day

2011-06-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite memories of my Dad from when I was a kid would happen every now and then on a weekend, or in the summer, when my brother and I were really bored. He'd strap both of us into the passenger seat in his pea-green 1970's Toyota pickup truck, we'd hit the road, and he would let us take turns navigating- "turn left" "turn right" "go straight," etc. We'd head out into the "unknown," usually in the North Bay or South Bay, and have an adventure. Once we found a house with lots of pink flamingoes in front of it; once we got incredibly lost somewhere near Point Reyes, in the rain, and had to buy lunch from a tiny grocery store. Wherever we ended up, it was always someplace new.

I'm pretty sure that's where the whole "wanderlust" part of my personality came from.

NEWSFLASH: (Some) Things Have Changed!

2011-06-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

So! I am officially not a real resident of Los Angeles. That is to say, I have taken all my stuff (which ohmygod was SO MUCH MORE STUFF than I thought I had) and moved it into a 5x10 storage locker in Glendale, and taken the rest home to San Francisco with me, and now I am basically a nomad. I have gotten sick, in the last week, of explaining to people how well, I am not really in San Francisco permanently YET, or maybe not EVER, because I'm going to Chicago for 6 1/2 weeks and THEN I'll be around for a couple months at the least, but I'm not really sure where I want to be, and blah blah blah I see their eyes glaze over as I'm talking. They don't really care. And who can blame them? The minutiae of my life really matters only to me.

I've been home in San Francisco for about a week and a half now, and while I can't even begin to describe how much I miss seeing Steve and Kirk twice a week, or watching nerdy movies with Brian or my trivia buds or geek sessions with Nausheen and Richard... I love it here. I don't really want to leave. Life just seems so much more NATURAL in San Francisco. Why is that?

I mean, beyond the fact that when I'm subbing at Pac Prim I am forced to eat organic non-allergenic foods. Why is that?

My cousin Tobin, who is Wise, once said that "it's something about the air." So true.

And as my pseudofriend Maggie, tonight at a high school-themed party full of kids from high school (where I felt awkward and was glad that, unlike high school, I am now allowed to drink), said, "San Francisco is not a bad place to be figuring your life out."

Yes. That is what I'm doing. I'm figuring my life out. I'm also still kind of drunk and trying my damndest to avoid typos.

This party tonight! Weirdness. It was for Alexis' birthday, which was officially yesterday, and which was also the 10th anniversary of the day we actually graduated from Lick. Matty P and Will Madison had blown up photos from high school and hung them up everywhere. I wore my class tshirt; Rachel had on her class sweatshirt, and the guys all had some form of letterman or LAX jacket. We are nerds. I'm glad we're all still seemingly proud of going to Lick... it was a good place. Those kids are still so much cooler than me though. Individually perhaps they're not cooler, but as a group they are way cooler. I still don't really know what to say to, for example, Emily Johnson. She started out cooler than me and will always remain cooler than me. The end. I think in general, though, the boys have gotten nicer, which I appreciate. Matt Levy was never really a jerk, but now he talks to me and actually seems glad to see me. Will Madison was kind of a jerk for awhile and now is not. Etc. Alexis and Matty P have always been great. I'm glad they've stayed that way. And I'm glad we have Rachel and Alexis to hold down the high school fort, so to speak.

Rambling! Sorry.

So what else has happened? OH! I went to Texas, finally. May 21st-28th I was in San Antonio with Kevin Welch and Jennifer and their adorable children, makin' a movie. I think Jennifer was kind of annoyed with us for taking over their house (and rightly so, given the tiny children involved), but other than that I think it was a very successful trip. I don't know how it turned out... to my knowledge Kevin hasn't started editing yet, nor perhaps even looked at the second day's worth of footage. I am a touch worried about that second day, because we did a lot without any crew and when we were keeping the actors overtime, which is to say we might have been rushing, and rushing always concerns me. But it is what it is. It was a comedy about a couple who have conflicting fantasies over the breakfast table... it involved a lot of gore (which was incredibly difficult to clean up) and suggestive sex scenes and well, I just hope it turned out well. I really like working with Kevin... he doesn't flip out (or at least he didn't this time) and he puts a lot of thought into his movies, which I appreciate given the lack of thought put into anything by many LA directors. Not my AFI directors- they were great- but other directors that I've worked under, if not for. LA is very product-driven, and that's not how I was raised in the film world, and Kevin is much the same way. Plus we have fun, and that's half the battle.

We spent the first few days doing prep for the shoot, which involved all the usual stuff like shot-listing, but also shopping for production design elements and costumes, as there were no people specifically designated to do that. Shopping for women's clothing with two guys (Kevin and his friend/co-writer Craig) was exhausting. They were confused the whole time, and it was not really the right season for what we were looking for. We ended up with a good outfit for our actress, who looked great in purple, but only after buying about 6 different outfits "just in case:"

Those are our actors, after the fantasy murder scene. They were pretty game for anything, which was great- and it helped that Kevin had unwittingly cast two people who had recently started dating, so they were perfectly happy to hang out into overtime as long as they could be making out in the other room while we set stuff up.

Kevin and I also did a bit of production design on the Welch's kitchen, which consisted basically of this improvised wainscotting:

(the blue stuff, in the back there... whether it looks legit or not I'm not sure, but we liked it)

The hardest part of the shoot, as a DP, was... well there were two things, a) getting "natural" light into the middle of Kevin's long, largely windowless kitchen, and b) getting the EX-1 to have any sort of depth of field. I think things ended up ok on both fronts, but I've barely looked at the footage... hopefully I'll have time to look at it more this summer. About halfway through the first day I just taped an ND6 onto the front of the lens, and left it there for the rest of the shoot to force myself into lighting to a T1.9. Ghetto, perhaps, but I think it worked out.

The crew consisted primarily of Kevin's students from St. Mary's University, who were eager at first but soon realized that working on a film set isn't all glitz and glam and awesome. It's hard work. It was an awkward position- while we needed hands to get everything done, we didn't really have a lot of time to teach them how to do things properly, or WHY we were doing them, so I think they got bored pretty quickly. To be honest, I can't really blame them- I frequently get bored on film sets and I generally DO have a vague idea what's going on. Being clueless would only be more boring. By the middle of the second day (and there were only two days) we had basically lost everyone to made-up excuses like "I suddenly got called into work." Oh well. I hope they learned something... I was able to teach them basics like setting up HMIs and Kinos, and they got pretty good at that. I'd tell them where to set things up and then after they did, I'd run around and tweak things. A few of the girls who were interested in camera stuff got to pull focus on some shots, and they took some great camera notes for me. So, you take what you can get with a free crew. Someday we'll have a real crew and things will be amazing.

Texas itself was not really what I was expecting. Perhaps that's because the Welchs live not exactly IN San Antonio but outside it a bit, perhaps a 30 minute drive from the downtown area. It seemed pretty suburban with a lot of chain restaurants and giant stores. I think my main impressions of Texas come from things like Friday Night Lights and No Country For Old Men, so I imagined it being poorer and less clean. We drove over to Kevin's school to pick up some equipment, and that neighborhood was much more like what I'd been picturing. Downtown San Antonio was a little bit more of what I was expecting, too- the old, preserved buildings and the Alamo were exactly how I had pictured them. The Alamo was really cool; we didn't really spend a ton of time there, because it's just a building and we had a baby and a 3 year old along for the ride, but it was pretty cool just the same. Just what the history nerd in me wanted.

Speaking of 3 yeard olds, I had a lot of fun with Avelyn, Kevin and Jennifer's 3 year old. She is a little firecracker who talks a mile a minute, called me "honey" when she couldn't remember my name, and did a damn good job in the few shots she was in for the film; she did exactly what Kevin told her to do, and looked adorable:

I only wish Noah, the baby, had taken to me in the same way, but he's only 3 months old, so I can't really blame him for only wanting his Mommy.

Anyway, enough about Texas. I could go on and on with details and impressions and general film geekery that I'm sure none of you care about. In two days (HOLY CRAP TWO DAYS) I am off to Chicago, where Tim and I are hoping to shoot a zombie movie next weekend, except for the fact that we are lacking an actor at the moment. My frustrations with that are running high, but I'm hoping against hope that it works out, because we've been planning to do this for at least 6 months and we're both really invested in just making SOMETHING this summer. And then, in about a week and a half, I'll be at Northwestern, and in the dorm, and in one spot for 6 blessed weeks of hanging out with my Chicago friends and David and Jessica and Willa Marie, maybe even including a baseball game with Dave and/or Willa, MAYBE even a Giants double header, and let's just say I'm really looking forward to the whole damn summer. And TEACHING. Is it ridiculous that I've realized so late how much I love teaching? I hope not. I just wish I knew how to turn it into an actual career.

OK! To bed! Tomorrow is the Haight Street Fair, which is pretty much the quintessence of what I love about my neighborhood in San Francisco. You know, the Fair where I unwittingly bought a gay pride windchime when I was 10 because it was a pretty rainbow, and where I first registered to vote with the green party. HEY, WHO ARE YOU CALLING A HIPPIE? Oh, me? Yeah, well, yeah I am.

Goodnight.

my boys

2011-06-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about how much I love this commercial:

They're just clearly having so much fun... and I think that's the most expression I've ever seen on Matt Cain's face, except for perhaps the day they won the World Series. AND this was made back before Romo shaved his chin and created the stupidest looking beard in baseball. I love it every single time it comes on.

(maybe not so) secret fantasies

2011-04-30T23:43:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be great if I could leave Los Angeles at the end of May in some sort of vengence-related blaze of glory, where I tell absolutely everyone that I have ever hated exactly why I hate them and what I think is wrong with them and to just generally go to hell? If I could slap every snotty AFI brat I've ever wanted to slap, and find the director who made my AFI career go so badly and, I don't know, do something so incredibly awful to her that she would have to leave the country or at the very least, give up filmmaking, so that she could never ruin anybody's career ever again?

I'd find all the people who have ever looked at me and assumed I didn't know what I was doing, or ignored me because I was the fat girl, or hired someone else because I'm a girl, and I'd corner them and yell at them until they feel just as awful as I do about everything they've ever done. Then I'd find every passive aggressive bitch I've ever worked with and give them what-for.

And then I'd gather up all the people that I love here, because there are quite a few even if they don't all love me, and tell them that they're pretty great, and that they're the hardest thing to leave about LA, and let them know that I really, really hope I'm not going to be the only one in our relationship trying to keep in touch if I don't end up back in LA. That is something I'm afraid of more than almost anything else- if all these people can't be bothered to keep in touch with me when I'm actually in Los Angeles, they're basically just going to write me off once I'm gone, right? Right. Especially the film people. Film people are very out of sight, out of mind. If they're not currently working with you on set, you might as well not be friends.

I just hope I make it out of here with a few of them. Film people and Northwestern people alike- I would have been out of here a long time ago were it not for things running through my head like "but I just have such a good TIME with Joey/Blake/Li-Wei!" or "who will I play stupid board games with if not Kara/Steve/Kirk/Naomi/Letia/Dustin?"

LIFE: WHY DO YOU KEEP CHANGING AND MAKING THINGS SUCK??

/rambling stream of consciousness

P.S. How cool would it be to write a fantasy novel and name a river in the fantasy land the "Stream of Consciousness?" Hahahaha ohhh I crack myself up.

from our trip to Vegas

2011-04-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

I need to write a legit post about Vegas, because it was pretty great, but I'd say this video sums it up decently well:

Girl things that continue to elude me

2011-04-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

I have never been a particularly girly girl. I went through my pink and purple stage in preschool just like every other girl on the planet, and there are girly things I enjoy, but for the most part, "girl stuff" kind of baffles me. A good example is tiny pockets in stupid places. I had a shirt once that had a tiny pocket on the sleeve, as though it was made for keeping quarters in case you needed to make a phone call in 1996. Why was it there? It drove me nuts. Ever since that shirt I've had a strict rule: thou shalt buy no clothing that has inexplicable parts attached. It's worked out pretty well.

My current issue is nail polish. I have never ever in my entire life been able to keep nail polish on, in pristine condition, for more than two days. I kind of like nail polish- I like fun colors like orange and green. But how on Earth do most people get it to stay on? On Saturday morning I did my nails at Katie's house, with a clear top coat and everything. They were nice and minty green for all of six hours, and then my right index finger started to chip. It's always my right index finger, probably because that's the finger I use the most. Now, on Monday night, I have six complete nails, two partial nails and two completely naked nails. Do normal people just keep reapplying? What a waste of time!

Other girl things I don't understand include strapless bras, bangs, and anything that involves clubbing.

Advice on how to be a normal girl is, as always, appreciated.

sigh take 2

2011-04-19T19:41:00.001-07:00

Well now I'm not going to Texas until late May at the earliest. Ah, the ever-changing, constantly confusing life of the freelancer. I hate it and love it all at once.

Sigh

2011-04-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been awhile since I have written, and accordingly, I have totally slacked in the last week about going to the gym. I am off to San Francisco tomorrow, and while it's hard to eat well when I'm at home, I'm going to make a decisive effort to go to Koret (the gym at USF) a lot while I'm there and to eat very well, with two exceptions: Easter dinner, when my Dad is making barbecued chicken, which is like the best thing ever, and I am making pie; and tomorrow night, when I will drive into San Francisco and go straight to Naan N' Curry for my favorite Indian food. This has become a bit of a tradition the last couple times I've driven home, kind of like getting Potbelly as a first and last meal when I fly into Midway in Chicago.

So here's to another new exercise beginning, and hoping that I can stick with it through the end of May, now. It's going to be rough given that I'll be in Texas (I think) for part of it, and I have no idea what the food situation is like there, and I'll be moving out of my apartment when I'm in LA, but I'm going to do my damndest.

UGH

2011-04-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've been at this for about two weeks now, and while I haven't been exactly going to the gym EVERY day, I have been going a lot, and I've been eating very well- tons of vegetables and not too many carbs, although I did have some of Joey's spaghetti (but no meatballs, because of the eggs) last night when he forced us all to watch Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. The problem is: last week I was seemingly starting to lose weight- just a couple pounds, but I was happy about it. And then this week they are right there again and I don't get it at all. I'm not the kind of person who can cut out carbs or meat completely, and I don't think you should have to, but I don't know what else to do! I could go to the gym twice a day but then literally my whole day would be taken up with the gym and I wouldn't get anything done. Besides, we've already gone over how bad I am at getting up early...

So, any tips on how to kick things into high gear would be much appreciated. I am feeling really discouraged at the moment.

An Open Letter to the Naked Ladies at the Hollywood YMCA

2011-04-08T00:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Naked Ladies at the Hollywood YMCA,

I hate to sound anti-feminist or something, but- who ARE you people? How are you so brazenly comfortable with your bodies? You stand around, naked as jaybirds, and just... CHITCHAT for long chunks of time without making even the slightest move towards getting dressed. Sometimes one of you will put your towel on the bench and straddle it and keep talking while brushing her hair or texting, boobs all out in the open as though you're about to breastfeed a baby or something. We get it, you have very nice boobs, but who is so important that you MUST text them before you get dressed? And all of you are always standing right in front of my locker, so that I have to navigate an awkward array of blithely gossiping bodies in order to get dressed myself. Don't you notice how quickly and efficiently I do so? You can be quick and efficient too! Please, be quick and efficient!

It's not that I hate the female body or mind naked people in the locker room, but when you are not using the locker room for typical locker room functions (LIKE GETTING DRESSED), I mind. I mind when I have to hear all about how awesome that spin class was, or how much your boss sucks, or oh my god how you wish so-and-so would just dump her boyfriend. These are conversations that can be held IN THE LOBBY, where there are LARGE COMFY CHAIRS.

And don't even get me started on the times when one of you decides to make idle conversation with me. I'm just trying to get my stuff and get out of here- I have no interest in hearing your impassioned ode to your pilates instructor.

The least you could do, Naked Ladies, if you're going to traipse about the locker room, is be fatter than me- but NOOOOOOO you all have to be model/actress types, don't you? I have noticed many of you have back/torso/hip tattoos- do you stand around naked to show them off? Then why not get a tattoo that is easily seen? Go to hell, all of you.

And please move away from my locker.

Sincerely,
Cameron

DON'T PANIC

2011-04-05T00:34:00.000-07:00

Ah, the immortal words of Douglas Adams. They come to me often, these days.

Hung out with Deirdre and Sarah tonight, and we watched The Business of Being Born, which is a really interesting documentary about how the medical industry has made having a baby into something rushed, scheduled, and overly medicated, which is something it shouldn't be. You may call me a hippie if you like, but the fact that 1/3 of deliveries in the US are by C-section and a significant percentage of THOSE are pre-scheduled is pretty fucked up.

But that's not the point. The point is that afterwards, we got to talking- these are my former Suitebonders, so of course we got to talking- and we talked about all the changes that are starting to happen with everyone: Deirdre's married now and is "half-moving" to Phoenix (that is, she's moving but Karl isn't and they're keeping their Los Feliz place), where she got a tenure-track job as a professor at ASU, and Sarah is parting ways with John as a roommate and moving in with Zoe. And I- well, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. I have vague notions about things like "in May I'm probably going to Texas" and "starting in June I'll be in Chicago for 6 weeks" and "in August we have a family reunion," but I have no big life plan like most people seem to. I don't even have a semblance of a life plan, and it's scary. It's what makes me think I need to get away from LA, just for the sake of starting my life.

But then I think about all my friends here, and my Book Club, which is finally starting to coalesce and become a staple in all of our lives, and how can I possibly watch the next season of Glee without Steve and Kirk? How can I not see Kevin every few weeks? Will my AFI friends, who I hardly ever see and who basically (I'm not counting you, Letia!) don't give a shit about me, cease to care about me at all? What about all those random boys I had/have crushes on who I never had the guts to approach? And I never made my documentary about the desert. How can I do that from San Francisco? How will it feel to not be involved in making movies AT ALL?

In short: is being unhappy a large chunk of the time really a reason to give up some of the few things that do make you happy?

Also, I completely fell apart over the weekend as far as exercising. I blame baseball: there were too many games to watch/listen to/go to. I went to my first game at Chavez Ravine last night, and even though we lost, it was a good game, and I hardly ever see Kevin Chatupornpitak and Dave Dittell anymore, so it was a lot of fun. Tomorrow I'm hopping back on the exercise bandwagon. The good news is that I've been eating fairly well- lots of yogurt and fruit, to be honest, but that's a hell of a lot better than "lots of chips." Deirdre made roasted veggies for dinner tonight, which is something I have to do more often, because it's so damn easy.

And finally, a plea: if any of you know anyone who needs a 2-month sublet in LA for June and July, Kara and I are looking for a subletter to take over my room between the time I move out and the time she moves out. This is, honestly, the main thing that's stressing me out at the moment, because I don't want to leave her hanging with no subletter. I'm going to be clearing out my room quite a bit in the next week, and then taking a lot of stuff home in a couple weeks, so hopefully it won't be too hard to find someone, but I know she'd rather live with someone that we know at least vaguely than someone random off craigslist. So please, if you know anyone, pass them on. Rent isn't bad and it's a cute apartment in Los Feliz.

air sex education

2011-04-01T16:41:00.000-07:00

LA has been doing its damndest these last couple days to make sure that I don't go to the gym. It's rolled out the 85 degree weather and I have a distinct fear that it's here to stay. There is absolutely nothing I hate more than hot, sticky weather... unless it's going to the gym in hot, sticky weather. But that's what the pool's for, right? I guess I should start going to the pool.

Yesterday was the first really hot day, and I didn't go to the gym. To be fair to myself, this wasn't just because it was hot; it was an extremely busy day and I was already tired from going to the Air Sex Championships the night before. I was leaving work early to shoot a VFE interview, so I got to work early to compensate and didn't go home for lunch for the same reason. One awful side issue related to dieting is that not a lot of diet food is portable- you can't just make a sandwich in the morning and go, because sandwiches contain bread, and bread is, apparently, the enemy. Which sucks. I love bread.

But anyway- I didn't eat much other than yogurt and apples all day, and the VFE interview was stressful because of the people hovering around me while I try to set up, and it was hot and sticky, and then I had to go straight to a meeting with Robin and Sasha afterwards and didn't get home until 9. So, long story short, I had no desire at all to go to the gym. Instead I went to bed at 10:00. It was awesome.

It's hot again today, but I'm going to go. Really. I'll go home, grab a snack and go. I don't actually have to return Kris' lights until Sunday, so that's a plus.

Anyway! Air sex! I'm sure you've all been dying to hear about the mysterious Air Sex Championship that Steve and I went to on Wednesday. It was kind of exactly what you'd expect- it's kind of like sex miming. People choose a song to "perform" to and then act out their half (or some fraction thereof) of having sex with a person, an object, etc- one guy pretending he was having sex with a 15-foot woman. Some people were really funny, some people were stupid, a couple were really gross. I don't really know what else to say for those who still can't imagine it... I suppose "like that scene in When Harry Met Sally, but with more gestures" will suffice.

I don't know that I need to go to OTHER air sex shows... I mean, some people are probably really good at it, so maybe it'd be fun to go to the WORLD Championships or something, but the Los Angeles Championship was just a few people who were really into it, a few people who did it spur of the moment but were good, and a few stupid drunk people. The girl who won performed very realistic and enthusiastic lesbian air sex. She won a Fleshlight. I don't know if that would be useful to a lesbian, but maybe it would. If you don't know what a Fleshlight is, either look it up or listen to more Savage Love.

