June - July 2010

- I graduated high school! Yeah, I’m not a complete failure.

- Started learning how to drive with my insane driving instructor, she is nice, and then not nice! All at once! And speaks bad English. Driving isn’t hard but it is kind of scary, and it’s making me well aware of how fucked we pedestrians are.

- My friends and I have been going out and doing shit! We’ve been hiking, traversing through dirty rivers, hiking down cliffs, climbing up cliffs, boldy going into small dirty caves. (I went first!) I also went to my first all ages rave! Avoiding all the drugs and half naked underage girls isn’t that hard, and then comes the gross sweaty dance fest! Loved it! Going and wandering is the greatest thing ever, I need to be outdoors before cast into the theatre world for 4 years. My last year of high school was pretty stressful, and doing theatre shit at the school was great, but it was a lot of work. I went out sometimes, and saw my friends occasionally. We’ve also all been stressed out about our convention, and so I took my days of relaxation, and now I want to adventure!

- Two cranes! God I still can’t believe I am doing that. A year ago I swear I heard myself saying “I will never do a crane, that is dangerous and stupid and scary!” I still hold the exact same belief, except without the whole “never” part. It IS still scary! It is completely dangerous! And yet it’s a thrill I can’t really compare to anything else. You have to work pretty hard to get on top of one, and what we learned last night is that there is always the chance that you just won’t get on it. (We climbed about 55 stories worth of stairs, only to hear workers upstairs! Who the hell is working on the building at 11:30pm? Has to be illegal.) So we climbed down a few floors, took a few shots, and then left quietly. The 3 boys we were with were tired, so my female partner in crime and I went for another crane, a shorter one. (We figured we were already FILTHY, so..) When we finally get into the building, after being bugged by some old crazy lady, we realized the crane wasn’t ON the building, the building was merely built around it. What does that mean? That means going all the way up the crane tower, straight up, from the ground. Sort of painful on the knees and toes, but thankfully we both had gloves.(By the way, ow ow ow, my body hurts.)

This one was nice, not too tall, but the scary “oshit!” moment was the helicopter that flew right at us, flew alongside the crane, and then landed on the building next to us. Partner was inside this sort of hidden part of the crane, the first ladder down is surrounded by the metal part that turns the crane. I was just above that ducking down, praying they didn’t shine their lights on us. Helicopters are loud! We quickly descended in full view and got the fuck out of there. Hah! Adrenaline!

The previous one this month was a tallish crane, 45 stories, with a good view of the city since it was east of the downtown core. That one was easy to get in, but the actual crane was stupidly dangerous because the guide wires on the arm of the crane were just slack airport cable. Hah! If it was windy we could have been blown off.

Both of those nights were long nights, but last night was just a long, long day as I am working on a show this week. (Thankfully my call got pushed forward today, because 9am would not have happened after getting home at 2am.)

- Summer of fun! Later in August I’m going to Montreal, and I just got back my friend’s cottage. Summer of doing shit! Fun!

- Aiding me in doing all this fun stuff is my new Macbook Pro. 13″ of glory, I love it. What is more entertaining is my iPod Touch. I set my Macbook to be a wi-fi hub and then I sit in the kitchen and play on the internet. Or get recipes. Or do other crazy shit. For somebody who doesn’t get to play with new electronic type things, getting both of these is like “woah, future!”

- Other shit! I don’t know, I’ve just been trying to figure myself out and all that crap. I’m supremely excited to go to school and be social and meet people and all that fancy jazz.

Eventually more. As always, pictures of the above are on my Flickr

II’ve been having more and more weird exploring dreams lately.  So here goes…

I mean, in the beginning this was just a bike ride to a forest. But it felt like I was biking through my high school because I kept seeing familiar faces. When I get to the forest entrance it turns out it’s a building, but the nature has taken over this front room and it is full of dirt. Apparently this girl and myself are having a skateboarding competition? But I start off on my bike, and manage to pull of a back flip on a bike. (No, not something I can do in real life.) The freaky part was half way through the flip, I say to myself “Wait, can I even do this? I’m going to die.” but I pull back and perform it, and land, but I re-imagine it as if I didn’t land. (At the same time I land. Dream logic.) Regardless, everybody cheers, and we move on to skateboarding down what seems like a long mini-waterfall track. But my skateboard wheels are all messed up, they’re worn down in funny places.

