Home for the Holidays

I got together with P again when I went home for Thanksgiving a month later, and that hike went much better from my perspective.  We discussed all sorts of things, and I felt like she really understood me, as demonstrated by her observations of exceptions in my life that didn’t really fit who I was at heart.  We had a really good talk, but still didn’t approach the topic of our actual relationship.  I considered it, but had trouble leading the conversation around that direction, which in hindsight was probably a fortunate thing.  I suspect I would have been totally unprepared for the results at that point.

Back in LA, work was pretty focused on preparing for a big event.  My company threw a huge Christmas party as a PR and popularity stunt, to show off our new warehouse office.  There were hundreds of people there, with lots of alcohol, and I hear it got even crazier after I left around midnight.  Not much actual video work got done between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I was soon headed home again for Christmas.

I tried to connect up with P when I returned home, but she didn’t want to get together.  That was the first setback in that process in quite a while, but it was a discouraging one.  It always causes one to wonder if they should have done something differently.  I saw her at the camp reunion, but didn’t get a chance to have much of a real talk.  I was rooming with MC5, so I got a bit of a look at the steps that led up to him being named the next summer program director during that reunion.  And we did ropes course and paintball in pouring rain, which is a bit tough with the masks fogging up.  But it was always good to be out at camp, and with the people there.

I was soon headed back down to work, and things were getting real busy at the office.  We had a big test shoot that happened to fall on my birthday.  We took all of our cameras, as well as gear we had rented, and tested it all at night, in the dark.  We had night vision goggles from the military, radioactive ultra-scope light intensifiers for certain cameras, and other with really fast lenses.  We played all night in a steep valley north of LA, testing different settings and combinations.  I had my laptop there to analyze the results immediately, and was highly involved in the process.  We concluded that the newest DSLR cameras were the best option for shooting in the dark, which we anticipated doing a lot of with our various projects with the military.

At the end of that month, we did a large shoot with the crew from Terminator Salvation, creating a prequel scene for a marketing campaign.  It was shot entirely on DSLR, using a process and workflow that I had played a large part in developing, so I was on set the whole time to support the process.  I was at one point offered the part of the voice of SkyNet, which I declined at 4am, afraid that I would screw it up.  That fear seemed to be well founded, when the guy who accepted the part botched it repeatedly, which does not win points with the crew when we are still working at 4am.  This experience may have unduly discouraged me from lending my voice to other roles on subsequent projects, which were probably a mistake to decline in hindsight.  But I am used to being valued for my mind, not my voice, and I accept that fact as part of my identity.