Sometimes, I have to get out, even when it feels like it’s 40°C outside, because I need my music loud, and I need to fucking strut, and the birds clear the way cause they know it’s serious, cause the pictures are fucking killing me, so I’ll just keep skipping songs until it hits me then I’ll CRANK IT until it hurts, walking it off like it’s nobody’s business, dancing inside to the bass pounding in my ears.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Thinking Of Her
Sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, I think of her.
She’s lying on my stomach again, listening to my heart beat, hands tucked neatly under my body. Or she’s spooning me, her arm resting on the crook of my waist, with a finger drawing distracting circular lines on my chest.
Sometimes we’re in the tall grass, surrounded by colours of life with the warmth of the sun above us. A regression to a time when all I had to think about was the colour of popsicle I would have when I got home from camp. How unfair that our innocence is taken from us when we need it most.
And I lie there in bed, waiting for sleep to take me as the images lead me on.
My body telling me to let go, my mind struggling to keep her next to me a moment longer.
A Change In Writing
There’s so much to say, and not enough time to write. It’s obvious that I haven’t been sticking to any kind of posting schedule lately. The benefit is that I don’t feel the pressure of having to write something every day, the drawback being the fact that things I want to get down are often lost. When I do get a chance to write, it’s like I’m perpetually writing about thoughts, feelings, and events that are a month old.
Perhaps another evolution in the way I write.
I used to write my thoughts quite often. Things I had to figure out or get off my chest. Now, it’s mostly things that happen in my daily life, and something random here and there. It’s like I’m moving beyond my confused adolescence into some sort of reflective dotage.
The entries from the first year were written with so much more frequency — roughly three times a day. Then that changed to once a day, then every other day. A few times, I tried to write less frequently, without a set schedule, but that never really worked. The writing itch was always there. At one point I took a month-long hiatus.
Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.
The thing I particularly miss are the entries written late at night. Spilling my soul out in words, with the music, the sky, and the empty streets guiding me. As tired as I would be (I swear, sometimes it was the exhaustion that brought it out in me), I always went to bed after feeling satisfied.
Now, I’m not sure what this all is.
Baby Gensey
Introducing Ryan Kevin Gensey, Aaron’s new baby boy, delivered right on the projected date. I bought him the turtle you see in the corner of his basket there.
I had the chance to hold him before he was a day old in the hospital. At first, I approached this idea with some trepidation, seeing as how I carry the preconceived notion of how fragile baby’s necks are, but I couldn’t resist. He’s a lot lighter than Dolly, but somehow just as warm.
Aaron has always wanted a boy first and a girl second — so the older brother can take care of the younger sister — and it looks like everything is falling into the plan.
I’m now officially an uncle.
Video Love and Hate
I’ve been playing around with video all weekend, trying to get a bunch of things working to no avail, when really what I wanted to do was just do some editing and get a project under my belt.
Among the problems:
- My Canon HF100 shoots in a pseudo 24p, which doesn’t get imported into Final Cut Pro as true 24p. This means I have to convert the video from the camera to ProRes, then convert to 24p, then bring it back into Final Cut Pro, then begin my editing. Too bulky a workflow for my tastes.
- Rendering a few minutes of video will take several hours. So I have to leave the rendering on overnight, occasionally into the next day, which means I can’t use my laptop until it’s done. Thank god I have two computers.
- Clips in the Final Cut timeline become unplayable when using Magic Bullet for colour tints, due to dropped frames.. This means I have to do all my editing, making sure all the timing is perfect, then add the colour effects to it, then render. It’s a leap of faith, because I can’t preview motion with the colour; if I don’t end up liking the effect, I have to re-render the whole thing again.
I hate giving up these things, but seeing as how I’ve spent countless hours researching and experimenting for solutions without any luck, I think I’ll have to for now. Hopefully full-frame sensors will become cheap enough that regular consumers (like me) can afford them, and maybe video standards will actually be more standard. Until then, I’ll have to accept this “highly-rated” camcorder that still lacks a manual focus ring, can’t produce any kind of shallow DOF with bokeh, and has an annoying amount of low-light noise.
On the non-technical end of video, one of the difficulties is that I’m always torn between telling a story, and saving a memory, both of which seem somewhat mutually exclusive. The former tends to be more concise but cold and mechanical, whereas the latter is filled with all the little details I enjoy but potentially boring.
Video is also less forgiving, as framing is more final without the cropping function of still photos. Then when you move into high definition, things like dirt on a car, blemishes on a face, stray hairs, become much more noticeable…and invariably end up driving a perfectionist like me crazy.
I still love the combination of movement and sound and dialogue that video affords though; it’s the medium that I find comes closest to real life.