Anyway, we skate, I perform tricks I have no idea what they are. I tell my audience that truly I have no idea what I am doing and I have never skateboarded before, I’m just hoping I don’t die. (It’s the truth.) We move on deeper into what looks like a big house or weird office building. The walls are funny colors, I don’t see color in my dreams often I don’t think, so that was nice. We keep going and everybody is filtering in deeper into all these rooms for our next “competition” the next track looks like random bits of metal in the floor, I have no idea what they expect me to do with that. So I walk deeper into the house away from everybody, and suddenly I have my camera and I start taking pictures because I’ve come upon these beautifully adorned rooms. Christ. I keep taking photos when I hear somebody coming, so I hide behind a bit of the wall. A girl followed me and is taking all these obnoxious flash photos in the dark room. At night. (Very sneaky..) So I come out from the wall and turn on the light switch by my head to make her stop. (Why is there power?)

I continue walking through the rooms when I come upon a room that is blue and glowing, there’s a light curtain dividing it and I come up a giant ballroom full of people dancing. (But it’s really quiet nonetheless.) The other girl comes around and starts chattering and talking and I keep trying to tell her to shut up so that nobody sees us. A man comes and tells us to “get out of here!” so we book it past the rooms, and back to where people were. The building is changing now, taking on a more modern industrial feel. (Like a modern day warehouse/factory) I realize he told us to get out because all the people in the ballroom are going to die. I start screaming something akin to “IT’S A SENIOR’S DEATH DAY” Referring to high school seniors, not old people. We all start just RUNNING towards an exit. We’re running past shelves and shelves of food, and we’re on metal grates now, and somehow we discover we’re on the second floor, and I see airlocks everywhere and it feels like an airport? I see stairs down, but we all run past them for whatever reason. Lastly I think our only solution is to jump into a giant chute that is filling giant bags full of stuffing material. This part was supremely confusing, and I don’t remember the rest.

I remember waking up and thinking “damn, that building was beautiful.” What’s strange in the dream I kept thinking they were part of these apartment buildings we’ve been looking at on the forums I read. But I know those are just boring apartments, and this was something completely different.
I’ve had dreams before about locations that don’t exist, I end up waking up with a really empty feeling, knowing I’ll never see those places again. Added to that is the fact that I take photos in the dream that don’t exist. Damn!

Oh, also I’m finished high school classes. Only have one exam, a few theatre jobs, and report-card pickup day left. And then… Uh, I guess I’ll start having more and more creepy high school dreams that I had the past 2 years. Love those.

(Aka: Things to do before I have to either care about my life because of toddlers hanging off of me, or things to do until I get old and boring (if that) or things to do if I’m still awake after the next 4 years)

I’ve been thinking lately about the future. When I about to enter middle school I was able to give myself a pretty generic plot of what would happen into high school. Everything was on a pretty set path through the grades system. But I could never quite imagine what grade 12 would be like, or what the high school experience would be. I expected somethings to happen, and I was wrong about many of them. But also a lot of things happened that I could never have expected. I didn’t expect to go into theatre, or to NOT go into art. I didn’t expect to actually fail classes, or meet the people I did, or do the things that I’ve done! And as I attempt to graduate high school and move on into what our teachers are scaring us with, the “real world” It’s even harder to imagine what that will be like. So here’s to the next 7 years of my life, the last 7 have been weird and strange. I have no idea what the future holds for me, I hope it’s exciting, and I hope I can fulfill some of the things I think the future will bring.

