Pushing to the end

I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last post. Clearly I don't juggle my classes with other priorites very well. I've had a short reprieve the last couple of days since I had a midreview on Monday. Time to gear up for finals. I guess I'll be back in another month.

Putting out fires

Yesterday I slept all day while waiting for the mail. At seven in the morning, the tracking for the overnight package said it had been delivered but nothing had come! I didn't drive to Los Angeles with my dad to pick up my mom from work because I wanted to wait at home. The cds my brother sent didn't arrive until around two in the afternoon. I must have been knocked out then because I didn't hear the doorbell and the postman just left it in the mailbox. I was relieved that they repaired my system just fine and everything is back to normal. I need to start backing up my work to spare myself a lot of stress.

Is it part of human nature to slip into apathy so effortlessly? Despite having a decent workload for the break I still haven't sit down and started on anything. All feelings of urgency normally present at school have been sufficiently defused so that I now lay in bed all day with my mind landing nowhere long enough to have a substantial idea. It feels taxing enough to try to parse these thoughts into words here, much less study the failings of the Chinese republic in the 1910s and 1920s and the development of socialist thinking. Somehow I feel I've been conditioned into managing life from crisis to crisis, from one review to the next, from midterms to finals. Nothing can seem pressing enough until it has reached crisis proportions. That would explain all the last-minute cramming and all-night studio production. I'm tempted to think the lulls in between the storms of work are just periods of recovery and should be forgiven as such, but they do perpetuate an unhealthy cycle of work ethic. 

A related issue is how some people feel the need to stir up trouble, whether consciously or otherwise, to add some new excitement to their lives. Everyone knows at least one person like that, the friend who has some new drama every other week. I'd say I do prefer this mental stasis over that.

Perhaps it is a primal vestige from our human evolution. How can one plan so far into the future when one's existence is uninsured? We might not fear getting mauled by wolves in the search of our next meal but the logic persists that mental processes would be better utilized for what's at hand. What a weak excuse. How easy it is to attribute my own indolence to some innate and insurmountable cause.

Spring break

The last two weeks have been insanely painful. I had to study so much for midterms the first week and then crank out a ton of work for mid-review on Wednesday. My sleep habits were in total disarray. While trying to study for history I would read a page and fall asleep for two minutes, wash, rinse, and repeat. I fell asleep in the middle of eating lunch one day. When I woke up, I finished eating and went straight back to studying. For two weeks I couldn't have had more than a couple of hours of sleep each day, and this wasn't even at night either. Whatever sleep I managed came in lapses while I was working away. The weekends were a bit better, probably four or five hours a night but only because I made sure to relax a bit, get rest, and see some friends. It's hard to look in the mirror and not find bags under my eyes these days though.

I almost lost my job - the easiest one in the world where I get paid to sit at a desk and do homework the whole time. The first week I went in late both times because in the morning I am quite vulnerable to passing out. Tuesday morning I didn't wake up at all and fifteen minutes before my shift was supposed to end my boss called my cell phone. I listened to the voicemail later and basically if I didn't go to work on time Thursday she would give all shifts away. Ugh. It's a good thing mid-review was on Wednesday so I got a little more rest that night.

I'd say some good things came out of all that effort though. I did well on my history and film midterms, around 87% on both. The simulation game for my city planning class went well too, my graduate student instructor seemed to acknowledge the work I put into the negotiations and I even showed up in the newsreel for it. I'm extremely satisfied with the dedication I had to studio as well. I really flipped the switch last week, spending the time I needed to and focusing in on production work. I needed that. It's still been difficult shifting myself into studio life and committing to time it takes to do good work. Given I still didn't complete everything I should have for the mid-review, I can definitely improve on efficiency. Nevertheless, the review went well and I received postive comments and good criticism.

I came home later than planned; Friday afternoon I was still finishing some work samples to send to SOM for their summer internship. Even though I was still wiped out from mid-review, I spent all of Thursday night editing and laying out my work. It would be amazing to get that internship. With the grade issues on my transcript, I am definitely not getting the San Francisco one I applied to.

For some reason, today my laptop died on me. I believe the battery died while it was trying to configure some updates on startup, so the registry is corrupted and Windows won't start up. I am a complete idiot for not backing up my work before I left for spring break. I'm feeling completely stressed out over the thought that I might lose all the work I did last week. My whole project for studio is on there. I need some cds that I left at school to even try repairing it, but it might take a complete reinstall if that doesn't work. In that case, I think I could still recover my work. I'd have to buy a laptop hard drive enclosure so I can access my files and save them somewhere else. The most frustrating thing however is that I would have to reinstall all of my programs which is so time consuming. I don't have the patience for that now. I already have to wait until Tuesday at the earliest to have Charlie mail me the cds from my apartment. Why does technology always do this to me. I definitely know how to use and take good care of my laptop but I still have the worst luck. That's disgusting.