So! Big plans this weekend- gym, Glee, work, Book Club and then my FIRST REGULAR SEASON GIANTS GAME with a bunch of Dodgers fans. I'm looking forward to it, but also hoping no one beats me up for wearing Giants gear, which happened yesterday at the season opener. Dodgers fans suck- I've had enough random people yell at me from across parking lots in LA just for having a Giants bumper sticker that I know this for a fact.

Oh, and happy April Fool's Day! It's one of my favorite holidays- pranks and jokes are big in my family. Two days ago my brother and I sent my Dad a letter "from" the City and County of San Francisco, saying that he had to clean out the basement and passageway in our house, both of which are completely full of stuff. We gave him a number to call- which was Taylor's Google Voice number- and left a message saying the office was closed, or something. He fell for it hook, line and sinker and left a harassed message on the voicemail. Hurray! I couldn't let him suffer for too long though, so I called and 'fessed up pretty quickly, since Mom reported that he sounded really stressed and mad about it.

I just love holidays that are all about being goofy and childlike, don't you?

Wednesday, Dad's birthday

2011-03-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

One of the stupidest things I do in regards to the gym is not give myself enough time to be there properly. This is because I don't like going, so I put it off, but I know I have to go, so I go at the last possible minute, and then either the gym is closing (on weekends it closes at 8, grrr) or I have to go somewhere. Example: I'm sitting here at my computer, waiting for the Midol to kick in (because I think we can all agree that it's not fun to go the gym BEFORE the Midol kicks in, right?), which I figure will happen in about half an hour, which will leave me with only two hours to get to the gym, work out, come back, eat dinner/change clothes, and go pick up Steve for the Air Sex Competition we are going to tonight.

Yes, you read that right, the Air Sex Competition. I'll get to that in a second.

I don't really know how to change this issue- my life this year is busier than last year, and thank goodness, because it makes me feel like less of a waste of space. But isn't this the most important thing I could be doing with my time? Yes. So why don't I allow myself enough time to do it properly, to go and do multiple machines, not just the elliptical, or else do just one machine and then go swimming? I miss swimming, but it certainly is more of an ordeal than just going on a machine. Bleh.

Everything would be solved if I could convince myself to get up at 5am and go to the gym before work, on the days that I work. But I cannot do this. I'm not a 5am person, never have been, never will be. There have been a couple times in my life that I've been awake all night with insomnia and went to the gym before work because I just never fell asleep, but I can hardly hope that THAT happens often. Besides, I sleep better when I've been exercising well, and I'd hate to ruin that. So I'll just have to keep cramming things in for the time being- but exercising some is better than exercising none, right?

Anyway, yes. The Air Sex Competition. My trivia friends found out about it, and we were all going to go, but then they bailed (for "jobs," so I suppose I can't fault them) so now it's just me and Steve, and maybe Li-Wei if she leaves work in time. I don't know much about it, but it sounds just too weird-in-a-good-way to pass up. It's been described to me as "kind of like air guitar." I'll keep you posted, but will NOT be bringing my camera, because I'd feel like some sort of weird... air voyeur.

Oh, and today thus far I have eaten ok. Did a Lean Cuisine pizza for lunch. It was not really worth it. I'd rather have the Trader Joe's Chicken Tikka Masala any day.

Tuesday

2011-03-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

Today was fairly successful. I finished my taxes (hurray, refunds!), picked up lights from my friend Kris for the Vote For Equality interview I'm shooting on Thursday (I'll have to explain a bit about that at some point, I guess), and went to the gym and did the elliptical for a nice long chunk of time. And I ate ok. Again, not spectacularly, but I'm on my way to reviving the nice balanced diet I had there for awhile. The key I think is eating your 5+ servings per day of fruits and vegetables- it's hard for me because I don't like most raw vegetables, so I have to cook them, and often I am just too lazy. But this will be a thing of the past soon, I hope.

I'm super tired so the only other thing I'll say is that I promise to never, ever while I am blogging about losing weight call the whole ordeal "my weight-loss journey." They say this on The Biggest Loser (one of my guilty-pleasure reality shows) all the time, and I cannot stand it. I get that losing weight is all about creating better eating and exercising habits, etc, but COME ON. The phrase is just a little too loveydovey for me. Gag.

It annoys me in the same way that I am annoyed when I'm working at preschool and they don't allow peanut butter in the building anymore because there are some kids who are incredibly allergic to peanuts. I get it, theoretically, but again: COME ON. It should be noted, however, that these two things aren't really connected anywhere except in my mind.

Well, oops.

2011-03-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I didn't go the gym today. I ate ok but not spectacularly. My excuse is that I had a meeting with my friend Robin about a music video we're trying to make, and then he was like "hey, want to watch Mildred Pierce (HBO's new miniseries)?" And obviously I did, so we did, and then it was 8:30 and while I usually DO go to the gym late-ish at night, I was also too hungry to go without getting a headache. All of which is a long-winded way to say: today I sucked, but I will go tomorrow.

Set on Sunday provided not the WORST food in the world- there were at least veggies to go with the typical Mysteriously-Ethnic-Food-Flavored Meat. And with very little craft service to speak of, I think I came out ok in the end. Yes, I did have a baked potato when I got home, but now I don't have any potatoes left, so that's the end of that, for awhile at least.

Which sucks, though. There's nothing I love more than a baked potato with lots of cheese and butter... unless it's my mom's scalloped potatoes, which have lots of cheese and butter baked INTO them. Oh man, we had the best scalloped potatoes at the Bellagio buffet in Las Vegas. Not as good as my mom's, of course, but amazing just the same. I let myself have two servings because there were no desserts I could eat and I paid $40 for the damn buffet.

There were also good scalloped potatoes in Scottsdale at Don and Charlie's, the famed baseball memorabilia steakhouse. There should be a law that vacation food doesn't actually add to your body fat content.

So, here's to a better tomorrow, in which I will go to the gym AND finish my taxes! I would finish them tonight, but my mom went to bed and I need her to explain things like what the hell all of it means. Stupid freelancing.

An experiment

2011-03-26T22:15:00.000-07:00

So, I decided, just now, that I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to try, between now and May 1st, to write about my ongoing and ridiculous struggles to lose weight. I've been really bad about it in the last couple months, mostly because I've been really depressed, and it's a cyclical thing where when I'm depressed, I just want to sit around rereading Harry Potter, and then I get more depressed that I haven't done anything all day and no one seems to care that I exist. Plus, I'm really good at being in denial- the whole "well, I'll go to the gym tomorrow, but today I'm going to sit around rereading Harry Potter." And then I don't go tomorrow. So, I figure maybe if I'm sort of holding myself accountable for it by writing about it every day or two, it might help with motivation and also with not being in denial. At least I hope so. I have to do something different, and this seems like a good start.

I'm not going to tell you all how much I weigh (because it's embarrassing) or how many calories I burned or any of that boring stuff. I'm just going to report back on whether I went to the gym and ate well. It'll give me a reason to write more, too, and I can segue into other stuff from the boring crap.

I don't really expect to lose a ton of weight in just 4 1/2 weeks, mind you, but again, it seems like a good start.

So tonight, I went to the gym. Not for too long, or as long as I used to stay, because it closes at 8pm on Saturdays and because I'm easing back into things. I did the elliptical, which I like because it doesn't mess with my asthma the way a treadmill would. If anyone can explain to me why a treadmill makes me out of breath and the elliptical doesn't, that would be great- it makes no sense to me, I just know that I live in fear of treadmills. They remind me of running laps on the field in elementary school, and Mike Axtell lapping me as he completed his 4-minute mile. Jerk.

As I was leaving the gym and Nice Bald Manager Guy was closing the gates, he said "Keep it up, you're doin' good!" Apparently he failed to notice that I haven't been there in over a month. But at least SOMEONE thinks I'm doin' good, even if he was just saying it... I need the encouragement.

I ate ok today. I was on set for part of the day, which always makes eating well a huge task- sets are littered with things like soda and candy and chips and basically anything portable that a crew can grab and go. That doesn't translate well to losing weight- it's one of the main reasons I gained so much weight at AFI. I'm on set tomorrow, too- for the whole day this time, not just a half day like today- and I'm kind of dreading it. This also means I won't be able to go to the gym tomorrow... but Monday and Tuesday I have off, so hopefully I'll make up for it.

A plea: PLEASE email and bug me if you notice I haven't posted or something. I clearly am not very good at doing this on my own.

Oh, and I'm going to start going to Weight Watchers again too. It helped a lot the first time I did it, and then they changed the stupid system and I got confused and fell off the wagon. I might change to Monday night meetings instead of Tuesday night, though- I can't face Carl The Kindly Old Man when he weighs me and sees that I gained back the 12 pounds I lost last year. I will kind of miss Carl, though, so maybe when I am back on track I'll start back on Tuesday nights. Tuesday is Glee night with Steve though... hmm.

So thanks for being there, guys, and I hope this isn't too dull for you to follow. I don't want to lose my 3 readers.

Whoops

2011-02-16T23:54:00.001-08:00

Disregard what I said in the last post- Watson kicked ass in the second two Jeopardy shows. I guess the computers will become our overlords. C'est la vie.

elementary, my dear Watson

2011-02-14T22:13:00.000-08:00

Tonight was the first of a long, drawn-out Jeopardy game featuring Watson the supercomputer, developed by IBM to... play Jeopardy, I guess. He was playing against the "two greatest Jeopardy players"- but the weird thing was that he wasn't very good. I mean, he was good, and for awhile it looked like he was going to win, but he ended up tied with one of the Human Being Players. Then there was a little segment about how the group of scientists programming Watson at IBM had a hard time making him understand the various phrasings of Jeopardy questions. Which made me think...

The whole point of supercomputers is to be smarter than humans, right? And everyone is potentially concerned about how someday the supercomputers might get so smart that they'll take over the world a la 2001: A Space Odyssey. But how can a computer be smarter than the people who program it? It was a little like Watson was Amelia Bedelia, always taking statements at their face value, making cakes out of sponges when requested to bake a spongecake, etc.

It was kind of comforting, to see the computer be so bizarrely out of tune and to watch the Human Beings match wits with him. Not that I REALLY thought computers were about to take over the world, but you never know.

i guess i'm that girl

2011-02-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

That girl who is really bitter about Valentine's Day, that is. The thing is, I am not bitter about the idea of Valentine's Day- I think it's kind of sweet. I'm bitter about being single and apparently perpetually unattractive to men, combined with the marketing and overemphasis on sweets of Valentine's Day. And my grandmother Mere Mere died on Valentine's Day, so it's always a bit of a weird feeling.

But most of all, I am bitter about those friends of mine who are in relationships and take it upon themselves to send Valentines to their friends, their poor lonely friends who are probably drinking themselves to sleep on Valentine's Day. I don't know what compels these people to do this, but seriously, friends in relationships: IT'S REALLY CONDESCENDING. DON'T DO IT. WE HATE YOU AND WILL SEND IT BACK LACED WITH ANTHRAX.

That is all.

somebody get me a dream manual, stat

2011-02-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

Two nights in a row now, I've had very disturbing dreams involving Steve possibly being gone. Gone as in missing or dead. They are freaking me out.

In the first, I was at a bar on Halloween, in my Pippi Longstocking costume, with friends from middle school. Steve apparently owned the bar, which was in my neighborhood in San Francisco. A guy with a gun came in, and starting shooting everyone. I hid under a table with Shonda Thomas (who I wasn't even really friends with in middle school) but the shooter saw us and shot at us, a wound which then miraculously disappeared. Afterwards, I couldn't find Steve, and was panicking until he walked in having been looking for me, perfectly fine and un-shot. Big hug, Independence-Day-when-Jeff-Goldblum-and-Will-Smith-did-not-die-in-outer-space-style, and I woke up, very worried.

Last night, the dream was much more vague and I just had a general sense that Steve was missing. It involved a Gchat conversation with Marc Lummis, who kept reassuring me that Steve was probably fine, wherever he was, and a lot of phone calls, and then he popped up, having been "in the desert."

I don't understand this. Obviously I have some weird subconscious thing going on where I am worried about Steve, but I don't FEEL worried about Steve in any way. Steve is a big boy and one of the most cautious people I've ever met- he knows how to take care of himself perfectly fine. Of all my friends, I probably have the fewest reasons to worry about him. So this begs the question: WTF, subconscious?

I suppose there are two possibilities: either these dreams are prophetic (God forbid), and I really SHOULD be worried about him and perhaps install a GPS device in his neck, or I am preemptively dealing with the day when I don't live in the same city as Steve and I am separated from someone who has basically been my best friend since I've been in LA. I guess it's a good idea to start dealing with that now, but I'd really prefer that it didn't take the form of nightmares.

2010 Recap: June-December

2011-02-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of my "I didn't blog enough in 2010" post!

8. NHSI 2010: This one doesn't merit much explanation, especially since I did a pretty extensive post on it. Let's just say it was an excellent summer.

9. Mono Lake and Bodie with Mom and Dad: Family Camp is always great, of course, but taking this day trip to a weird lake on the eastern flank of the Sierras, and then an even weirder ghost town, made it completely awesome. See the above linked post for some pictures.

10. Deirdre's wedding: Another gorgeous drive across California, and then a two-day reunion with my suitemates from college. End of story.

11. Chicago and Kate's wedding in Indianapolis: Another wonderful friend reunion, this time with everyone you could ever want from our days of CRC and Ridge and Church living. Steve and I flew into Chicago in order to spend a day there before we drove down to Indianapolis with Tim and Sip, and got to go to the Art Institute and a play that Pat King was in. The wedding was great fun, but Indianapolis itself disappointed me- it may have been the most boring city I've ever been to. We had most of the day after the wedding to kill after our flight left, and we ran out of things to do after about two hours. Oh well. Small price to pay for a weekend chock full of my favorite people.

12. Kevin and Lauren's wedding: The final wedding of the year was the farthest away, but possibly the closest to the way I'd like my own wedding to be, someday. It was outside in rural western Connecticut, on a lake, in the fall, with changing leaves and beautiful blue skies and that perfect chill in the air. I drove up from New York with Erik, Pedro, Blake and Joey and (Blake and Joey's bickering aside) we had a splendid time on our little road trip. I don't know a ton about the Northeastern part of the US, and I am always kind of fascinated with how quaint it is. Anyway, there was a bonfire by the lake after the rehearsal dinner, with beer, hot chocolate, and s'mores- and one of the prettiest night skies I'd seen in a long time. The next morning Kevin and I happened to both be down by the lake fairly early- him checking out the conditions for the wedding later that day, and me just going for a walk (as my 4 roommates were all still asleep), so we ended up going canoeing. This is what I love about Kevin- it's his wedding day, but he has time to go canoeing with me. I don't know many people who would do that.

Other great parts of that trip included going to a pumpkin patch/farm with Erik and Pedro, stopping at a former insane asylum on the way back to the city, hanging out with my brother for two days in New York afterwards, including watching the Giants win their division against San Diego and going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and playing Celebrities with the likes of Kate, Stuart, Lyssa, Marc, Caroline, Will, and Pedro. Most excellent. Oh, and the wedding, of course, was beautiful. Kevin and Lauren have very classy taste... and the prosciutto/salami/toasted bread course at the dinner was delicious.

13. THE GIANTS WIN THE WORLD SERIES!!!!: This is it, folks. This is the absolute best thing that happened all year. The Giants were teetering at the top of the NL West for the last part of the regular season, constantly swapping places with the Padres... and then they BEAT the Padres to win the NLDS, they beat the BRAVES to win the NLCS, and then, miracle of miracles, they beat the Rangers to WIN THE WORLD SERIES. I could go on and on and on about the players and the minutiae of each game and how AWESOME it was to watch all this go down, but I'll spare you guys and won't...

The best part of the whole post season was my parents being generous and buying me a plane ticket back to San Francisco, at the last minute, to watch the Series, which was over Halloween weekend. I hadn't been in San Francisco for Halloween in 4 years, so that was exciting in and of itself, but throw in the World Seris and I practically had an aneurysm. My flight was at dawn, and from the attire of the other passengers I'd say it consisted exclusively of Giants fans. Mom and I watched Game 1, which Tim Lincecum pitched, with Aunt Kris, Uncle Owen, and Tobin at their house- my Dad actually went to the game, something he had never done before, and had a grand old time. The Giants won. My mom and dad and I all went to the Russell-Snyder's house for Game 2, which Matt Cain pitched. The Giants won. We watched Game 3, which Jonathan Sanchez pitched, at home. The Giants lost. Game 4 was on Halloween, and I watched mostly at home, but during the 6th inning I decided to go up to Upper Belvedere (a couple blocks away, and a street that the cops close off for trick or treaters every year... all the houses do fun things like haunted houses and spend thousands of dollars on candy) to see the scene. There were multiple houses that had projected the game onto screens set up in the street, or pushed their TVs into their front windows. Every time Madison Bumgarner struck someone out, there was a huge cheer. It was perhaps one of the most San Franciscan moments of my life, and I don't think I'll ever forget it. Bumgarner pitched 8 shut-out innings and only allowed 3 hits, and it ended 4-0 with Brian Wilson closing it out. Amazing.

This is one of his strikeouts as watched on a projected screen on Upper Belvedere:

I watched Game 5 at home too, because for monumental things like that you have to dance with the ones that brung you, right? Lincecum was pitching against Cliff Lee, and pitched 8 innings before Wilson came in. Edgar Renteria hit THE home run that would bring us home. I have to tell you- I've never heard my dad scream, ever, before the Giants won the World Series... but man, did he scream after that last out. He kept saying he didn't think he would live to see it, and here it was, happening right before his eyes. I think that was the best part of the whole thing- that my dad, a loyal if pessimistic Giants fan for his entire life, finally got to see them win. PLUS, they won in Texas, and while it would have been nice for them to be at home for the win, that last strikeout happened mere feet away from George W. Bush, sitting behind home plate. The most liberal city in the country triumphing over the most backwards, conservative president in recent memory- how sweet it is!

Dad and I went down to Haight Street to mingle with the revelers- some random dudes adopted him basically because he was the only old guy there:

All over the city, the cops has closed off various streets, thrown up their hands, and let the revelers go to town. Later on the news they showed Muni buses stuck on Chestnut Street because crowds had swarmed around them. Tobin and I went back down to Haight later to get a drink at the Golden Cane, and we were both just... well, "giddy" is really the only word I have to describe it.

It was the absolute best thing about the entire year. As Brian Wilson would say, FACT.

14. Now, I always love Thanksgiving, but this Thanksgiving was particularly wonderful. Everyone came down this year, and even Taylor came home from New York- for the first time in 3 years! The day after Thanksgiving, we had a surprise party for David and Nicolai's 40th birthdays, which were in October. We took a new All Cousin I had taken some lighting and camera gear out from AFI- one of the perks of working there- and I spent the days surrounding Thanksgiving taking portraits of various family members. There wasn't enough time to get them all, unfortunately, but I'm pretty happy with what I did get. I started with Tobin, and quickly realized that family portraits should not be as artsy as I was trying to make his. We got a few funny ones of him though, in his soccer uniform,like an AYSO shot. Here are a few favorites:

My always classy family:

Tobin and Willa Marie's mid-90's family heist comedy:

Willa Marie and David:

Jessica, Tobin, David, and Willa Marie:

Kim and Simon:

Kim and Whitney:

Nicolai:

Tobin (this one was in jest, but I love it):

Ellen and Beccy:

15. December and Christmas
Like Thanksgiving, I always like Christmas, but this year was nice because Taylor came home and brought Jessica, his girlfriend, with him for the first time. It made for a different sort of Christmas, but not drastically, and it was sort of a nice progression in the whole growing-up process (what do you mean, I'm already grown up? bother). We had a nice Christmas Eve at Aunt Kim and Uncle Simon's house, and a lovely lazy Christmas Day. December in general featured a bunch of friends from high school, including the now-yearly Holiday Dinner with the likes of Rachel, Alexis, Larkin, Diane, Martin, Matty P and Matt Levy, which is always fun. Jonny and I went to the Lick Alumni Party at a bar downtown, and saw lots of random people that we'll see again in December 2011 for our 10 year reunion (...eek!). New Year's was at Katie's house in Oakland, for the third year in a row, and possibly the last time, as who knows where half those people will be a year from now. All in all it was very warm and cozy and just what I wanted from December.

So that's about it for 2010 for me. At least, those were the highlights. Other good things happened, some bad things, and there was a whole lot of worrying about my career and unemployment and when (if?) I should decide to move back to San Francisco. But really... what else is new?

Here's to 2011 being even better!

2010 recap: January-May

2011-02-01T00:32:00.000-08:00

2010 turned out to be a pretty good year for me, a fact that I attribute solely to that day that Jon Hamm said he liked my shoes. You know, starting the year off right (ie with a handsome celebrity smiling at me and telling me he likes my old beat up Doc Martens) and all that. So, for the sake of commemorating a good year, I present you with

2010: The Good Stuff
(in chonological order)

1. Mom's Retirement Party: Aunt Kim, Aunt Kris and I put together my mom's retirement party in March, held at Aunt Kim's house in San Francisco, and it was a resounding success. All (or at least most of) her best friends came, and people made lovely toasts about how great my mom is, which was really nice because quite frankly she doesn't usually get much thanks or credit for all the things she does. We also had people bring her books to read, whether they were borrowed or new or just suggestions, because she loves to read and now, in retirement, has a lot more time to do so. It was a great gift idea because she ended up with not a bunch of crap, like you might expect at parties, but with things she would really enjoy.