- Remain drug free (I think this is more of a life goal, sorry.)
- Remain pukey-drunk free. (Alcohol is okay, but the mouth hole is a one way street.)
- Travel to awesome places. (To name a few, Lithuania, Japan, weird warm islands people have never heard about.)
- Bungee Jump off something really, really high.
- Go caving! (Conquer that phobia…)
- Keep exploring and taking photos. (In that vein, get better photography gear)
- Don’t fall off, through, or onto anything painful. (Like a condo, or wooden floor boards, or rusty things.)
- No, seriously, don’t get hurt in the next 7 years.
- Graduate University. (Or an equally deserving alternative that I can still rock my life with/without)
- Road trip somewhere! Camp out in the wilderness. Don’t get eaten by bears.
- Get one of those supremely badass haircuts that parents will like, but secretly kind of go “wtf?!”
- Move out of my parent’s house, and into my own place.
- Ride a motorcycle, or DRIVE a motorcycle.
- Work in a professional theatre-setting doing something neat.
- Go paragliding, hopefully with my dad.
- Climb a higher crane (Without dying!)
- Be more spontaneous
- Take more risks
- Don’t get suckered into doing anything I don’t want to do
- Don’t be afraid to lose it all, even after 7 years, you’re still young.
- Get into the Toronto subway tunnels. (Get into ANY subway tunnels.)
- Work at a concert!
- Don’t get electrocuted!
- Snowboard on an actual mountain range, with my dad!
- See more of my favorite bands live
- Work on another film set
- Help people who need it
- No, really, really help somebody, change their life completely. (Though, I have my entire life for this one.)
- Do something really amazing.
- Climb that radio tower near my house that I really want to climb. (I can also save this one for insane-old-age time.)
- Don’t get arrested. (Or… Get arrested? Hmm.)
- Meet more awesome people. (And remember all of their names)
- Learn to dress myself better-er.
- Maintain Happiness level
- KEEP EATING CANDY. (Directly related to above.)
- Learn to cook so I can make myself and others delicious food.

Updated:

- Be a life drawing model at least once

- Get another piercing somewhere (anywhere)(Ear lobes don’t cut it)

And the list goes on because I’m constantly making it. There are lot of things not on here, either because they’re emotional and sappy, or because I simply don’t know about the things I want to get done yet.

As well, if 25 year old me ever re-reads this list, I’m sorry, okay? If I get you killed, well, can you blame me?

So in Canada we have what is called “March Break” we get a week off of school, and when you get back you still have a whole bunch of assignments due, and life is generally miserable. On this week you can do one of two things. You either go snowboarding/skiing. (Though, sadly this option is being depleted by crappy warm weather) or you go somewhere with amazing weather and all inclusive resorts and blah blah blah. Who needs that crap?

I got to spend my March Break going to night school for 4.5 hours a night! From 4:30 to 9:00 I sat, ate a lot of junk food, and heard The Great Gatsby read in many different accents. But this means I almost done this tedious gesture to get myself my final credit, needed to get into university. I spent a lot of money, very unfortunate. Though I just found out my tax return is like $100, which isn’t too bad.

It was an amazing week for weather, the first coat-less week of the year, I would think. On Friday some friends and myself had a bonfire in the park. I guess I was the Saviour of the day, I came late and bought them water and smore making materials. Hero? I think so. My arms still hurt carrying all that to the far off destination. The fire was good, it was a good high school moment as we left the fire and wandered the neighborhood. Even that night was pretty warm.

Saturday though, the day I go off to a urban exploration meeting? Cloudy skies, snowed at certain times, terrible. Nonetheless we headed off towards a known active warehouse, with an abandoned backside. But as we walked through the door we tripped off a well hidden door alarm and booked it out of there… Into another abandoned warehouse. This seems silly, but hey mother duck is running towards the hole in the wall, you should be following her. There we are for about 10 minutes watching the other place when two security cars show up. We freeze on the second floor watching them. What did they do? Nothing. They sat around, one guy walked half way around our building, another took a piss. One car left and the other sat there for another half hour. After 45 minutes they left, we took a couple photos of the well known spot and left. (We also climbed more things that probably wanted to collapse beneath our feet.)

On this day I also learned that my father had wrongly ghosted my hard drive, and had pretty much lost anything I had done on it in the past week, since he last ghosted my hard drive. We’re trying to get me a completely new build, and it’s been frustrating. I’m hoping I didn’t lose any photos, but I’m pretty sure I lost an entire batch from… somewhere, I don’t recall. I lost a lot of photos I had just saved to my computer from various artists, as well as a few photoshop files I was working on, and the new resume I had made myself in Illustrator. (Due to lack of inDesign.) I’m sure there’s other stuff I lost and I hope it wasn’t anything important. Maybe I should think of buying an external backup.

