for September 11th

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.