Aunt Kris, Mom, and Aunt Kim

Sherry Abrams, Jim McKerrow, Mom, John Lewis, Marty Hales, and Dad

2. Trip to Oregon: The day after the retirement party, I flew to Portland as a last-minute addition to my mom's trip to visit her sisters and my Great Aunt Solveig. We decided my being there would be a suprise for Aunt Kelsey, Aunt Karen, and Nicolai. Whitney picked me up at the airport and I spent the first night at her house, then the next day we spent at Powell's Books (which is basically the best bookstore in the world) and then went out to dinner for Aunt Karen's birthday- which is where we surprised them. Aunt Karen could barely believe that I was there, it was great. Mom and I spent a night or two at Aunt Karen and Uncle Bob's new condo, which is very cute. The next day we went to Great Aunt Solveig's house to visit her, which was nice because it was pretty clearly the last time I would get to see her- and sure enough, she died this August. She was pretty much the nicest person I have ever met, and an amazingly loving mother and aunt:

Whitney, me, Aunt Kennedy, Aunt Sol, Aunt Karen, and Mom

Afterwards, Aunt Karen, Whitney, Mom and I went up to Simon's house in Husum, Washington, which was unbelievably gorgeous. The Pacific Northwest is incredible... I haven't spent nearly enough time there. Simon's house is up on a mountain with a spectacular view of Mt. Hood:

So yeah. Oregon rocked. Family and nature- couldn't be better.

3. Death Valley With Steve I never wrote my fabled Death Valley post, but I'm pretty sure Death Valley was the 2nd best thing I did all year- we'll get to the first a little later. Steve and I basically just wanted to get out of LA for awhile, and we'd never been to Death Valley and heard a lot about it. Fortuitously, we decided to go early enough that we could time our trip for the best wildflower time- and I am incredibly glad we did. The wildflowers were beautiful, and confusing, as they would often grow seemingly out of pure rock. We went to all sorts of fun places, like Mosaic Canyon, and the Sand Dunes, Badwater (lowest spot in North America!), Rainbow Canyon, Salt Creek (where the incredibly awesome Death Valley Pupfish thrive, against all odds), Zabriskie Point, the Amargosa Opera House Hotel, and- possibly my favorite- Rhyolite, which is a ghost town just over the Nevada border that features a bizarre outdoor art museum and some totally badass ruins. I could post endless pictures, but I will just share with you a few of my favorite. The rest of them are here in my Flickr set. In particular, I enjoy the one of the the giant naked Lego-esque lady in Rhyolite and the miner and his penguin friend.

Me and Steve in Mosaic Canyon

Steve in the Sand Dunes

A Sphinx moth caterpillar, one of literally millions that we saw all over the place, particularly in Salt Creek

The Amargosa Opera House Hotel

sunset from Zabriskie Point

Wildflowers on the Beatty Cutoff to Rhyolite

Rhyolite, Nevada

In summation, I could go back to Death Valley over and over and over again, particularly because we barely scratched the surface of amazing things to see.

4. Jennifer and Josh's wedding: AFI friends, Echo Park, open bar, cheese fountain. 'Nuff said.

5. New York in May: my brother, as a birthday present, bought me a plane ticket to New York for the same weekend my parents were going to be there, which was coincidentally the weekend of Mother's Day. It was a whirlwind- I was there for about 48 hours total- but it was worth it. We went to a Giants/Mets game (which the Giants sadly lost), to the Whitney museum, to the Museum of Natural History, to Central Park, and all sorts of things. I saw all my New York people, and went back to LA utterly exhausted- but in that good way that means you had a good weekend.

6. Blood Meridian shoot: This is kind of incorrect, as the actual Blood Meridian SHOOT was pretty rough- despite a fun camera crew and oh hey, did I mention? Luke Perry was in it!- it was three days of running up and down rocky mountainsides with EX-1s and Digizooms, and long hours, and holy hell my Osgood Schlatter's knee started to hurt for the first time since I was 11. Also, it was directed by James Franco- yes, that James Franco- who decided that he should hang out looking over my shoulder all weekend at the onboard monitor while I pulled focus on long lenses. So that was nervewracking... Still, the shoot was in Bishop, CA, which was both beautiful and somewhere I'd never been before (always a plus), we got to ride up and down hills in these rad ATVs called Rhinos, and the whole frickin' crew fell in love with Luke Perry and his many abilities. My friend Kris Carrillo, who was Key Gripping, has a great story of his truck getting stuck in a ditch and Luke Perry riding triumphantly over the ridge on a horse, dressed like a cowboy, and getting the truck out. Amazing. Luke Perry wins everything.

PLUS- I left Bishop at 4am after we wrapped around 1am, and despite running on about 3 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours, the drive to San Francisco was amazing. The pass through the Sierras was closed, so I had to drive to Bakersfield and then back north- which meant I got to go over Highway 178, a road I would not have known existed otherwise. I went past an amazing, tiny little cemetary, which of course I had to stop at despite racing the clock, and also past Lake Isabella and the accompanying river, which most definitely warrant a second visit. And all this segues beautifully into...

7. Jarrod and Amelia's wedding: I was running on fumes by the time Taylor and I made it to College Prep in Oakland for Jarrod's wedding, but I didn't care, because it was the largest gathering of people from my childhood in at least 10 years, and that was awesome. The wedding was put together completely by their friends, and was very focused on the communities surrounding them. It was a lovely little hippie wedding, and we took pictures of all us Family Camp kids, one of which is one of my favorite pictures of the year:

Leo, Jarrod, Jake, Taylor, Tim, me, Zach and Spenser- this one is my favorite because Zach has clearly just pushed Spense over. I think we probably have this same photo somewhere, from when we're all under 10.

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I reveal June-December, including the Absolute #1 Best Thing To Happen All Year! I know, you're all on pins and needles.

Myriad Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

2010-11-19T04:57:00.000-08:00

This is not going to be a proper review- all my thoughts are too jumbled and all over the place, and it's been forever since I've written a proper review anyway. But it's 4:18 a.m. and I just got back from HP7.1 with Ana, and I have things to say, I tell you!

So first of all: I am of the camp that was TOTALLY STOKED when it was announced that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was going to be made into TWO movies instead of one. I have had the "2 vs. 1" fight with a certain friend of mine time and again, because apparently we have nothing better to do on the phone than discuss Harry Potter at length. Here is my stance: HP7 is perhaps the most intricate book in the series. It's the culmination of a whole mess of things, all of which were touched on at least at one point in the preceding 6 movies, so to throw away anything would be to do an incredible disservice to the story. My certain friend claims that the first half of HP7 is boring and angsty and sees our heroes do nothing but wander about in the woods. He is wrong. It is character-driven and moody, to be sure, but since when does that make for bad cinema? Since never. Thus, parts of me were almost more excited about HP7.1 than the Grand Finale of the whole thing. Give me mood, baby- Harry Potter thrives on it.

And boy howdy, was there mood! Absolute boatloads of it, and it was used SO WELL that I hardly even know where to start. This was the only one of the movies that will not take place primarily at Hogwarts, and maybe that's why I responded to it so well- not that I don't love Hogwarts in all its gothic splendor, but I don't relish the way the movies- even the later ones- have taken to doing long sweeping shots of the castle and its grounds, as if just to remind everyone that oh hey, remember? We're in a castle! A MAGIC CASTLE! Removing the three main characters from this world created a raw reality, one in which they're not safely guarded by teachers and Dumbledore. It's what I loved about the book, and I'm glad that it worked out so well in the movie. In the end, this is the story of Harry Potter, not the story of What Happened In Magic Land When The Bad Wizard Came Back.

HP7.1 does a lovely, striking job with all of this, with the edgy, terrified teenagers it follows, and especially with the look of the thing. Eduardo Serra, the rather underappreciated cinematographer of The Girl With The Pearl Earring and The Wings of the Dove, goes to town with the visual storytelling, especially with regards to Harry- the long lens close-ups of Harry when Ron starts to turn on him are just delightful, and the natural lighting, so rare in a Harry Potter film, is exactly what was required of this turn in the "real world." Oh sure, a lot of this was due to David Yates- David Yates, aka the best thing to happen to this franchise since Alfonso Cuaron- but Serra held is own against such past Harry Potter DP heavyweights as Bruno Delbonnel and Slawomir Idziak.

I don't know whether it's David Yates or simply the fact that the three stars are no longer awkward teenagers who basically stumbled into their roles by looking the part, but I cannot say enough how much Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have blossomed as actors. They've gotten better with every film (funny how that corresponds to every film improving upon its predecessors), but even in HP6 there were some icktastic acting moments, some overdramatization particularly on the part of Watson, and some bits where you could tell they were reciting lines. Not so with this film- I breathed a sigh of relief at the end when I realized that hurray, finally I could go into the next Harry Potter movie without worrying about these three kids butchering their characters. They were natural and sincere and funny when they needed to be without any of it seeming forced. Perhaps I am overly critical of child actors, but seriously- have any of you watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone recently? It makes me long for the dramatic subtlety of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

One thing I'm not completely sure about regarding Yates' direction was the segment in which Hermione reads aloud the Tale of the Three Brothers, from which the legend of the Deathly Hallows derives and the jumping-off point for the final film- it is animated. Yes, you read that right: animated. I am of two minds on this, because the animation was beautiful and elegant and lent the segment a sort of distancing from the rest of the wizarding world on screen- the kind of distance that perhaps was appropriate given how the characters regarded it, as nothing more than a legend. However, the distancing was also exactly the problem I had with it. It took me out of the entire movie, and made me notice once again that not only was I sitting in a theater, I was actively dissecting why the director made this choice, and formulating ideas about it. I always think that's a bad sign, when I begin to overthink a cinematic choice while it's actually happening. It was also so completely incongruous with the style of the rest of the franchise that I feel it was the wrong decision based on that alone... yet at the same time, what else could they have done? No one wants to see a strange, desaturated flash back with random actors portraying characters that aren't even really characters in the books. So perhaps making it so different was a good thing. I don't know.

I'm not going to go into the ways things were changed from the book, other than to say that for the most part I thought every decision was appropriate. I could talk about little changes all night, and no one wants to read a fanatic's ramblings about such things. Again, Yates was the best director for this series because he knows what to cut, and what to slightly alter to make a sleek movie out of a rather long and winding book. He didn't have to change as much this time as with HP5 and 6, which again is why it was a good decision to make it into two films. I can't wait to see what they do with the last one, and how they resolve certain things that were not addressed in this film. When the movie ended tonight I felt like I could have sat there for another three hours, watching right up until the end of the story. In other words, I loved it. I know I'm a Harry Potter dork and so of course I loved it, but I really do think that it may be the most interesting of the lot thus far.

It should be noted, just to brag, that Ana and I totally pinpointed the exact scene at which they were going to cut the book in half. Perhaps it was obvious, but we were proud of ourselves. And I loved the slight additional scene (not seen, but merely recounted, in the book) they stuck in there to end this first movie- it worked really well. Kudos.

Oh and also, the scene at the beginning with the 7 Harry Potters was adorable.

I'm sure I'll come up with more to say, but now it's almost 5 a.m. and hey, I have to work tomorrow. Happy Harry Potter Day!!!!

Specifics regarding LA

2010-11-10T17:58:00.001-08:00

Los Angeles: where vague attempts to make plans fall through either because someone is suddenly working at the last minute or because someone just plain sucks. This is what suffices for "keeping in touch" and "having friends." There need be no actual face to face contact, just the odd acknowledgement that the other exists.

NEWS FLASH, LA: that's not actual friendship.

It should be noted that I myself have been guilty of the above scenario, and am not at all proud of it.

to ponder, on a Monday morning

2010-11-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

The other day, I was getting gas at my usual crappy gas station at Franklin and Gower. I swiped my debit card, and when I was punching in my pin I noticed for the first time that there was braille on the keypad numbers.

I realize that the swipey-card machines are probably pretty standard issue, but still, it begs the question: how often do you think blind people pump gas?

it ain't ALWAYS sunny, bitches

2010-10-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!

Reflections While Doing Laundry On The Eve Of The NLCS

2010-10-16T01:20:00.000-07:00

I'm the kind of person who, when momentous things happen, or anniversaries pass, or what have you, likes to look back on where I was at a similar point in the past- or not so similar, as the case may be. And so, in this spirit, and because I am trying to stay awake while I wait for my laundry to be done (ahead of a 6:30am call time tomorrow), I will now reflect upon the last time the Giants got to the NLCS and beyond.

It was the fall of 2002.

I was a sophomore living in CRC, just getting started with my "film career," which at that point looked at lot more promising than it does now, after having pursued it for 8 years. I was working on The Caseys, a Studio 22 Bindley grant film that I thought was just about the coolest thing in the world; I was gripping for the first time, overseen by JP Belliard and Mike Sippel. I had just met Kevin Cannon, when we were seated across a table from each other as background in a diner scene, and we were becoming friends. George W. Bush was president, and at the time I was absolutely certain that he wouldn't be reelected. I lived with Martha on the second floor of the dorm, which meant I came home from set a lot to Martha and Nate making out in our room. Sarah was down the hall writing something about insane people, which spawned one of my favorite lines of dialogue, "the proof is in the insanity pudding." felt distinctly unloved by a lot of the people who were supposedly my friends, to the point where I was thinking about transferring away from Northwestern. Not all that different from now, actually.

I had a crush on Matt Olson, who had no idea, but we were friends enough that he sat in the TV lounge in the dorm and watched the World Series with me- because oh yes, the Giants got to the World Series. They had beaten the Braves to get there, just like this year, and then the Cardinals. They and the Angels were both wild card teams, which was unique. This was one of the Giants glory teams- Barry Bonds, JT Snow, Jeff Kent, and one of my favorites, Benito Santiago. The days of Dusty Baker, who at the time felt to me like a San Francisco institution. This was before the Bonds steroids issues exploded, before any asteriks or careers ended in shame. It was the first World Series to be played at Pac Bell, which had only opened a couple years before. It was a Big Deal. The Giants had bats galore, and they had a decent pitching staff, including Robb Nen, whom I think about to this day when the 9th ("Nenth") inning rolls around and Brian Wilson comes in as the Giants' closer. Nen was a hell of a closer.

I want them to win this NLCS series so much it hurts. I want them to get to the World Series. This is the scruffiest, scrappiest group of weirdos I've ever seen on a baseball team, and I feel like that deserves some recognition. Lincecum, Posey, Schierholtz, Wilson, Uribe, Vellez, Sanchez and Sanchez- I fall a little more in love with each of them every day, with their lanky postures and wide-eyed excitement and strange facial hair. They make baseball fun, and not just because they win- because it's like the Peanuts gang playing little league. Part of me wouldn't be surprised if Snoopy were stationed in left field.

I was apparently the only person who really cared about the Series that year in the dorm, because the TV lounge was pretty deserted besides me and Matt- I'm sure Marc came down for some of it, and there must have been others, but I don't remember who. When it was over... when the stupid Angels had won... I was basically all alone there, sad, telling myself it was only baseball, but it felt like a lot more. Watching felt like being close to home.

I guess the main feeling that ties 2002 to this year, for me, is that intense desire to be back in San Francisco, with all the other Giants fans, cheering on my team. Sitting in the basement of the dorm was a bit better than sitting alone in my room watching on my computer- and WAY better than sitting in the sun in Santa Clarita, checking scores on my cell phone- but my basic reaction to seeing my city on TV, in all its glory with this crazy cast of characters, is the same: I should be there. I just... should.

Sorry for all the rambling.

Go Giants!!!!

fact

2010-10-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

Things are never going to work out for me in Los Angeles because I hate myself when I'm here. I hate that I somehow disillusioned myself into thinking that I could make it in this stupid film business when it's filled with a bunch of half-people that don't actually care about anything. I hate that I still want all those half-people to love me. I hate that I have about two real friends in this town, and that neither of them need me because they have more important people in their lives. I hate that all I do when I'm not working (which is usually) is sit in my room and rot because I'm too afraid of spending money. I hate traffic and Hollywood and bars and the slugs that invade our kitchen. I hate how hating myself makes me so miserable, and that I can't talk to anyone about it because I don't want to make them miserable too.

The whole thing feels like when I was 11 at sleepaway volleyball camp and was so homesick that I couldn't stop crying, no matter what anybody said. Everyone thought I was crazy then. I'm beginning to think I'm crazy now... I just do a better job of hiding it in public.

Something needs to change. I can't stay in this place where the only thing that makes me happy is the thought of leaving... but I don't know how to leave, because of the disappointment I hear in my family's voices whenever I talk about it. They want me to be successful. All I want is for someone to love me. That's never going to happen as long as I hate myself like this. Something needs to change.

it's been a long long time

2010-10-09T01:54:00.001-07:00

I'm going to try to get back into the habit of writing- not that I have anything very interesting to write about, but because I like to be able to look back on things and remember them. I'd be pretty shocked if anyone still checks this page, but hey, maybe it can just be for me.

So, let's see. I had a really wonderful summer teaching cherubs at Northwestern- great kids, more confidence in myself as a teacher, good friends on staff with me. I got to see most of my Chicago people, although not nearly as much as I would have liked. "6 weeks" always sounds like a really long time, but it's not, especially when seeing friends usually means trekking into Chicago. A few really unique things happened, both in the form of visits- Bre came to visit on her way back to her parents' house from Michigan, and Danielle came to visit from New York. Well, Danielle wasn't visiting ME, specifically, but she was in Chicago so we went to Hecky's with Kevin Welch. I'd seen her in May, but it was awfully nice to see her again. It's great to have friends who don't change, don't randomly turn on you or stop acknowledging that you exist. I feel like my friendship with Danielle will always operate on the same level, and that's exactly the way I like it.

Breezy coming to visit was interesting- basically, she had just been to Michigan to sign divorce papers, and came and spent the night in dorm on the way back. We had a lot of fun the first night she was there- we had snacks and played Ball Game (more on Ball Game in a minute) and watched movies with the rest of the staff. I think she was happy to be with people her own age, and I was really, incredibly happy to see her. It was the first time I'd seen her since she and Jake had moved away from LA in May 2009. The next day, though, I think the reality of signing divorce papers sort of hit her, and she was pretty upset- and it didn't help that I had to be roaming the campus, checking on 17 year olds shooting documentaries. It's an issue I really don't know how to help her with, and I feel like I'm an awful friend because of it. I am really glad she came, though- and we got to go to Panera, just like the days of AFI.

So, like I said, more about Ball Game! Ball Game is an utterly ridiculous game the staff invented over the course of the summer. We were in Jones this year, a Residential College with suites instead of long hallways, so we had a couple suites staked out as "faculty only." My suite became Ball Game Suite, and we spent many a happy hour throwing a tennis ball back and forth, with lots of nonsensical rules and variations. The Ball Game Game Ball is a tennis ball with decorative black gaff tape on it, and the Ball Wand is a 2' flourescent light bulb used to get the Game Ball out from under the couches; there are the Primary Chairs, 1st Chair, and 2nd Chair, plus "the keys" and floating, Phantom Ball Shaggers, if there are enough people playing. There is Intellectual Ball Game, and Super Intellectual Ball Game. There are Ball Stares, and Ball Steals, particular things to call when you are traversing the suite and want to play (New Player!)/do not want to play (Fragile!), or when you are playing and you have to respond to a text (Text Out!), and there are special rules when Zanne, one of the FA's who isn't very coordinated, is playing. There is no way to win. It's spectacular.

Ball Game is, really, how I spent the bulk of my summer.

But I mentioned the kids, didn't I? The kids this year were a bunch of lovely little nerdlets, kids who were legitimately interested in being there and learning all we had to teach them about film. They were active and engaged and polite and generally just darling. Oh, sure, there were a couple that bugged me sometimes, but they were all trying so hard that I was just kind of in love with them all summer. It made me want to teach them more things, and I think I did end up teaching this batch of kids a lot more than last year's kids. Part of this was because we were shooting on HD cameras, the HVX-200s, for the first time- but most of it was because they listened and absorbed things more quickly. It was great, and I think their final projects were significantly better as a result. Next year's kids will have a hard time living up to it.

Staff photo 2010! Post 4th of July touch football game.

David and Dusty, two of our FAs, playing detectives in one of the kids' noir-esque final project

one of my advisees shooting in Dearborn Library

the last night of Cherubs, when they all stayed up all night just like good little high schoolers. they look like brats, but they're not!

Oh, one more thing- Tim and I finally got to see a Twilight movie together. We've had a suicide pact ever since the books first got popular: to read each of the books and see each of the movies simultaneously. For most of the movies, this meant timing our West Coast/Midwest viewing times to coincide, but Eclipse came out on July 2nd, which meant we got to see it together. Danielle came with us, because she was in Chicago at the same time. It was awful. They are each a different kind of awful, and this one was just really, really boring- which is odd, because as much as the books are wretched piles of simpering girly crap, the third one was the only one with some semblance of plot. Seeing it with Tim and Danielle, though, was definitely the way to do it. Sadly, neither half of Breaking Dawn (for they are, inexplicably, Harry Potter-ing it) is slated to be released in the summer, but who knows- maybe they'll get pushed back.

So, that was Cherubs 2010 in a nutshell. As soon as I got back from Chicago- and I mean literally as soon as- I got in my car and drove to Camp, making it just in time to go out to dinner at La Morenita with Mom, Dad, Laury, Sue, Zach, and his girlfriend Marria. They were just up for the day, basically, and I was incredibly glad I made it in time to see them. Laury and Sue stayed at the Strawberry Inn, while Zach and Maria pitched a hammock in the woods behind our tent area and slept there. I can't imagine it's comfy to sleep in a hammock with another person, all rolling on top of you and stuff, but it was all very lovely and California just the same.

