Spoon Loves Robots

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.)

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.

When I first got my cellphone I looked through all the features and I saw it had a “planner” in it. A scheduler of sorts to put in everything I’m doing and make sure I stay on track. I laughed at it, put in my birthday, (as if I need a reminder of that…) and never touched it again. I was a “go to school, come home kind” of kid for a long time. In the past year and a half that’s changed dramatically. I didn’t go home right after school, and if I did I felt odd and empty. Suddenly my weekdays filled up with more school events to work on than I could count. Weekends filled up with social time. A part of me liked being busy, it was a busy I liked and I could control. The last two months of school where more stress than I could take though. Constantly working and slacking, and working, and stressing. Surviving the school show was one thing, passing all my classes was another. And then it finished, and I had one exam, and 2 weeks of break before co-op. Those 2 weeks were  great. I slept, I played video games, I talked to people, I hung out. I had not knowledge of date, or time. The weekend and the week were not a seperate entity to me. No planner in my phone is needed.

Then there’s co-op. Summer co-op is a chance for me, a student, to work at a place I could not normally work at with my lack of proper age, and lack of any expierience or post-secondary accomplishments. It’s a chance to learn something about the buisness you may want to go into in the future. It’s a chance to show you’re not a complete twit and not a complete slacker. This was my goal, and I think my goal failed. My placement was decided from my resume, my resume is full of sound work I’ve done at my school theatre over the past year. I’m sick of sound, really. I wanted to go into theatre. But currently I sit at the desk of a small sound art studio. Currently I am supposed to be transcribing, a task that is only interesting 4 hours in, and then NEVER interesting again. (I’m on my third radio show, probably a bit over an hour, and the track is only going through the left channel. If that doesn’t spell HEADACHE, I don’t know what does.) The best things I’ve done on the job are the soldering workshops. One of them I did before co-op started, another I did last week. I’m a hands on person! I like learning about little gadgets, and getting to make them. (Though I do not like the burn on my hand from hot solder.) Otherwise I’ve been cleaning and hefting heavy items. The irony of the entire thing is that my job title is “junior theatre technician” No, that is not an apt title for this job. 

I work a 9 to 5 schedule, which means getting up at 7 to take a bus, a train, a streetcar, and a bus. The routine is so engrained into my head I don’t even remember doing it by the time I get to work. I get to take this same way back home, right around 6. At which point I collapse in front of the TV because I can’t look at a computer screen again. And for anything else I have my phone. Oh faithful phone, I had to start using your planner feature. So now the month of July is filled with red squares telling me I have something to do on each and every day. 

My weekends were full at the start of the month. So first weekend is a big meeting for the convention my group of friends is planning for next year. (ConBravo!) On Sunday my parents took me to something amazing, Tree Top Trekking. It’s an incredible workout on your entire body. And the next day at work was “lift heavy shit day, grunt.” Amazing. Next weekend my father really wants to go rock climbing, and so do I. So it’s another early morning to downtown Toronto to learn about belaying and climbing, followed by archery which my mom set up for us at another place. (My parents are great, really.) Sunday we have another meeting for the skit we’re planning to do at a convention in two weeks. (Otakuthon!) These meetings are shouting matches, that I’ve caught myself participating in, unfortunately. They drain me like nothing else, but they get the work done. At least I can mostly sit back and just take notes. 

Where does this leave any time for myself? I couldn’t fall asleep last night because that was really the only time I had to think about life. The stress started pouring back in because I don’t have any breaks to let it settle. Now in less than 2 weeks I have to make a costume for Otakuthon, practice the skit, finish co-op (Including all the assignments we have to do.). On top of those things there’s stuff I want to do for myself. I want to spend time with my friends, I want to go to a Toronto urban explorer meeting. (Only happens once a month!), I want to make comics, I want to play GuitarHero2, I want to watch some damn anime! But I’m tired, and busy. Those little red squares are pouring into August, and then I just go back to school. Ouch. 

I have to start looking at college options, and the scary thought of university options, and the even scarier task of assembling a portfolio. I have to study for my G1, because I’ve been neglecting it all year and want to at least get it before I turn 17. I want to make comics! I want to make promotions for this site. I want to clean my desk, I want to make a painting. I want to stay up past 11, but it’s getting harder and harder. I want to sleep! 

Where is summer? Summer was supposed to be a break from stressing out, but it’s coming back in buckets. I really just want to throw out my phone, and not go to co-op anymore, and get away from all the people and things and tasks that are freaking me out. Little red squares that have boxed me in… Go away.