On my way to ER

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I Don’t Like The Drugs But The Drugs Like Me

I’ve been taking psychiatric medicine for my entire adult life, and after eight years I can honestly say, it has not improved my condition. I have been on about twelve different medications in different combinations, none of which completely worked. Maybe it stopped me from committing suicide, but maybe there were other ways of avoiding suicide too. Sometimes it even made me suicidal. It definitely made me manic. Either way, the beneficial effects have been negated by long term brain damage. I have tremors now that I doubt will ever go away. I’ve been in perilous near fatal drug related situations for a few months now. I hear things when I didn’t hear things before. My intelligence and creativity have been dampened. I’m just tired of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to feel like doctors have more control over my life than I do. I don’t want to feel like if a major catastrophe happened and I was unable to get medication, I would lose it. I just don’t want this life anymore. Something has to change.

I know someone who had a major manic episode and since then has become a devout buddhist and has lived a completely normal life for decades just doing meditation (and I’m sure eating healthy and other things). People have managed both epilepsy and bipolar disorder only using marijuana, which I know for a fact DOES work for me and has no side effects aside from the munchies. And here in Canada I could apply for a license to use and grow medicinal marijuana (which has been approved for epilepsy and with a persuasive doctor’s note, bipolar too). And then there are various other therapies, the whole exercise thing, etc etc.

I’m going to wait until I see this neurologist. I want to know that I have temporal lobe epilepsy for sure and then I want to find out if that is what has been called “bipolar,” or what. If it is ONLY temporal lobe epilepsy it will be easier to get a license to possess and grow marijuana. If not, it will just be a more involved process. It’s not as simple as TLE and Bipolar either, I also have PTSD, OCD, and Social Anxiety Disorder, all of which respond to medical marijuana.

If I smoke up everyday my seizures go down about 90%. And my moods become a non-issue. In fact, thinking back on it, if I had marijuana when I was suicidal it would go away. I don’t remember a single Long Bleak Night when I had marijuana around. And plus when my moods get really fucked, it usually involves messed up sleep patterns, and marijuana makes me sleepy if I smoke before bedtime.

I have never cried while on marijuana and I have never run around going “Woot!” on marijuana either. Sometimes I get paranoid, but ONLY when I’m worried someone might smell it and call the cops, which is also silly because Canadian police usually don’t care about pot (with exceptions, I know a relative who will go unnamed was tossed in the hoosegow once for having pot).

But I don’t want to rely on ONLY marijuana, obviously. I want to do everything else I possibly can because I do know seizures and suicide aren’t fun. I know there are a few Buddhist groups in town who meet Tuesdays and Thursdays to meditate and then have discussions. I could do that. I think meditation would help me focus my mind a lot better. Yoga would probably help too. There’s a doctor who specializes in Chinese Medicine who got rid of my depression for most of my teen years. I was still dramatic like any teenager, but I wasn’t trying to hang myself like when I was a kid. I know he still practices. I have a shitty diet and I could do better on that front. There are tons of things I can do basically besides medication. And with no long term damage either. Yes, people say marijuana causes brain damage, but I know people who have used it on a regular basis for decades with no ill effects. And the drugs I’m on now have caused more severe brain damage in a much shorter time.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this in Vancouver, when I had no money to buy groceries, or in Montreal, when, uh, life just sucked and I didn’t know where any resources were. But I do have some stability here and I feel like I have the support to do it.

It’s just getting away from the psych industry that freaks me out. They take so much from you that eventually you really do believe you can’t live without them. It’s like being in an abusive relationship and not feeling that you deserve better.

I know there’s a chance I could have a major psychosis again, and I would use Zyprexa and Ativan as needed to bring me down should that happen, but I never want to be on long term drugs again. I have to talk with my doc about this and see if she’ll be supportive. She’s pretty open minded, so I hope so. And in theory I can get off these drugs if I’m in remission.

So yes, I have to do some research, talk to doctors, friends who are off drugs and doing fine, find a good therapist. It’s not going to happen right away, but by May I hope to be off all of my medication.

God, I had a dream I was reading Frankenstein and suddenly came across a passage where Mary Shelley wrote something along the lines of “I don’t know if people know the turmoil I am in as I write this. I am in a disturbed state of being,” and basically went on describing going crazy and then went back to her story in the next paragraph. Mary Shelley did have mood disorders btw.

Psychiatric Industry

It is lunch. Hurrah!

Back in the regular world of living with insanity, I noticed some things recently.