Can I mention how happy I am that Zach, Jarrod, Spense and Jake are all living in the Bay Area now? Now Taylor and I just have to get our asses back there and all the Camp kids will be within bus distance of each other. By the way, this is the 8 of us (including Tim and Leo) at Jarrod's wedding in May:

Tim, Leo, Jarrod, Jake, Spense, me, Zach, and Taylor

By comparison, here we are in the Golden Revue Talent Show at Camp when we were very small (I'm that disembodied arm behind Jake):

Leo, Jarrod, Taylor, my arm, Jake, Zach, Tim, Spense

Anyway.

Camp was great, as usual, even if it was mostly just me and Dad and Mom for the week. I'm ok with that now- I would rather have everyone there, of course, but I really just enjoy being at this place that I love so much, even if others can't come. And being in the mountains, with real air and dirt and trees, is the best. The stars are incredible. We went out to the softball field one night and looked at the stars- Mom said she hadn't done it since we were little kids. I showed them the Hula Clown, a constellation we made up when we used to go out there as a group after the Burger Shack closed, and the group of stars that ALMOST spells CAM (it spells CA and then a sort of M-type-thing). Dad and I played in the Trivial Pursuit tournament, again, and came in 2nd to the same people as last year- but this is a couple where the guy is some sort of physicist or something, so I don't feel too bad about it. At least we beat Bean Guy, who has been our Trivial Pursuit Arch Enemy for about 15 years now.

The best part of the week was the day trip we took, I think on Wednesday, over Sonora Pass to Mono Lake. Sonora Pass itself was incredibly beautiful, and over 9,000 feet high. Mono Lake is a lake on the Eastern flank of the Sierras that was once where LA got its water- but that stopped when these weird limestone formations called tufas started rising out of the water when it got low enough to uncover them. It looks like some kind of otherworldly sculpture plopped in the middle of a lake:

We had lunch at the Whoa Nellie Deli in Lee Vining, which is also a gas station, and then went for a short little hike down to the edge of the lake at the part where there were the most tufas. It was pretty neat- I would love to see what the place looks like covered in snow.

THEN- and this is what I was most excited about- we drove about 13 miles off the main road to Bodie, California, a ghost town in a state of "preserved decay." It was once a gold mining town, and was fairly large, but the gold started to run out and the town was officially donated to the State Park system in 1962. Since then, it's been kept up as a State Park, so you can go and look at all these tumbledown buildings and walk around and pretend things... or at least that's what I did. Besides, it has the COOLEST GRAVEYARD:

And you all know how much I love graveyards! Here is Bodie the town- I have a ton more pictures that I took, recklessly, on real film, and have not yet processed, so don't be surprised if you see more of these sometime soon:

Ghost towns and strange geological formations. Yum.

On the last morning of Camp I woke up early, pre-breakfast (a first for me at Camp!) in order to get on the road early enough to get to Morro Bay in time for Deirdre's wedding. I made it with about two hours to spare, and totally fell in love with highway 41, which cuts across the state from around Fresno to Morro Bay on the coast. The drive was beautiful, and I was really bummed that I didn't have more time to dilly dally and take pictures. I did, however, stop for this, near Atascadero:

This is really the type of homeowner I aspire to be.

Anyway, I got to the Masterpiece Motel in Morro Bay ("A masterpiece in every room!"), where Sarah, Zoe and I were sharing a room with Danielle and her boyfriend Drew, just in time to run into Martha and Danielle walking up the hill from town. We brought my stuff inside, and then made a random trip to a yarn store across the street. There we found "fancy brooches" for all 5 of us suitebonding 1 Brown girls, and packaged Deirdre's up as a collective gift from the 4 of us, then wore our own to the wedding. Mine is sparkly and blue, and tacky in the extreme. In other words, it is most excellent.

Deirdre's wedding was absolutely beautiful. It was on the deck of the Inn at Morro Bay, which looks out on the Rock at Morro Bay, a protected bird sanctuary. It was at 5pm, so it was backlit by the sun starting to set, and the whole thing was very atheistic (lots of quotes from Carl Sagan) and low key and wonderful. It was so Deirdre and Karl- I couldn't have imagined a better wedding for them. Deirdre looked gorgeous, of course, and the setting was just perfect. There were a bunch of birds, maybe cormorants, perched in the trees around the Inn during the ceremony, and right as Deirdre and Karl were pronounced husband and wife, and kissed, the birds all took off and flew over the guests. Very dramatic and well-timed... if perhaps a little messy- Martha's boyfriend was unfortunate enough to be, well, BLESSED by a bird. But beyond that, what a great way to usher in a marriage!

Martha, Danielle, Deirdre, me, and Sarah- 1 Brown Forever =)

with Eileen and Anne at the after party

The next day we all woke up and, missing Deirdre's presence, went to breakfast and read over two books of suitebonding notes from college. I suppose I should explain- suitebonding was an almost-weekly ritual we had in college, started in our suite, 1 Brown in CRC, during which we would lock ourselves in a room and vent/gossip/girltalk/what have you. It began one night fresman year when Sarah and Martha were being pursued by boys they didn't want to deal with, who were just hanging around our suite and wouldn't leave. We locked ourselves in Sarah and Deirdre's room and didn't come out for about 4 hours. Every week after that, until Danielle graduated our junior year, we would get together and talk about Life, Boys, School, whatever there was. And we took notes, mostly in the form of funny quotes. This is what we read over at breakfast, and we didn't stop laughing for almost an hour. It was great- and I hope no one other than one of us ever gets their hands on those notes.

After everyone left, I drove out to the Rock at Morro Bay to look at the birds, and then drove home. It was Mom's birthday, and I was working at Pac Prim the next day. That's where I'm going to leave it for now, as this post is ridiculously long already. I'm glad I'm back to blogging- you can expect to hear from me again soon, to recap the rest of the summer, the more recent weddings, and hey, maybe I'll even backtrack a bit and tell you about the spring, which was interesting, to say the least. We'll see =)

My Pronto

2010-06-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

My kitty Pronto died on Thursday. He was 13 and his liver had started to fail. There is nothing in the world quite like watching a beloved pet deal with sickness, seeing them slowly lose weight and stop eating. Knowing how scared and confused they must be is the worst thing in the world.

Pronto was such a sweetheart, from the day Mom and I brought him home as a kitten in 1997 to the last moments of his life. We kept him in the bathroom at first, so that Pogo would get used to his smell, and I would have to lie on my stomach and drag him out from under the bathtub in order to pet him- but he loved to cuddle, and once you got him out and he started purring, that was that. Pronto adopted Pippin, or maybe it was the other way around- either way, when Pronto was a year or so old this little black and white kitten showed up in our yard, and they would play like the best of friends. It didn't take too long for Pippin to move into our house, and they were pretty inseparable from then on:

Pronto got lost, stuck in someone's garage or basement or something, two or three times in his life, and it always gave us quite a scare- there was a time when he was gone for over a week. He wasn't running away, though, and when he showed up again you could always tell how afraid he'd been to be away from us. He'd start meowing from three yards away- and he could have a very loud voice, when he wanted to- and keep it up until he was sure that we'd heard all about his ordeal and about how happy he was to be home. It wouldn't take long for him to be snuggling with Dad on the couch. It was the same way when I'd come back from college or grad school or wherever I'd been: he would be skittish at first, a feral Glen Park cat by birth, but within a day he was jumping onto my bed at night for some solid cuddle time.

He was just about the nicest animal I've ever met, always loving, rarely mad, quiet and gentle and funny. He was sweet to Pogo when she was sick, and always looked out for Pippin. He guarded our yard with a vengeance and kept away the bad cats. He loved us unconditionally, and I hope he knows that we loved him the same way.

Pronto died at 4:15 on June 24th, with my Mom and Dad there petting him and keeping him company. They burried him yesterday in a nice spot in our yard, so that he can always be a part of the action outside. It hasn't sunk in for me at all yet, that he's gone; I got to spend a few days with him before coming to Chicago on the 22nd, and I am so incredibly glad that I got a chance to say goodbye. I don't know what it will be like to go home and find him gone, but I do know that home won't be the same without him.

Sleep softly, my cuddle bear. I love you.

this is reality

2010-06-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

Listen, world. Nobody likes the melon in the fruit salad, unless it is watermelon, and it never is. Nobody eats it. Last week at the Boring Work Barbecue there were two entire bowls of cantaloupe and honeydew melon left over for this very reason. Melon sucks, and also I am vaguely allergic to it. Stop forcing us to eat melon! Melon should be the sort of fruit that fans must seek out, like apricots!

On a completely different note, I enjoy the fact that until recently at a local drugstore, tampons and maxi pads are kept in the same isle as yeast infection medication, condoms, and diapers, amongst other things. Walking through it is kind of like an Epcot Center ride through failed birth control: first you need the tampons, then you use the condom, which presumably doesn't work, which results in needing the diapers. I giggled every time I visited this aisle, and now that it's gone I'm sad and I have to wonder if someone complained about the implications and hinting involved in putting diapers right next to period-and-sex-related paraphernalia.

advice center

2010-05-13T00:13:00.001-07:00

If any of you have any tips or resources you could pass along relating to helping out friends who are going through a divorce... I could really use some advice. This is something I've never done before, and it makes me feel like a grown-up in the worst kind of way.

it's that time again

2010-04-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

Spring/summer/early fall: that time when life gets incredibly busy for no one reason, always followed by fall, which for the past two years has been a melancholic dead zone of joblessness and depression. But for reference, here is my (tentative) schedule for the next few months:

Now-May 27th: work at AFI. attempt to not stab out eyes/ears with readily available screwdrivers from workbench.
May 1st (this Saturday! gah! must find something to wear!): Jennifer and Josh's wedding
May 28th: drive home
May 30th: Jarrod and Amelia's wedding
May 31st-?: home... depends on jobs
June 22nd: fly to Chicago
June 2rd-July 31st: teach film cherubs at Northwestern! yay!
August 1st: fly back to San Francisco, drive to Camp
August 1st-7th: Camp! vacation! yay!
August 7th: drive to Morro Bay for Deirdre's wedding, get there by 5pm ceremony
August 8th: Mom's birthday, drive home
August 9th-20th: at Pac Prim with Rainbow Dolphins
August 21st-September 3rd: ??
September 4th: Kate and Stuart's wedding in Indianapolis. have not figured out how/when to go. stupid Labor Day ticket prices.

and then... into the ghastly blank, my friends.

Death Valley post soon! FOR REALS.

grab bag

2010-04-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

Things About the Inner Workings of Which I Understand Very Little:*

1. hair extensions (where do they latch on? to your skull or to your hair? what are they made of? i could research this easily but choose not to.)
2. people who suddenly become extremely religious for no apparent reason
2A. Jews for Jesus
3. taxes
4. The Effect of Masers On Supernova Remnants (this is why I keep Jack around)
5. Ru Paul's Drag Race
6. narwhals**
7. The inability of Los Angeles residents/ the dictum by the City of Los Angeles that trash cans must be left IN THE STREET for trash pickup day, thus rendering it impossible to park anywhere.

*Don't you love it when concerted efforts to not end a sentence with a preposition make said sentence unnecessarily confusing?
** BUT I LOVE THEM and no one else really understands them either!

Also! The "wanderlust" portion of this here blog is soon to be expanded- Steve and I are going to Death Valley tomorrow! I also owe everyone (myself?) a rundown of me and Mom's trip to Portland, and then in May I'm going to New York for a weekend to see Taylor! Things are looking up, life-wise- or at least travel-wise.

oh gosh

2010-03-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

I am a horrible blogger. I have much to tell everyone... and by "everyone" I mean "Kara, my mom and Jennifer." But I am so glad that at least they care about what I have to say! I feel that I am rambling when I have only written four sentences. That must be a record.

More soon!

just spreadin' the word

2010-02-09T01:09:00.000-08:00

The HPV vaccine is now available for men. So if you are 9-26 OF EITHER GENDER go get yourself vaccinated! Hurry! You're not getting any younger!

one * does not a swear word conceal

2010-01-31T00:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Fat Guy At The Gym Who Wears Rainbow Socks, A Salmon Do-Rag, And A Muscle Shirt That Says "FEEL MY F*CKING PAIN" On The Back,

You are my new favorite person. Will you be my friend?

Sincerely,
Cameron

gchat snippets, the sad and the snarky

2010-01-30T00:17:00.000-08:00

Today's snippets are all on the subject of OKCupid:

JULIA: wow
these okcupid people are freaks
ME: ?
yes.
JULIA: it's really amazing
i went on a great okcupid date on saturday
but i don't anticipate meeting anyone else
ME: are you going to see him again?
JULIA: yes
we're going to the tactile dome on saturday
ME: to make out in the red room?
JULIA: hahahah
perhaps
ME: that's like the whole point of the tactile dome
to be tactile with each other

JULIA: this guy messaged me and said he liked my profile
i checked him out
he said he likes good charlotte and reggaeton
and heavy metal
i'm just wondering how he could have possibly read my profile (bob dylan, velvet u., my morning jacket, etc) and thought, YES perfect match!!

JULIA: let me remind you that i got hotlisted by a 5'2'' transsexual on JDATE.
ME: yeah, a dwarf messaged me because i have on my profile that i like weird animals like narwhals, and he wrote me a message about narwhals. and then i wrote back because i felt guilty ignoring the dwarf, and he never responded again. so either he senses that i am secretly weirded out, or i got rejected by a dwarf.
ME: my life is amazing.
JULIA: HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
narwhals
haha
you prob have one of those profiles that i make fun of
hehe
ME: great
so that's why no one but dwarves love me

JULIA: omg
check out this chat i just got on okcupid
"hi lady. i want to learn your opinion about a subject. i enjoy older women very much and an older woman said she has a weak submissive husband who has a tiny and flabby private part so she has been training him into a sissy man so she wants to show him he is not real man and adequate by having intercourse with me at their bedroom while he being at home. what should i do ?"
ME: i... ok. you win.

JULIA: did you get my text [saying she got okcupid matched with someone we went to high school with]
ME: haha just now
amazing
there should be some way to avoid finding people you know
i got matched up with a kid from afi
JULIA: hahaha yeah
ME: plus, i mean, i don't want people i know to know i'm pathetically desperate and on ok cupid
although if they are too, then i guess i shouldn't be embarrassed
JULIA: yeah i don't think online dating is desperate at all
i don't feel desperate and i'm doing it
ME: i do, yet here i am.

JULIA: is it wrong if i don't respond to a guy because i don't care for his name? (saul)
i just..i can tell you right now that i'm not going to marry a saul.

Online dating: we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

sigh

2010-01-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

A co-worker of mine is annoyed with me because I "like to do things the hard way."

GUESS WHAT, ASSHOLE? Alphabetizing is only "the hard way" if you're an IDIOT.

weighing in a little late here...

2010-01-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

So, there was that huge deal a few months ago at the Video Music Awards when Kanye West jumped on stage and ruined Taylor Swift's acceptance speech and all that. At the time I barely knew who Taylor Swift was, watched the clip, saw the poor frightened blond girl and felt bad for her, and was just as outraged as everyone else.

Then a few weeks ago I heard the song on the radio, thought it was fun and upbeat (I have officially gotten over my "I don't listen to pop because it's too popular" phase in life and will now embrace a good song when I hear it), and added it to my gym mix, which is chock full of songs that would cause people to roll their eyes. I figured I should watch the video, so I did.

...

Is it horrible to say that, um, I agree with Kanye? Not that it's ok to interrupt the biggest moment of someone's life to announce that she didn't actually deserve it, but Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video (which is also on my gym mix, by the way) is WAY better than this cheap-looking retread of a video. How many times have you seen this video made before? It's not even well-lit. The whole POINT of music videos is to be fun and stylish and well-lit, not to be a tiny romantic comedy set to music. Yes yes, Taylor Swift is geared towards tweens who probably eat this crap with a spoon, but REALLY. Kanye was right. Beyonce's video should have won. And yes, I know it won the Best Video award or whatever and thus Taylor Swift probably won the Best Video by a Female Artist award just so that it wasn't a complete sweep, but REALLY. I have never been a huge fan of that logic. The same logic states that when a foreign film is the best movie of the year, and is nominated at the Academy Awards for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, it cannot win both, even if it deserves both. This is bullshit. If something is that good and happens to be foreign, it should win.

So Kanye West is a jackass, but hey, at least he's not a delusional jackass.

star struck

2010-01-15T22:55:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I'd be the sort to get all giggly and excited about lots of stars in one place, but oh hey, guess what? I am. Today was the 2009 AFI Awards, and as I am working at SDAC (it's like AFI's version of the cage, but way less fun) the other guy who works there and I had to go shoot it. I was all excited because maybe George Clooney was going to be there; turns out he wasn't, but WHATEVER, it was still packed with famous people. Before the banquet started my friend Tyler and I stood by the interview set-up, "helping" by saying "Thank you!" to the famous people as they left their interviews. In between, we giggled and discreetly pointed and generally geeked out about the whole thing.

The best part was when Jon Hamm from Mad Men was leaving the interview area- he looked at me and said "I like your shoes!" !!!!!!! I was wearing my good old Shirley Temple Doc Marten saddle shoes with the pink star laces. I had no idea what to say but managed to say "Thank you!" and to not add "I like EVERYTHING about YOU!"

So, because I live in a sucky city that has few merits, and because one of those merits (that of sometimes seeing celebrities) was on display today, I am now going to brag with a big long list of people I saw and was excited about. I'm sure I'm missing a few too, but this is who I could remember:

FAMOUS PEOPLE I SAW AT THE AFI AWARDS
Jon Hamm (Mad Men)
Henry Selick (!! - director of Coraline AND A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS)
Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights)
Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights)
Michael Stahlberg (A Serious Man)
Alan Arkin (A Serious Man)
Richard Kind (A Serious Man)
Gabourey Sidibe (Precious)
Ben Foster (The Messenger)
Woody Harrelson (The Messenger)
Heather Graham (The Hangover-- but more importantly, Twin Peaks!)
Julianne Moore (A Single Man)
Tom Ford (director of A Single Man)
Amy Landecker (from A Serious Man)
Jeremy Renner (from The Hurt Locker)
Katherine Bigelow (director of The Hurt Locker)
Christina Hendricks (from Mad Men)
CCH Pounder (from The No. 1 Ladie's Detective Agency and Avatar)
Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family)
Ty Burrell (from Modern Family)
Ken Marino (from Party Down, which I have never seen)
Ryan Hansen (from Party Down)
Adam Scott (from Party Down)
Deborah Ann Woll (from True Blood)
Sam Trammell (from True Blood)

My camera was right near the A Serious Man table and if only the Coen brothers or Roger Deakins had been there, I think I would have died right then.

Then I came home and my mom had randomely sent me four filet mignons from Omaha Steaks, which was pretty awesome, and I had dinner with Arielle, Li-Wei, Joey, Blake, and Kelly. So all in all, it was a good day! I need more of these in my life.

NARWHAL UPDATE

2010-01-13T18:56:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I could love narwhals more... and then someone went and made this, which is both delicious and gross looking, notable primarily for its whimsy.

pros and cons

2010-01-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

Pros of Moving Back to San Francisco:
1. Being near family.
2. Being near friends, the kind who are not just half friends and who actually sometimes want to do things with you.
3. Hopefully not being sad all the time as in LA.
4. Ability to work at Pacific Primary and actually make money.
5. Potential of maybe finding a teaching job.
6. Not as much competition in film-related fields as in LA.
7. Ability to actually walk places, sometimes even to work!
8. The plethora of good book stores.
9. The weather.
10. The close proximity to real nature, not fake nature like in LA.
11. Having some sort of support system for when I feel as incredibly awful as I constantly do down here.
12. Ability to possibly not pay rent and save money for a couple months while I figure things out.
13. My kitties.
14. Kaiser in San Francisco sucks a good deal less than Kaiser in LA, as evidenced by the various times I've gotten sick while at home in the last year.
15. Actually living in the city that I want to live in forever, thereby abolishing the possibility of meeting/dating someone in LA and being stuck here forever.
16. Being there when my family needs me, for whatever reason.

Cons of Moving To San Francisco:
1. All AFI-related people and much of my family will assume I've either just given up on film or am too lame to ever get hired and make it work, and many of them will be disappointed in me.
2. Parents, while happy that I would be home, are probably not thrilled with the idea of me moving back in.
3. I'm not too thrilled with that idea either.
4. Having to find a storage unit and move all my crap.
5. Leaving the three or four good friends I have here.
6. People will stop hiring me for AC/gaffing jobs if I leave, no matter how much I tell them that I can come down to LA.
7. No 24-hour grocery stores for uncrowded shopping trips.
8. Radio stations in the Bay Area have really gone downhill.
9. Leaving my gym- I really like my gym, despite the fact that it's sometimes crowded with soccer moms and every now and then the star of my thesis film comes in and I have to hide from him.

The Year In Review

2010-01-03T00:21:00.001-08:00

2009, on the whole, was a very bipolar year for me. There were really good times, and really bad times, and the sum total of the year seems to be Depression, both mentally and financially. So, a few lists to finish it off, even though it's already 2010.

