When I was a kid, my favorite movie genre was HORROR. I mean yeah, I still loved The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, but my family knew my tastes were somewhat askew when I went crazy over The Nightmare Before Christmas at the age of six. My favorite killer is Michael Myers. I think Jason Vorhees is a pussy. I own the Scream trilogy.

The thing is, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, I have lost a lot of my lust for blood. In fact, some new scary movies actually scare me - and we all know horror movies aren’t made as well as they used to be. (Umm, piss your pants at Nosferatu, anyone?) Now it’s all about blood and guts and stuff, and not actual tension and fright. And apparently, I don’t handle blood and guts so well.

I also don’t seem to handle the supernatural so well. The Exorcism was one of the only older movies that really scared the shit out of me. And then a couple years ago, I went to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose by myself (but really, I was surrounded by people in the theater). That movie FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT. That scene when Emily has a seizure or paralysis or whatever the hell it is on the floor of her dorm room, and her eyes are all black and staring straight at the camera - I’m pretty sure I was half-sitting in the lap of the woman next to me at that point.

I’m debating if I want to see the new Saw this weekend. I saw the first three, but not the last one. These movies really disturb me, they’re so gruesome. So what happened to my love of horror movies? I think it’s just the horror genre itself has taken a turn. I still like the “oldies,” from the really old, like Dracula, to the semi-old, like Halloween. But since I was a kid, there’s just been more corn syrup and fake organs, and I’m not really following the trend.

In fact, oddly enough, I am now becoming more attached to family-style movies, Disney and related. I really did join the Disney Movie Club, though not with the intention of remaining a member. Someone gave me $30 to do it, which is how much my first five movies cost including shipping. I had to buy four more movies to fulfill my membership requirement, which was $90 including shipping. So technically, I got nine Disney movies for $10 each - and one of those (Finding Nemo) is one of Josh’s Christmas presents, one is my childhood favorite (The Little Mermaid), and I also got the Santa Clause trilogy to enjoy over Christmas break, snuggled up on the couch with my honey.

I guess I am already developing mom-brain or something. Then again, Beauty and the Beast has NEVER failed to make me cry, no matter how old I was. Maybe I’m just more into the idea now of movies making me feel GOOD rather than all BLOOD BOOBS BOMBS FASTER FASTER CAN’T BREATHE GROSS. Animation helps me find my center.

Bob help me if they ever start making really gross horror animations in the mainstream. I will have nowhere left to turn.

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Good lord, what a week. Midterms, working, assistant directing a film shoot all weekend, catching up on chapters upon chapters of reading yesterday, FINALLY going grocery shopping (but still haven’t washed towels)…

I even got the engagement photos I took for a young couple edited and uploaded to Flickr. I am currently importing photos from the film shoot this weekend to be slightly touched up and also uploaded. I got picture lock on a short film and will hopefully soon be passing it off to a sound mixer… but of course, now I have to start editing Sam’s film (the one we shot this weekend). :)

I cannot remember the last time I had a free day, or even half an hour of free time to myself without any work to do. This is extremely bad. In fact, Josh actually got really mad at me about it this weekend because while on the shoot I was still sick and hadn’t had time to go to the doctor all week. Fortunately, I am now getting better on my own, but Josh is still really worried that I’m overloading myself. His grandfather was recently put in the hospital because of heart problems related to stress, so he’s extra sensitive any time I mention how much work I have and how tired I am. So I’ve promised him I will not take on so much work at one time, and I will practice saying “No” to people.

Since then, Josh has been more pleasant on the phone. Which is fabulous. Because before he explained that he didn’t want me working so much, he was just really grumpy and short with me on the phone, and it only added to my stress because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong or what I had done. Now I get it, and now I’ve reassured him, and everything is back to the way it should be. I love that man so much I would stop eating bread if he told me he thought it was bad for me.

I told Sam on the phone this morning that I wouldn’t start editing until at least next week. So now my goal is to get ahead on my work for the next week or so, so that I actually have an opportunity this weekend to spend some time with myself, or talking to Josh on Skype. I am crewing again this weekend - I promised weeks ago! - but it will only be until around 7 Saturday night, and around 4 Sunday afternoon, and none at all Friday. So those evenings I intend to spend in front of the TV (or computer screen) for once, just enjoying myself. I realize this is still like four days away, but at least I have something to look forward to.

By the way, what the hell is up with my body? Suddenly I’m having another period? Ugh. My depo shot is Monday. Maybe after this one there will be absolutely no more surprises.

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Yesterday was just ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous.

First, in the morning I had two demands requests from fellow student filmmakers: the first, that I upload photos I took at a shoot the weekend before last to Facebook. So I resized and obliged. Then the director of the shoot I’m assistant director on this weekend - my good ol’ buddy Sam *cough* - needed me to make a shooting schedule. So I did that.