Onwards with exploration, the team heads downtown to check out a small condo that was being rebuilt for a while, and lo’ and behold, and open door! We send one guy in to check out the place, and he comes back telling us it’s quiet. We all walk in, and being last, I gently close the door with the help of a friend. What we didn’t know, but would soon find out is that it mag-locked behind us. Suddenly we’re in a building with no exit, and one security camera watching us. We find more locked doors, an alarmed fire exit, and then we find a door with seemingly no alarm. What the hotel staff across the street must of thought of 6 people bursting out of a construction office at 11pm, I don’t know.

So it was the night of failures, we were pretty much ready to give up, we wander aimlessly past other buildings being built, looking longingly at cranes behind secured doors and cameras. (My favorite door being seemingly unlatched, but obviously had a bunch of cinder blocks behind it.) When we chance upon a completely open stairwell, what must be the future site of a fire exit door. We pounce upon it, and thus begins the great run up a lot of stairs, scoping out the building for security, and through a bit of a maze making it all the way to the top. About 50 stories, in the west end of downtown, and it was just amazing. Completely worth all the stairs to see the city from that high. (I will post some photos later)

And then the crane. The crane is about 2 small stories about the building, and completely enticing. We climb the tower and sit above the cabin, and you can feel the damn thing shaking in the cold, cold wind. One of us sets up a camera, the other clings for dear life to the center of it, and myself? I climb even higher, to the highest point of the crane. I figure it I get to the ground, and the rush wears off, and I am too scared to ever do this again, this will be my only shot. It was high, very high. I didn’t stay long, the wind picked up and I climbed down as fast as I could. But boy what an incredible feeling to be that high. (Off the ground.) So it’s around 2am now, we scamper down the condo finally, ducking into a few unfinished rooms. So tiny! How unfortunate. Then finally, after feeling incredibly grounded for a moment, we head back to the cars and home.

Today? My legs feel completely dead, I have a ton of work to do for school, and only my mom’s computer to do it from. Frustrating. Hopefully the computer build goes well, and goes soon. Climbing the building was the highlight of my march break, and now that it’s almost over I go back to the dread that is finishing a bunch of projects, putting on our One Act’s festival, building sets, doing my university interview, and not dying!

(None of this list involves doing comics, sadly.)

I’ve been busy, I’ve been really busy, but let’s update.

School:

I dropped a course, because of a bad class and I need to make up the credit so I can apply to university. So I’m taking night school twice a week. It’s a bullshit course, and I feel bad we’re paying so much for it, but it’s the way it has to be. Hopefully I will be able to finish it as quickly as possible. Regular school is tough as it is with course work from different classes completely colliding in on itself.

Theatre:

I’ve been trying to keep lighting crew together, it’s hard to manage these people without having any time. They’re finally getting the training they’re supposed to get, and we’re almost at the point where they can do stuff on their own. I think. On the other hand I’ve still been doing shows, and I’m finally about to be on the lighting board for a major event, fashion show. I was there today, running through the lights with them, doing that for the next two days as well. God help me… It’s not that I hate fashion show, I really do love the event, but the crappy loud music this year combined with indecisive people and a thrown together crew, on top of other stresses. Sigh, I just want this one to be over.

Social life:

What of it? I don’t see people anymore, I don’t really hang out anymore. When I’m at school I just want to get through the day as quickly as possible and go home. Really, I either have stuff to work on, or I just want to go home and tune out completely. We’re going to an anime convention in Feburary, G-Anime in Gatineau, Quebec. We’re performing a skit, and I’m in it, and we’re making my costume, and it’s frustrating and stress full. I guess I look forward to the con a bit, but I’m thinking of just finding things to do in Ottawa/Gatineau itself and doing that instead. Something about cons that isn’t grasping my full attention anymore. Though I guess it’s nice to be ON the stage for once, I’ve realised I’ve been slowly picking up stuff about acting through my backstage work. Who knew?

University/College/Next year:

Yeah, I’ve applied, and that’s the first step of what seems to be a billion. Stop sending me emails, seriously. I’ve applied to Ryerson but I hate their website full of nonstop links to other pages, to pdfs., to files within files, with links back to their website. It’s crazy, it’s frustrating, but I guess that’s just part of the challenge. I have to get a theatre resume up, I have to make a photography resume because I applied to that as well. Hell, I need to have a portfolio for them of 12 amazing photos by Feb 1st. Help? I want to move out next year, that would be very nice, more stress I guess. I just want to leave I guess, either move out, or go somewhere for the summer for a while. Somewhere far enough away… God, this urge to travel recently has been insane. Get me out of here, get me far away.