Some Good Times, In No Particular Order:
Jack and Kat's wedding
Rachel and Alexis' wedding
NHSI
the set of A True Story
Camp
meteor shower

Some Bad Times, In No Particular Order:
January 2009
November 2009
Bre and Jake moving away
the set of the mockumentary Nausheen shot

Some Resolutions, In No Particular Order:
-Lose weight (obviously, but for real this time) via Weight Watchers and going to the gym at least 5 times a week
-Figure out a way to use my skills in San Francisco so that I can move back
-Try to not be constantly sad in Los Angeles, via whatever means necessary
-Learn to sew
-Make enough money to be able to afford to go to all five scheduled weddings
-Visit Taylor and others in New York
-Keep all receipts and thus keep better track of finances
-See more movies and improve my Final Cut skills so as to be a better teacher at NHSI this summer

Resolutions are good because they uphold the idea that things can't possibly continue to be this awful, right? Here's hoping. 2010 is off to a good start, and all I can do is pray that doesn't fall to pieces once I get back to LA.

fact

2009-12-27T01:03:00.001-08:00

The country that I had previously thought was called "Gambia" is IN FACT called "The Gambia," which just seems to make it that much more important, don't you think?

progress?

2009-12-23T12:56:00.000-08:00

I am now, at the age of 26, only half as terrified of the Mean Teacher At Pacific Primary as I was when I first met him at 17. Maybe when I'm 35 I won't be afraid of him at all! Huzzah!

no that is not a name

2009-12-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

Pretentiously Stupid Names Given To Hapless Children Who Currently Attend Pacific Primary: A Partial List

Honey
Brown
Rye
Wynant
Sterling
Basil

I get the feeling that all you have to do to get in to Pac Prim during the exclusive admissions process is name your kids after inanimate objects, or make up a name entirely. Bonus points if you can make your made-up name sound like another word ("Wynant" sounds alternately like "whinin'" or "why not"), or if you can spell a normal name in a completely unpredictable way such as "Ghaiyne" pronounced "Jane" (ok, I made that one up, but it's not far off).

Admission 1: I actually think "Sterling" is almost cute, but more for a boy than a girl, right? Poor kid.

Admission 2: Yes, I used to (USED TO!) watch America's Next Top Model, which is why I know that "Brown" was a name forced upon a poor desperate skinny girl by Tyra Banks many seasons ago, simply because the girl had the same name as someone else, so I am already sort of set against the name- except oh wait, it's NOT A NAME. But this aside- WHAT IF THE KID YOU NAMED "BROWN" HAD TURNED OUT TO HAVE BLOND OR RED HAIR?

It all reminds me of this.

someday my prince will come

2009-11-13T05:22:00.000-08:00

I have ranted about this to some of you before, but I am having a horrid bout of insomnia, and Tim has been doing an essay series on animated Disney films, and so I figure the time has come to once again complain about princesses.

Now. To be clear. I have nothing against actual princesses. In fact, I still harbor a pathetic fantasy (and it has been previously documented multiple times) that I will somehow end up as the Princess of Sweden. What gets me about princesses is the commercialization of the concept of "princess." And, again, let me be clear- it's not that I'm against little girls pretending to be princesses- I played at being a princess innumerable times myself. It's the qualities that are somehow assigned to being a princess that I can't stand.

I shall start at the beginning.

When I was 15, I spent a summer babysitting for Rebecca and Ellen, my step cousin Diane's two little girls. At the time Rebecca was 4 and Ellen was about 2 1/2, the sorts of ages where you can't really expect them to play on their own without getting in fights. They had this game called "Pretty Pretty Princess," wherein each player was a colored princess token, and you took turns spinning the dial, and moving your token, and if you landed on a space with a crown, you got a crown.

There were crowns- or, I should say, tiaras,- necklaces, bracelets, rings, and (clip-on) earrings, and the object of the game- the ENTIRE OBJECT- was to collect all five kinds of jewelry and thereby become a pretty, pretty princess. As I recall, there wasn't even a way to LOSE jewelry if you did something wrong, you could only acquire jewelry, and thus the game was always over very fast and we always had to play many, many rounds.

Pretty Pretty Princess was bad, and incredibly boring, but it was nothing compared to this wretched video game Natalie and Alec had when I babysat for them in college. To give them credit, they only played it for a couple years, until Alec became obsessed with dinosaurs and was no longer willing to do whatever Natalie wanted. But until then, there were many interminable afternoons during which you could find me in an Evanston basement, one kid on my lap and one by my side, playing Barbie Princess Bride:

The whole basis behind Barbie Princess Bride was that Princess Barbie was in love with Prince Ken, and one must assume that he was in love with her, because he goes off in a boat on a Long Voyage, and Barbie stays home and plans their wedding. There is absolutely no indication that Ken is aware he will be getting married when he returns, but no matter, because oh! Planning a wedding with Princess Barbie is such fun! When you plan a wedding with Barbie, you get to:

1. Deliver wedding invitations to all the woodland creatures! What is it about being a princess that seems to require one has woodland creature friends? Is it some sort of royal gene?

2. Decorate the wedding cake, using decorations plucked from the garden of her helpful butterfly fairy friend! (Really.) The ingredients that go into the baking of the cake included butter, sugar, flour, harmony, and the gift of giving (really).

3. Sing an incredibly unfeminist song to the swans! The lyrics of said song included "For all times I'll be here waiting for you/ for all times I'll be here, your heart is close to mine/ Still I can't believe that love has come and walked into our lives/ For all times I'll be here waiting, waiting for your heart." Ignoring the gramatically incorrect use of the word "times," doesn't a princess have anything better to do all day than moon about singing mopey songs to swans?

4. You get the idea of the game design, yes? I shan't bore you with any more pictures, then. Next you get to fish important things out of a well, after a boy dropped them down there while "polishing things for the wedding." For how can there possibly be a wedding without the candlestick and the goblet?!?!

5. Design the wedding dress! If I recall, you didn't get to really DESIGN it- it is the same poofy princess shape no matter what- but you do get to decorate it, because apparently the life of a princess is largely concerned with decorating things. This sequence is the most fun, because you can pretend to be the fairies from Sleeping Beauty and switch the gown from blue to pink to blue to pink. Or, if you are me circa 7 years ago, you can let Natalie do it all because holy god, this game is boring.

6. Hurry ever so much faster because Ken's face gets clearer in the magic mirror, which presumably means he is getting closer, and whatever shall we do if the wedding is not ready when Ken gets home? That might give him a chance to run away.

7. Patronizingly check in on the musicians, then "help them play the right music" by reorganizing their sheets of music.

8. Omnisciently "navigate" Prince Ken's boat home through such ocean-going terrors as wind, sea monsters, islands, and dolphins.

9. And finally (and this is the game that was truly the bane of my existence), you get to pathetically toss coins into a fountain and make wishes about how soon Prince Ken will come home. This was the worst part of the whole thing because the design of the game was bad enough that where you clicked was not necessarily where the coin would go, and thus you had to compensate, and neither Natalie nor Alec ever really got the hang of it, so I'd always have two extremely frustrated kids on my hands while I clicked away at the damn thing so that the stupid fluttery butterfly fairy would shut up about it.

Anyway. Sorry for the Barbie Princess Bride tangent, but it truly embodies all that bugs me about commercialized princesses these days. For, you see, Barbie's entire life revolves around Ken and her wedding. Pretty Pretty Princess was dumb, yes, but it was also a game for 3 and 4 year olds, and there was a fairly simple goal to it, but Barbie Princess Bride makes a huge to-do about how Barbie won't really be happy until she has a giant fairytale wedding to The Man Of Her Dreams, surrounded by adorable forrest creatures. Should we really be teaching our impressionable little girls that getting married is the most important thing ever? I mean sure, getting married is great and all. I hope to get married myself one day. But hey- maybe we will make fewer girls completely miserable if we don't dwell on it in such an utterly magnified way when their brains are so maleable?

Also, I don't know about you, but I have never truly been happy with my life, because I cannot commune with woodland creatures. All the cool girls in the Disney movies did it. Snow White, Cinderella (she was the one that really got me- oh, how I wanted tiny mouse friends!), Sleeping Beauty, even Belle and Jasmine and Pocahontas to a certain extent.

Which brings me to Disney and the ridiculous "Disney Princesses" brand name. I don't know if you guys have been much exposed to all this, but I worked at a preschool right when it was first being marketed, and man, the power these few cartoon ladies hold over little girls is terrifying. So today, after reading Tim's Sleeping Beauty essay, I googled Disney Princesses and found The Official Princess Website, which invites you to "explore each enchanting world and collect charms from each princess." Its the same sort of crap that litters Barbie Princess Bride- in Cinderella's world, you help her get dressed for a parade. In Jasmine's world, you help her get dressed for a tea party. You help Snow White get dressed for a Forrest Friends Festival, who bakes "gooseberry pies for everyone" to cheer up Grumpy and helps Dopey pick flowers. You help Pocahontas get dressed for a Wind Celebration. Do you notice a pattern here? The only important thing to do in these girls lives is get dressed- and might I add that I don't know any real women who would just indiscriminately let someone else pick what they were going to wear to a big event?

So, what I gather from all this is that first you must get dressed, and then you must get married. I'm so glad that these are the things on which such powerful corporations as Disney and Mattel have chosen to focus. Really sends a message of independence.

You can also paint a picture, although the things you can do with your brush are very limited. I painted this (click on it, for it's hard to see all the incredible detail with such a small size):

I realize I'm not articulating any of this very well, but it's 5:15 in the morning and I haven't really slept in the last few days (woo!), and so this has turned into what it promised to be: a rant. I'm sorry. But I'm also not. It makes me mad. I guess it's good that girls are using computers and all, but I don't really think they'd be avoiding computers otherwise. Why can't we just resurrect Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego and let them, I don't know, learn something? Are we really still stuck in this age where girls play pretty dressing up games and boys DO things?

In conclusion... I'm going to bed.

P.S. If you are so inclined, you can watch a guy with a cute Liverpudlian accent get frustrated with Barbie Princess Bride here. I owe him a lot for refreshing parts of my memory.

wedding #1: Rachel and Alexis

2009-10-23T11:44:00.001-07:00

I haven't written about the weddings yet because quite frankly, I'm still processing it all. They were both fantastic, and both came with such a plethora of friends and fun and memories that I still get a little overwhelmed/teary when I think about them. But I've spent too much time on this blog worrying about the weddings to not tell you all about them, so here goes.

One must start with Rachel and Alexis' first, because it was first.

I went up to Aunt Kim and Uncle Simon's guest house in Sonoma on Friday afternoon, in the vain hope of procuring a last minute tan. No dice, but it was nice to get some sun and laze around with my books for awhile. The wedding wasn't until 5pm the next day, so I did much the same thing on Saturday, and then of course left a little too late to get to the wedding on time while, you know, actually going the speed limit. It all worked out, though, and I got there justintime to catch a shuttle bus up to the house/vineyard where the wedding was held. Ezra and Isa Barth-Rogers were in the shuttle with me- they were the a-little-too-cool-for-school twins in our class- and seeing them all of a sudden was sort of what the whole day felt like, being thrust back into this world of high school. Ezra was very sweet and tried to dredge up things he knew about my life from Facebook- "you're making movies now, right?"- which was nice, since he never used to really talk to me. Isa, however, continued to not really talk to me. Oh well.

We got out at the house, and there are Will and Will, standing on either side of the entryway waiting to greet everyone. I wonder if they were given that job because they were both named Will? Who knows. Most people were already there, and I hardly had a chance to see anyone other than Diane and Phia before it was time to sit down. We found a row with Gio (single people unite!) and Matt Pantell's parents and Martin's dad. The view was horrible, made up largely of Andrew Tolve's head, but I managed to take a few pictures during the ceremony. Some are blurry, sadly, as the sun was setting pretty rapidly and we were under a bunch of trees, but oh well. It's not like I was the official photographer or anything.

Oh, the ceremony. It was the sort of perfect California non-religious ceremony that I can only hope to have someday- outside, with tons of friends, and someone who knows and loves the couple officiating. Rachel was escorted down the aisle by her mom and her brother (her dad died very suddenly of cancer when we were in college), and she looked absolutely gorgeous- her dress was sort of Greecian and she had no veil, just flowers in her hair. Susan, her mom, looked so incredibly happy. I told you all I would cry when Dr. Adams spoke, and I did, although not as much as I was expecting. The point that really got me was when he talked about how at Lick-Wilmerding, they try to teach students to use their "Head, Heart, and Hands" (which is the school motto, or one of them), and how in this case, they did a good job with the Heart. The ceremony was incredibly short, I'd say twenty minutes tops- Al spoke, the bridesmaids/groomsmen read a poem, Rafi (Rachel's brother) read something, and then it was over, and Rachel and Alexis were married. Holy crap.

Next there was finger food and champagne in the little patio area, which was cobblestoned and made everyone who had worn heels sincerely wish they hadn't. Between the soft earth from the rain the night before and the cobblestones, walking around was next to impossible. This was when I really got to say hi to everyone- Deirdre and her boyfriend (who wore a pastel blue suit with a red bowtie), Jon Anderson and his girlfriend, Andrew Tolve and his girlfriend, Andrew Kelsey, Gabe (Gabe was actually nice to me! For like, the whole night! It was amazing), Jordan, Martin, etc. I spent a long time talking to Martin's dad about teaching, which made me really start to think that I'm barking up the wrong tree with all this ridiculous "making movies" nonsense.

This was also the first point when I didn't eat enough food and had too much champagne. It would prove to be a theme for much of the night.

Gio, Martin and Phia

Emily and Julia, bridesmaids

There were little bundles of lavender with our names and table assignments on them, and I was put at the "Poughkeepsie" table, along with Diane, Gio, Gabe, Ezra and his girlfriend, and a couple kids from Vassar, one of whom lives in Los Feliz. It was a decent group of people. The DJ announced the wedding party entering and they all danced down the stairs of the house, and then there were speeches, which were mostly short and sweet. Alexis' mom gave a really nice speech in her thick French accent about what a lovely and warm person Rachel is; Rachel's mom didn't say much but exclaimed about how much she loved everyone there that night; and Maggie, the maid of honor, cried through her whole speech. It was all very simple and touching. Dinner was sort of family style, and I spent a lot of time wandering around talking to people and taking pictures, so again, I didn't eat much. There was salad, and a tomato thing stuffed with blueberries and corn, and halibut, and steak. I don't really remember the cutting of the cake (or of the cupcakes), but I know that when Rachel went to feed a slice to Alexis, it was very neat- no frosting all over everything or crumbs dribbling down his front. Perhaps Alexis just has a cupcake-sized mouth.

The backyard of the house, by the way, was really decorated beautifully, especially with the sun setting over the mountains in the distance:

Rachel and Alexis thanking everyone for coming

And then, right before the dancing started, we took a giant photo with all the Lick alumni who were there, plus Dr. Adams (and, for some reason, Ezra's girlfriend):

It makes me incredibly happy to be a part of this photo.

And then there was dancing! The dancing was long and drunken and man am I glad I brought flip flops along with my heels. The great thing about dancing with these people now was that there was no strange relationship crap going on like there always was at high school dances; we were just there to have fun and celebrate.

Alexis and Rachel with Al Adams

Alexis' mom, Julia and Alexandra McKleroy dancing

Andrew Tolve's patented dance move (and Gabe really enjoying it)

Jordan, Will Madison and Matty P

Martin and Jon Anderson with their respective girlfriends (this, by the way, is pretty much what all my pictures from high school dances look like)

I don't know what is going on here, but I hope it's what it looks like- Rachel's friend India slapping Alexis' ass as he dances

At some point I had a long drunken conversation with Susan and Al Adams, which in retrospect is pretty embarrassing. . . but they are so nice and I love them so I hope they weren't shocked or appalled by me. And then, it was pretty much time to pile into the shuttle to the house where the after party was and where the whole wedding party was staying. All I remember about the shuttle ride is Phia asking the driver if they could smoke up in the van, and he said yes, and they did. I didn't think about it very much and didn't bring anything with me to sleep in, nor did I really expect to spend the night at the after party house, because I kind of thought there would be a shuttle to take me back to the winery. . . but there wasn't, and it was not a good idea for me to drive anyway, so oh well. I slept in my fancy dress, but worse things have happened. The house was pretty amazing, with a pool and a huge sunken living room with a weird ledge thing that just seemed to invite MTV Grind-style dancing. Oh, what an insane party- as all good Lickie parties are. There was dancing, drinking, random conversations, lots of pictures taken, more dancing, pool shenanigans, boys cooking some weird hamburger/cream cheese concoction that was congealed and gross the next morning, people falling asleep in random places and/or leaning on others, and oh yes, lots of dancing:

India and Rachel

Rachel, Maggie and Julia

living room ledge

Rach and me and Deirdre

Andrew Kelsey and Gul. . . oh god, just like high school.

Eventually Andrew Kelsey fell asleep on the couch, and people began quieting down and/or falling asleep in various random spots. I snagged a spot next to Andrew and sort of lay there in an uncomfortable daze smelling odd things from the kitchen while the boys cooked the weird cream cheese burger. Stephen Blair was on the other end of the couch from me and in the morning when I woke up he was on the floor, maybe because I had kicked him too much. I know Andrew kicked me. I heard people throughout the night throwing up, which was gross. Didn't sleep much, in the end, and when I finally decided to get up I was one of the first ones. The house was a wreck, almost comically so:

Emily's boyfriend Ryan with congealed cream cheese hamburger

Rachel made mimosas and coffee, which were both helpful (strange how alcohol can cure alcohol, isn't it?), and everyone pitched in to clean up, and then Maggie's parents showed up with breakfast for everybody and we ate by the pool in the sunshine. Eventually I figured I should leave and get back to clean up the guest house in Sonoma, so I convinced Rachel's friends Peter (the one who lives in Los Feliz) and Kunur to give me a ride to my car at the winery. Said goodbye to everyone, till Christmas or thereabouts, I imagine, and then. . . it was over. I went back to the guest house and fell asleep for awhile, then went home to two very angry kitties, annoyed with me for having left them in the care of someone they didn't know.

It was such a strange weekend, but such a wonderful one. I have a weird relationship with the people I went to high school with- on the one hand, I feel more comfortable with them than anyone else; on the other, the group at the wedding largely consisted of people who were never my BEST friends. Julia still is one of my best friends, of course, and Rachel is certainly one of my best friends from high school, and I also had years when Phia and Deirdre and I were very close... and Matty P was one of my good guy friends. But in the end, these were the cool kids, and I was never REALLY one of the cool kids. I was a floater, in the most classic sense of the word- I was friends with the Julias and Rachels, but also the Jonnys and Danielles, the ones who rebelled against the cool group pretty much just because they were the cool group; and then I was also friends with people like Thomas Chow and Greg Maximov, the undeniable nerds who were the secret gems of Lick society. It's weird how all it takes is a few people who used to be cooler than you to make you feel 15 and insecure again. In the end, I love my Lick friends- I love them in a unique way I'll never love another group of people- but I feel much more safe and loved with my friends from college. Rachel and Alexis' wedding was beyond amazing, the perfect California hippie liberal kid wedding, the sort that I want to have for myself- but as far as friends go, Jack and Kat's beat it to a pulp.

And that post will be next. . .

from Steve

2009-10-21T01:09:00.000-07:00

An email from Steve:

"Kirk had a dream Sunday night that I HAVE to tell you about. For some reason, you and he and I and this (imaginary) friend of yours were all staying at some hotel somewhere together, and for some reason, we all had to sleep in the same bed (!!!) Your friend was this hot Latino guy, and when the rest of us got into our PJ's, he took off ALL his clothes and started gallavanting around the hotel room messing with the shades and the lights and stuff. You me and Kirk were all completely agog, and then McHottie hopped in bed next to you and you couldn't sleep with him all naked and everything, and you just kept giggling. And that was the end of the dream."

Kirk has better dreams than I do.

Tomorrow, wedding post #1.

For My City

2009-10-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

20 Years Ago this afternoon, Matthew Lane and I were chopping down a tree. I think it was an apple tree, and it was scrawny, kind of like the two 6-year-olds hacking away at it with a tiny little ax. It was a hot October day in San Francisco, and we were in Matthew's back yard, which as I recall was a bit overgrown and shrubby, the sort of place where you could build a lot of forts. Something must have been wrong with the tree, because Matthew's mom had said we could chop it down. Neither of us had any upper body strength to speak of, and so it was taking a very long time.

Then the ground started to shake, and we didn't really know what was happening. Matthew dropped the ax and we held onto the tree, which in retrospect was pretty dumb given that it was halfway cut through. Things shook and paused, shook again, a kind of rolling shake that made you feel wobbly-kneed. And then it stopped. I don't think either of us said much, just sort of looked at each other- and then Matthew's mom came flying out of the house, having run down the stairs as the whole house was shaking to check on the silly kids with the ax in the backyard.

I don't really remember what happened next, but the power was out and hte phones were down, and a few minutes later my dad showed up to get me, having walked the two blocks from our house. Back at our house a plant had fallen over, and my dad, who had of course been watching or listening to Game 3 of the World Series (Battle of the Bay!) had spent the earthquake ready to dash out from the doorway of the kitchen and catch the antique light fixture over our stove. Some neighbors had lost chimneys, but on the whole our neighborhood got off without a lot of damage. It is, after all, built on actual ground, unlike the Marina, which is built on landfill and apparently crumbled at the slightest jolt. To this day I don't think you could pay me to live in the Marina. Our neighborhood was also made up of a bunch of old Victorians that had survived the 1906 quake, our house included, and this was just a little bump in comparison.