I had called the HealthLine when The Rash showed up. The nurse I talked to was very thorough, although I still felt that she didn’t know much about lamotrigine. Still, she made sure I wasn’t having some really serious complications, which was good. And when I said I had bipolar disorder she didn’t treat me like I was a child, which was nice. She told me to go to a walk in clinic to get it assessed, so I did.

The doctor I saw at the walk in clinic had VERY little knowledge about what issues I was having. He didn’t know what lamotrigine was. He had to run off and look in a book for what I was talking about. And then in the end he just told me to go make an appointment with my regular doctor and lower my dose. I don’t think he realized that the rash could be a sign of a serious complication. It was so frustrating.

I’m lucky in that my regular doctor does know a lot about what I’m dealing with, and what she doesn’t know she isn’t afraid to go and independently study. She really doesn’t muck around with me. And she takes my File that now follows me for the rest of my life with a grain of salt. Even though it says there are certain drugs I should be on FOREVER, she doesn’t follow it. And it has helped a lot, she helped me get off one drug which had dramatically reduced my quality of life for three and a half years. I can finally feel emotions again, and think, and be creative. Before my hospitalization I averaged one short video a year. After hospitalization I only made ONE in four years. So as you can imagine, I was glad to ditch olanzapine forever. Fuck you Zyprexa!!!

But I also noticed some other things. When it did look like I might have to go to emergency I realized I didn’t want to. And the reason was that if I went to emergency and I did have to be admitted and they did find out I was taking the medication for Bipolar disorder, I was worried I would be put into the psych ward again. And it’s a very real possibility. And it made me realize why many other people with mental illnesses have poor health care. It’s not that we don’t notice something is wrong with us, or that we don’t know we urgently need health care, it’s that we’ve been seriously wounded by the psychiatric industry and the possibility of getting sent to the psych ward again for a non-psych related health problem is so terrifying. One of the reasons abuse is permitted in psych wards is because if we’re punished then we might not have the audacity to go crazy again and therefore end up at the hospital. But what really happens is that ex-inmates go to such lengths to avoid the hospital that other health problems aren’t addressed later on.

I am using the words Psychiatric Industry rather than mental health system or psychiatric system because those words imply that healing is actually possible within them. The fact is, psychiatry is founded on principals of capitalism. My 6 week psych ward stay cost $20 000. That’s more than I paid for five years of tuition at film school. Old timey wards like Bedlam housed inmates who were paid for by family or husbands who didn’t want to deal with their relatives or wives who were eccentric or acting out. Often times people imprisoned in these places didn’t originally have mental health problems, but they did after they lived there a while. And it was a very profitable industry. You could charge a lot of money and provide substandard housing, there were no mattresses, only piles of straw. The food served was the cheapest stuff they could find. And people running the wards made a killing. Later on mental patients made great experiment subjects as well, and I’m sure someone was getting money for recommending various inmates for studies (this still goes on). Currently psych drugs account for a multibillion dollar industry, and the fact that the drugs go on to create more health problems like diabetes, tardive dyskenesia, high blood pressure, Parkinsons, etc, makes it MORE profitable because then additional drugs will be required, made by the same companies. And since psych drugs cause brain damage and often create MORE mental health problems, people can justify keeping us on them because we keep getting crazier and crazier.

If we do get off our drugs, we get worse, not because that’s who we really ARE, but because the drugs have been designed to worsen our condition if we withdraw from them. Quitting a drug your brain has become dependent on can seriously flip you out, and it would flip out anyone irregardless of whether or not they were mentally ill.

In Mad In America the author notes that people who have a mental health crisis in third world countries fare better than those of us in “Developed” nations. The simple reason being there are no drugs, no wards, and no psychiatrists. A person having a schizophrenic break will often remain in their community and be cared for by the local shaman. In fact, in an experiment in the sixties down in the states had a supervised home for people in the midst of psychotic episodes. There were no drugs used, just supervision. People had episodes lasting on average three months and then got out of it ON THEIR OWN. The people running the home noticed pretty much everyone went on to have a normal life afterwards. They said people did do things like run outside with no clothes on, but for the most part there wasn’t major trouble. And they also noticed that people were having life changing spiritual epiphanies, and letting them go through that process made them feel stronger and more capable once it was over.

