Thursday, April 21, 2011

Interns

Being back in San Diego has been very good for me in terms of my sanity. But in order to stay down here and not have to travel as much, I had to take on a lot more fx editing jobs. For the most part it’s fine, but little by little I was drowning in work and spending way too much time on my fucking computer. This is when I decided I needed a couple of interns to lighten my load.

The thing about interns is they can really be hit or miss. Putting up signs at my local university wasn’t going to get me the best crop of slaves to do my bidding and posting an ad on craigslist was a headache that I didn’t even want to begin to deal with! So I did what I do best and I called somebody I knew who would be able to help me out perfectly in this situation.

A friend of mine just so happens to be a professor teaching Maya at a university in SD. I let him know I was looking for a couple of super duper talented minions to do my bidding for little to no money BUT have the opportunity to get some real life industry experience as well as some pretty decent connections for later. Lucky for me there aren’t that many opportunities like this for aspiring animators and editors so I basically had my pick of mostly all of his students! My friend suggested 5 and I picked the 2 I felt would be able to deal with my crazy ass the longest.

One of the guys I hired had a very distinct voice, and the second I heard him talk I felt like I’d known him for a long time. But no matter how much I thought about it I just couldn’t place how I’d known him because I didn’t recognize his face, just his voice! Towards the end of his interview he used some strange phrase that I can’t quite remember now, but then it came to me! A few months ago I was having HUGE issues animating dynamic hair; at first I couldn’t get the hair to look real, then the values kept failing when I went to render it and then the computer would crash and I would start crying! Anyway I’d watched and rewatched a bunch of this guy’s videos a whole mess of times to try and help me out! It was totally a meta moment, you guys don’t even know!! I kind of wanted to jump across the table and full on mouth kiss him for taking the time to make those youtube videos that helped me out in my time of need.

I feel so grownup now that I have my own little workforce of slave labor! They have really been soo helpful to me. I feel like everybody should go out and pick up a couple to take care of all the litte odds and ends you just don't want to deal with. I have interns, a home office with 4 workstations, an awesome boyfriend who’s insisting on paying my rent (because his name is the only one on the lease), and enough time to relax that I am not hating life nearly as much anymore. I don’t know what else I could possibly want at this point. Well except maybe a few million dollars and a house on the beach somewhere between Santa Monica and Malibu… Oh yeah! Also a hoverboard like the one from Back to the Future.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Another Coachella post...

This year I have struggled with a lot of my decisions to do things that I have always done. Its not that I no longer want to do these things, its more that my body really isn’t up to letting me do them. I can’t go surfing, I can’t practice martial arts, and I can’t even go skateboarding anymore because my asthma will act up or my frail ass body will just give out on me again! It’s true that slowly I am getting better. Last Thursday I ran a mile in under 10 minutes, which is something I haven’t been able to do since this time last year (even though this time last year I would probably be very close to completing a second mile in that amount of time!).

I haven’t gone surfing in 10 months. I haven’t gotten on the mat to spar with a buddy in a year. I haven’t picked up a skateboard in so long that I am not even sure I still no how to ride one! I didn’t even get to go snowboarding during one of the best winter seasons of my entire life! Everything I do that makes me who I am, I can’t do it anymore, so who the fuck am I!? I know that to a lot of people this all sounds ridiculous. I have so much going for me that it’s pretty much disgusting how I can’t be satisfied with what I have. I am in love, I have the best friends in the world, and I make money being artistic and creative. I have a great fucking life and I KNOW that I should be satisfied, but it’s just not enough.

I needed some kind of return to normalcy! I didn’t care how small the gesture was, I just needed to do something that I have always done and get through it in one piece. Enter Coachella. For anybody that’s been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I have gone to this music festival EVERY SINGLE YEAR it’s existed. It’s what I do. For a few years I worked for the festival, for a few years I worked at the festival, and for a couple years I just went to enjoy the festival. This year was going to be all about enjoyment.

On Thursday morning Brad and I packed up the SUV and headed for his uncle’s house in Palm Springs because there’s no such thing as a vacancy in Palm Springs during Coachella weekend and this was a last minute decision. Friday I got a little overzealous running around the fields to the different bands and by 6 I was in soo much pain that I just laid down right where I was and didn’t move until around 8 (but from where I was I did get to see the LEGENDARY Ms Lauryn Hill, she still has it!). After that I refused to leave because I still had to see The Black Keys, The Aquabats, break for some Heineken and a few friends in the dome, and then finish the night off with some Flogging Molly.

Saturday morning I woke up feeling like I had been trampled by a mob the day before. It was 12 before I got out of bed and 3 before I finally started to feel somewhat human again. We headed for the venue around that time, got there and parked ourselves in front of the main stage and just sat there the whole day. It was pretty nice and relaxing and I got to see about 80% of everybody I wanted to see that day anyway, so it was nice. We even called it an early night and left after Animal Collective around 10:30. I really wanted to see the Scissor Sisters but I knew I shouldn’t push it because I still had another day of this bullshit and I had to make it to the festival crazy early because I had a friend performing pretty early in the day who would KILL me if I wasn’t there onstage off to the corner.