Julie, our babysitter, came up from the apartment downstairs with a battery-powered tv, and we watched it for awhile and listened to the radio to find out what was going on. Slowly we heard about the chunk of the Bay Bridge that had collapsed, the Cypress Freeway in Oakland that had also collapsed, the many destroyed buildings in the Marina and the fires throughout the city. I don't remember what we ate that night, or what else we did to fill the time, but I do remember being out on the porch with most of the neighborhood, talking to people we hardly knew. I remember how quiet the city was, with no power and no cars driving, nothing but the fairly steady stream of distant sirens. When it got dark you could just barely see the smoke from the fires from our back deck.

Taylor and I both got to go to sleep in Mom and Dad's bed that night, me on Mom's side and him on Dad's with a flashlight between us. I remember Mom and Dad staying outside on the porch until late, and I know I lay awake a long time after Taylor had fallen asleep. I wasn't really scared, but I knew this was the sort of thing I'd remember. The next day in school half the kids weren't there- kept home for fear of aftershocks, or simply too afraid to leave their parents. I was proud of myself for being brave enough to go. A few days later our whole first grade class made a book called Our Earthquake Stories, and my picture of me and Matthew and the apple tree made it onto the cover of the Xeroxed, stapled packet. I still have it somewhere- I find it whenever I clean my room back home.

Earthquakes are horrible and devastating, but I also secretly love them. I don't think I've ever felt so much a part of San Francisco as I did that day, and it was a very fierce, protective feeling. Protective of my glorious city, protective of my house and my family and my pets, of all the things that I was suddenly aware I could lose. I guess you could say in that way it was a pretty formative experience. In any case, today even more than usual I wish I were back home, enjoying what is another October 17th with curiously warm weather. Earthquake Weather- it's not a myth, and that is the only thing about today that gives me pause. As much as I like earthquakes, I don't want another big one.

#5

2009-10-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

I know I have not yet posted anything about The Weddings, and I am a horrible blogger because of it. I'm working on a giant Wedding Post, but truth be told, that week- the one that encompassed both Rachel's and Jack's weddings- was a very emotional one for me (in a good way!), and it's hard to put that into words. But any way, on the subject of weddings...

Today I heard about my FIFTH wedding to go to next year, that of Jennifer Nashorn and Josh Blankenship, two screenwriters from my class at AFI. Jennifer was the screenwriter of my Cycle 2 and one of the funniest, warmest people I know. She's the one who made me a Rice Krispie penis for my birthday when I turned 25 (it would have been cake but I'm allergic to it) and Rice Krispie boobs when I turned 26. That should tell you about what she's like. One shudders to think what kind of Rice Krispie body part I might get this year.

Anyway, their wedding will be in LA, so it shouldn't be too costly for me to go to... but it got me thinking. I complain about how expensive and time consuming it is to go to these things, but really- how lucky am I to have 9 friends- 10, if you count Richard, who hasn't yet set a date for his wedding- who like me enough to want me to be there when they get married? I need to remember that more often.

That's all. Posts and wedding pictures soon, I promise.

in indignation

2009-09-19T07:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Waterproof Mascara,

You are supposed to be waterproof. WTF.

Sincerely,
Cameron Shaw

P.S. Jack and Kat's wedding today! Am having the absolute bestest time in Chicago.

speechless

2009-09-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Old friends.
Winery.
Wine.
The Wills greeting at the entrance.
Significant others.
Friends' parents.
Alexis in the sunshine.
Rachel, like a Greek goddess, with flowers in her hair.
Her mom.
Rafi.
Al Adams.
Head, heart, hands.
Short, simple, perfect ceremony.
Cried.
Duh.
California hills and sun.
Heels and soft earth and cobblestones.
Champagne.
Too much champagne.
Martin's dad.
Lanterns and twilight and dancing.
So much dancing.
Julia and Matty P music.
Andrew Tolve dances funny.
Missed the cake.
Lick photo.
Flip flops.
Drunken conversation with Susan and Al Adams.
Must apologize.
Shuttle to house.
Coffee?
Long phone conversation =)
Snagged spot on couch.
Andrew Kelsey kicked me in the head.
Stephen Blair squeezed my foot.
Not sure why.
Julia, asleep in the bathroom.
Broke a nail.
Boys cooking hamburgers with bacon and cream cheese?
Not much sleep.
Woke to discover golf course.
So many smells.
So much havoc.
Such a mess.
So many friends.

Perfect.

Details soon, with pictures. Oh, the pictures are FABULOUS.

in anticipation

2009-09-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Purchased: one tube of Maybelline Wet N' Wild waterproof mascara.

I am most definitely going to cry tomorrow. Absolutely no question about it. Not only is it Rachel and Alexis getting married- Rachel and Alexis, whom I've known for 12 years now, who I've had sleepovers with and whispered with and ridden the bus with and done homework with- but Al Adams is performing the ceremony, better known as Dr. Adams, who was our high school headmaster. And Al (I call him Al because Taylor was friends with his son and I grew up calling him Al) always makes me cry. He has a way with words, and is just about the nicest headmaster you could ask for. I cried at the last assembly for Taylor's high school class. I cried when his Jug Band played at the last assembly for his son Willie's high school class. I cried when the teachers formed an ensemble and played "Ripple" for our class (come to think of it, that song STILL makes me cry, all because of that one performance). I will cry. It is so likely that it may as well have already happened.

Thus, the waterproof mascara.

and on it goes...

2009-09-08T05:26:00.000-07:00

Wedding Announcement Of The Week (because it certainly seems to be a weekly thing nowadays): Kevin Cannon and Lauren Trinker, which I have been suspecting to happen for quite some time and am very happy about. The great thing about Kevin, from the perspective of a girl who has mostly boys for friends, is that he doesn't treat other girls any differently when he has a girlfriend/fiancée. Most guys find a girlfriend and then suddenly feel like they aren't allowed to be friends with other girls anymore (and indeed, most girlfriends feel/force them to act this way). Doesn't seem to be true of any of my guy friends getting married currently, for the most part, but it is a general trait I have noticed. I'm pretty sure things with Kevin will stay about the same, though, for the time being at least. We'll still randomely go get coffee at Psychobabble and go to movies and sit around watching trailers on his Apple TV. When we're in Evanston we'll still go for walks late at night on the Lakefill. He isn't swayed easily, Kevin Cannon.

Now I just have to hope that his wedding, "sometime next fall," doesn't coincide with either Deirdre's or Kate's, or anyone else's I may not know of yet.

september

2009-09-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

And now we come to September, which promises to be a good month, what with all the old friends to see and the yearly, utterly satisfying overlap of the Major League Baseball season and the college football season. Today Northwestern beat Towson 47 to 14. Woo! Go 'Cats! For some reason this year I care about things like this more than usual. Perhaps it is a function of being utterly lonely.

Home for Wedding #1 in 4 days.

snark

2009-09-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

You know what's awesome? It's awesome when your friends move away and suddenly don't give a shit about you anymore, don't answer texts, or phone calls, or emails, or anything. Because goodness knows it's impossible, in this information age, to be friends with people who don't live in the same state as you! Why even bother?

It's almost as awesome as my computer crapping out and being without the internet for days at a time. ALMOST.

woozle

2009-08-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

In going through all these photos, I found this forgotten role of 120 film that had a bunch of pictures of David and Willa Marie, back from when she was just a tiny woozle and not the big imaginative talking woozle she is now. This role of film is why I wish I could get my Mamiya fixed, and actually afford to get the film developed.

Medium format is just plain better! Gah!

because i like pictures

2009-08-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday night and I have been video taping horse shows in the 100 degree Burbank heat all day (not the sort of thing I thought I would be doing with my MFA), and I've been scanning all these old pictures for Rachel and Alexis and they got me thinking about pictures. I haven't posted any from the summer, so here are some of my favorites:

CHERUBS

the faculty (minus Caleb, who urgently had to go to the gym): Jim, Dusty, Adam, Kevin, Glen, Kevin, Melissa, Joe, Marci and me. I LOVE THESE PEOPLE.

me, Joe, Adam and Glen

faculty dancing... don't let the kids see! (oh wait, there's a kid in there too)

Glen, Marci and me

Dusty, Anthony (one of my advisees) and Joe

4 good kids and Joe: Simon, Jacob, Sam, and Claudia

Ben Ratner (far right) shooting his movie on the Lakefill, with Chicago in the background

Emily (on ground) shooting her project in Tech with an audience of kids from the Center for Talent Development

Kevin at the White Sox game

Adam and Kevin

Brokeback Mountain starring Jim and Kevin!

Melissa, Glen and Adam, bored while chaperoning the "mixer"

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Pat, me, M-Dep, Tim, Jack, and Kat at a White Sox game

Nat's henna tattoo

Alec and Natalie on a spinny ride

Kane County Fair and midwestern clouds

Jennifer and Avelyn visit

Jamie and Avelyn play

Jessica and Willa Marie, 4th of July on the Lakefill

Jack and Kat at Jack's last public observing session with the Dearborn telescope

Jack is a nerd

Sadly, I have no pictures of Tim, Pat and my drunken viewing of Mamma Mia!, but trust me, the memories are priceless.

Soon I will put up some pictures from Camp and oh hey, maybe tell you something about it. I am deplorably behind in this respect, and I'm sure you're all on pins and needles waiting to hear whether Dad and I won the Trivial Pursuit tournament.

random things on wednesday

2009-08-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

a) I'm trying to grow my nails out, and in the process of doing this I have become utterly fascinated with them. I've never tried to grow them out before! I've never wanted actual nails! My nails are weird and squarish, just like my hands, so I always figured they looked better short. But anyway, I'm trying not to bite them, and it makes me feel like Sister Bear in The Berenstein Bears and the Bad Habit, where they put tape on her nails to get her to stop biting them. Except with me it's nail polish- mustn't consume toxic chemicals and all.

b) Do you think they will ever add a president to Mt. Rushmore?

c) A list of famous people who have died this summer, so far:
Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, Karl Malden, Billy Mays, Robert McNamara, Ed McMahon, Steve McNair, Frank McCourt, Walter Cronkite, Arturo Gatti, David Carradine, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, John Hughes, Ted Kennedy, and Dominick Dunne. Geez!

please don't kill me with your eyes

2009-08-25T03:05:00.000-07:00

Now that I am back in LA, every day on my way to the gym I drive past this poster at the Pantages Theater, and I want to find some mace to spray in those giant, terrifying eyes:

I don't understand who thought this was an attractive picture, one that would make people want to see this godforsaken musical adaptation! She sort of reminds me of Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls plus Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

Oh, how I miss the days when the poster to drive past was the fairly benign and actually rather graphically clever Wicked poster.

geez!

2009-08-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

So, I bought a dress. It is a little dressy for Rachexis' wedding, but most of that will be at night, so I'm ok with it, plus as Jonny says you always need to dress for the dressier event of the two. For Jack and Kat's wedding it will have to have a sweater or something over it cause it's strapless, but whatever. Sweaters are good because they cover up my fat arms.

ALSO Deirdre emailed us 1 Brown girls today to tell us that she and Karl are getting married next August, and Kate/Stuart are officially getting married Labor Day weekend 2010, and Jarrod and Amelia are getting married, and Richard and Jada presumably will be getting married sometime in the next year. Conclusion: HOLY CRAP, WEDDINGS. Hopefully one of those other weddings will be appropriate for me to wear this dress again.

Plea to Jarrod and Richard: PLEASE DON'T GET MARRIED NEXT AUGUST/SEPTEMBER OR I WILL DIE.

oh bother, now i'm sad.

2009-08-22T01:01:00.000-07:00

I'm looking through my boxes upon boxes of photographs from high school and college- really, I have no idea why my parents put up with me spending so much money on film and processing- and I found this, and I wanted to cry:

Can I please go back to college?

another list

2009-08-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

Differences Between Working On Films and Teaching Preschoolers:

1. Reaction to the phrase "Look how deep my hole is!"
Teaching Preschoolers: "Wow! Can you see the other side of the world?"
Working On Films: "That's what she said."

2. Reaction to lunchtime:
Teaching Preschoolers: Is it over yet?
Working On Films: Sweet!

3. Primary Materials With Which Things Are Built:
Teaching Preschoolers: Legos, sand, tape.
Working on Films: Metal, wood, tape.

4. Meaning of the phrase "I can't find the sticks!":
Teaching Preschoolers: lost Lincoln Logs
Working on Films: lost tripod

5. Meaning of the word "dirt":
Teaching Preschoolers: actual dirt, generally smeared all over children
Working on Films: sandbags

a list

2009-08-13T12:17:00.001-07:00

Things With Which I Disagree

1. Teenaged girls who call their boyfriends "hubby." WRONG FOR SO MANY REASONS! It's annoying enough when grown women who are ACTUALLY MARRIED do it.

2. Twitter.

3. The guy in the audience of Dazed and Confused last night who, when people 20 rows away in the back of the theater were talking, turned around and screamed "SHUT UP!" across the entire theater. Holy crap, man, it's not like they're sitting anywhere near you! Anyone whose hearing is that good and cares that much for silence in a movie they had presumably already seen should be put out of their misery.

4. People who register for gifts when they are not getting married or having a baby and just assume that they deserve said gifts.

flummoxed

2009-08-09T00:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, flummoxed. By this whole wedding thing. No, not my wedding, sadly. Or is it sad? Who knows. FLUMMOXED BY WHAT THE F TO WEAR/BUY AS PRESENT/WHERE TO STAY/HOW TO PAY FOR IT. I am a) broke, b) fat, c) clueless. I haven't been to a wedding since I was 16 and my cousin David was getting married. Now all of a sudden this whole slew of my friends are getting married left and right and I have no idea how to deal with any of it except to want to curl up into a ball and not go.

No, that's not true. I do want to go. I just don't want them to be humiliating.

Which is ridiculous! Why would they be humiliating for me? Nobody will care what I'm wearing. I hope. Right? The only thing people care about is the bride. And the food. Right? I hope. Eeek.

The most annoying thing is that these two weddings, Rachexis' and Jackn'Kat's, are a week apart and it would be lovely if I could just wear the same damn thing to both of them, except they are as different as they could possibly be. One is sun-dress-country-chic-Napa-hillside-sandal wedding, the other is formal-hotel-heels-church-black-tie-optional-what-the-hell-does-that-mean? wedding. And both will be exquisite, I know, so I want to look and be awesome for them. These are four of my very good friends, all getting married in the space of a week. Rachexis (hey, we started calling Rachel and Alexis that LONG before Brangelina and Tomkat) have been a staple of San Francisco ever since sophomore year of high school; Jack and Kat are by far the best couple to come out of CRC. I don't want to embarass any of them by being their dowdy looking fat friend who doesn't understand what to do at weddings.

By the way, I think I've figured it out. I think "black tie optional" means that you should look like you COULD be in the wedding party, even though you're not. So I should find a dress that looks like it could be a bridesmaid dress, but a LITTLE more casual, so I can wear it to Rach's wedding too. Right? But oh shit, I can't even wear dresses. Any dresses that fit my boobs don't fit the rest of me.

I wish I was a guy! One of those guys that just puts on nice jeans and a button down shirt and can have tea with the frickin' Queen he looks so good.

Then there's the question of presents- like I said, these are my good friends, and I want to get them something that actually matters, not just some dumb napkins from a registry. I know they're on the registry for a reason and that they don't want a whole bunch of crap, but it makes me feel awfully impersonal and uncreative. Also, do you bring the present to the wedding or just have it sent? In Jack and Kat's case I guess having it sent makes more sense, since they're moving and all. In Rachexis' case I have no idea. I think I'll have to get them, at least, something small and nice from the registry, and then collect all the pictures I have of the two of them from high school and beyond and put them in an album or something. That's important. It's not like I'll go to any other Lick weddings... I certainly won't be invited to the Sam Coffin/Sasha Osipova wedding (WHICH, LICKIE READERS, CAN WE PLEASE DISCUSS??).

Also, this is all going to add up in cost very quickly, and it would even if I didn't get them presents at all- the TRAVEL costs are ridiculous! One wedding in Napa (ok, that one's not too bad), one in Chicago, then next year Kate's will be in Indiana, and Richard's will probably be either in DC or the frickin' Virgin Islands-- then Jarrod Fischer is now getting married, and for all I know that will be in Minnesota, and basically I would just really appreciate it if everyone could get married from now on in either San Francisco or LA. Ok? Thanks.

OH, AND LISTEN, HAIR: you were supposed to be nice and long again by the time I had to go to these weddings, so that I could NOT look like a bag lady. I have been very nice and taken good care of you, and for my money you have not held up your end of the bargain. If there was some tangible way to punish my own hair, trust me, Hair, I would be punishing you.

Rant over. In the end, I am really incredibly looking forward to both of these events. Each should be a small wonderful reunion, and one held for the best of reasons. I'm particularly excited about the Jackn'Kat wedding, as I'll hopefully be seeing people I haven't seen in years and years. Marc Lummis and Lyssa and Kate and Ross? Oh my! Yes please =)

goin' goin' back back to Cali Cali

2009-08-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

Well, folks, that's the end of it. I've been in Chicago for the fastest 5 weeks of my life, and now here I am at the airport waiting for a delayed flight. I have so much to say about the last five weeks that I don't know where to begin... except to say that hey, I really like teaching, and that this could potentially be something I'm interested in doing. Whether or not to pursue it is a debate that's been raging in my head for weeks now.

To change tracks completely, let's talk about how Northwestern always smells the same. You'd think that things might change slightly over time, depending on who lives in what dorm, what the weather is, how old the building is, etc, but no. No, every Northwestern building I set foot in this summer smelled exactly like I remembered it. Walked into the library and immediately felt like I was going to Opera and Betrayal class in the Media Center... walked into the dorm and immediately missed Martha, my freshman and sophomore year roommate in CRC. Louis still smells like stainless steal and watery sunshine, and Fisk still smells like radiator heat and rain. What is that? Why is smell such a strange sense? It's the only sense you can't readily conjure up to remember... or at least I can't. I usually can't remember a smell until I smell it again. Even the SIDEWALK at Northwestern smelled like it used to. It was comforting and strange and sad all at once.

Along the comforting/strange/sad lines, the best thing about this summer has really been being with my friends. They weren't all my best friends or anything, but it was awfully nice to be in that effortless environment of a college dorm with people you genuinely enjoy- Kevin and Jim and Kevin Welch, and all the others I either met or got to know better over the course of the summer. I think that was really the best thing about college, being so close to all your friends. It's a lovely little alternate reality where you don't have to pay for things, your friends are nearby, and everything is within walking distance. Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came, etc. I'm really going to miss these people and the brief yet divine falling-in-love-with-new-friends period.

Anyway. Enough with the waxing nostalgic. You'd think it would be hard to be nostalgic about something you just finished today, but I (like many of the kids who were bawling as they checked out of the dorm today) am doing a bang-up job of it, thank you very much.

NHSI is a summer program where rising high school seniors come to basically take a one-semester college class over the course of 5 weeks... except that it's more than just taking a class, because the program occupies them just about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We had Film Producting kids and Acting For the Camera kids, and despite their annoying habits (like staying up late and shrieking), I was very attached to them by the time they left this morning. I was the Production teacher, which basically meant that I taught them how to compose and light shots, use the camera and lights, and to record sound. Well, I did the best I could, at least, and I hope I taught them a few more things along the way. It sounds pretty obvious, but to teach something you have to remember what it's like to not know anything about it, and that's really hard to do. If I do this next year (and I really hope I do), there are a lot of things I'm going to change about how to approach teaching. It's hard to teach them things when you're not there looking over their shoulder all the time, but you also don't want to be hovering and doing things for them. I wrestled with how to treat them a lot, whether they needed me to babysit them or not-- and I realized that sometimes they do better when I'm not around to tell them exactly what to do. Granted, they also sometimes come up with the worst possible way to shoot whatever it is, but you take what you can get.

Jim and Kevin Welch are the directors of the Film program; Kevin Cannon teaches animation; Glen teaches screenwriting; Caleb Johnson (who briefly went to NU as a grad student) teaches editing; and then we have 5 Faculty Associates, or FAs- Marci, Adam, Dusty, Joe, and Melissa. Marci and Adam were students of Jim's at Montana State, Joe and Dusty were cherubs themselves three years ago, and Melissa just randomely applied for the job. We were a strange bunch, to be sure, but it seems like sometimes the strangest groups of people are the ones that end up getting along the best. Not that we were without strife, but for the most part the summer went pretty smoothly among the faculty.

I also got to do some random fun things with my friends from college this summer, although not nearly as much as I would have liked- NHSI sucked up a lot more time than I was expecting. Tim and Pat and I made screwdrivers and watched Mamma Mia! just to be masochistic; The three of us plus Jack, Kat, Mike Depilla, Kat's sister and a friend of Pat's went to a White Sox game (my 2nd of the summer- we took the kids to a Sox game in a rainstorm, too); Kevin and Tim and I met Jack and Kat at Jack's last ever Public Observing session at Dearborn Observatory (which he's run on Fridays ever since I've known him); Jennifer Welch and their baby Avelyn came up to visit Kevin, and we got to hang out a bit; I went to the Kane County Fair with Jill, Natalie and Alec; Kevin and Jim and I went mini golfing with Jamie Madison, Matt Repchak, John McGlothlin, Dan Peringer, and another guy, and Jim and I BOTH won free games on the final hole; I went to trivia night in Lincoln Square with Tim, Kreutzer, Andrew Linnehan and John Tsarouchas, Kevin Cannon and Amanda and I went to Harry Potter at midnight in Skokie, as you already know (first time I ever took the Skokie Swift!); and David, Jessica and Willa Marie came up to watch fireworks on the Lakefill with us for the 4th of July. Oh, I have so much to say about it all. I can't say it now. It's too late. I'm too tired. There's too much to do.