Then I had class, after which I “tutored” for two and a half hours, then ran back to my dorm to eat something, then caught the subway up to Central Park for a photo shoot of an engaged couple. THAT was fun. I don’t really mean that sarcastically. It was a bit rushed since we didn’t have a lot of time to begin with, and then they were about 15 minutes late. But they were real troopers - they were into all kinds of ideas, and came up with their own of climbing into a tree (which nearly ended in disaster, as the girl was then terrified of coming down). She even broke her lovely black belt. It was my first shoot like this, but I definitely think I’d like to do more - some of the pictures looked really great in my LCD review.

After that, I hopped the subway back to campus, just in time for my first Chemistry exam. There were six questions, with a few sub-questions in each. I was rolling through, like Yeah, I am so smart, taking Chemistry after I took AP Chem in high school, this is a piece of cake, and then I hit the next to last question. Spent about five minutes on it, couldn’t get it yet. So I finished the last question, which took all of 30 seconds. I ended up spending the rest of the exam time on that next to last problem. We’re talking, that movie moment where I’m sweating bullets and I keep staring at the clock and I can practically hear the second hand ticking as the professor calls out “three minutes left.” I actually got the answer by my awesome powers of deduction with a calculator way before that, but the fact that I couldn’t do the math right was bugging me, and I wanted to figure it out. I mean, it seemed so EASY. Then, literally on the last minute, I realized the wording of the question had thrown me off (it was percentages, and he had said to use x and 100-x as the variables, when for my problem it should’ve been x and 1-x). I was like, OHMYGOD. So I scribbled all the steps to the answer very quickly. And I am quite confident I aced this one.

Then I came back to my dorm and waited for Josh to call. He did, and the conversation was going quite well (aside from my persistent loud coughing - thank you, sickness), until I decided to bring up the fact that I didn’t want guns in our house when we had kids. Good lord, people, did this strike a cord. He was all “I have six guns and it’s a hobby I have to shoot them off” and I was all “Statistics show guns in the home are primarily used for suicides and accidental homicides between family members” and it turned into a big argument.

That’s been happening a lot lately. It seems like every phone conversation we have ends with ten minutes of silence after we have a disagreement, then we hang up and I text him apologizing and we text for half an hour about how we both feel. Why can’t we talk about this stuff on the phone? Oh well… it’s better to text it than to not talk about it at all. Fortunately, neither of us are the type that like to drag arguments on for ages and ages. If he was here, we totally would’ve been boning when he got home from work.

And that was my day. How was yours?

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Blogging every other day is just not my style. It’s too erratic. Too unstructured for me. And yes, I realize I’ve been doing it lately. That’s because my brain has gone to mush and suddenly I can only view my computer as a depthless hell trying to swallow me whole with its mass of saved Power Points and exam questions.

That’s right! College mid-term time. And in the first semester after three years where I actually have gen eds, it’s a little rough. Fortunately, none are on the same day. I had my Abnormal Psychology test last Thursday, and it was a fail. I did badly, I’m quite sure of it - hoping for a B-, will probably get a C. My first Chemistry test is tomorrow night. Shouldn’t be too bad, but I could be fooling myself.

The NIGHTMARE is going to be my Child Psychology mid-term on Thursday morning. 25 multiple choice, three essays. And they gave us eleven essays, saying three of them were the ones that would actually be on the test. But that means I must make outlines for all eleven to be prepared for any that might pop up. Which is WAY too much studying for me. Plus, these teachers like to take questions from their lectures and Power Points. I prefer studying from textbooks. Dammit.

I still have about eight hundred PP slides to read and re-read, and three outlines to make. This is a stressful time for me. I do not do studying well. I prefer intelligence to come naturally.

I’m still trying to decide what classes I’m going to take next semester. I think I’m registering part time to save money, so I only have room for two. Do I really want to take Children’s Literature AND Classical Mythology, so that I have one class every day Monday through Thursday? Or should I pick stuff that’s on the same two or three days so I have some extra free full days? I don’t know.

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In other news, my sister is having surgery this Friday. I don’t know how “serious” it is, but it’s sure scaring the hell out of me. First, they found two bloody polyps in her uterus and are removing those. (Note: any polyps can be pre-cancerous. Let’s not go through this again.) Second, during the SAME surgery, they are going to go in through her bellybutton and basically take out anything that “looks funny” or that she “doesn’t need” (<-- not entirely sure what that means..). This is because she is STILL having the back and lower abdomen pains she's been having the entire summer, and all kinds of doctors have done all kinds of tests and procedures and have still not made an accurate diagnosis. She's still hurting. So I guess this is one of those "We're not sure, so we're going to eliminate all possible factors" things. How refreshing.

And they found kittens at our house last night. More news on that when I hear more. (No pictures, sadly, as I am 800 miles away.)

P.S. I do plan on returning comments after these stupid exams are over. Thank you all for your feedback!

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I wanted to share this video that I made for my niece’s soccer team over the summer. I’ll be starting another one soon for the fall season, once Jennifer sends me some footage she shot. Sydney and Cameron are on the same team this year, which is AWESOME.

I offered to do these for the other teams for money, and at first there was a lot of interest, but in the end no one bought. So I’ll just make the next one even awesome-er and make them all pissed that they didn’t order their own.

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