I’m ready for school though, I’m ready to go and learn and I want to do all the courses you promise me, and I want to work and do and get into that stage. Come on…

The good things:

I worked on a major film set in November in an abandoned building. Two things I love combined, it was an amazing experience, in both film, and freezing cold weather. This is a building with no heat, and two very late nights of filming. 10am till 4am. Lovely, right? It was, the people were nice, and we were just shooting a few scenes from the opening to a horror film. Film is insane, it’s just insane. It’s a completely different world from theatre and it’s just crazy, and kind of fun. We’ll see if I ever pursue it further. Becoming the only sound person in the span of 12 hours was interesting, and I spent the next day trying to remember what I was taught the day before, learning on the fly, and being crammed into some very interesting spots to get sound. Most of it probably won’t be used, but hey, I felt useful for a bit. That boom mic also gave me some muscle, but man, nothing has tired me out that much. Photos on Flickr…
Exploring, god, I crave it now more than ever. I went into a place last month that I never thought I would get into, and more so I was simply afraid to. In 2008 a man fell from a catwalk and died in the building we were in while exploring it. The place really is a deathtrap, especially at night, when it’s freezing. It was an old power station, the giant generators already cleared out it was simply filled with broken concrete floors, dangerous catwalks, stairwells that suddenly ended. The entire place was one big scary maze. My fellow explorer and I entered a giant air shaft that used to lead to a smokestack. We went in thinking the metal “floor” beneath us would rust and break through, dropping us 30 feet or so to the ground. It didn’t. I still shake a little thinking about that night, it was simply amazing and scary, and I’m completely ready to do it again. The thrill you get is simply unexplainable, maybe that’s why so many of us are photographers as well, it’s an undenying urge to capture the feeling, and it can be so hard to do just that.

What else is really good right now, to me? I don’t know, I’ve mostly been going insane. I want to do things, but I can’t complete. I want to make journal comics, I want to sit down and do hourlies, what happened to the dream of creating comics? It ran away somewhere, and now it just sits in making these long winded blog posts. Because I should be talking about the things I’ve done so far, so way later I can look back and think “what the hell was I thinking?”. Right now I just want to do. I want to go exploring, I want to get out of Toronto for a bit, I want to climb a crane, I want to take more photos, good ones. I want to make actual comics and update this website! I want to stop this cycle of getting more and more crazy, because it’s been really bad lately, I don’t know why it is, but it’s just been terrible. I want it to be over, this “crazy” phase. You know what I mean?

Because he’s racing and pacing and plotting the course,
he’s fighting and biting and riding on his horse,
he’s going the distance.

There’s a lot of drama surrounding the school show, every year without fail it’s there. This year it came in buckets, lots of buckets.

While I could type out the intricacies of the past and present of my school’s annual plays, and the politics of the people that run and reside within them, I won’t. Simply because I would be here to long. (In fact I think I would need more than a hand full of diagrams as well.) What I want to talk about today is something somebody said to me about the crew, the technical crew. We the techies run the lights, the audio, and anything else that fits within our realm. We construct the set, we rent all the various things we need, and we sit proudly in our booth and work like dogs. We are not always acknowledged, but we’re always last at the set strike.

Today I was told that we don’t really care about the show, that is, we’re not “really” part of the show. We are away from it, we parachute in on the last 2 weeks and do our work and walk away from it. I was told that we make mistakes because we don’t know the show, because we aren’t around. This is simply not true.
Techies work damn hard for the school show every year. In the 2 weeks before the production we spend more time in the theatre than we do in class, or at home. We build wonderful sets, we paint them, we light them, and we make sure you don’t fall off of them. We make sure the actors are heard, and we make sure they can take a breath when we close the curtain. We do not simply parachute in, we take a damn nosedive in. Your actors breathed the show for 3 months, we learn the show in 2 weeks.

What they fail to understand is that what we do is work, and it is hard. We are in high school, the skills we learned were passed on to us by students who have moved on. The skills you want us to have are learned after a few years in post-secondary, studying and breathing technical knowledge. We pick up these skills and do them to the best of our abilities while trying to learn 8 other subjects, while going out with our friends, while doing homework, while doing your show, while freaking out in typical teenage fashion. We do not simply press buttons!