More when I'm back from Camp!!

HERE I AM NOTICE ME

2009-07-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in Studio 105 in Louis Hall at Northwestern, waiting to tape one of the acting classes for the Acting For The Camera students we have in the NSHI Film program. I offered to help out with stuff for the end of the camp, because I had the afternoon free, and this is what I got stuck with... but I suppose it's vaguely interesting. Our acting kids are so much less annoying than the Theater Cherubs. Bane of my life, the Theater Cherubs! They sing in the dining hall and walk around in loud attention-getting clothing, hug each other and climb on each other and just generally make sure that EVERYONE NOTICES THEM AT ALL TIMES.

I HATE people like that.

Theater kids have always bothered me, even in college when I was friends with a lot of them. Hell, even at Lively Arts Summer Camp in 5th grade when I had to be in a play- even THEN I secretly knew it was all bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a good actor more than you know- it's murder being on a film set with only bad actors, or even just one bad actor who throws things out of whack. But when theater people are grouped together, there's just this loud, impenetrable wall of PERFORMING that surrounds them and dwarfs all the normal people. Gag.

Random! Yes I know! I shall be coherent again someday!

elementary

2009-07-24T18:26:00.001-07:00

After a) reading my first Agatha Christie novel and b) seeing the trailer for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film (with Robert Downey Jr!), I have been thinking a lot about how I used to want to be a detective. Observe:

This is me in my oft-present Detective Hat. I had The Young Detective's Handbook, which taught me how to find clues and dust for fingerprints, then save them with Scotch tape, and I had this hat, and a magnifying glass. Heather and I used to set out to "solve a mystery" oh, probably about once a week. It was either that or looking for secret passages. Random, yes, but man, those were the days. Maybe I'll quit film and become a marine biologist who studies narwhals... and when there are no narwhals I will solve all the mysteries in Greenland.

cherubs gems, volume 5

2009-07-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

KID DIRECTING: "Oh wait, she's supposed to cry in this scene. (To actor) How fast can you cry?"

KID DIRECTING: "So, when she leaves, it's like a slow pan, and then you guys are like, da bomb wiggity."

SAME KID, STILL DIRECTING: "Can we up the LOLing?"

FRIEND OR FOE

2009-07-19T18:42:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned before that I am sort of addicted to the Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast and blog... and obviously you are all painfully aware of my deep obsession with narwhals and burgeoning desire to ditch the film industry and go be a marine biologist in Greenland. So you can only imagine my surprise when Stuff You Missed In History Class got a new co-host who is also obsessed with narwhals. Is she meant to be my bestest friend whom I can stealthily stalk via the internet? Or is she an enemy out to thwart my narwhal-related job search? HOW CAN I TELL?

cherubs gems, volume 4

2009-07-17T22:15:00.001-07:00

KID: "Can you do a British accent?"
ACTING KID: "Um... I can do a pirate accent."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009-07-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

My thoughts on this movie and the franchise in general are many and scattered, so please forgive me if this is a less than coherent review. The Harry Potter series is a little too dear to my heart for me to think rationally about anything connected to it.

So!

I find that I differ from a lot of people in which of the five previous movies I think to be the best- I think it's #5, Order of the Phoenix, while most snobby film folk will go with #3, Prisoner of Azkaban and anyone who is looking for a not-shitty-yet-surprisingly-true-to-the-book adaptation will say #4,Goblet of Fire. Sure, Prisoner is probably the most concise, and Goblet is a whole lot of fun, but the latter I definitely found to drag at points, and the former I thought cut out things it didn't need to cut. Order I thought was the first film to strike that delicate balance between maintaining the magical world created in the books and creating a decent movie, while also injecting a much-needed sense of lurking danger into the franchise. The books are dark- there is death and tragedy left and right, and yet until the 5th movie you didn't SEE or feel that darkness. Prisoner got close, I suppose, but holy crap, has there ever been a movie more brightly lit than the first two films? Harry is facing off with Voldemort! Clearly we must light it like a sitcom!

I'm talking more than lighting, though- the 5th film is the first to really delve into Harry's character, too, and as anyone who has read the books can tell you, it's a hell of a book for character development. So that's where I stand on the movies- if I could order them, until now, it would go (best to worst): 5, 3, 4, 2, 1.

And so because I like #5 the best, I was ecstatic when David Yates, the director behind that film, signed on to do not just #6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but the entire rest of the series, namely #6, plus #7 Part 1 and #7 Part 2 (which is another discussion entirely). Huzzah! Interesting that Yates chose to switch up DPs- he got better results with Slawomir Idziak on #5 than anyone else had in the franchise- but who knows, perhaps Idziak wasn't available. In any case, hurray for a decent director finishing out the series, and one who seems to have a rather accurate perception of the series- dark yet comic, sweet and fun but sinister and tragic all at once.

ANYWAY.

Half Blood Prince is right up there with Order, I think. I just saw it, and it's 4am, so perhaps my impressions are a bit tweaked, but it was pretty frickin' awesome. The effects are finally (for the most part) starting to integrate seamlessly into the film, which was a huge downfall for some of the earlier movies, especially the first two, and also sadly the second two. The kids, who started out so shaky and painfully dull in their performances, are now solid actors who actually bring a lot to the film- especially Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) and Rupert Grint (Ron), who have quite the comedic timing together. Emma Watson (Hermione) still leaves a little to be desired, for me, mainly because she always seems to make the same "I'm angry/sad/smart/snobby" face, but she too has come very far and almost completely embodies her character.

Bonnie Wright (Ginny) is a bit of a different case. She started out as the worst of the horrid child actors, and while she has definitely improved over the years, she's still no shining star. Sure, her performance is no longer the visual equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard, but it also always seems that she is deliberately given very few lines so as to avoid having to recast her. But I suppose by now I should have resigned myself to this awful actress playing one of my favorite characters, and should probably shut up about it, at least until #7-1 comes out.

On the subject of acting- Jim Broadbent, who plays Horace Slughorn, was fantastic. He's very different than how I pictured the character when reading the books, but I am 100% ok with it, because his interpretation is much more nuanced and interesting than the cartoonish figure I had in my mind. As Amanda said, you saw both his jovial professor side and his more manipulative, two-faced side. Hell of a casting choice, and with him under their belt I think the only British actor who HASN'T been in a Harry Potter film is Judy Dench (and thank goodness they didn't cast her as Dolores Umbridge, even if she was the obvious choice! Imelda Staunton was a much more unexpected and inspired decision).

I know a lot of people who are upset with the amount of things that were either cut or changed from the book- nearly all of Harry's journeys with Dumbledore into the Pensieve, for example. There are a few things that bothered me too, or that I would have really liked to have seen, but for the most part I recognized that things were cut for the sake of making this a better MOVIE- that is, more than just a verbatim recreation of the books. In general, what was cut was cut to make things more streamlined, and what was changed was changed largely to expedite some things that would happen in the next two films. I am as much a die-hard Harry Potter book fan as anyone, but I know that if the books were stuck to, we'd just have 8 long sludgey movies like the first two were- and I don't know of anyone on the face of the Earth who thought the first two movies were good.

They added a couple scenes, and I thought one of them was rather interesting, although they didn't revisit it as I felt they should have. Harry is at The Burrow, Ron's home, for Christmas, and a bunch of Death Eaters show up and chase Harry and Ginny into the surrounding wheat (or something) fields. There is an exciting, tense sort of battle sequence, culminating in everyone being safe, but The Burrow being burned. This scene accomplished two things that I thought were good: a) it added some action to the middle of a story that drags a bit in the middle (most of the middle of the book is spent going into the Pensieve, and obsessing about girls and Quidditch), and b) it reaffirms Harry and Ginny's relationship a bit, so that it's less weird when they finally hook up. So hurray, extra scene. That hasn't been done much in these movies, and while I don't want anyone to get carried away with it, here it was done well. Besides, the image of people running through miles of wheat fields in the dead of night was pretty sexy.

Sexy! There's something to bring up about this movie: there were a lot of sexual innuendos, most of which I felt were a bit out of place. Sure, the kids are 16 now and starting to grope each other or whatever, and that's all fine and good, but the sexual references were a bit over the top. Obviously they'll go over the heads of most kids, but it just seemed to be stooping to a level to which Harry Potter should not stoop.

ALSO in relation to "sexy," THIS MOVIE WAS SHOT SO FRICKIN' SEXY. Bruno Delbonnel, be still my heart. I knew you were awesome, but man. Idziak also did an amazing job, and I legitimately can't decide which I prefer, but there were a LOT of frames and camera movements in this one that were just... perfect. There were lovely rich colors and subtle color changes and oh, did i mention the shot of the staircase looking up that uses so many planes of focus I can hardly stand the brilliance? The image was perhaps a little overly DI'd (digital intermediate, a color correction device- I blame Letters From Iwo Jima for starting the "DI IT INTO OBLIVION" trend) in some scenes, especially the flashbacks in the Pensieve, but on the whole it was totally badass. Kudos, Monsieur Delbonnel.

Have I talked about the visual effects yet? They have gotten ever so much better than in the first 4 movies... even #5 had some composites that I questioned. This one I bought nearly everything, even the (previously always awful) Quidditch scenes. The best effects scene was when Harry and Dumbledore are in the cave with the Horcrux, and the Inferi start to climb out of the lake... holy crap! Way creepier than any other reanimated dead bodies I've seen in movies. That whole scene was pretty solid, in fact... I wish they'd made it a little tenser, with Dumbledore drinking the potion and yelling at Harry, but it did its job.

If the movie had one downfall, it was perhaps the same one as all the other Harry Potter films: a lot of time is spent in the beginning on minimally plotty things, and then they sort of have to rush through the ending. The one thing I was truly sad that they cut out was the battle between the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix at the end of the book, when Harry gives his 3 friends the remainder of his Lucky potion and they and the teachers fight the invading Death Eaters. A battle like that, with the ramped-up tension it would provide, would have made

SPOILER

Dumbledore's death that much more shocking and heartbreaking. As it was, it was almost like the filmmakers figured "hey, everyone KNOWS Dumbledore dies, they know what's coming, why bother building up to it?" So I was a little bummed about that, but hey, you can't have everything.

In conclusion: YAY HARRY POTTER 6!! Go see it. AND GO SEE ICE AGE 3 while you're on a kid's movie kick.

8/10

I'm sure I'll be adding a few things as they come to me, so check back again if you're really intensely keen on my Harry Potter musings.

cherubs gems, volume 3

2009-07-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

KID: "So Cameron, I know you're like, kind of grown up, but what do you want to be when you're really grown up?"

(I wish I had an answer!)

Also, right now the kids are at the "film mixer" downstairs in the common room. The counselors decked it out with Christmas lights and they're doing that thing where everyone stands in a circle and cheers while one person dances in the middle. It's. Frickin'. Hilarious. The greatest part is that a lot of these kids are totally the dorkiest kids in their respective schools, and putting them all together and making them dance is just priceless. I'll try to take pictures.

cherubs gems, volume 2

2009-07-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

(this one's for the cinematography geeks)
while watching a clip from Citizen Kane:
ME: "So, what kind of camera movement did you notice?"
KID WHO THINKS HE IS CONRAD HALL: "There was definitely some Steadicam."
ME: "Well... Steadicam wasn't invented until 1976, but good guess."

after watching the opening of Silence of the Lambs
KID: "I just didn't buy the performance of the actor playing Hannibal Lecter. He wasn't creepy enough- I can think of 5 or 6 actors who would have been a lot creepier."
TEACHER: *stunned silence*
OTHER KID: "Didn't he win an Oscar for this?"

during critique of the kids' experimental short films:
KID: "I thought whoever did the camera did a good job of keeping it in focus."
TEACHER: *laughing uncontrollably* "When having something in focus becomes the benchmark of quality, I just... I don't know."

KID: "I really liked how they used the clock to represent time."
TEACHER, LATER AT BAR: "The clock doesn't REPRESENT time, the clock IS TIME. YOU ACTUALLY SEE IT PASSING."

KID OPERATING CAMERA: "OK, so put the slate in... ok now unslate! Unslate! I mean deslate! I mean whatever, just get out."

brief reactions to Public Enemies

2009-07-06T01:38:00.000-07:00

I don't feel like the movie is really worth disecting in detail- it was ok, but nothing great. There were about two memorable scenes for me. My primary reactions were:

a. holy crap, this movie looks like shit.
b. why on Earth is Leelee Sobieski in this movie?
c. maybe i can leave and sneak in to watch Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs again.
d. seriously, it looks like SHIT.
e. i must run home and watch LA Confidential so as not to completely lose faith in Dante Spinotti.
f. i sure am glad NHSI paid for this and not me!

P.S. fyi, Ice Age 3 is really cute. good kid's movie, and not annoying like many animated movies nowadays. it's a solid famly movie. if you see it, be sure to stay for the credits and clap for Taylor Shaw in the visual effects section!

cherubs gems, volume 1

2009-07-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

TEACHER: Does The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remind you of any modern filmmakers?
KID: Dr. Seuss.

while watching a scene in Buffalo 66 with lots of quick cuts and then one shot held for a very long time
TEACHER: Why do you think they cut it like that?
KID: In the quick shots they probably just didn't have much film.
TEACHER: Um, maybe... so why would that one shot be held for so long?
SAME KID: Obviously they got it all in one take.

KID WITH BATTERY IN HAND: My camera won't turn on.
ME: Um, try putting the battery ON.

missing Martha

2009-06-25T22:35:00.000-07:00

It's weird to say that I'm still "used to" something that I haven't done in a good 6 years, but I think it's safe to say that I am used to having a roommate when I live in a dorm, and that this whole "no Martha" thing is strange. Not INCREDIBLY strange, since I had my own room before freshman/sophomore year and have had my own room ever since, but being in a Northwestern dorm that SMELLS exactly like CRC and has furniture literally identical to CRC furniture, it's weird to not have Martha sitting at a desk across the room, quietly writing a paper or downloading songs from LimeWire.

LimeWire! Remember that??

Anyway, Martha was my freshman/sophomore year roommate in CRC, and despite thinking at first that she was way too cool to be my friend, we ended up being pretty great roommates. We had three Beta fish (Kurt Cobain, Eeyore, and Aaliyah), and when the last one, Kurt Cobain, died, we had a Nirvana funeral for him, blasting Nevermind out our window and digging into the frozen Januaray earth beneath our window with a dining hall spoon. We had Suite Bonding with the other 1 Brown girls (Sarah, Deirdre and Danielle), and flashed Hinman every week in the process; we went to the graveyard on Halloween with Lummis and Camilla; we had a radio show where we fought about music... and I miss her. And all because of a smell and some furniture!

So, Martha Grace "Action" "M-Cat" "Lucky Bunny" Jackson, here's to you.

why my dad is awesome

2009-06-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

Because a pictures is worth a thousand words- he:

wears silly hats

likes to dress up

builds awesome things like Pinewood Derby tracks

did tricks in the pool at Camp

carves pumpkins

digs giant holes

let me dress him up like a rabbit

was Taylor's Cub Scout master

loves the lake, a good book and his pipe

and Christmas lights, even in the summer

is a dorky dancer

And so many many more reasons. Happy Father's Day, Daddy. I love you!

grammar police

2009-06-20T01:49:00.002-07:00

Leading sentence in an article on BBC news, headline "Greece to Unveil Acropolis Museum": "The long awaited Acropolis Museum in Athens is to be unveiled later."

...

COMPLETE THY SENTENCE, BBC. Or, if it's so dull as to not really be pressing and just plain old happening "later," why write the article in the first place?

Also, recently I heard someone say something was "copywritten in 2004." NO IT WASN'T THERE IS NO SUCH VERB AS "TO COPYWRITE." Furthermore, this makes me think of that stupid short film Copywrite which many friends of mine worked on before I got to Northwestern, and which is secretly not very good, but they all think it is the absolute nectar of the cinematic gods, and if I ever have to hear another story about how much fun it was to make, I will kill someone.

I seem to have switched rants mid-post there, huh? See, bad grammar brings about only bad things.

It's going to be weird

2009-06-18T13:48:00.001-07:00

So this summer, as many of you know, I am going to be in Chicago. No- I am going to be in Evanston, teaching cherubs, otherwise known as a bunch of 17 year olds endeavoring to make a movie. I am going to be on campus, spending most of my time in Louis (the NU film building), eating at Willard, and living in one of the Mid-Quads- not sure which one. It's going to be very strange. Thank goodness for many things:

a) Kevin will be there, so it will be just like sophomore year when Kevin lived across the street from me in Hinman and we ate in the same dining room.

b) I'm NOT living in CRC- that would just be too sad. To be in that dorm without my 3 Green friends or 1 Brown friends or the vaguest possibility of Suite Bonding? No fun. Tears.

c) I still have some of the extra-long twin bed sheets I had for the dorm.

d) Jack and Kat will still be around through September (duh, when they get married), so I won't have to face Chicago Sans Jack until two visits from now.

Other than that I don't have much of an idea of what the summer will bring. The structure of the program is slooooooooowly coming into focus, despite Jim (who runs the whole thing along with Kevin Welch) claiming that they were "vague on purpose" in their descriptions of the damn thing. I love it when people are vague on purpose. It really helps with communication. Snark.

Also, can we talk about how many times I will have been to Chicago by the end of this year? Or how much total time I will have spent there? Almost two entire months, depending on how long I'm in town for le wedding in September. I will have flown back and forth almost as many times as a typical year in college. Bizarre but good.

today's million dollar idea!

2009-06-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

This idea has been sitting around in my head for months now.

WEEKEND BREAKFAST CART

Ice cream cart-style purveyor of fine breakfast pastries such as cinnamon buns, donuts, bagels, etc. Model 2.0 would upgrade to bacon, eggs, hash browns, etc. To travel college campuses and chosen neighborhoods on Saturday and Sunday mornings, selling wares to hungover and/or hard-working young folk. Eventually will branch out and become as ubiquitous as inspirational ice cream truck, although with no rogue units that secretly sell drugs, as is suspected in my current neighborhood.

Cart would play the following song:

COPYRIGHT CAMERON SHAW

redirection

2009-06-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

Because I feel weird posting the same post on two different blogs, I will hereby direct you all to what I just wrote on the communal blog "Dave Wecsler Doesn't Exist."

If I had $2,300,000

2009-06-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Martin, for sending me this link, which says THE HOUSE (garage?) FROM FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF IS FOR SALE!!!! What I wouldn't give for that much money... although sadly I would have to, you know, pay off student loans or something equally boring/responsible first.

Incidentally, sort of, Martin was recently published in The San Francisco Chronicle.

As was Maya's little brother.

So Lickies kicked ass this week, and maybe since things come in threes that means that something good will happen to me too?

a banner day for weird obsessions

2009-05-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Big news! Well, ok, big news in the way of narwhal obsessions: An article in The Smithsonian about tagging and studying narwhals. Giving serious thought to ditching this whole "cinematography" thing and taking off for Greenland to study narwhals. Key to the awesomeness of this article is the mention of a Danish scientist named Ole Wurm, which is both an excellent scientist name AND bad ass rapper name.

anyone have a job for me in late september?

2009-05-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

Upcoming schedule, just fyi:

5/9-5/14: AC for Richard
5/15: get ready for birthday party!
5/16: birthday and birthday party!
5/17: recover from birthday party
5/18: THREE doctors appointments, ugh
5/21-5/28: go home? i hope?
6/1-6/21: gaff/AC for Dustin
6/22: drive home
6/23: SLEEP
6/24: fly to Chicago!
6/25-8/1: cherubs
8/2: fly home and drive to Camp!
8/2-8/8: Camp!
8/9-sometime: home
sometime-sometime: back in LA
9/10: drive home
9/12: Rachel and Alexis' wedding in Napa
9/16 or thereabouts: fly to Chicago
9/19: Jack and Kat's wedding in Chicago
9/21: fly back home
sometime: drive back to LA

It's weird when your life fills up all of a sudden. Weird but good.

Awkward Family Photos

2009-05-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

It's sites like this that are the glory of the internet.

one thing Facebook is very good at

2009-05-03T23:10:00.001-07:00

...is making me feel simultaneously happy and embarrassed about the people I used to have crushes on. Happy because whoa, most of them are REALLY not cute now, holy crap, I'm glad they never liked me back! And embarassed because whoa, most of them are REALLY not cute now, holy crap, what did I ever see in them?

Most of them are from middle school- the guys who asked you to dance and got your hopes up and then started dating that annoying girl the next week. Thank you, Facebook, for pointing out that these boys apparently peaked, aesthetically speaking, in 7th grade! But then of course there are the few who are REALLY successful and still cute, sometimes even cuter, than they used to be. Those are from high school, for the most part. Dammit. But still, I am glad to have Facebook to gather together all the random people I have ever known and make me feel like being such a nerd as an adolescent saved me from, say, my first boyfriend being someone who ended up in drug rehab, or stopped growing in 8th grade.*

*Nothing against short guys, of course, but that kid was supposed to be like 6'4! What is he doing being 5'8?

today i am grumpy

2009-04-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

because i couldn't sleep last night.

because i hate ACing and have to AC for the next two weeks.

because all my friends move away from me.

because i am not one of the skinny people at the gym.

because camera prep is the most annoying activity in the world and i never get paid for it.

because i wasted an entire day this week driving around in a car in the middle of nowhere with someone i hardly know.

because cheese has too many calories in it.

because my room is a mess but is also too small to ever actually be clean.

because wireless follow focuses are finicky and stupid.

because That One Job hasn't paid me yet.

because That Other Job might not exist.

because i hate Los Angeles.

because i inherited all the Patterson/Shaw medical ailments and my brother inherited none.

because nobody likes me best.