The psychiatric industry is not about healing people, no matter what the people working within it may think. It has always been based on the principles of behaviour modification, on making sure the insane just don’t bother the normals. We may think we’ve advanced because people aren’t institutionalized like the olden times (although a lot still are), but the drugs are working in very similar ways. A patient may not have a manic episode again on Olanzapine, but neither will they feel deep emotions like love, compassion, anger, or sadness. Neither will they be able to think, or to effectively live a regular life of working, or to create, or to challenge the psychiatric industry. The people around them will be happy with the way they have changed, but the person who is really living that life will not be happy, and even worse, they won’t even know they aren’t happy.

Possibly the thing which frustrates me the most is that while I have done extensive research on the history of psychiatry, psychotropic drugs, neuroleptics and their origin in Fascism, the causes of bipolar disorder, etc etc etc, I still have to deal with people whose education is, to put it gently, limited. And yet they still assume they know better than me how I should be living or being treated because they are sane while I am crazy. It’s getting to the point where I want to make up bibliographies and hand them out to people and say “Look, before you start telling me this shit, you have to educate yourself by reading these twenty books, forty of these articles, and at least ten of these medical studies. Oh, and I also want you to spend a week in a ward.”

And to them I also say, it doesn’t take much to step over that line. Anyone could find themselves on the other side of a locked door, whether they have a mental illness or not. And once you do end up on the other side, you will be dogged by the psychiatric industry for the rest of your life.

Madness In Four Actions

Remember how earlier in this blog I mentioned that it’s the extended anniversary of my hospitalization from a psych drug induced mania? Well, now some weird fucking thing keeps happening with my computer. The language settings keep slipping to Canadian French, which means when it slips over I get shit like this when I type in quotations: Èè What the hell? It reminds me of every small petty annoyance I had living in Montreal. The French language is hijacking me! When I first got One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on DVD my friend turned it to the French language selection and I blew a gasket. “How could you be oblivious to such an obvious trigger!! Change it back right now!” I mean, the film itself was one big trigger, but making it an unintelligible language to me AGAIN, that would just slip me over the edge.

I’m having less triggers about hearing French. I quite like the language actually, I just think Quebec has some really shitty human rights abuses that go on unquestioned. I heard some FUCKED UP shit that they did to the warriors at OKA after the blockade went down and they got a hold of them, like torture under the Geneva conventions type shit. So many of those guys have snuffed it since.

Anyway, the video, which now has a name, is sitting in a DVD player at the Mendel, which is shut down this week for installation in all galleries. The video is called Madness In Four Actions, because it uses four repetitive actions performed by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in the Miracle Worker. Taken out of context they are pretty interesting because they are so adversarial and yet so meaningless. And I also liked using it because Patty Duke did go on to have a diagnosis of manic depression. She even states “Although I don’t think that my bipolar disorder fully manifested itself until I was about 17, I had struggles with anxiety and depression throughout my childhood. I have to wonder, as I look at old films of mine when I was a child, where I got that shimmering, supernatural energy. It seems to me that it came from three things: mania, fear of the Rosses and talent.”

One thing I noticed about it is that it references repetitive loops I fall into when I get really upset about something. If I get so upset I lose higher communication skills I will, quite literally, repeat a short five word or less phrase over and over and over, sometimes 15 times. I guess I feel like if I say it enough people will understand I really mean it, because sometimes if I just say it the one time they don’t really clue in that it’s bothering me. So making Patty Duke slap Anne Bancroft around over and over was pretty fun.

I also liked that it was using tropes of performance art moreso than other videos I have done. And it was more of a collage than other videos too, everything was sampled, even the text. There are still a couple tiny things I want to tweak, but I’m taking a break for a couple weeks and doing it later for the copies I’ll send to distributors. I think I’m also going to burn a bunch of DVD’s to go with the Betacam master I’ll send in case people do use it for installation.

I saw my friend Megan’s work at the gallery too, it’s really good. She did Velveeta (my ex from art school) really well. And it’s from a photo of when Velveeta and I dated and she looks really happy, which is cute.

Anyway, I’m glad I got to make this video while I was having The Anniversary. I think it helped me resolve a lot of my feelings around being in the hospital. This is the first time I’ve actually tried to evoke what it feels like to be involuntarily committed and also the politics around it. I quoted R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Benjamin Rush, and two survivors. And I read Mad In America during rendering times, for the second time. If you want to read a really good book on the psychiatric industry and it’s gross human rights violations throughout history, I recommend it. And it even describes an all too short humane alternative that worked and was abandoned around the turn of the century.

Once I am done being so exhausted I will compress it and post it on Youtube. In fact, I think I might use Youtube for videos more, maybe it will improve distribution.