Keep calm and carry on

Why am I still designing 3 nights before midreview?!

Adderall

Girl I'll tell you now

my path never seems

to cross anyone's for too long.

What about

Saturdays in the park

Sunday afternoons in bed?

Really now the world

can't come soon enough

but I don't know how to meet it.

I thought I was

the one you could

have strength for.

A good idea from a bad dream of a good idea

I thought I had a really funny dream just now, but when I sat up and thought about it for a bit I guess it was just strange. My friends and I were were out getting some Mexican food at some restaurant a while away near the beach back home. Maybe it was Mexico though, I can't say because I've never been there. It was pretty far so it was a special trip, but we had been there once before and it was amazing. I'm talking about crazy tasting burritos. Well we went this second time and it was really good again. For some reason I was writing a novel there. We left the restaurant in my friend's lifted truck. I really don't know why any of them would have one.

At the grassy, green park with plenty of trees, somehow right next to the beach, we started goofing around and my best friend started doing some stop motion animation, teleporting and moving around sporadically. This is the hilarious part because it was a sequence set to Benny Hill's Yakety Sax. We all followed in chase, pelvic-thrusting our way towards him, but obviously to no avail. Seeing this, I had the amazing idea of capturing this stop motion movement with my camera's multishot feature. It took me a while to get it all set up on my little point-and-shoot, but I started taking a continuous series of shots. At that point the whole world started turning into what my camera was capturing, but instead of being in fast motion due to the low number of frames rate I was taking, it was in super slow motion.

We were getting closer to catching that silly fox but not close enough. In a moment of genius, one of my other friends suggested that another way we could stop him was with bullets. (This is still in good humor...) So everyone brandishes machine guns and starts spraying lead everywhere, and bullets fly around the park in slow motion. I don't join in because I still have my camera in hand, taking continuous shots and keeping the world in slow motion. But unfortunately, I run into a tree and become fused into it and everything goes downhill.

I'm half-stuck in its trunk and my friends are still shooting. I'm not worried at first, but one, then two, and then a few stray bullets start coming towards me. I get lucky with a couple waves but then one, then two, and then a few start hitting me in the body. Wave after wave start drilling me as the air gets thicker and thicker with slowed down bullets (think The Matrix). I'm getting torn apart and when my camera finally gets blown away, the world slowly returns to normal speed. I fall out of the tree and stagger behind it, feeling really heavy. All my friends run up to me, worried about what's happened. Strangely, I'm all right. I'm just really happy I got that all on my camera. We go back to the restaurant for more awesome burritos. I continue to write my novel but this time with a new idea.

The concept? A story of children that learn they can play around, slowing down time. However, they don't realize that though they are slowing things down, the rest of their world drives ahead in parallel. In a climactic finish, they come to realize the dire effects of this when they intersect with their future that is occuring at a different rate. They try to reconcile with the real time they belong to, but only bullets materialize from the war that is happening and they are all cut down.

I realize I have really wild dreams when I don't get enough sleep during the week. Normally when I'm well-rested I either don't remember my dreams or don't have interesting ones. It could be either a good or bad thing. The night before last I woke up screaming because I thought some huge, fat, juicy, translucent, light blue with purple spots colored bug was crawling all over my back. I jumped up in bed and my roommate, still awake, gave me a really shocked and weird look. Later that day, I noticed I had some kind of bug bite behind my shoulder. I don't even know what to think. Telling a friend about it later, I drew a picture of the bug. I felt nervous seeing it again.

Something is better than nothing

(At least in some cases.)

This is a pretty nasty little habit of mine. I don't ever want to start or do anything unless I'm positive I can follow through with it perfectly, hence the lack of posts here and excess of topics in my notebooks. I've got to dive in and just produce. I don't want to descend into merely dramatizing my life but if that's what it takes to write more regularly, so be it.

You've got to let them know you're thinking anything at all.

I can recap last week pretty easily: two hours of sleep over three days and lots of coffee. The midreview on Wednesday went well. I definitely need to improve on the graphics side of things though. That's one of my goals for the semester, to compose better presentation boards and learn how to create some awesome renders. It's late and I need some sleep.