Why do we do this? Why do we jump into a show two weeks before it opens? This is a misconception, because while you are acting we are planning. We figure out what you want the set to be, we go and we rent the perfect lights to go with your show. We rent microphones and we hone our skills because while you are acting we are still working on other things for the school. We work, and we think, and when your actors are ready, we come in. We cannot work until they are ready. We cannot rehearse our tech until we have something to light! Until we have a full show! Until we have actors belting their lines into our microphones. If you cannot have them doing full rehearsals by the time you want them to, that is not our fault.

Tech week is the week before a show, it is when we work our magic. We do not leave the theatre and we work ourselves ragged. We hang lights, we finish your set, we set up our microphones. With the school’s history we only have about 3 days to hone the technical aspects of the show. There is one crazy full day of trying to set every lighting cue, for every scene. We have to stop because the director is not happy with how somebody entered the scene. We wait, the scene restarts, and we set the cue again. Then you’re not happy with it, we change it. At the same time the poor audio people are trying to make microphone levels, but the actors don’t want to project properly. They’re trying to figure out when exactly you want that 3 second sound effect that starts off really quiet, for some reason. Meanwhile a stage manager is trying to call the show, take notes, and write down every single lighting cue, audio cue, orchestra cue, curtain cue, and anything else the director’s heart contents. Then a microphone is in the wrong place, we run and change it. A light just tilted down accidentally, we run and fix it. We have to re-tape, but we can’t do it during the rehearsal, so we stay when everybody leaves.

Then we have a dress rehearsal. This is the first time all the lighting and sound cues are in order, it’s completely hectic. The poor stage manager is trying to call cues they don’t really remember because they’re just damn tired. The audio guys don’t quite know their levels, and the lighting designer just found a blackout in a place there definitely shouldn’t be a blackout. Also, the director isn’t happy, again, so the dress rehearsal stops 6 times. A microphone cable snaps, we have to replace the entire thing, again. We stay after the rehearsal, again.
It’s the day before the show. The stage manager is pumped up on coffee, their cue book is something only they can read, but they’re completely sure they can run the show. But how can they run the show when our clear-com system doesn’t work? The techies come early and fix it, but nobody knows what we’re talking about anyway. Okay, here we go, it’s the last dress rehearsal. The costumes are done, the props are done, everything is set up! We’re going to do this without any stops! Okay! So here we go, the stage manger starts calling the show. They sit up in the booth with the techies, the techies are following the script, and they’re following their cues. But ow, that microphone was loud, and that light was a little late, and the stage manager kind of forgot a few cues. But hey, we did it. We got through a rehearsal. Now we can go… No, no we’re staying late to fix one more light, because it will bug us and we want the show to be perfect.

We go home, we dream of the show, we look at our cues. The week of the show goes by, we make a few mistakes because life just happens. Mistakes happen. We’re not professionals, but we try our hardest. On the last night we’re the happiest people in the world, we know our cues by heart now, and we perform our own show in the booth, because we know every single fucking line. We know every single song, and we make sure you can hear us singing it. When everybody claps at the end, we pretend it’s for us, but we know it’s for those on the stage. It’s okay, we know how hard we worked. Well, we’re not done yet, we have to strike the set the next day. So we do, and we clean up all our cables, we fix our lights, and we’re sweeping up long after everybody else has gone home.

And what do we do on Monday? We get right back in the theatre to run an assembly for the school.

Please don’t look me in the face and tell me we don’t care, or that we’re not part of the show. We are not the old lighting crew you are thinking of. We are damn hard workers, and we love the school show. But we’re not professionals, and we make mistakes. Why can you only remember us for our mistakes, and not our achievements?

I had an upsetting day with somebody who should know all of this. The show goes on and I will be working on it because I love my school, and our school shows are awesome. I’m going to meet people like this in the future, but I just have to learn how to work around this complete and utter bullshit. What’s important is that I know that techies work hard, because they do.

The show goes on! And the only reason it does is because we’re the ones pulling the strings behind the curtains. Remember, without us you perform on dark stage, where nobody can hear or see you, you’re not in costume, you don’t have a set, and you’re not even performing for an audience.

When it’s all done and over, I’m sure you’ll hear about it, and that’s all for now.