Schrodinger is wandering around on the desk being cute. He’s such a sleek little weirdo.

I saw Paradise Now. REALLY GOOD, holy crap. I’ll have to write more about it later. Next I’m watching Mandalay, the second in Lars Von Trier’s American trilogy. I hope he doesn’t do something awful to the protagonist again, but I’m not holding my breath.

Rendering Pines, Rendering Pines

Well now my video is pretty much done EXCEPT for compressing it into an MPEG2 (which Compressor is doing now for the next twenty minutes) and burning to DVD (which will take at least another twenty minutes). But aside from that I’m pretty happy with it. I MIGHT put it on Youtube just so I can let people preview it, but a lot of the text might be totally illegible then. I went WAY overboard last night and got pretty heavy handed, so I had to take it down a tad this morning. I thought I had to get it to the Mendel at noon today, and then I just got an email saying Wednesday is fine. Aaaaah! Oh well, it’s done.

I like it, it’s the first time I’ve made something specifically for installations, so making sure it can loop and still make sense was fun. I’m also going to output a single channel screening copy for festivals. It would be nice to send it to Rendezvous with Madness, which is in Toronto. I’ve never been to it, but they’ve shown two of my tapes and send great swag. Maybe this time I can take a trip to Toronto and watch other films on madness.

And the audio isn’t too shabby, it’s minimalist but that makes sense. And I found a website called FreeSound Project which has downloadable wav and aiff clips of sounds it’s members have uploaded. It’s so useful, I don’t know how I didn’t know that site existed. I’m on my mom’s computer BTW, which pisses her off. I keep running back and forth between the upstairs computer and the downstairs computer.

I’ve spent at LEAST 24 hours on rendering and processing this 7 minute video. It’s not so bad, that’s pretty normal, but it’s a reason I like having my own suite. Paying for 24 hours of rendering time would so SUCK! Ugh! At ten bucks an hour that is PRETTY fucking pricey.

I have six more minutes before I can import into DVD Studio, set it up to loop endlessly, and burn it. BURN IT!!!

Editing is weird and fiddly, but I like it. I had to go on the hunt for an errant frame that kept showing up. My mom watched a rough cut with me and suddenly I yelled “Hey! That frame isn’t supposed to be there!” She didn’t see it though. How can 1/30th of a second be so obvious? But it is. I fixed it and even though she didn’t notice it the first time, she thought it was an improvement. There’s one thing I wish I had been able to fix, which is the slapping scene. But I think it’s fine as it is, I’m just being uber picky because now I’ve watched this damn thing about 50 times.

And General Error 34 started showing up when I wanted to play full screen in FCP. I know it means I have a corrupted file somewhere, but it’s not affecting the video itself, just the program, so I decided to ignore it until I can deal with it later.

I could probably tweak my video for the rest of the week and still not be satisfied. At a certain point I just have to back off.

Ugh, and now I have to re-compress because I didn’t like the way it turned out last time.

20 more minutes. Plus another 20 for burning, when I finally get there. So fiddly.

I’m bored of writing about how boring making videos can be. I’m going to go look at stuff while I wait.

I am still itchy. The doctor I saw yesterday said to go back to the dose of Lamictal I was at before the RASH happened. Hopefully that works. I don’t think it will get worse. I’m all covered in calamine lotion. And I’m hungry. Wah! Anyway, yes, no death today. I think I will be okay.

Zizek!

Slavoj Zizek is my favorite philosopher and cultural critic these days. A film was made about him recently called Zizek! which I have yet to see. A Canadian made it. He has a background in Lacanian theory, which is a way better branch of psychoanalysis than Freud. Freud can go suck a phallus.

Anyway, here’s Slavoj talking about the creativity of the void and the violence of love.

p.s. The health nurse says I should just go to a walk in clinic today with all my meds and see what’s up, so I am okay, for now.

Death as a Side Effect

Last night my lower back erupted into a rash, and it started spreading to other parts of my body. I was wondering, oh maybe it is stress? And then I remembered the dire warning everyone who’s prescribed Lamictal gets. Here is the kind of medical warning no one really likes reading.

ALTHOUGH BENIGN RASHES ALSO OCCUR WITH LAMICTAL, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT RELIABLY WHICH RASHES WILL PROVE TO BE SERIOUS OR LIFE THREATENING. ACCORDINGLY, LAMICTAL SHOULD ORDINARILY BE DISCONTINUED AT THE FIRST SIGN OF RASH, UNLESS THE RASH IS CLEARLY NOT DRUG RELATED. DISCONTINUATION OF TREATMENT MAY NOT PREVENT A RASH FROM BECOMING LIFE THREATENING OR PERMANENTLY DISABLING OR DISFIGURING.