JUST BECAUSE.

conspiracies and explorers and U-boats, oh my

2009-04-26T17:32:00.000-07:00

This ability to watch endless History Channel documentaries for free on Netflix might just be the end of me. The end of my active participation in the world around me. It might even be better than that "Stuff You Missed in History Class" podcast.*

*Because I DID miss a lot of stuff in history class. Well, not AP Euro, that was basically the best class ever. And not freshman year Ancient & Classical Civilizations. But junior year US History? With Mr. Nelson? Who talked about lettuce a lot and drank vodka from a coffee mug? Yeah, I missed a lot in that class. And 20th Century Dictators with Ms. Nuñez... talk about a waste of a semester. Oh sorry, tangent.

survey says...?

2009-04-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

So, just to take a broad survey of the three people who read this blog:

When you see people you hate, do you pretend to like them?

a) Yes.
b) Yes, and I usually overcompensate by being super friendly.
c) No, I just ignore them.
d) No, I am blatantly mean to them.

I ask because there is this woman I went to grad school with, whom I had a terrible horrible no good very bad experience with on set once, and every time I see her I sort of try to ignore her, but she comes over to me and makes a big show of kissing me on the cheek and talking to me when I would really rather she just ignore me too. I am 98% sure that she, like me, continues to hold a grudge against me-- things were pretty sore between us for a long time. But when she acts all nice and oh-everything's-fine-nothing-bad-ever-happened, I feel like I am the bad guy. Don't get me wrong, when she does it I do it too, because to just ignore her after she's being fake happy at me would be downright inhuman, but... it's just strange. I think secretly she does it so that I feel guilty. If that's true, it's working, and I don't even really know what I feel guilty about.

What a manipulative bitch!

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

just because Kara likes them so much

2009-04-03T02:42:00.001-07:00

Another post about how I was a dork as a kid! Let us call me "The Once and Future Geek."

Here I am, reading an encyclopedia first thing after waking up:

let's talk about how impossibly cool i was as a child

2009-04-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

I used to be really into bottle caps- so much so that my Dad still saves them for me when he gets new or interesting ones. I would crawl around in the dirt under the bleachers at my brother's baseball games, looking for bottle caps, or pick them up out of the gutter, or pluck them from the recycling bin. But I had forgotten that I used to wear them as buttons, that my Mom devised a method to make them jewelry with a disc of cardboard in the back. Forgotten, that is, until today:

I think I deserve some sort of dork prize- I'm surprised my parents didn't worry about me more.

WILD DONKEYS

2009-03-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

I love the fact that wild donkeys exist in the world, and that they are so close.

I just wish I'd had my longer zoom lens with me, cause they wouldn't let me get very close.

People I Have Unwittingly Seen Naked In The Last Two Weeks: A List

2009-03-22T01:43:00.000-07:00

Alan Cox
Susan May Pratt
Josh McVaney
JP Riley
Liz Lytle
Katie Hall
Courtney Abbott

Plus some guy who claims he was in Braveheart and is on Grey's Anatomy and Nip/Tuck, but who I cannot find on imdb. Oh, and all the naked people who live at the resort, of course. One of them gave me a copy of The New Yorker with Obama on the front because he saw me wearing an Obama t-shirt. The nudists are so nice!

Also, while driving back to the condo the other night, I saw one of the herds of wild donkeys that lives in the area! They were so cute![Insert nudist resort/donkey joke here.]

one strange week

2009-03-15T21:11:00.001-07:00

So, the last couple weeks have been out of the ordinary. This is both good and bad. Let's see.

I went up to San Francisco (yay!) for the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, which "Dockweiler," my thesis film, played in. I went up a few days early because let's face it, I'll do anything to spend more time in San Francisco. So I left Tuesday afternoon and figured I'd go back to Hell-A on Saturday after our movie screened Friday night. I spent most of the time at home doing very little other than scanning old pictures from high school and being happy to not be in LA. I saw Julia, Larkin, Diane, Belinda, Laura Creager, and Libby one night to celebrate Larkin getting into her doctoral program at Columbia:

I went to Berkeley Bowl to do grocery shopping with Jonny (Berkeley Bowl, by the way, has THE BEST PRODUCE SECTION EVER-- I'm going to need to make a trip there next time I'm home). We then had coffee and walked around Rockridge, stopping for Jonny to pose with Liza Minnelli:

I also had lunch with Aunt Kris and drink with Tobin, and got my hair cut (or trimmed, since I am still trying desperately to grow it out) and had a facial that Mom had been insisting I have for ages now. The facial place was really calm and serene and strange- I'm not used to being pampered like that, so there were numerous times when I almost laughed or told the girl to stop making such a big deal out of me. It was also nice, though, and made me think maybe I should care about my skin more. Anyway.

The screening on Friday night went really well. Mom and Dad and I drove down and had dinner with Donna and Arnie beforehand, because the screening wasn't until 9:00. We ate at an Il Fornaio and then went over to the theater, which was PACKED- Mom and Dad had already bought tickets, which was good, but Donna and Arnie hadn't and we were worried they wouldn't get in. Turned out Nick had extra passes, thank goodness- it would have been awful for them to go all the way to San Jose and not get to see the movie. The rest of the films that were screening in the Student Shorts Program were pretty good- there were a few clunkers, and a few that really stood out as great. A lot of people in the Q&A afterwards asked questions about Dockweiler, which was nice... it means they really noticed it. Yay.

The only bad thing about the festival was that I started to not feel so great during dinner. By the time we left I felt really lightheaded and had a horrible cough, which had sort of been building up for the previous few weeks, or really ever since I'd been on the set of The Suck (Did I mention that? oh man. I should write a post about it. Dumbest set I've ever been on). By Saturday the cough had turned into the sort of death hack that makes you feel like if you cough anymore you're going to throw up, and my asthma was going haywire. Mom thought it would be a good idea for me to not drive back to LA that day and go to the doctor instead, and she was right. We went to Kaiser (which, by the way, was SO MUCH NICER and more efficient and pleasant than the Kaiser in LA) and a doctor saw me, was all worried and gave me two nebulizer treatments and prescribed antibiotics. She said I had bronchitis, and told me a story about a doctor friend of hers dying from asthma. Great. Thanks doc.

My breathing was a lot better when we left, and then got so much worse when I went home that we ended up back at Kaiser in the ER that night. It felt like when I was a little kid and Mom and Dad had to take me to Kaiser and sit with me while I was given endless pulmonary aid treatments. The doctor in the ER was really good and nice, and I trusted her more than the doctor in Urgent Care, for some reason. I was there for about five hours, in the end- Mom stayed with me in the beginning, and then Dad came to take her home and then came back and took over. It was nice to have them there, even if I'm a grown-up, technically, and didn't really need them to stay... it was comforting. A nurse took me for a chest x-ray (to make sure I didn't have tuberculosis and start an epidemic, I guess), and I had to take my bra off for it, which was fine when the nurse was some Eastern European lady, but when a Cute Male Nurse showed up to wheel me back, not having a bra was not ok. I hate not wearing a bra. Rrrrgh stupid x-ray machine.

Anyway. Dad and I got home really late from the hospital and I slept in the TV room next to an open window to avoid any cat hair that might have been in my room. I didn't sleep very well, and I didn't really feel so hot the next day, but I had to drive back to LA anyway. I had a location scout Monday morning for the short I'm shooting in a couple weeks, and I didn't feel ok missing it. I did, however, cancel the first few days I was scheduled to be helping Dustin Pearlman and JP Riley out on the feature they're doing... I just felt like I had to let the antibiotic and the prednisone run their course before doing lots of physical labor. It was a good decision, in the end, but one I felt really guilty about.

So my first day on Dustin's shoot was Thursday. The film is set at a nudist resort, so the location is Olive Dell Ranch, a nudist resort in Riverside County. It's about 60 miles from LA, so the crew is staying at a random unfurnished condo in Loma Linda. The actual resort is up in the canyons in Colton, and it's really pretty and sort of like summer camp... if you went to summer camp with lots of retired naked people. Yes, most of the nudists are retired. They live primarily in trailers, a few in mobile homes or cabins. The guest cabins are like tiny little smurf houses, or bird houses or something. I kind of wish I was staying in one, but I don't really fancy the communal showers. The whole nudist thing is weird, but strangely idyllic... all they do all day is hang out by the pool naked, and play poker at night. Not bad for a retired lifestyle. Plus, think of all the money you save on clothes!

It did take a little getting used to, though. There was one incident, which really only my brother can truly appreciate, where I almost laughed out loud at one of the nudists. I was carrying the camera, which is a lot heavier than it ought to be because of the stupid handheld rig they're using, and an old naked man walked past me, all wrinkled and saggy, and goes "Got a match?" Yes, yes, it doesn't sound funny, but this is a joke my Dad has been saying to Taylor and I when we have our hands full for pretty much our entire lives. That made me almost laugh, and then I was REALLY tempted to respond "Nope, do you?" Because clearly he didn't... because he was naked. See? Hahahaha. I crack myself up.

I have another 8 days on this set. Who knows, maybe I'll be a nudist by the end of it.

...No, probably not.

my kind of town, Chicago is

2009-03-05T23:56:00.000-08:00

Oh gosh, I am a horrible blogger. I meant to write while I was in Chicago, really I did, but I forgot my computer power cord in LA and thus my laptop stayed silent for most of the trip. Didn't want to take over Tim's computer too much and all, beyond obsessively checking my email the way that I do. I did write my post Oscars round up sorta thing, but that doesn't count for much.

Anyway! There was Chicago and it was all cold and snowy and lovely and filled with people I hardly ever get to see. I guess in the end I didn't really DO much, but I don't go to Chicago to site-see anymore. Sure, there are things I've never done there, like the Field Museum, which I regret having never done. But when I'm there it seems as though every day brings a new long-lost friend or acquaintance, and they are far more important than museums. Except the Art Institute. The Art Institute is the best.

It snowed in the first couple days I was there. I LOVE snow and I haven't seen any in a good long while, so this made me very happy. I got to wear my Chicago boots and my Tim Burton mittens (which have started to unravel! does anyone know how to DARN?) and holy crap I had forgotten how cold it can be. I love walking through untouched snow and defacing it. I love how it gets all packed up and crunchy under my boots and I love when people toss salt all over the place to try to melt it. And things get so silent when it snows, even in a big city like Chicago and a busy place like Wrigleyville. It always reminds me of that giant unexpected snowstorm sophomore year of college when Martha and I laid on her bed looking out the window and commenting on how cold people looked with their lack of snow clothes.

So, let's see. Fun things that we did. Tim and I saw Waltz With Bashir, which was good but depressing, and we went to the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the Music Box. The Music Box is so wonderful. I wish there were more theaters like it in LA. I love the star-filled ceiling and the memory of going to see Raiders of the Lost Ark there with Will and Tim and Lummis, and that crazy homeless man who talked to Lummis on the El on the way home. Hee hee. I went and had lunch with Sarah Graber, who was in Wizzer. We went to a Thai place in Belmont and then went back to Tim's and watched BOTH seasons of Wizzer. Wizzer is so strange- we all thought it was really hilariously funny back then, and we pretty much do still, except that now we realize how bizarre and absurdist it all was. There are some very... shall we say, ABSTRACT sketches. I suppose that's what earned it the "sketch dramedy" title. Sarah is doing really well for herself in Chicago- she teaches and does storytelling at schools and always seems to be in one play or another. I really miss seeing her and must make a point of it to see her every time I'm in Chicago.

I saw Mark Kreutzer THREE times, which is insane because I don't think I'd seen him since I was a junior, if not before. He lives near Tim and they do trivia nights together, along with Andrew Linnehan (!) and Josh Elder. I saw Elder very very briefly at Kreutzer's birthday party. These are all people who lived in CRC with us, and I was never particular friends with any of them... Kreutzer was around a lot, but we weren't super close, and I barely even spoke to Andrew Linnehan ever. Now, though, he is someone I legitimately enjoyed hanging out with, especially on Monday night when I went to trivia with them. I guess I have an ability to bond with pretty much anyone who can geek out about inane factoids.

On Thursday I met Jack, Sip and Tim at Panera (Panera!) in Evanston, and then Sip and I went over to visit Brian Perkinson, our old boss at the cage. It's strange how some things never change- Brian is pretty much the same, although he seemed a little less annoyed with life, and the cage itself is just exactly as it always has been. There was even the same giant box of duvetine. I bet if I'd hopped the counter like I wanted to and poked around a bit, I'd even find a few things that are still labeled in my handwriting (or Steve's, or Will's, or Sip's, or Kevin's... etc). The weird thing about being at the cage and at Louis was how I literally don't know anyone there but Brian anymore... there are a few staff members at MSG who are the same, but Caesar and Tony and Cliff are all gone. Still, it's nice that it hasn't changed so much physically. They're even still playing things like Power Surge and Jackson and Have You Seen This Man? on the flat screen TV, presumably because no one has made a good movie since I graduated =)

After that Sip and I went and saw Coraline in 3D, which was AMAZING and that is pretty much all I have to say about it. Easily the best movie I've seen in a good 6 months. Go see it, and see it in 3D. Oh, Henry Selick, I love you.

We went to the Hopleaf that night, with Mike DePilla and Mike Sippel and Jack and Som. I don't think I'd seen Som since the days I lived with MDep at Ridge and Church- he's Mike's friend from high school and was around a lot back then. He's a lawyer now, which is insane. Oh, the Hopleaf! I haven't spent ALL that much time there, but the times I was there I had a grand time and it always seems like the quintessential Chicago bar experience. The fact that it's in Andersonville, where everyone seemed to move after graduation, makes it stand out in my mind, I guess. It was like the first grown-up bar- that is, the first bar we went to outside of Evanston. This isn't true, obviously, but that's how I think of it. Anyway, we had mead and beer and all stayed out later than we were supposed to, even Jack.

On Friday night, after Tim left with his parents to go to the opera, I went on a walk around Wrigleyville. I was sort of looking for a bookstore, but I gave up on that thought pretty quickly when I realized how far away it was. It was nice to get out in the cold and stretch my legs though, even if it was starting to get dark. I walked through the giant graveyard near Tim's house, the one that you pass near the Sheridan stop on the Red Line. I always like cemeteries, but Chicago seems to do them better than most cities. I don't know why- maybe there are a lot of religious people in Chicago? In any case, there are tons of graveyards filled with huge monuments to the people buried there, and I really like them. I was at this one just as the sun was setting, and it was beautiful.

Oh gosh, let's see. What else. On Saturday Pat King and Sip and Tim and I went to Hot Doug's, which is this famous hot dog place, or "encased meats" place, as they say. They make crazy sausages like "Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck Sausage with Truffle Sauce Moutard and Sel Gris," as seen here (the one in the lower left):

Also exhibited above are the famous Duck Fat Fries, which were pretty damn good. I guess anything's good if you fry it in duck fat. Anyway, it was snowing like crazy while we waited in line for a solid hour, and by the time we got into the restaurant we were frozen solid. Nothing like a Chicago hot dog (for that is all I had, no crazy sausages for me) and Duck Fat Fries to warm you up!

After Hot Doug's Sip drove me over to Logan Square, which was not far, to hang out with David, Jessica, and Willa Marie for awhile. Willa and I played Spaceships for awhile and then she showed me her room and then she did water colors. Dave and Jessica and I caught up with everything. Things are always nice and relaxed at their house. They always have tea and the dogs lie around and no one is ever rushing anywhere. Sometimes I feel a little awkward, cause we never really DO anything when I'm there and I'm not really much of a talker, but it's always nice to see them. And I do like checking in on Willa Marie as she grows up- I can't believe how big she is.

Speaking of being all grown up- on Sunday I went up to Evanston to spend some time with Natalie, Alec, and Jill, the family I babysat for all throughout college. It's insane how big they are now. Granted, they're still kids- I don't know what I'm going to do when Nat starts going to high school. I'll probably just throw in the towel and assume I'm over the hill. Natalie just turned 13 and Alec just turned 10- they're in 7th and 4th grade, and are just about the sweetest kids you could imagine. The trippy thing is that I've known them for 8 years now; I started sitting for them in the fall of my freshman year, when Nat was 5 and Alec was 2. Crazy. Anyway, they are doing really really well. Their dad died 3 years ago, in January 2006, and while they are always in the back of my mind, I'm never really WORRIED about them. Jill is just about the bravest woman I know, and I know she's doing all the right things for the kids. I love visiting them. They're always lots of fun- we played the same game we played the last time I was there, which involves guessing what each person playing likes best out of a given set of things. The kids wanted to play it to see how well we still knew each other, and the answer was pretty well, but not as well as I would like. A lot of things are the same- Alec still drinks soy milk, the kids still squabble as they eat lunch, Jill still cooks yummy-smelling things and the house looks pretty much the same- but a lot of things are different, too. I have to do a better job keeping in touch with them, my Evanston family:

Sunday night, of course, was the Oscars, and it was also Jack's birthday. He had just gotten back from Atlanta earlier that day, so he wasn't up for much celebration, but he did come over to Tim's house for guacamole and Oscar watching. Jamie and John McGlothlin came, which was great and astounding, because I hadn't seen John McGlothlin in, oh, five years. Maybe longer. He looks exactly the same. Sip came too, and a friend of Tim's named Stephanie. See previous post for thoughts on the Oscars. It was awfully nice to watch it with old friends. Nothing against my new friends- I would be dead without them- but this harkened back to the olden days in strange, not quite accurate ways.

Monday I devoted entirely to wandering around Evanston. I had been up there twice already, but I hadn't gotten to revisit all my old favorite spots on campus, or walk contemplatively along the Lakefill, or any of that. So I took the El up and had lunch with Jack at Al's Deli on Noyes, and then walked over to campus. He had to go back to work, so I said bye to him for possibly the last time in awhile, and went on my merry way wandering around. I love the Northwestern campus so much. It's so unpredictable, with it's melange of strange buildings and gothic towers hidden gardens and pathways. It doesn't look one bit like an east coast school, and that is one of the things that drew me there in the first place- I was never a fan of the "Giant Squares of Grass" method of designing colleges. So I walked past CRC and Louis and AMS and wandered the Lakefill and went to the Shakespeare Garden and went in the tiny chapel near the Shakespeare Garden that I've always inexplicably loved, and went to Norris and the arch and the Rock and all that. I will never get sick of remembering the good times on that campus. Call me sappy, but... well, I am sappy.

After that I walked through town and over to our old apartment, where a woman was standing on the corner and asked if I was there to look at apartments. She was showing 1703 and 1707, but sadly not 1705 Ridge or I could have gone inside. Although, maybe that would have been weird. Maybe I just want to remember it how it was, with its yellow walls and my green room and the perpetually dirty kitchen floor and the built-in china hutch that had things in it from so many past occupants that opening the drawers was like an archaeological dig. God I loved that apartment. It was perfect... for college, that is. Then I went to look at the Childcare Center, where I'm sure no one remembers me. It looks the same, although the playground has been updated and looks a lot less fun. I also walked through the alley at Ridge and Davis and pas Tom Thumb, and actually went in and purchased something at EV1 (a bottle of wine for Tim for letting me stay with him), which was very rare occurrence for me. So it was a very Evanstonian sort of day. Perhaps not as much as I would have liked-- I would really like one of these trips to just wander around Evanston for like TWO solid days so I could go past all the old film locations and visit Lighthouse Beach and actually EAT at Mustard's Last Stand, all that. Oh well. Next time.

Monday night I had coffee with Matt Cozza, who is someone I really wish I kept better in touch with. He's doing really well and doing freelance shooting and editing. He won that Heinz 57 Ketchup contest a year or so ago and with the money he and his girlfriend went to New Zealand and Australia, and I was incredibly jealous. It was good to see him and catch up. Then I went to the bar where Tim/Kreutzer/Linnehand were waiting to do trivia night. We did really badly, just out of a few sheer bad guesses, but I got a couple questions right that I was proud of. I love trivia nights. There's really no better time to revel in your own geekery.

Tuesday morning, before my flight, Tim and I went to the Art Institute, which as I've said before is pretty much my favorite museum ever. They have added a few rooms for the Impressionist collection and a new Modern Art wing, so it felt a lot bigger than it used to. I could stay at the Art Institute all day, but sadly we only had a couple hours, so I limited myself to paintings, photography and the miniature rooms. They had an exhibit of Edvard Munch paintings that I didn't go in because it cost extra, and a great photography exhibit of portraits by a guy named Yousuf Karsh, which were amazing. I'd seen a lot of them before and not known whom they were by, and this guy is incredibly talented. Consider me a fan.

And then it was time to go, sadly, but it was a most excellent trip in my opinion. I wish I could have seen Kat (she was sick most of the time, and working), and more of Jack, and more of Pat, but for the most part I was very happy with what I accomplished- a whole lot of visiting and very little that was actually productive.

Sorry this is so long- it's mostly for me to remember everything. If you actually read all this, well... you must think I'm very interesting =)