Sunday I woke up and KNEW I was done! Even my hair hurt. I took a shit ton of pain meds and called a doctor friend of mine for a cortisone shot. This whole thing was turning into the worst kind of endurance test EVER! We got there just in time to watch my friend, as always he really was truly amazing. The fucker is so talented it kind of makes you want to punch him in the face even though he hasn’t done anything wrong! At that point I was done though. I like The Strokes SO HARD it’s not even reasonable. They have one of the top 5 the hottest drummers in rock music! Plus I love their new album. But I just didn’t have it in me.

Coachella kicked my ass. I really can’t do anything anymore. Intellectually I know that I am still in the process of getting better and becoming stronger, but I still can’t help but feel so defeated after a weekend like this! Its just really hard to think about how much work I have put into getting better and then realize how much more I have to do before I am where I want to be. I am just feeling sorry for myself and I really need to get over it, I KNOW!

I am being a spoiled rotten brat right now! I had a good weekend. I got to spend a lot of quality time with my boyfriend and a lot of my good friends like Tyler, Johnny, my little brother, and a whole lot of other people. I saw dozens of amazing performances that a lot of people will never get the opportunity to see. I laughed, I recreated and I enjoyed. I am going to focus on that and then deal with the rest later…

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Reunion recounted

So my oddly timed 10 year HS reunion happened over the weekend. I guess the thing that was most abundantly clear walking into event was that I had no idea who 90% of the people in attendance were! Unfortunately the inverse did not seem to hold true. Every two seconds my personal space was being invaded by some vaguely familiar stranger jovially screaming my name. There was way more people here than I ever imagined there would be.

Most people weren’t even wearing nametags so I had to give a whole lot of “Hey you’s!” to random people walking up and greeting me. For the most part it wasn’t too bad because I walked in with Tyler, Jane and Brad flanking me and they mostly provided a decent buffer from all the humanity that seemed to be coming at us from ever direction. Jane has this creepy memory where she can recall every single person in her homeroom class from all four years of high school, so she had no problem identifying all these strangers.

The first truly awkward and mostly terrible moment of the night happened almost right after we walked in. The girl I lost my virginity to (and she to me;)) walked up to me and gave me a HUGE hug. As we untangled she reached over to give Jane and Tyler a hug, then she looked at Brad and commented on how he looked much too young for this crowd… Moment of truth! So I introduced my 22 yr old boyfriend of 4 years to her… Her jaw hit the floor. She smiled and quickly walked away, didn’t hear from her for a few more hours as she took the time to really soak in this new info… We laughed heartily about that for the next few hours until she came around again.

Bulging eyes and awkward silences became the theme of the night as I introduced people to Bradley. It was really funny because nobody was being rude or offensive or anything like that, they were all just genuinely surprised and caught off guard with this new information. The girls were the best because they ALL did this thing where their voices went up several octaves and each time I was worried a window would shatter! Most of the guys just made crass and inappropriate sexual jokes about Brad’s age and his muscles and stature. All in good nature of course.

At the far end of the hall there were all these pictures on this massive display. There were all the different sports team shots, and candids during different events, etc. (standard yearbook crap) Brad had a lot of fun spotting me all over and commenting on my hair, clothing decisions and general cocky demeanor that seemed to ooze from each of my pics. And I really was all over that wall! Varsity Surf, Vasity Golf, Varsity Tennis, Class VP junior and senior year, Academic Decathlon, peer counseling, beach cleaning organizer, Asian/Pacific Islander Leader of the year. When the fuck did I ever find time to sleep!? Seriously looking at that wall made me feel like such a lazy underachieving loser! What the hell happened to me?

I don’t really know what the point of HS reunions are. I had a good time in HS, but I just don’t understand the point of reliving it. The people I still wanted to remain friends with are still my friends, the ones I wasn’t interested in back then, still not so much caring about them now. By the end of the night most of the people were pretty drunk and making out with each other all over the place. It was pretty sad and extremely uncomfortable to witness. All these people acting like teenagers when they are all closer to 30, it was all just really lame!

Eddie (HS classmate/former boyfriend/current colleague and very good friend) had the right idea avoiding this disaster like a twilight movie! I thought the night pretty much sucked, but Tyler and Jane really enjoyed themselves. Maybe I have a mild case of late onset autism setting in rendering me incapable of recognizing a good time. Maybe I had a lot of unconscious anxiety about coming out to all of my former peers in such a large setting. Maybe the whole event was just as sad and pathetic as I thought it was. Whatever the reasoning, that was such a waste of a perfectly good Saturday night!