Yes, so those last three things, death, disabling, and disfigurement, well, those all freak the shit out of me. I know those things could happen without pharmaceuticals being involved, but if I must be disfigured I would prefer it not be because of some ridiculous pill. I can’t believe I was a meth user at nineteen and yet nothing happened then, and then now I take doctor approved medication and oh yeah, I could just suddenly die! Well just great, and it’s terrible timing too because I have a deadline coming up. And my cute friend is in town again and I don’t want to look all disfigured.

I am seriously considering trying to live my life sans meds. I haven’t ever really done it, so I don’t know what to expect. I do know that marijuana seems to work more effectively than the legal drugs I’m on. I’ve been doing a maintanance dose of the equivalent of one joint a day for a couple of months or more, and its really helped. I dont get high unless I’m really like “Oh yeah, hanging with the cousins,” mostly I just get a low grade buzz and my symptoms go away. Come down from the highs, come up from the lows. Fewer absence and complex partial seizures. It’s a hell of a lot better than these ridiculous drugs, and it’s been proven safe and effective for my conditions over THOUSANDS of years, not just 20 to fifty years. Of course it’s illegal because some racist capitalists had to put it out of business to secure their own profits. GRRRRRR!!!!

I did realize my own mortality though. I’ve been feeling it more lately, ever since Chris died. In your head you can kind of understand the concept, but that’s different from really truly realizing your mortality. And then last night I realized this really could be it. And I was trying to figure out if I was happy with my life, or if I felt like it had meaning. And I honestly couldn’t answer. I knew how I wished it was different. I don’t know how much of that I could have ever had control over.

I’m so tired of feeling like I don’t have control over my life. And I’m tired of the constant pressure to go the pharmaceutical route to deal with bipolar disorder and epilepsy. The thing is I can see the good things meds have done for me. It’s not a black and white issue, there are tons of grey areas. I’m not one of those “Everyone should take drugs” and I’m not “Everyone should get off their drugs” either. Maybe some people can eat a strict healthy diet and exercise and meditate, but then there are also lots of people who’s lives, through no fault of their own, restrict them from being able to do those things. Someone living on disability is not ever going to be able to afford to eat healthy.

But maybe I can do the alternative. I can actually afford groceries now, and I have more time to do exercise. I have done meditation but maybe I could join the Saskatoon Zen temple folks or something. Talk about Dharma instead of what a lamotrigine rash looks like.

I do know I have to figure out how to live my life so that I would be happier about when I do croak. I don’t think I will though, at least not now. I think there’s still stuff I have to do here. I want to pull a Kubrick and die just after I start editing my last movie. Or at the premiere. Thank you. Bye! Put the reviews on my grave!!!

Eyes Wide Shut didn’t get very good reviews though.

Fucking Amal, Ma Vie En Rose

My computer is still processing. And the car needs to be plugged in for an hour before we can leave the house because I am going SQUIRRLY!

I think my favorite all time lesbian film is Fucking Amal, which also happens to be my all time favorite teenager film too. Maybe because I know the feeling of high school clique-crossed lovers. I was reading a message board where someone was looking for a good lesbian movie to watch and someone said Fucking Amal had vague lesbian undertones. I was so shocked. Did they watch Fucking Amal? The whole thing was about Elin figuring out she liked girls and coming out. How can you call that undertones? That’s as dumb as saying Ma Vie En Rose is vaguely about growing up transsexual. Strangely enough looking for the trailer I did find a bunch of clueless Film Critics saying that exact thing.

I find it bizarre when queer films are made by or for children/teenagers and then people get upset, like we’re recruiting or something. They never think that there are queer children and teenagers who need to see themselves represented somewhere, because heterosexual children have tons of movies and television shows that make them feel normal. Oh right, I forgot, queer kids aren’t allowed to feel normal about themselves.

Oh, Ma Vie En Rose makes me cry every time I watch it. It is such a sweet film. Even the TRAILER makes me cry.

It’s interesting to note that both of those films are foreign. I have no clue how the ratings system works overseas, or if it even exists. Either way, some really revolutionary queer film comes out of Europe. And the character development is spot on, a lot of mainstream work totally misses the mark on how children or teenagers actually behave.

