I crewed on another film shoot this weekend. But I have no more planned after this! Nada! And if someone asks me, I’ll say no! Really! Because now I have to edit the last two films I’ve crewed on, color correct the one I’ve been working on, and, um, finish my own by the first of December so I can actually get a grade on it.

The one this weekend was relatively painless, considering it was all outside. We shot in Tribeca (the west part of middle downtown) and Saturday it was absolutely gorgeous. The weather was around 60 degrees and it felt really nice with just a jacket on. Then YESTERDAY, all of a sudden nature decided it was going to get a lot fucking colder, more like 36 degrees and windy as hell. I felt bad for the actors - Kate just had to wear a skimpy dress and I was afraid she would die. I wore an extra jacket but it was still pretty nipply. Fortunately, there was an apartment building with a small visitor lobby that we all kept ducking into when we weren’t needed, to at least get away from the wind. I just kept telling myself I have been in far worse, much colder outdoor shoots… such as Justine’s color sync last year, in the middle of November in Jersey, with it threatening to snow any second and three little girls as the main characters.

I really love the Tribeca area. It’s all about family, albeit rich families. There’s tons of kids running around, which is completely unlike most of the rest of the city. There’s also a Barnes & Noble right next to a Bed Bath & Beyond. :) Also, apparently James Gandolfini (Mr. Tony Soprano) walked his big white dog through our set TWICE Saturday, and I COMPLETELY MISSED HIM. BOTH TIMES. And I was even on the lookout for the second time! This is evidence of how many celebrities I may have passed over the last three and a half years without noticing because I am completely oblivious to the world around me. Also, during our lunch break, I was singing MMMBop along with the iPod speakers we had on set, and apparently Debra Winger walked by and laughed at me. I mean, I saw a woman and heard her laugh as she passed, but one of the actors on set said it was Debra Winger. I didn’t even know she lived in New York, and if she doesn’t, why she would just be strolling down Greenwich Street past student film sets… But isn’t that a great story, if it was her? “Hey, this one time, I made Debra Winger laugh by singing MMMBop on the sidewalk.” Yeah. Really great story. Uh huh…

There was one other thing about this shoot I found unusual. The director was a woman, and there tend to be more female crew members on shoots directed by women. There were a few female crew members including myself, and most of them were pretty attractive. And yet, I found a couple of the guys on the crew talking to me frequently. As in, they preferred talking to me over anyone else on the set. I’m curious about this, as my appearance has not changed in the last year (except gaining back weight) and this is not usual for me. Especially when there are lots of other hot girls on a set. But the production manager just kept talking to me and running errands with me, and the assistant director kept making jokes and asking if he could get me anything. I sort of didn’t tell them I’m getting married. It’s nice to have my self-esteem boosted once in a while. :)

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The house Josh and I have been eyeing the last few months is now under contract (and not by us). I knew it was bound to happen, but I am a little sad. But as Josh said, we’ll find a house when it’s the right time for us. Maybe even one that’s not next door to my mother… not that the free food that would clearly be available in that situation would be all that bad.

I’m finally making some decent money with my tutoring and building my savings account back up. We’ve got our honeymoon covered, so now anything we save will be building up a down payment on whatever house we eventually get. The problem is, I am torn between saving every last penny right now, or spending chunks of it on things that could potentially help me MAKE more money in the near future - such as photography equipment.

I have made a rather reasonable wish list of lenses I would like to have for my digital SLR. Yes, they’re expensive, but it’s not like the list includes those ridiculous $15,000 telephoto primes. Granted, the cheapest one I want (besides the cheap telephoto I’ll probably buy before I can afford the “good” ones) is $325. But what if it does dramatically improve my photography and I start getting people willing to pay me for my work (unlike that guy who said he’d “tip” me for the photos of his baby’s blessing, and even asked me for my address, and then didn’t send anything at all)? I know it can be an investment if I take it seriously, I’m just terrified of NOT being successful with photography and then here I am with lots of nice lenses and equipment that is not helping us pay our mortgage.

I don’t like making difficult decisions. Bobby, Josh’s brother, offered to give me the money for my first lens on a 99-year, no interest repayment schedule. Well, as awesome as that sounds, I would probably still feel inclined to pay him back before we even bought a house, so it’s all kind of the same - I’d still be spending all of that money instead of saving it for our down payment.

What to do???

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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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