BIGGER PICTURE

I went roof topping on Saturday.

First roof was very neat looking on the inside of it, since it had a “box” section, and to get to the roof you had to climb through the hatch. The thing is, on our way out we let a security guard INTO the roof area with an engineer. We thought we were in deep shit! Until he apologized to us and just let us walk past him.

The second roof had a great view of the city! Which is why I guess two falcons live near it/on it and wanted us out of there. They kept swooping down over our heads. I think they realized we were not a threat and just watched us until we left. They made noises. Craw craw.

Did not get many good photos, I give up. I need a new lens before I can do more. Sigh.

Couldn’t stay until the night because I had to run to Oakville. More roofs this summer!

I helped my friend out with an all ages Rave/Dance party thing. I helped set up the tech and then for the rest of the night stood back and watched drugged up teenagers do stupid shit. Rave kids are an uncontrollable, hugable mass of frenzy. This was an actual club with couches and tables, and they were just climbing on everything. That place was left a mess, but I think it’s safe to say this was the highlight of my night. Not pictured is the crowd of people who burst into laughter as he smacked his head into the overhanging plexi. It was a good moment of a ridiculously long and tiring night.

I was going through my files and I found this digital painting I don’t think I’ve ever posted! Well here goes. It’s from this picture I took last summer.

Large Version

Bonus: Later in the summer I climbed that crane.

Summer was good and I did many good things. Then I went to Montreal and did fun things. Then those fun things weakened my immune system so I got a bad virus for about a week and a half that made me super sick. Somebody nice visited me a few times and was very sweet during it. Subsequently, I missed my Frosh week. Aaand, I really don’t care too much, I’m not too upset over it.

September, 2010.

September looks like this:

To say September was busier than I thought it would be is a complete understatement, October was worse, but still.

First I had to get used to commuting to school. I was a spoiled kid whose dad would give her a ride to high school every morning, it was nice. Commuting, not too terrible, but squishy and only getting worse as it gets colder.

Ryerson campus isn’t too too big, my classes are pretty close together, hurrah. But finding them was a bit of a mission nonetheless. My classes are interesting, if not completely boring for the first 2 weeks of them. But moving past that, I found out which shows I am too work on. The first of which is the “hard” show. You’ll be working with the best of the best, but we start NOW and we don’t end until the end of November. Are you prepared? Now then, are there any volunteers for even more work? You there, yes, you. Good. Say bye bye.

And thus my first position at theatre school, apprentice stage management and production assistant. Third week of school and I found my self sitting in rehearsals watching, learning, assisting. Also lifting furniture, a lot. (A lot.) Thrown in there was one all day Saturday shop call, a full day lighting hang (Joy!), a completely hungover and sick gel-cutting morning, sewing buttons in a wardrobe call. A bunch of changeover calls. (Two shows are going on at once, so, more furniture lifting.)

Mixed into there is one amazing night meeting the older students and getting drunk with new friends of the next 4 years, getting drunk with my friends of 2 years already, and overall enjoying the whole university thing while trying to hand in assignments.

October 2010

Let’s start October with another crane, where the young hero learns that it way too fucking cold to be climbing cranes anymore. I’m waiting till spring.

Let’s continue with a sleepless month of progressively longer and harder rehearsals, trying to make a good impression on my senior staff, and less and less free time. October 20th our show opened and my backstage ninja debut began. Finally, the workload is cut off by about a third. But being active backstage is not easy. Not while trying to do midterms and more and more assignments.

Halloween! My favorite holiday was spent trying to recover from a cold because if it got any worse I would be in trouble.

November, 2010

More work, more tests, more homework. I did not sleep a lot in Novemeber, but, we finished the show with resounding success! I’m pretty sure I impressed a bunch of people, which is really good! I did all my assignments, I haven’t skipped any classes. I’ve actually been doing pretty well for myself.

Why is it that high school made me so ridiculously tired every day? What a miserable environment to foster learning or living. I love theatre school, it’s a quirky place. Everybody is going through the same stress, and most people are pretty nice about it. I’m glad I am where I am.

2 more weeks to go, and soon, the semester ends! Exams begin! Intense.

Fare thee well

This is a test

It’s day 3 of the clean-a-thon, and I’ve already got 4 garbage bags and 3 recycling bags full of, well, crap. Not even crap I can give away to charity, just crap. I’ve been up to my ass in nostalgia for 2 days. From elementary school to high school I kept a lot of… Stuff.  I can literally track my mental growth and how I was sorta messed up in middle school, and the weird crap I did in early high school, and the strangeness of my grade school years.

But I found a piece of paper discussing my writing skills and things I wanted to experience, I don’t remember where I put it now, but something sticks out. I talked about how I have to have a dream about falling, I needed it, it was an obsession, I needed to experiences that feeling. I guess not knowing at the time I kind of got my wish a year or so later when that is all I dream about.  I would have the same dream for what felt like hours of rising into the air and slowly going back down to earth. Most times I would never touch the ground, and when I did it would hurt like nothing else. Even worse was the anticipation of hitting the ground, fearing the pain I would be in, and then touching down without feeling a thing.

The dreams where unsettling, but almost comforting in their length and absolute weirdness. They weren’t quite flying dreams, and they weren’t quite “plummeting to my death” nightmares, it was a very slow feeling.

Lately for whatever reason I’ve been thinking about that falling feeling more and more. Maybe this coincides with the adventures I’ve been having lately. It is hard to not think about falling when you’re climbing cliffs and cranes and going to theme parks all within a short period of time. But it is a weird feeling to fall, there’s an anticipation there to hit the ground. There’s a forward action as well, to fall you need to either be launched upwards, or trip, or jump, or climb something very tall…

It really isn’t the fall that unsettles me, it’s the fact that falling ends when landing, and landing usually hurts. In those dreams I would fall for hours, maybe never landing, and it was such a scary feeling to never hit the ground again, but somewhat thrilling. Lately I’ve been very ungrounded, my life went through a change almost 2 months ago, and I suddenly I wasn’t grounded anymore. I was jumping, and then falling, and I don’t think I’ve hit the ground yet. This unstable feeling is supremely exhilarating, I’m controlling it just enough to stay sane, and letting everything else just go.

When I was younger, and hell, even now I ridiculously loved swing sets. My friend and I would go and talk and swing for hours, and it was pure entertainment for us. I’m not obsessed with control, but something about the perpetual motion of falling and catching yourself was completely addictive. And it was at my control, I could stop, or jump, or break the pattern. I usually jumped in the end, but it always took so long to build up to it, to get the courage to jump. I usually imagined my broken body in a lump at the end, but now I just go for it regardless. It breaks the cycle of falling and catching yourself, because now you’re literally slingshotting yourself into the open air and allowing yourself to hit the ground. It’s great, it’s that tiny bit of adrenaline that I so crazily feed off.

I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this, but I’ve just been thinking lately about the negative and positive connotations of falling. On the one hand you’re playing a losing battle against gravity, it’s going to end in hitting the ground. On the other it’s freedom and velocity that you just can’t control! Which can be a great thing.

Lastly, I would rather not fall of anything. If I’m going to fall it’s because I control the when and the where. I think it’s important to note!

And one more thing, lately I’ve been having terrifying dreams where I can’t scream. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Means something? Who knows!

- 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

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.

This is in the “awesome things I did in march” category. I also climbed a crane, but didn’t fall off. A pleasant thing to replace the front page of my website with.

Coincidentally how life feels right now. Awesome.

Large version

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?