I think I am going to have to find some uppers to stay up late enough to get serious work done on this project. Le sigh.

French and Saunders have computer trouble

BNC, Enchante!

Once my friend Candie became totally smitten with someone because they knew what a British Naval Connector was. I have to admit, people who know tech stuff make me cream my jeans. When my friend Rheanne and I saw Shortbus I got all excited when I saw a character using Final Cut Pro. “Aw! Final Cut Pro.” “You geek.” Which coming from her is a compliment.

I don’t understand people who don’t appreciate geeky video tech-y stuff. It must look pretty obvious that I’ve hung out with mainly video and filmmakers for the last decade. I was so depressed when at my last job I was accused of knowing nothing of sound editing, because they were using a very temperamental Logic Pro software which was incompatible with their input device and I had spent a decade using Protools in well designed suites, which in my opinion is a far superior program. Although maybe I am just a software loyalist. It makes a LOT more sense for video editing at least, because the interface is similar to programs like Avid and FCP. I hate Logic Pro, it can go to hell, it’s such a fuck ass program. And in my experience thus far M Audio sucks too.

Either way it’s kind of dumb to tell me I don’t know sound, when I can use Protools with one hand tied behind my back and standing on one foot. It wasn’t my fault they didn’t choose a more intuitive program, which would probably have been better for their membership anyway.

I remember one time I was sitting around with friends having a conversation and another tech minded person and I started talking about RF modulators. Which I didn’t think was very impressive, but everyone else was all “Oooh, RF modulators, how do you know that stuff?” He also asked a question about winding cords and I mentioned the crucial 3/4 turn. Oh yes, he said, the 3/4 turn.

The most major suck ass thing about my previous job (besides terrible interpersonal issues) was that I came in and NOTHING was set up and barely any video decks were functional. The Betacam deck had to be serviced. The distribution amplifier had been out of commission for ages. There was no 3/4″ deck. The S-VHS decks were crap, which was a big issue because for some ungodly reason the centre had been using S-VHS formats to master onto for YEARS! Anyone who masters onto a video tape that is a 1/4″ wide is being an idiot. Even 3/4″ is more stable, magnetic doohickeys just fall of tape and the less physical size of tape you have the more magnetic particles coming loose with destroy your tape quality.

And then we were all told that Mini-DV tapes were generation lossless and you could keep things on them forever. Ha ha ha. What we didn’t find out until years later was that Mini DV is “lossless” because it replaces a missing piece of information with whatever the next pixel beside it is. As you can imagine tapes on Mini-DV are starting to get really square pixel shit happening and distributors everywhere are imploring their artists to stop sending in Mini DV masters. I’m sure HD is going to end up having some horrid complication later in life too. The fact Betacam has always been and will always be the best format to master onto unless something MAJOR happens. But as a rule analogue is superior to digital.

The sound suite was in random pieces. The M-Audio input device they were using kept crashing and having to get software reinstalled, it would work for a while, and then it would crash AGAIN! It was like being in the 9th circle of hell. I never want to go into a tech artist run centre job again when nothing is set up and barely anything works. I can’t troubleshoot equipment that is totally broken.

I think the problem was things were being acquired because In Theory they were a good idea, although in practical usage they were too new to have proper support or a large base of knowledgeable people to consult. Just a bad idea. I remember when I was in elementary school we did rudimentary computer programming with sprites and I wrote a program which In Theory would have worked perfectly, but in real life application was pretty shoddy. I was talking with my friend Archer about getting an HD camera and he told me to stay away from it until they work out whatever kinks will come out. It’s true, if you’re putting thousands of dollars on equipment you’d better be damned sure it’s going to be reliable for the next six to seven years until they come out with a different format and everyone screams. And using a Beachtek because the camera has no XLR inputs is so dodgy, and few of the new HD cameras had XLR built in.

I digress. Once I found out a filmmaker friend didn’t know how a light meter works and I never looked at her the same way again. I’m awfully shallow about stuff like that. In film school everyone had their own light meter because the school’s meters would get smacked around by constant use and ended up being pretty unreliable. And when a minute of 16mm film costs $100 bucks from film stock to processing, you can see why everyone put out that much cash for their own meter. Once when I was totally broke my mom kept trying to convince me to sell my Sekonic so I could buy groceries (they’re about $200) and I was appalled. You can have my Sekonic when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

I am still waiting for my video conversion to finish and I got on a tangent. I think I have to do something else. I am going to go play We Love Katamari and try to pass the campfire level.