Posts in category "Daily Life"

Autopilot

Cohen and MacBook Pro

I’m cur­rent­ly on autopi­lot. Doing with­out think­ing, and just being.

It’s a strange feel­ing because I’ve been try­ing to get to this lev­el where I’m no longer con­scious of try­ing to be at this lev­el1. It’s a recur­sive night­mare. But now that I’ve been here for a few days, I’m not sure if I like it. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m not used to it, because I feel like I’m miss­ing some­thing, or because I feel way too over­stim­u­lat­ed.

I tried to sched­ule a day of rest, aka me time, aka her­mi­tiz­ing in my house, in between every event, but that did­n’t work out. I won’t have a sin­gle day to myself until the 3rd of January. I was hop­ing for a hol­i­day where I could sit and do noth­ing for two days in a row, just so it’d be like a long week­end at least. I’ve been try­ing to cel­e­brate because I fin­ished my con­tracts ear­ly, but I sup­pose these last few days have been enough of a treat, even if it’s left me with­out any time to with­draw and reflect.

One day I woke up at Darren’s house, went down­stairs, turned on the TV, and Serendipity had just start­ed. I remem­ber watch­ing this gener­ic hol­i­day dri­v­el set in a New York Christmas at Vicky’s house back when I was in uni­ver­si­ty. It was def­i­nite­ly Christmas back then cause I was back home in Toronto, before my par­ents divorced, and we went to house par­ties as a fam­i­ly. It was it’s own lit­tle serendip­i­tous sign, remind­ing me the hol­i­days were here, and I should take it all in for a sec­ond.

  1. Croupier, star­ring Clive Owen, is com­plete­ly based on this idea. Go see it. [↩]

Ryan's First Birthday

A video I shot as a Christmas present for Aaron and Karen. This was the first day I tried my “poor man’s steady­cam”, and aside from a few shaky shots from fid­dling around while try­ing to cap­ture every­thing, the pan­ning works very well.

I was think­ing about sav­ing the video for when Ryan gets mar­ried, but fig­ured I may be dead before that hap­pens, so I decid­ed to give it to them now. There are so many notes in the pro­duc­tion of the video that I feel like I need a 10-minute direc­tors com­men­tary to cov­er all the details. Alas, I’ll leave the insight up to the view­er.

How can so many peo­ple love one lit­tle boy? It seems almost impos­si­ble.

Two (and a half) Days in St. Louis

Day one

At secu­ri­ty, I’m select­ed ran­dom­ly for a screen­ing. The guard asks my age. “Twenty…”, I begin, try­ing to remem­ber if I’m 27, 28, or 29. “Twenty. Okay.”, he says, cut­ting me off. Somehow, he believes I look near­ly a decade younger than I am. For two days, I’m packed light, with no checked bag­gage. In my rush, I for­get to get some American mon­ey. This wor­ries me.

Ottawa airport

Plane in Ottawa

Continue read­ing “Two (and a half) Days in St. Louis”…

House Show 2009

The house show (announced ear­li­er this year) was a huge suc­cess. I moved a bunch of fur­ni­ture around in the liv­ing room and trans­formed it from this:

Venue before

To this:

Venue after

There were almost 30 peo­ple crammed into my liv­ing room for a night of inti­mate music and an ice cream bar1 (on which I spent near­ly $100, includ­ing all the fix­ins). Admittedly, I got a lit­tle over­stim­u­lat­ed and pan­icky some­where in the mid­dle, due to all peo­ple, but Pat and Jen came and talked to me, and they calmed me down. It also got real­ly hot with all the peo­ple in there, so I cranked up the A/C a few hours ahead of time.

Arne, who goes by the stage name Duryea Hawkins and was Shane’s sur­prise guest musi­cian, com­plete­ly blew every­one away with his open­ing num­ber, named Snowman. At the end of the song, you can hear Dan say, “Wow”. It’s so good, I have it on con­stant repeat at the moment.

Once again, Shane ded­i­cat­ed a song to me (woo!), my favourite of course, It’s A Drag. He also did a few new songs I had nev­er heard before; one of the best parts of con­certs is being able to hear new mate­r­i­al that a musi­cian is work­ing on.

And for the first time, I got to see Jesse rap in per­son. He was going to do an all acoustic show, with sev­er­al exot­ic instru­ments, but then Nick (who does the back­ing vocals/beats and goes by the stage name Rockefort F. Loopfrog) bought a loop machine, so they decid­ed to use that instead. Quite dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio pro­duced sounds that I’m used to hear­ing from Jesse, but just as good.

The artists all went home hap­py with the mon­ey that was donat­ed2 and made from the swag they sold.

Since it was my first house show, I real­ly want­ed to enjoy it instead of fuss­ing with get­ting the prop­er shot, so I set up my cam­era and left it on in the cor­ner. Next time, I’m going to do a bit more cam­era work.

  1. This must have been a fair­ly mem­o­rable part, because peo­ple like Jess called it the Ice Cream Party instead of the House Show. [↩]
  2. Legally, as the venue, I’m not allowed to make mon­ey, so I have accept “dona­tions” as a cov­er charge. [↩]